4 - Sissi the Terrible: Melodrama, Victimhood, and Imperial Nostalgia in the Sissi Trilogy

Summary

ON 9 JANUARY 1957 INNSBRUCK’s Tiroler Tageszeitung reported a trade dispute that had been brewing for some months over Austrian films in Germany. Under the headline “Sissi as ‘German film’!” the newspaper cited criticism from Austria’s governing party, the Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP), of the common practice among West German distributors of marketing Austrian titles both in the FRG and internationally as German. This long-running Austro-German dispute had intensified with the release in December 1955 of the Vienna-based Erma-Film’s Sissi, the first title in a trilogy, directed by Ernst Marischka, which charted the life of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth (1837–98). In its first twelve months Sissi garnered West German audiences in excess of twelve million, achieving up to 98 percent market penetration among the south German provincial audiences who were the film’s most enthusiastic fans. Sissi’s unprecedented success spurred Austrian efforts to claw back control over national nomenclature from German distributors (Herzog-Film in the case of Sissi I and II, Ufa for the trilogy’s final part). By February 1957, this binational trade dispute had become a full-blown diplomatic row. When the German envoy in Beirut offered to absorb Austrian film productions into his cultural brief and allegedly screened Sissi as one of five Austrian titles shown “under the German flag,” complaints from the Austrian Ambassador Kurt Farbovsky triggered high-level talks between the Austrian Foreign Office and the FRG’s Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction. By the end of April the Ministry had given its blessing to a directive from the Austrian film industry’s trade association that its members write into contracts with West German distributors a clause mandating the branding of their titles as Austrian — and the row died down.

The episode remains telling, however, for the history of German suffering which this volume attempts. The distributors’ “Freudian slip” from Austrian to German nomenclature as well as the Sissi films’ phenomenal West German success suggest an enduring attachment among both industry and audience to a cinema culture unconstrained by the boundaries of emergent postwar states and fused instead into the larger cultural territories of the German-speaking lands. In the case of Sissi that territory is the space of German-language film production in Western Europe, and specifically Austria and West Germany after 1945: a territory united in matters of popular film aesthetics and social affect, which later took the form in the trilogy, I suggest below, of an affective drift toward imperial nostalgia and the melancholy of territorial loss.