Chapter 6 VIENNA ’ S MOST F ASHIONABLE NEURASTHENIC Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size Zero d Sabine Wieber Wandern, wandern, wandern. An den Gestaden südlicher Meere, durch kleine Städte Italiens. Unerkannt, unscheinbar in ihren Trauerkleidern, versteckt und den Zudrang der Menschen meidend. Jahre. 1 – Felix Salten (1910) I n the above-quoted essay, Felix Salten – probably best known as the author of Bambi (1923) – commemorated the Austrian empress Elisabeth (1837–1898) as an isolated individual who spent the final decades of her life restlessly travel- ling through the Mediterranean. Salten used this text to project Elisabeth as an ethereal, misunderstood and ultimately tragic figure: ‘he Empress … has long escaped our grasp, she was the embodiment of someone who carried her way and well above the existence of others’. 2 Salten’s rhetoric formed part of a wider posthumous idealisation of the Empress first set into motion by her assassination in 1898 but continuing well into the present day. Films such as Ernst Marischka’s iconic Sissi trilogy or Xaver Schwarzenberger’s 2009 costume drama produced for Austrian, German and Italian television audiences have kept Elisabeth alive throughout the twentieth century. 3 But these films form only a small part of Elisabeth’s twentieth-century popularisation, and indeed commercialisation, as a beautiful and carefree young Bavarian princess who married the dashing Austrian