AUSTRIA: The Mystery of Mayerling

Viennese cinema goers have surged in for weeks beneath a blazing sign: THE DRAMA OF MAYERLING. Such a title would have been unthinkable in the days when Austria-Hungary was an Empire, would have led to wholesale arrests for lèse-majesté. Even last week, in republican Austria, a young post office official, Ewald Laumann, 23, was driven to the last fringe of emotional hysteria by this curious, true drama of the Habsburgs, the mystery of which is not even yet revealed.

Herr Laumann, after witnessing the cinema drama several times, took a third class ticket...

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