General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Sissi – The Young Empress

Sissi – The Young Empress (German: Sissi, die junge Kaiserin) is a 1956 Austrian historical romance film directed and written by Ernst Marischka, the second part of his three-film Sissi trilogy about Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837–1898). Romy Schneider and Karlheinz Böhm repeat their roles as the young imperial couple from Sissi (1955), with the story following Elisabeth's first years of marriage, her conflict with the domineering Archduchess Sophie, and her role in the Hungarian coronation.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Sissi, die junge Kaiserin (Austria, 1956)¹
Director and writer	Ernst Marischka, who also produced with Karl Ehrlich for Erma-Filmproduktionsgesellschaft Ernst Marischka & Co. (Vienna)¹
Premiere	19 December 1956, Munich (Stachus); 35 mm, 1:1.33, Agfacolor, 2,900 m / 106 minutes¹
Lead cast	Romy Schneider (Empress Elisabeth), Karlheinz Böhm (Emperor Franz Joseph), Magda Schneider (Duchess Ludovika), Vilma Degischer (Archduchess Sophie)¹
Key crew	Bruno Mondi (cinematography), Anton Profes (music), Alfred Srp (editing)¹
Award	Bambi 1957 as the commercially most successful film¹
Place in trilogy	Middle film between Sissi (1955) and Sissi – Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (1957)³

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens after the wedding of Emperor Franz Joseph to the Bavarian princess Sissi, an event celebrated across Europe. Sissi's unconventional manner makes it hard for her to fit into court life at the Hofburg in Vienna; nearly everything the natural child from the Starnberger See enjoys violates court etiquette, and the groundwork is laid for a deep enmity with her mother-in-law.² The young couple lives happily at Schönbrunn at first, but Sissi grows increasingly aware of her gilded cage under Sophie's constant surveillance and the strict court ceremony.⁴

The conflict with the emperor's mother peaks when Sophie decides to take over the upbringing of Sissi's child and has the baby brought to her apartments without Sissi's knowledge, provoking an open rupture.³ Sissi flees after a quarrel to her parents in Bavaria; Franz Joseph follows her, and the couple makes up for their honeymoon in the mountains.⁵ Back in Vienna, Count Andrassy (Walther Reyer) presses Sissi to attend an important reception for the Hungarians, and the imperial couple travels in triumph to Budapest, where Franz Joseph is crowned with the Crown of Saint Stephen.⁵ In the film's resolution, Sissi embraces her role as empress, overcomes her escapist tendencies, and settles her conflict with her mother-in-law, merging the opposing spheres of private feeling and public duty into one integrated nation.⁷

Production

The overwhelming success of Sissi in 1955 allowed Marischka, an Austrian director openly fascinated by the historical Empress Elisabeth, to continue his screen monument a year later with Sissi – The Young Empress.⁴ The film was shot in Agfacolor on 35 mm in the 1.33:1 ratio, in the lavish style of the 1950s Heimatfilm genre with expensive sets and scenic nature footage.¹^•⁵ Magda Schneider, Romy Schneider's mother, again played the empress's mother on screen, and Vilma Degischer returned as the villainous Archduchess Sophie, Franz Joseph's mother.⁶ Thousands of fans besieged the shooting locations, celebrating with sausages and beer, and the trilogy became an enormous export business.⁵

Historical liberties

The film is a romanticized view of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth, and Marischka took liberties with history throughout the trilogy.⁶ The characters correspond more to the advertising emblem on kitschy souvenir coffee cups than to their historical models, and the imperial biographies are visibly and almost clumsily embellished; the films do not present themselves as serious history but as a fairy-tale, brightly colored, romanticized version of the imperial era.⁴ The real Elisabeth's life, which ended in anarchist assassination at the age of 60 in 1898, was far darker than the trilogy allowed.⁸ The museum record of the empress notes that the sweet, unaffected young "Sissi" of this image tradition corresponds only partially with the empress's actual personality.⁹

Reception and legacy

The trilogy sits oddly in postwar German-language cinema. The film scholar Heidi Schlipphacke, a specialist in German studies, describes the Sissi films as "simultaneously amongst the most popular with moviegoers and the least revered by film critics" in the landscape of postwar West German and Austrian cinema.¹⁰ The first film alone sold ten million tickets in West Germany in 1955, and the trilogy is still screened biannually on German television.¹⁰ The films remain among the most popular in the German language, comparable with Gone with the Wind in American cinema.¹¹ In Austria the trilogy has become a Christmas television tradition, and the Sissi films are treated as cult objects in the Vienna Furniture Museum's collection of film sets and memorabilia.¹²

China. The dubbed Chinese version of the trilogy, broadcast in the mid-1980s as one of the first non-communist Western films dubbed for Chinese television, reached around 800 million viewers, and China Central Television has broadcast the trilogy every year during the Chinese New Year holidays since the late 1980s.¹³ The cinematic Sissi, known in China as Princess Xixi, became a pop icon and advertising figure whose image blurred the line between the historical empress and the 1950s film character.¹³

Later portrayals. Romy Schneider reprised the Sissi role in Luchino Visconti's 1973 film Ludwig II, an appearance that both pays homage to and sabotages the figure Marischka created.¹⁴ Recent films such as Corsage (2022) and Sisi & I (2023) explicitly break with the images shaped by the trilogy.¹⁵

Scholarly readings

Scholars have read the trilogy against its postwar context. Erica Carter, professor of German at King's College London, traces how the trilogy's success fed an Austro-German trade and even diplomatic dispute over whether Austrian films could be marketed as German, and reads the films as drifting toward imperial nostalgia and the melancholy of territorial loss.¹⁶ Schlipphacke argues in the journal Screen that the films' mood is melancholic rather than celebratory: they resist linear, heteronormative closure through frustrated desires, romantic triangulations, and tableaux of royal display, correlating a queer affect of melancholy with a German mode of mourning blocked by the guilt of the nation's fathers.¹⁷ Sabine Müller, writing in New Readings, counters the charge of willful collective amnesia, arguing that the sugar-coated royal romance formed part of how 1950s audiences narratively coped with the past.⁷

The trilogy's literary roots predate the films: serial novels about Elisabeth published in the 1930s formed the basis of Marischka's postwar trilogy, and the first film about the empress had been made in 1919, directed by her niece Marie Larisch.¹⁸

Notes on versions

Sources give slightly different runtimes: filmportal.de records 106 minutes for the 2,900-meter original print,¹ German listings give 107 minutes,³ and streaming databases list 1h 47min.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026