Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Yonan, Michael E.

Titel

Modesty and Monarchy: Rethinking Empress Maria Theresa at Schönbrunn

Ist Teil von

• Austrian history yearbook, 2004-01, Vol.35, p.25-47

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2004

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The austrian habsburg court under Empress Maria Theresa has been characterized as combining an informal domesticity with a rigid ceremonial structure inherited from her predecessors. In this picture of life at the Habsburg court, the strict protocol and elaborate calendar of ceremonies only partially designated how the imperial family structured its time; protocol and ceremony coexisted, it would seem, with more casual and relaxed forms of familial interaction. Popular Austrian writing on Maria Theresa has stressed the image of the empress as mother, and the maternal quality of this portrait has colored some modern notions of how her palaces were occupied and used. Tourists visiting Schönbrunn palace, for example, are often told that many of its rooms were designed with familial contact in mind, and the resulting picture of the palace's use and habitation is curiously modern. The notion that an “imperial domesticity” governed actions at Maria Theresa's Schönbrunn has found its way into scholarly literature as well; one scholar has gone so far as to describe Schönbrunn's admixture of ceremonial and intimate spaces as vorbiedermeierlich, that is, prefiguring the family-oriented, bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century Vienna. The instigator of this myth may be Stefan Zweig, who in 1932 described Marie Antoinette's childhood at Schönbrunn as one filled with carefree play, personal freedom, and adventure, all of which prepared her inadequately for her future role as queen of France. The modern visitor to Schönbrunn might be forgiven for thinking that, despite the palace's sumptuous rooms and elegant decoration, it differs minimally from the modern single-family home.