Twilight of Empire

“Absent documentation, history can only speculate about what happened between Rudolf and Mary at that isolated lodge” (p. 249). This is the most important thing to keep in mind about the incident at Mayerling.

The book is arranged so: Part 1 covers Rudolph's life and Mary's life up to January 28th 1889, which gives us the context and background for the incident; Part 2 is about what happened at Mayerling; Part 3 is about all the theories concerning the incident at Mayerling; and Part 4 is a summary of the first three parts stripped down to the essentials and mixed all together. Frankly I was irritated by the fourth part because 98% of it was a repeat of what came before, but at the same time one can't really skip it due to that new, interesting 2%. They would have done better weaving the good into the previous sections, keeping the Epilogue, and eliminating the rest of Part 4.

My other problem with this book concerns source material. The authors make it very clear that primary source material is scarce, due to the Emperor ordering basically everything about the incident destroyed or suppressed. Furthermore, everything that we do have, primary source or not, is of dubious truth because everyone - everyone - had reasons for lying about what happened at Mayerling; even Rudolph and Mary's letters are not to be trusted. And yet these same dubious materials are what the authors use as the basis for their book. It is hard for me to read that the memoir of so-and-so is filled with lies about Mayerling in order to protect their own skin, and then a few pages later read something presented as fact but whose source is that same lie-filled memoir.

Overall I'm conflicted about this book. On the one hand the first two parts were informative and exciting, but that final part was nothing short of tedious and left a bad impression behind.