A Nervous Splendor Read online

  A Nervous Splendor

  Vienna 1888-1889

  Frederic Morton

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1979 by Frederic Morton

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition October 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-395-3

  More from Frederic Morton

  The Rothschilds

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Gallery

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  More from Frederic Morton

  Connect with Diversion Books

  to M. C. M.

  to Felicia and Lester Coleman, for so much

  and to my parents, my two dearest Viennese

  Preface

  This book lifts a chunk out of the life of Vienna: July 1888 to April 1889. A limited span—but to write any history is to put limits on infinity. It seemed to me that by focusing on a brief time I might expose more of its depth, its details, its dailiness. In this dailiness I’ve looked for the city’s pulse: small flutters no less than great poundings. I’ve tried to trace local tremors that began along a curve of the Danube, then echoed across the world to come thundering down into our century.

  Why just these ten months? Because they seemed representative of a watershed when the Western dream started to go wrong dramatically and the very failure was flooded with genius. It was the context and subtext of a number of events that interested me—including, probably, one that goes unmentioned in my story. I will confess to it here.

  On some morning in the fall of 1888 a twenty-three-year-old tool-and-die maker named Bernhard Mandelbaum shoved the last lathe into place in a basement in an outer district of Vienna and opened a factory to produce costume jewelry. I am Bernhard Mandelbaum’s grandson and the idea of that fall day gripped me as a child each time I looked at the letterhead of my father’s firm: Bernhard Mandelbaum & Sohn. Gegründet 1888.

  Founded in 1888. A phrase concealing a miracle. The factory had become no more than a fair-sized enterprise in the 1930s, but under Bernhard it had borne up very well during the Great War. Under Sohn it thrived right through the Depression. For fifty years it had been the pride, the fixed star of our family. How could my grandfather have conjured it out of nothing in 1888?

  Later, in grade school, I learned that the miracle was really rather commonplace. We were taught that in Vienna the decades following 1850 were called Gründerzeit, the Time of the Founders. In that period the Emperor had built the dream-sweep of the Ringstrasse. Other Austrians, commoners or counts but giants all, had strung the railroads and raised the chimneys which had—almost—made the baroque Empire modern.

  Of course, my grandfather labored only on the fringe of that drama. Yet to me he remained a founder among founders. Later I became an American and a writer and my perspectives shifted. I saw young Bernhard Mandelbaum behind a foreground of his truly great contemporaries, the kind who create not industries but climates; men who ninety years ago brewed the very weather of our minds today, men who might have strolled past my grandfather on the sidewalks of a Vienna misted with nostalgia now, a city beyond the looking glass, shining and haunting, lilting and lost.

  Do I place my grandfather in too elaborate a frame? Neither waltzer nor philosopher nor captain of cartels, he had come from Galicia to the capital to pursue an ungrandiose vision. He wanted to found with his factory a prosperous, stable, permanent place in which to be modestly dynastic. And here I am, his grandchild, looking at the Hudson instead of the Danube, writing in a language he did not know, under a name he would never recognize.

  In our world, as this book tries to show, achievement must end in irony. Yet I hope that my grandfather might join the great founders of 1888 with his own small posthumous success. These pages are the seed of his seed. If he and I are lucky, they will add a little to the charting of the dark through which all of us are drifting.

  F. M.

  Chapter 1

  On Friday, July 6, 1888, the price of sugar went up from forty to forty-two kreuzers a kilo in Imperial Vienna. On the afternoon of the same day, the gates of Franz Joseph’s palace swung open. A carriage swept out onto the cobbles of the Ringstrasse. Many of the strollers stopped, as though they’d been waiting for the canter of these two horses.

