689. A Murderous Affair: The Habsburgs’ Greatest Scandal (Part 1)
episodePreviously titled “689. A Murderous Affair: The Habsburg's Great Scandal (Part 1)” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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Count Hoyos and the Prince of Coburg ordered Loschek to break down the door. Out of breath, half crying, Loschek whispered that he had to inform their serene lordships that a lady, the Baroness Mary Wetzera, was staying in his Imperial Highness's room. Coburg and Hoyos recoiled. They retreated to the billiard room. Loschek kept knocking and calling. A kitchen maid began to whimper. Within a minute, the two emerged and repeated their order. "'Break down the door!' Some servant had already brought a wood-chopping axe. Loscheck raised it to smash the lock. The lock resisted. Loscheck hacked away at the white-painted door panels. The axe crashed. The panels splintered. Ravens fluttered up from the snow outside.'
The dogs barked and howled to the echoing blows. Loscheck hacked out a gash. The gash became a hole. Framed in jagged wood, smoky with blurred candles, dark with the drawn blinds, the room inside was visible. Only then did Loscheck drop his axe. The silence which followed changed the empire. So that is the climactic scene from Frederick Norton's great book, A Nervous Splendor, which is a portrait of Fantasiekler Vienna at the end of the 1880s. And it is a tremendously gothic account of the most notorious murder-suicide in European history, a scandal that so fantastically lurid that it makes the travails of our own beloved royal family, well, like nothing very much at all in comparison. And the context couldn't be more colourful.
We're just outside Vienna. The year is 1888. Vienna, of course, at this period, the city of Mahler, of Klimt, the young Freud, busy developing his theories of psychoanalysis, his notions about the sexual etiology of neurosis, and the question of Sex and neurosis will not be irrelevant to this story. And Vienna is the capital of an empire that is struggling to cope with forces that in the 20th century will have an absolutely explosive effect. Nationalism, antisemitism, a host of other modern pathologies. But the scene I just described, Dominic, I mean, it does read like something out of a kind of 19th century Gothic thriller, doesn't it? Like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.
Yeah, absolutely it does. So, hi everybody. The scene is a remote hunting lodge in the woods outside Vienna, and the two principal characters, so I'm going to give the game away right away. Our killer is the 30-year-old heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. He's Crown Prince Rudolf, an idealistic, haggard man. He's off his face on morphine and champagne. He is riddled with gonorrhea and he is the kind of man who keeps a skull as a paperweight.
I mean, he's another of the many people in history who look like our producer Callum. There's an astonishing number of them. But maybe the interesting thing about this, we did our series on Jack the Ripper. And we poo-pooed the notion that a crown prince could be a killer in that series. But here, there's not much doubt, is there?
There's no doubt whatsoever. So there's Crown Prince Rudolf, and then there is his accomplice and victim. And this is his teenage mistress, Baroness Mary Wetzera, who is a fashionista. She's a party girl. She's a social climber.
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Chapters
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