Vestiges of the Archduke Rudolf's Mayerling affair continue to titillate popular imagination in unlikely settings. The well-reviewed 2006 film The Illusionist had as one of its major protagonists a certain Crown Prince Leopold who makes his home in the Hofburg. Arrogant and temperamentally volatile, he is bent on driving ignorance and gullibility from an empire ruled by his father. As part of his program, he unmasks a fraudulent magician named Eisenheim, who is performing in Vienna and turns out to be not only a philosophical, but also a sexual rival. A thinly disguised abstract of Rudolf's more notable traits and the story of his brief clash in 1882 with an English trickster named Bastian, Leopold is champing at the bit to be emperor too.

Critics in the United States missed the connection. Nevertheless, the durable interest in the story and anticipation of the 120th anniversary of Rudolf's suicide in 1889 may have prompted publishers to make available two books on the controversial heir apparent. Neither work is altogether new. The Bled volume came out in French in 1989; Hamann's first book on Rudolf, Rudolf. Kronprinz und Rebell, appeared in 1978. She acknowledges in this second edition (11) that her basic conclusions have not changed, even though much research has since been done on Rudolf, including her own investigation of more recently available published and unpublished materials from Rudolf and his parents, Empress Elizabeth and Emperor Francis Joseph. Having now spent more than 30 years in reading and writing about fin-de-siècle Vienna in one form or another, Hamann is especially well-positioned to argue for the soundness of her original study.

Her basic story has not changed substantially. A comparison of the index of the 1978 volume to the more recent one reveals that the cast of characters is much the same. Some passages and phrases have been rewritten: for example, parenthetical remarks in the original have become subordinate clauses in the volume under review. Some names have been regularized to meet current lexical standards, but none has been altered beyond recognition. The chapter titles and topical keywords are identical to Hamann's initial study as well. A major change is the decision to italicize the many, and often extensive, citations from Rudolf's correspondence and other writings. Though, unlike Bled, Hamann has foresworn a formal bibliography of secondary literature, her scholarly apparatus includes Archduke Rudolf's publication list, a revealing glimpse into the contents of the young man's mind and his many serious concerns.

Both books tell the same general story and draw the same psychogram from its chief protagonist: Rudolf the progressive, who was eager to reach out to people beyond his rarified immediate environment; Rudolph the spiritually and physically vulnerable soul both pampered and cut down by dynastic formalism, the cut and thrust of court politics, and reactionary elements in his society at large; Rudolf the convinced rationalist with empirical and unassailable answers to all of humanity's problems. Both books attribute his lurid end to despair over bodily ailments—gonorrhea for starters—but certainly aggravated by his awesome daily intake of painkilling narcotics along with heavy smoking and drinking. The bleak frustration that afflicted Rudolf as he realized that he was heir to a state whose government from Francis Joseph on down discounted his views and visions also compounded his malaise.

Both authors resort to psychological forensics at a distance in explaining the archduke's life and career. Each comment extensively on the troubled childhood of the heir apparent: his mistreatment at the hands of his earliest tutor and problematic bonds with his stiff and distant father and his emotional but elusive and self-centered mother. Bled ventures to suggest that Rudolf was nagged throughout his life by the sense that he had failed to please his parents. Modern child psychiatry abounds in literature on this syndrome. For this reader, however, it is not wholly persuasive, depending as it does on today's construction of parenting as an act of friendship rather than an interaction between superior and subordinate—the norm in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Given the rough similarity of their childhood experiences, far more men of the time than Rudolf should have ended it all by their own hand, taking their inamoratas with them. Indeed, Bled goes so far as to say that Rudolf spent much time in his final years looking for a woman who would willingly engage in a mutual suicide. Though she does not say so outright, Hamann describes emotional outbursts and other behavior patterns in the young heir apparent that reappeared as full-blown bipolar disorder in his adult life.

Both books read smoothly and vividly enough to appeal to audiences beyond the academy. Both authors, however, rise above scandal-mongering in tracing the trajectory of Rudolf's career. Neither leaves any doubt that the archduke had a bright and inquiring mind that made him an accomplished scientific amateur. He also had a good understanding of the economic, cultural, and even political changes that were taking hold of Europe. Although Bled goes into Rudolf's relations with his wife, Princess Stephanie of Belgium, more systematically than Hamann, both books suggest that the couple was closer than the vicious tongues at the court in Vienna allowed.

Each book has its peculiar virtues. Readers who are eager to get to the Mayerling story will be better served by Bled, who covers Rudolf's upbringing, education, and environment adequately, but turns roughly one-third of the work over to setting the scene for the hunting lodge drama, the suicide itself, and its aftermath. Bled's consolidated treatment of Mary Vetsera's family background is more helpful than Hamann's coverage, which she scattered throughout her book. Bled's endnotes can be quite thin, drawn heavily, as they are, from published memoirs and secondary literature such as Hamann's earlier work on Rudolf. Primary sources that are cited often appeared in previous studies. The bibliography is solid, but not all materials listed appear to have been used in the book itself. Crucial passages that cover Rudolph's increasing preoccupation with suicide and others' observations of his increasingly erratic behavior and his search for a woman with whom he could die (144–146) are also left undocumented. The graphics, while handsomely reproduced, are largely familiar Habsburg portraiture, lithography, and studio photographs.

Hamann, in a text almost twice as long, devotes only a quarter of her space to Mayerling. Her contextualization of Rudolf's career is correspondingly richer and more vivid, particularly when situating the court in the environment of contemporary Vienna. The increased size of the new edition is almost entirely the result of many more and well-chosen illustrations, which give the reader a palpable feel for the realities of contemporary life. Occasionally Hamann's sympathies for Rudolf lead her to burnish his image unduly: the epigram makes the Habsburg heir apparent a spiritual godfather of the European Union. Hamann also relishes the role of accuser. She does not like Empress Elizabeth at all. In fact, she all but forgets that if “Sissi” and Francis Joseph were wretched parents for their son, he was not the right son for his parents. In general, however, her judgments are sound and informed.

If they must choose between the two accounts of the Rudolf story, scholars should opt for Hamann's. Not only is it fuller, but the 1978 edition of the book is also no longer readily available in libraries outside of Austria.