Werner Telesko's excellent new book is a study of Maria Theresa as a myth, that is, of her image as it was propounded in texts and visual representations across nearly three centuries. It is concerned less with the facts of her reign than with the way perceptions about her have transformed over time. As an example of Austrian art history, the book is unusual. It attempts to understand images as part of cultural history, to locate pictures within changing discourses of power and historical conceptions of Austrian identity, and this differentiates it from the tightly focused archival methodology common especially to Viennese art-historical scholarship. Likewise, it traverses disciplines, devoting equal time to Maria Theresa's textual representation as it does to her appearance in art.
Telesko begins with a discussion of myth as a historical concept. He acknowledges Roland Barthes's famous semiotic formulation of cultural mythology but finds greater applicability in the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann's notion of mythomotorics, the way in which a society fictionalizes its past in order to create a viable sense of itself. Viewed through this lens, Maria Theresa is less a static historical figure than an ever-changing screen onto which Austrian writers and artists have projected their priorities.
Within this history, three themes recur. One is the tension between Austria and Prussia and later Austria and the unified Germany, particularly how these two antipodes of the Germanic experience were characterized by opposing the personalities of Maria Theresa and Frederick the Great. Another theme is Maria Theresa's role as mother, be it her actual birthing of sixteen children, or her metaphorical roles as Landesmutter, as the mother of Europe, or as the mother of the Austrian military. Yet another theme is Maria Theresa's humanity, her fundamentally “normal” character despite her high status and monarchical duties. Versions of these ideas appear again and again, as Telesko shows, but their particular incarnations shifted according to Austria's changing historical and cultural situation.
The book is organized chronologically. Telesko notes correctly that there was little in the way of an official program of imperial representation under Maria Theresa that could compare to the Reichsstil of her predecessors. In the multiple representations of the empress that proliferated from the 1740s to the 1770s, Telesko identifies a dynamism that has until recently not received much study, and I think he is correct in arguing that her reign was an especially fertile one for Austrian art. He then develops a lengthy analysis of Balthasar Moll's imperial sarcophagus in the Kapuzinergruft, arguing that its polysemic iconography and decentralized composition enabled multiple Habsburg mythologies to be visualized.
By the late nineteenth century, the figure of Maria Theresa increasingly embodied an idealized “Austrian essence.” It is in this moment that the notion of Maria Theresa as Landesmutter gained its widest influence, which Telesko treats in a detailed reading of Caspar von Zumbusch's 1888 monument on the Maria-Theresien-Platz in Vienna. Its iconography, formulated in conjunction with historian Alfred Ritter von Arneth, presents her reign as an Austrian Golden Age even as it also carefully tempers her femininity. The twentieth century brought about a constantly shifting succession of mythical associations that Telesko links to Austria's frequently changing political fortunes. These ranged from the promotion of a neo-rococo Maria-Theresia-Stil in the empire's final years to the Germanization (that is, de-Austrianization) of Maria Theresa in the lead up to the 1938 Anschluss. The latter process raises the fascinating question, heretofore little studied, of how Maria Theresa may have fit within the broader histories of greater Germany promoted under National Socialism. Finally, Telesko treats Maria Theresa's many reincarnations in the postwar era, ranging from her political value to the ÖVP and SPÖ, each of which has championed her as an embodiment of their political platforms, to her appearance in scholarly writings, popular literature, and film. Of special note is Telesko's shrewd interpretation of Edwin Reinert's 1951 film Maria Theresia—eine Frau trägt die Krone, starring Paula Wessely, which he reads as a parable of Austria's national self-image in the years before the Second Republic.
It would have been interesting to include a discussion of Maria Theresa's place in the modern Austrian tourist industry, because for better or worse it is as tourist magnets that the Habsburgs hold the greatest significance to Austrian society today. The Schönbrunner Schlosshauptmannschaft's repeated attempts to turn Schönbrunn into a statement about Sisi, and not Maria Theresa, hints at how hard it has been to market the elusive eighteenth-century empress to modern audiences. Telesko's book succeeds in demonstrating how much the Austrian and also broader European community has invested in her image, and moreover how Maria Theresa's own multivalent eighteenth-century iconography paved the way for the ideological formulations associated with her ever since. Not long after Telesko's book appeared, the Slovak National Theater in Bratislava premiered a new opera by the Austrian composer Roland Baumgartner, called Maria Theresia, that retells the empress's story in Rosenkavalier-inspired neoromantic music. The organizers’ choice of subject matter and the performance locale have been justified by evoking Maria Theresa's cross-cultural significance and her embodiment of ideal personality traits, in this instance the modern traits of adaptability and cosmopolitanism. The myth of the ideal mother, monarch, and European continues onward.
