So now she’s riding again for the honor of Austria and the entertainment addiction of the Germans, as a torchbearer of empress kitsch and figurehead for flower sex between lace sheets and under stucco ceilings. Sisi is back, although she wasn’t gone at all in 2022.

Because until now on RTL (and from December 27th also free of charge) the second season of the mannerly crown series with the soulful Dominique Devenport as Austria’s imperial and royal sweatheart and the dashing Jannik Schümann as Emperor Franz Joseph I. has started done a lot in the royal media market. Sisi whispers velvety in the loop. The sticky Kaiserschmarrn is served on every conceivable channel.

Netflix has also added six episodes to the series market with the creamy “Empress”. The torment of the aging regent was tied up in the film “Corsage” by Austrian director Marie Kreutzer. And even the otherwise strict writer Karen Duve fell in love with Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie, Duchess in Bavaria and later Empress of Austria-Hungary. This influencer, rider, independent because rich royal woman and skillfully manipulating image tinkerer. It was worth her a hundred-page novel, which the high literary critics applauded.

After all, they all spell Sisi correctly with a simple “s” now. So much authenticity is now mandatory in the face of a woman who can hardly be fathomed among her many, more or less imaginatively talented reproductions. Since her death in 1898 at the hands of an Italian anarchist file, everyone has been concocting and projecting their own beautiful or ugly image of women in Sisi’s name.

And so there has long been an unstoppable, hardly comprehensible bugbear haunting around: fitness fairy and hair fetishist, frigid woman, would-be poet and cold-hearted wife like mother on the one hand, beautiful soul battered by evil court protocol, emancipated, freedom-loving spirit, political strategist with passion for the oppressed Hungarians and Franzl’s great love on the other hand.

Through an artificial, sometimes just crappy pile of films, series, novels, biographies, parodies, musicals, children’s cartoons. Once the mouth smiles like a porcelain doll, then it twists into a soulless avatar grimace. And while Duchess Meghan of Sussex does not want to end up as a filthy rich would-be victim whining about the persecution by the media beast via Netflix, the next monument is already being prepared for the first icon of the press and the colorful leaves of the 19th century.

Postponed for a long time, “Sisi and I” is due to premiere in March, the joint film project by Frauke Finsterwalder and her screenwriter, like her husband Christian Kracht. It should be about “power, humiliation, abuse and humor” when the royal red carpet is rolled out again from the perspective of maid Irma alias Sandra Hüller.

The astonishingly popular RTL Sisi, who definitely came up with production show values, showed herself to be adept at masturbation in the first season, traveled to Schönbrunn with a dildo and a prostitute teacher posed as a maid. But then had to bow to the historical truth like the strict lip curling mother-in-law Sophie (aka Désirée Nosbusch).

Year after year, Romy Schneider and Karlheinz Böhm flicker on the TV at home at Christmas time. Now comes the reinterpretation of the historical material – with Dominique Devenport and Jannik Schümann.

Source: RTL

In the second season, again filmed in the rather cool northern light of Lithuania and Latvia, it becomes totally absurd after two episodes with virtuoso camera technology: The empress, who is practically incognito with Count Andrassy, ​​is engaged in holiday diplomacy as a love of the country by a rebel who is cobbled together like Arpad, the gypsy (the poor Murathan Muslu) kidnapped and put in chains in a damp basement.

The husband in Vienna, who has to deal with a caricature of Bismarck (Bernd Hölscher), who appears with a spiked helmet and a German mastiff, which he previously let pee on the emperor’s statue, of course doesn’t get anything. But later in the disastrous Battle of Königgrätz he is allowed to slaughter Prussia in the front line as an Action Man with a knife and bayonet, as if the mass death on imperial orders (in reality from distant Vienna, of course) was a weekend treat.

And while both Dominique Devenport and Jannik Schuemann struggle to give their emotionally side-shifting royal castmates some form of believable acting, they can barely fill the gaping holes in the script, which vacillates between historical truth and predictable sex-and-crime TV action shut down. They didn’t even want to replicate the original St. Stephen’s crown for the Hungarian coronation, which ends the second season. It’s just another cheap prop. Nobody notices anyway.

“I want a man who will feed my soul,” sighs the Netflix “Empress” Devrim Lingnau, sweet as a booklet and kisses passionately with her Franzl (Philip Froissant) when they first meet in Ischl. After all, there is still the attractive brother Maximilian (cheeky: Johannes Nussbaum) as a spicy sidekick, who seduces with a drug party and Franz Liszt as a DJ on the piano.

Romy Schneider’s so nice “Papilein” shoots the horse of the disorderly daughter on Netflix and quotes Heine. Archduchess Sophie (Melika Fourutan) walks – it was filmed in Franconia – instead of through Schönbrunn through the digitally refurbished Pommersfelden Castle and gives the practiced PR strategist: “These are difficult times. Let’s give the people something to dream about.”

RTL-Sisi is already further along when it comes to cheap criticism of feudalism: “The court is like a corset that is too tight. It takes your breath away.” So away with the whalebone, bare skin should be shown. The romantic tearjerker can also become soft porn. That’s just the zeitgeist.

Even today’s Sisi has to bow to that. Strangely enough, however, if it is adjusted accordingly, it is always good as at least a superficial figure of identification. A myth of the 19th century as a carelessly fitted role model of the 21st century. Under his beautiful sash, however, only the Biedermeier clichés lurk. In the end, the seemingly radical woman remains the eternally manipulated fairytale queen of hearts.