  On the new Ringstrasse one promenaded in the hope of just such spectacles. Walking, one lingered. One came here to wait, as it were, in style. The Ringstrasse itself, all four kilometers of it, stood forever on the verge of a crescendo. Its parklike malls were flower-scented, heavy-leaved with lime and plane trees. To the left and to the right rose huge, intricately wrought silhouettes: Parliament and City Hall, the Imperial Museums, the University, the Court Opera, the Bourse, all teeming with pointed arches, towers, pillars, loggias, with vista after sculptured vista in neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque, all quite new, barely weathered and not yet, if ever, real.

  Great traditions had become mock-ups here. This was a vast stage set made of concrete, poured and molded to resemble classic stone. The architecture of previous centuries had been conjured into a theatrical dream, a mirage of portals and pediments sweeping around the medieval core of the city. A mirage waiting either to dissolve or to be touched by some great hand that would give it substance. Waiting, while the price of sugar went up.

  Something had to be coming. Children might shout here or horses neigh, but the sounds always fell into a peculiar and preliminary quiet. The boulevard was such a portentous backdrop. One always looked for some act in the foreground big enough to fill it. Those vaulting facades not only glorified the Empire’s past but also celebrated an imminence, a transfiguring future.

  Where, then, was the flesh of this future? Where the hero to animate heroic scenery? The strollers stopped and stared after the carriage. Somebody was floating away there who might justify so much splendor and so much expectation.

  The carriage itself, though, was small. No herald preceded it. No guard followed. Its wheels were not painted with bands of gold. Therefore it did not belong to the coach fleet of the Imperial house. The door exhibited no escutcheon like the ones on the coaches of the aristocracy. It was just a fiacre, a private black horse cab whose cabbie held the reins. His name was Bratfisch and he was a bit more natty than most of his colleagues. He wore his mustaches longer, his cravat more artistically flowing, his top hat more fetchingly angled. And he whistled to the dancing of the hooves, the jouncing of the rubber wheels. He whistled only old Viennese songs about small, sad, dear things gone by: about the chestnut tree by the gate, the gnarled nooks of little streets, the well
in the Vienna Woods; songs about the medieval walls that once had hugged the town where the “Ring” now displayed its glitter.

  He whistled affectingly. But that wasn’t why the strollers stared. After all, other horse cabbies serenaded their fares. But other cabbies had to obey traffic regulations; they were supposed to rein their horses to a walk at street crossings. Not Bratfisch. He zoomed right through, thanks to his passenger. That passenger, who hired him not for an hour or for a day but by the year, reclined in the shadow of the back seat.

  He was a young, very slim man in a plain hacking jacket. His beard half concealed a narrow, taut, handsome face. A face conscious, perhaps, that it was being waited for. A young man’s face become hollow from too much waiting.

  Next month he would be thirty. The stupendous boulevard on which he rode had been under construction for as many years as he had lived. And it had been built for him more than for anyone else. He was the Crown Prince Rudolf, born by God’s grace to be Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Jerusalem, King of Bohemia, King of Dalmatia, King of Transylvania, King of Croatia and Slovenia, King of Galicia and Illyria, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Salzburg, Duke of Bukovina, Duke of Modena, Parma and Piacenza and Guastalla, Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, Prince of Trient and Brixen, Count of Hohenembs, Grand Voyvode of Serbia, and thirty other titles, not the least echoing of which was Duke of Auschwitz.

  All these dominions awaited the slender figure in the coach. They stretched from chalets at the Swiss border to the minarets of Montenegro. Though they converged on him in a time still to come, they converged on him most specifically. Rudolf’s inheritance was a spectacular oddity among the great states of Europe. His future subjects were united neither by a common language nor a common religion nor common geography or tradition. They shared only one thing: his name.

  Habsburg. The Austrian Empire was a dynastic fiction, venerable, fragile, superb. Thirteen million spoke German in his babel. Ten million spoke Hungarian. Five million spoke Czech. Three million spoke Slovak, and millions more spoke diverse Slavic or Arabic languages. Only one person in those motley multitudes was really Austrian: the Emperor Franz Joseph, whose flesh magically united them all.

