Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 Read online

  The Emperor received the Crown Prince on January 24, a Friday. Just on that Friday, Broz might have been in town. He had an excellent reason for coming to Vienna a day early, as soon as the factory let out, even if he had to take the milktrain back to Wiener Neustadt for the Saturday morning shift. He and other young bucks of his particular craft had a motive for taking some extra trouble: On the night of Friday, January 24, the Sophiensaal in Vienna gave an Automobile Mechanics Ball.

  In Vienna almost every walk of life generated its own carnival festivity. Even the Insane Asylum at Steinhof held a Lunatics' Gala. But 'there was no fete for psychiatrists. Sig mund Freud, fifty-seven years old and becoming globally controversial as arch-analyst and founder of the psychoanalytic faith, stooped alone over his desk at Berggasse 19. He was filling page after page of a big lined notebook. Outside the windows of his study, the city was transmogrified into a masked ball. Inside, the master explored the origins of the mask-the primeval mask, the totem. In January 1913 he was finishing an essay called Totem and Taboo. It turned out to be a subject eerie not only in theme but in timing. For all carnival celebrations crest toward Lent; they all say "carne vale" good-bye to the flesh-as penance for the death of the Lord. Freud's essay deduced from the anthropology of primitive man that the totem was an animal symbol of greatness slain, of the father-leader killed by his sons and followers. After his murder they donned a mask representing the sacred corpse. As their victim's worshippers, they banded together under his symbol in order to bear their guilt better in unison. They ate his flesh or assumed his face to partake of his power, to obtain his forgiveness.

  Here was not only the dynamic of primeval myth. Here was the drama of the Eucharist and the plot of Easter, explored by a pen in the Berggasse, scratching on into the night. The ambivalence of carnival/Lent-so opulently celebrated in Viennapulsed around the once and future murder of the prince.

  The brooder in the Berggasse was not the only man to stay aloof from the city's revels while being inwardly attuned to its darker currents. About nine tramway stops northeast of Freud's study, a twenty-three-year-old artist subsisted at Mel- demannstrasse 25. This was the address of the Mannerheim, in a desolate corner of the district of Brigittenau.

  The municipal government had established this barrack to keep failures from becoming beggars. The Mannerheim" Home for Men"-gave shelter to the black-sheep baron who had drunk away his last remittance, the evicted peddler, the bit-actor too long between engagements, the free-lancer down on his luck, the day laborer always missing out on a steady job, the confused farm boy from the Alps, the flotsam from the Empire's Balkan fringes. They were men without anchor, without family, without sustaining women. All of them were lost in the merciless glitter of the metropolis. For three kronen a week[2] the Mannerheim gave them a last chance. That small sum provided a clean cubicle with a bed, a communal kitchen, a library with penny dreadfuls, a writing room for composing letters of application unlikely to be answered.

  Six years earlier, in 1907, the young artist had arrived in Vienna to hunt, like thousands of other ambitious provincials, for the greatness that must be waiting for him somewhere in the great city. Since 1910 he had done his vain striving at the Mannerheim. Twice he had tried to pass the entrance examination at the Academy of Fine Arts. Twice he had been rejected. He had carried to every important architect's office in town his portfolio of architectural drawings; not even the lowliest assistant's job had been offered to him as a result. His watercolors-unusually conventional renderings of Biedermeier scenes-failed to draw the interest of any gallery. He painted watercolors of famous Vienna sights such as Parliament or City Hall. These, when hawked on street corners by a friend, did yield some occasional cash.

  Actually he did not need to earn a penny. By 1913 his mother and his aunt had left him two fair-size legacies. He kept both secret. Nobody in the Mannerheim suspected him of an income that could have easily paid for quarters at a comfortable hotel.

  But he felt more at ease with fellow losers. Here, among his Mannerheim peers, he enjoyed a special niche. He quite literally occupied it. At the end of a long oaken table near the window of the Writing Room was "the Hitler Chair." It had the best light for painting postcards. Nobody but Adolf dared sit there. Everybody honored his obsession with the chair, partly out of gratitude: If a Mannerheim tenant fell short of his week's rent, Hitler was amazingly fast in organizing a collection. Respect also played a role in obeying the man's wish: He was one of the very few in the house never to splurge or debauch. When the Court Opera played Siegfried he would indulge himself in a standing-room ticket. Once a week he might drop into a pastry shop for a chocolate square. But he always practiced sobriety.

  And he was a worker. He would daub away with his brush even on carnival nights such as those in 1913 when the gas light outside gleamed on domino masks and decolletages. It didn't seem to bother him that he was excluded from a season so festive for the more fortunate.

