Austrian spa town Bad Ischl: Emperor Franz Joseph hidden away

By Brian Johnston
Updated November 23 2014 - 1:28am, first published 12:15am
Emperor Franz Josef I in hunting uniform. Photo: Austrian National Tourist Office
Emperor Franz Josef I in hunting uniform. Photo: Austrian National Tourist Office
Emperor Franz Josef I in hunting uniform. Photo: Austrian National Tourist Office
Emperor Franz Josef I in hunting uniform. Photo: Austrian National Tourist Office
Emperor Franz Josef I in hunting uniform. Photo: Austrian National Tourist Office
Emperor Franz Josef I in hunting uniform. Photo: Austrian National Tourist Office
Afternoon cakes at the Konditorei Zauner. Photo: Austrian National Tourist Office
Afternoon cakes at the Konditorei Zauner. Photo: Austrian National Tourist Office

History's great figures are so caricatured you could forget they were real people with the same emotions we all enjoy and endure. Emperor Franz Josef, with his ridiculous whiskers and tinkling medals, is a tragic buffoon from a comic opera. But in Bad Ischl he seems all too human, struggling to understand his changing times, strangled by rigid court etiquette, beset by family suicides and assassinations. Here, he isn't an emperor, but a man in love with a wife who never loved him back until the day she died horribly, stabbed in the stomach by an anarchist while promenading in distant Geneva.

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