  Rudolf waited to be the next Austrian. And Austria, that many-colored idea sprawling across the Danube lands, surrounded him as he waited, as he sped along the boulevard. Every fairytale corner of the Monarchy contributed visitors to the Ringstrasse. Visiting Vienna meant, above all, walking that boulevard, for seeing sights, for just being there. Exotic apparitions mingled among strollers in Western attire. As Bratfisch swooshed past, a Muslim—from the Imperial Protectorate of Bosnia—shuffled along in crimson fez and pointy white slippers, hawking ornate teakettles and inlaid snuffboxes. Coptic priests, with mitres and beards and violet waistbands girding dark-green cassocks, trooped beside Hasidim in black silk caftans and large-brimmed beaver hats. A Carpathian peasant took off his white fur cap before crossing the wonderful street—a form of Balkan humbleness. And few of these strangers in Vienna would ever guess who sat in the headlong carriage.

  Soldiers knew, and gloves flew up in salute. Much of the iridescence on the Ringstrasse was military. The boulevard attracted officers from all over the Empire, some posted here, some on leave from remote garrisons. All jaunted in their regimentals: Hussar majors poured into pink trousers and sky-blue jackets, Tyrolean Rifle lieutenants in silver-green…None of these uniforms was pompous with epaulet or braid or helmet Prussianly spiked. Almost every Austrian regiment favored the Crown Prince’s style, with a uniform cut along slender, beguilingly simple lines. It was not the garment of a killer or a strutter but that of a fencer, a dancer, a lover. Somehow it excised bellies, firmed chins, and transmuted soldier into leading man. At the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, Austria would win first prize for the most beautiful uniform on earth (the Artillery’s). Twelve years earlier, in July 1888, it was already just as beautiful in its many variations.

  Such variety made a pretty picture—and difficult politics. Habsburgs (forebears of the young man in the fast coach) had long reigned over many nations. But in July 1888, nation was beginning to mean nationalism. And sore new nationalisms screamed in Parliament, groused in newspapers, growled in the taverns. Franz Joseph manipulated these tensions. Rudolf wanted to resolve them. But meanwhile he had to wait. Meantime the price of sugar rose and Bratfisch let the hooves dance to his whistle. Along the Ring they cantered, faster and faster.

  On successive blocks, the promenaders stared. Wasn’t that fiacre going too fast? Why was the Crown Prince always too fast? He was being waited for. But did he know how to wait? His ancestors had known. Most Habsburgs before him had been virtuosos of slowness. Patient, steady husbandmen of empire through three-quarters of a millennium. Solid, craftsmanlike majesties. Some showed glints of flamboyance. Most never outfought or outshone their opponents. Instead, they outmarried them. They were adept in betrothing princes whose marriage contracts would win new lands for the House of Austria. Habsburg’s lumbering wedding processions had conquered more lands more lastingly than Napoleon’s cavalry charges.

  Habsburgs managed to avoid the inspirations and graces of decadence with which other dynasties danced toward their brink. Drabness was their secret. Drabness and patience. Manipulative, industrious, strangely modest, inexorable, decent, stodgy, staunch, the Habsburgs had come out of Switzerland in 1273. Manipulative, industrious, strangely modest, inexorable, decent, stodgy, staunch, Franz Joseph ruled in 1888. Rudolf was to carry his crown into the twentieth century.

  But would he? The promenaders stared. Would he, in a coach whipped on by a whistling Bratfisch? On wheels spinning wildly while the price of sugar rose? Too fast he floated past the Renaissance colonnades of the Court Opera and then past the cupolas of the Schwarzenberg Palace.

  Here Bratfisch veered his horses off the Ringstrasse, southward. In the distance stood the tenements of workers employed by the area’s new textile factories. Skinny sheep bleated on meadows already half dust bowl. Left behind Rudolf were the profits of industrialization, transmuted into gleaming imitation-antique on the Ringstrasse. Ahead lay the soot and weeds of progress.