  Most of the others in the Mannerheim were restless. Even the cheapest ball glittered at them from an impossible distance. They could only afford to drop by a local pub, hoist a lager, ogle prostitutes, leer about sending them to a Serbian bordello. They'd return home for the 11 P.M. curfew, not ready to be shut into their cubicles. So they lingered in the Writing Room to jaw about politics or to reminisce about hot women. And then, without warning or preamble, it would happen.

  Hitler would straighten up in his chair. He had been working all along, hunched over. Now the brush would drop from his hand. He would push the palette aside. He would rise to his feet.

  He began to speak, to shout, to orate. With hissing consonants and hall-filling vowels he launched into a harangue on morality, racial purity, the German mission and Slav treachery, on Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons. His forelock would toss, his color-stained hands shred the air, his voice rise to an operatic pitch. Then, just as suddenly as he had started, he would stop. He would gather his things together with an imperious clatter, stalk off to his cubicle.

  And the others would just stare after him. They had come to accept his fits along with his "chair." He was, after all, a good man otherwise. And he did give his Mannerheim audience a good show, producing so dramatically the gesticulations of a clown and the screeching of a demon. In January 1913, it was the Mannerheim's way of experiencing the Vienna carnival.

  2

  Chronologically the carnival of 1913 conformed with other years. It began shortly after New Year to end on Shrove Tuesday. This was the Merry Season as defined by the calendar. But carnival in the sense of opulent, ingenious, finely organized Viennese make-believe knew no such limit. In this city it had flourished continuously for over half a millennium.

  Here the fairy tale of Habsburg splendor, with orb, scepter, and throne, with pomp of blazons and gonfalons, with the choreography of homage and precedence, of raised trumpets, white stallions, and bowed heads… here it had been enacted and re-enacted every day through endless generations.

  The solemn, perpetual ball that was the Imperial court encompassed the entire town. London was other things be sides the King's residence. Even in Bourbon days, Paris had been much more than a royal encampment. But Vienna meant Habsburg. Habsburg meant Vienna. Vienna and Habsburg kept inventing each other into a crowned, turreted, sunset-hued fable that floated above ordinary earth. Compared to other urban centers in Europe, Vienna had little commerce, less industry, and hardly any of the workaday grayness of common sense. Fact-ridden pursuits could not leave much of an imprint on a city busy with the embroidery of Christendom's foremost escutcheon. Factory and counting house were dwarfed by the magnificent shadow of the Palace. Century after century the Viennese devoted themselves to the housing and feeding and staging of their suzerains' legend.

  Of course that legend needed a legal character through which the Habsburgs could exercise their dominion. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century they were Holy Roman Emperors. They wore that dignity like a preternatural carnival mask-a mask whose i
llusion was obvious to all yet whose charisma no one could escape. This peculiarity has been a commonplace among historians: the Holy Roman Empire was hardly Roman. It was not holy (being a cauldron of profane ambitions). It was not an empire (being a mess of brawling princes beyond the emperor's control). The Habsburgs practical power issued from the patchwork of their own huge possessions. As executive instrument, the title of Holy Roman Emperor was vapor. As mask of Christ's paladin it wielded incalculable force.

  Napoleon appreciated its resonance. In 1806 he forced the House of Austria to abandon it. Habsburg put the Viennese imagination to work. Other constitutional fictions were devised. By 1913 the latest of these had been in force for nearly fifty years. It was called the Empire of Austria-Hungary, and it was decked out in a legal framework as fanciful as any of its predecessors.

  This creation combined quite marvelously the heraldic with the schizoid. Here was a monarchy ruled by one monarch whose subjects passed an official border as they traveled from Hungary, where Franz Joseph was King, to Austria, where his title became Emperor. The realm had two Prime Ministers who were really less premiers than governors of their respective imperial or royal sub-realms. On the other rather dizzying hand, there was only one Foreign Minister; in a number of ways his power and prestige exceeded that of the Prime Ministers because he formed the chief link between the monarch and the twin cabinets. A further incongruity distinguished him above all other panjandrums. In addition to the conduct of Exterior Affairs he was also charged with "participating in family celebrations of His Majesty's household," as if these duties were complementary.

  Constitutional wonders did not end there. The two premiers shared between them one common Minister of Finance and one common Minister of War who commanded the common armed forces. The two men headed these departments as Imperial Excellencies in Vienna, as Royal Excellencies in Budapest. To endow Hungary with the dignity of being a separate country, all other, less essential, ministries were separately headed and staffed; so were the judiciaries and the civil services on both sides of the Austro-Hungarian hyphen.

