Seite - 625 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The Geriatric Circle 625 the Monarch only became possible following a written request.1426 After August 1914, the Emperor would only make very few regular trips out and leave Schönbrunn Palace. On 19 and 28 September, and on 15 October 1914, he visited wounded soldiers and hospitals. After that, he saw no further victims of the war that he had unleashed. And in November 1915, he had no other choice than to travel to Vienna’s Penzing railway station in order to greet Kaiser Wilhelm II in the court pavilion. He attended almost no more official appointments at Schönbrunn, and avoided donning his gala uniform. On 24 June 1915, he received the Mayor of Vienna and a delegation from the munic- ipal council that wished to offer its congratulations for the recapturing of Lviv. Then, in August and September 1915, he was obliged to receive congratulations on his 85th birthday. Perhaps the most arduous event was the entourage of a Hungarian delegation of around 300 people, which had come to mark the occasion. The certain reticence and understandable timidity of the Monarch when it came to still presenting himself in public also reduced the descriptions of meetings of the Mon- arch with those in positions of power in the Habsburg Monarchy, and it was and evi- dently still is regarded as a portentous statement when the Imperial and Royal Military Plenipotentiary at the German Supreme Army Command, Brigadier Klepsch-Kloth von Roden, described the Emperor as ‘very frail and in a subdued frame of mind’,1427 while the Lower Austrian governor and subsequent Interior Minister Baron Erasmus von Handel recorded after an appointment with His Majesty that the Monarch had appeared thoroughly ‘fresh’1428. The Prussian War Minister Wild von Hohenborn had a similar impression of Franz Joseph on 3 August 1916 : ‘The Emperor conversed with me for approximately ¾ of an hour with astonishing freshness, for the most part re- garding detailed military questions.’1429 However, he is frequently described as lonely and tired,1430 as one of his daughters, Archduchess Marie Valerie, noted in her diary in October 1916 ‘[…] a kind of veil lies between him and the outside world ; a kind of excessive tiredness’.1431 Similar comments had already been made previously. On 17 November 1916, Conrad von Hötzendorf was with the Emperor. The Emperor fol- lowed his ‘presentation with his usual interest’, but then fell asleep.1432 Those closest to him had already known for a long time that it made a great differ- ence whether one had an audience with the Emperor during the morning or during the afternoon. As the Chief of the Military Chancellery put it : ‘In the evening, the Emperor is very tired. While during the morning, he is a master of attentiveness, in the evening, he frequently asks for matters to be repeated.’1433 On one matter, everyone was in agreement who had dealings with the Emperor during these years : he was dominated by his everyday routine. Whether this was out of a sense of duty or because of his desire not to change the order of the day significantly from what it had been until then remains open to speculation. The unchanging daily cycle kept him alive.