  “I will have it thought about,” Franz Joseph would say when presented with profound trouble. Then he would order the best brains to think up a prettier facade to cover the problem. The Crown Prince, on the other hand, felt that problems must be faced and solved. “The many poor rightly see their enemy in the few who consume their substance,” he’d written at fifteen to his tutor, General Latour. “A tremendous change has to come,” he’d written his friend Moritz Szeps at twenty-four, “a social restructuring…”

  Now, at twenty-nine, Rudolf had learned that the things that have to come must bide their time, perhaps until the Empire’s destruction. And that it would be disobedient of him to speed changes on their way. His sonorous titles and peacock privileges did not include the franchise for doing something significant. This he had learned long ago. After a while he had also learned the pretense of accepting the intolerable.

  The day of his birth his father had awarded him the Order of the Golden Fleece and appointed him Colonel of the 19th Regiment. This spring of 1888 Franz Joseph had come up with yet another hollow honor and raised his son to Inspector General of the Infantry. Only two weeks ago, the annual High Command Conference had taken place, attended by many below Rudolf’s rank, and Rudolf had not even been invited. He pretended to accept that. His sovereign did not want to grant him true manhood. Very well, he would play the princely eunuch. For a while longer he would.

  He was cut off from the nerve center of the Monarchy—that is, from the monarch. “Correctness” governed stiffly the relationship between father and son. Rudolf not only did accept that but didn’t mind publishing it to those around him. Just three days before, on July 4, he’d written to his former tutor: “Do let me know when His Majesty the Emperor returns to Ischl. Surely you’ll hear the news a few days befor
e I do.” He was the heir apparent. Despite that—or because of it—he had never been given any real power save the almost occult one of making heels click and hats levitate everywhere through his mere appearance. He pretended to accept that.

  At last his fiacre slowed. Bratfisch stopped the horses before the Southern Railway terminal. The stationmaster’s cap levitated. Policemen’s heels came together. He acknowledged the ripple around him with a mild bow. He glimpsed a figure half hidden behind the coal cart. The inevitable detective, noting no doubt that His Most Exalted Imperial Highness was still alone. He accepted that as well. He let himself be bowed to his compartment.

  The train moved slowly, but Rudolf riffled fast through the newspapers in his valise. Fast enough to cover all the pages during a short ride. The financial columns in the back part of the Neue Freie Presse reported that, yes, sugar prices had risen by two kreuzers. In the personal-advertisements section on the next page small type simmered with passion. To my most beloved love: Have you forgotten me entirely?…Write! Greetings and kisses from your R. In a neighboring column a doctor advertised his “sequestered” waiting room for patients with secret diseases. Stanley was still lost in Africa, searching for Livingston. In Trieste an American corvette had amazed the whole harbor by hoisting an electrically illuminated flag on July 4.

  The Crown Prince concentrated above all on foreign news. The European picture had concerned him for years. Other empires were approaching modern greatness much faster than Austria: To the east, the Russian colossus knew how to exploit freshly emergent ethnic consciousness; St. Petersburg propagandized the Balkan Slavs both within and without Habsburg borders. In fact, Russia had just toppled the Austrophile Alexander Battenberg from his Bulgarian throne. To the south, Italy had already achieved much of its unification by reclaiming Lombardy and Venice from Austrian occupation; now Italy was going further and sending agitators into the southern part of Tyrol, the ancient Habsburg crown land. To the west, England’s sovereignty over the high seas was just being reaffirmed by the Suez Canal Convention, placing management of the Canal in the hands of a company controlled by Her Majesty’s Government. In Paris the dynamic shadow of General Boulanger galvanized all of France; “The Man On Horseback”—an admirer had invented the phrase for him—seemed fated to turn the Third Republic into a united phalanx under his dictatorship. To the north, in Germany, a yeasty young Wilhelm II had become Kaiser less than a month ago, impatient to start building his Greater—and ever Greater—Reich.