Dear reader, we are the souls of the future. Sisi has a message for us:
Dear Future Soul!
I'll give you these writings. The Master has dictated them to me, and he has also determined their purpose, namely from the
year 1890 on in 60 years they shall be published to the best of politically condemned person and their relatives in need of help.
For in 60 years as little as today will happiness and peace, that means freedom, be at home on our little stars. Perhaps on
someone else? Today I cannot tell you this, perhaps if you read these lines - With warm greetings, because I feel you are good to me,
Titania
Written in the midsummer of 1890, in the hastily running special train
(Elisabeth identified herself in her poems with the fairy queen Titania from Shakespeare's 'Summer Night's Dream')
With this famous letter Empress Elisabeth of Austria entrusted her poems to the "souls of the future". She described the people who lived from 1950 onwards as "souls of the future", the year in which the cassette kept in Bern was to be opened and their poems, their most intimate feelings, wishes and experiences made accessible to them. Elisabeth was disappointed by the people living in her time and felt misunderstood by them most of the time. Her hope was that the souls of the future would be more progressive, more modern and more open to her ideas and her life. A last attempt to be understood.
When in 1889 her son, the then 30-year-old Crown Prince Rudolph, met with his lovers took their lives in the Mayerling Hunting Lodge, the melancholy of the empress to the point of death longing. She gave herself the main culprit in the suicide of her son and never recovered from this a heavy blow of fate. From the day of her son's death, she carried only black and increasingly occupied himself with the dead: Achilles, Heinrich Heine and her deceased cousin Ludwig II became her constant companions in the Spirits. The broken Sisi also dreamt of her own death and fantasized about it. and wished for him in their poems:
Abandoned
How was I once so young and rich
Of joie de vivre and hope;
I didn't think anything of power was like me,
The world was still open to me.
I loved, I lived,
I've been all over the world.
But never achieved what I strive for.
I cheated and I was cheated.
(Gödöllö 1886)
On my Master
My soul sobs, she cheers and she cries,
She was with yours tonight
She held you so close and tight,
You pressed it on yours with fervor.
You impregnated her, you blessed her,
She still shivers and trembles, but she's refreshed.
O could blossom out of her after moons
as blissful songs as you once flourished! -
How would she cherish that you give her,
The children that you, your soul soaked,
(Winter songs: Vienna, January 1887, a poem for Heinrich Heine)
To the Gaffers
I wanted people to let me
In peace´ and unscathed,
I'm only certainly
A human born like them.
Bile's almost coming out of me,
When they fix me up like that?
I'd like to creep into a snail shell.
And die of anger.
If I see an opera glass
Treacherously directed at me,
I wanted this this,
And the person is destroyed.
(Winter songs: Cromer, Norfolk 1887)
To the Future Souls
I flee from the world and its pleasures,
and their people are far from me today;
It's her happiness that's strange to me and her suffering.
I'm lonely, like on another star...
(1887, poem to "the future souls", how Empress Elisabeth will make posterity
To my husband
Say my dear husband,
What are you trying to achieve?
I think of the general agony
Your cartwheel's almost stuck.
The donkey you've pretensioned,
It can't go any further;
It has gone too deep in the dirt;
Oh, if it were smarter,
You caught that noble horse
There, in the pasture,
And you squeeze his bridle in his mouth
Not tomorrow, not today.
Already once he ripped from the dirt
The fumbled cart to you,
That's why your fat little donkey chases away
Before you're made a fool of. (Third book: London, April 1888)
I am so shy...
I'm as shy as my deer,
And like the white fallow deer
I escape where I see people
to my rest in the green forest.
My forest! In the light May dress
Dazzlingly adorned by spring,
How are you of my heart joy,
How does your splendour make me crazy?
It's calling me out of the canopy.
To the cuckoo, my old friend;
We meet in East and West,
And every May we were united.
Also I want to stay as long
As that fruit tree bears flowers,
And departe to the long distance,
When he took off his wedding dress.
(Ischl 1888)
To the Future Souls
I walk alone on this earth,
The desire to be averse to life has long since disappeared.
It doesn't share my soul life with any loved ones,
There was never a soul that understood me.
(Poetic Diary p. 214)