  As for the legislatures, their doubleness came with an extra dollop of paradox. In Budapest, the Parliament of the Kingdom of Hungary convened. But in Vienna there was no such thing as an Austrian Parliament. Officially speaking, there was no such thing as "Austria." Yes, Habsburg was known as the House of Austria. Yes, the world knew Franz Joseph as the Austrian Emperor. Yet nowhere in the constitution of his empire did an entity named "Austria" appear. "Austria" seemed to be a grandiose ghost whose radiance must not be bounded by definition. The non-Hungarian portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not called Austria. The constitution referred to it obliquely and indirectly as "the lands and provinces represented in the Imperial Council."

  The Imperial Council was the Parliament sitting in Vienna. And the Parliament in Vienna was at least in part another feat of illusion. It was not very parliamentary. Electoral districting and balloting procedures gave Austria's German-speaking citizens proportionally more representation than Slav voters. What's more, one stroke of the Imperial pen could dissolve the Imperial Council at any time. Until the next elections (whose date the Emperor determined), the Emperor could rule and legislate by decree. Usually he refrained. The option always loomed. The Vienna parliament was a masterpiece of that famous Austrian speciality, latent absolutism.

  In physical terms, too, it was an interesting deception. On a Ringstrasse rampant with architectural heroics, Parliament looked like a temple of calm. Its granite ramps, huge but gently angled, led up to the serenity of a colonnade. It was guarded by the monumental poise of a statue of Pallas Athene. The facade breathed neoclassic serenity.

  Inside seethed a witches' sabbath of nationalisms. Here the ethnic groups of the Empire's non-Hungarian part went at each other through their representatives. Six million Czechs attacked ten million Germans for under-financing Czech schools in Bohemia and Moravia. Five million Galician Poles banged desks to demand greater administrative independence. Three and a half million Ukrainians stamped feet for a Russian-language university to counteract the Poles' cultural domination. Deputies from the South Slav area contributed to the multinational brawl. Through their representatives' throats, over a million Slovenes and three-quarters of a million Serbo-Croats shouted their grievances. German-speaking deputies split bitterly into Socialist and Conservative movements, the latter divided still further into the anti-Semitic Christian Socialist and pan-German parties. Such schisms inspired similar front lines within other ethnic factions. Occasionally all groups joined to excoriate Hungarian politics as practiced by the sister parliament in Budapest.

  It was less a legislature than a cacophony. But since it was a Viennese cacophony it shrilled and jangled with a certain flair. Polemics were delivered through clenched teeth. Yet the vitriol came with whipped-cream rhetoric: "If Your Ministerial Excellency would finally condescend to reason!" Friction ran red hot without becoming altogether raw. Instead of exploding the Empire, nationalist fury spent itself in theater. Representatives bristled so histrionically against each other that often they had little energy left to use against the Emperor's Double Eagle under whose wings they were allowed to stage their confrontation.

  Vladimir Lenin, resident in the Austrian province of Galicia, followed parliamentary performances in Vienna through the Cracow papers. The way Habsburg survived the ethnic imbroglio impressed him. In an article he sent to the St. Petersburg Pravda he declared that "Austria handles the national problem far better than the Tsar."

  As a matter of fact, Lenin admitted that he himself, as the leader of a revolutionary movement composed of different Slavic as well as non-Slavic elements, had things to learn about handling the ethnic problem. "As to nationalism," he wrote Maxim Gorki in February 1913, "I am fully in agreement that it is necessary to pay more serious attention to it. We have here a wonderful Georgian who is writing a long article for Prosveshchenye, for which he has gathered all the Austrian and other material."

  The "wonderful Georgian"-Stalin-had been entrusted with a task in Vienna that was vital to the Party. To Stalin himself it was a breakthrough opportunity. True, by 1913 he had already become something of a Bolshevist journalist through his contributions to the legally published Pravda in St. Petersburg. But his initial and still primary reputation among comrades was quite different. He had made his mark as a rough-and-ready activist, a fomenter of strikes, an organizer of bank robberies on behalf of the party's treasury-in brief, a red buccaneer who did not shrink from gun or bomb. His challenge in Vienna involved much subtler aspects of the cause. Socialism was international and supra-national by its very motto: "Workers of All Countries, Unite!" Yet in 1913 Europe's workers were subject to divisive nationalisms. Even the proletariat longed for national identity. How could that need be fulfilled without setting the oppressed of one land against the oppressed of another? This was the question worrying Lenin. During his Austrian mission, Stalin was to answer it by way of an essay in Prosveshchenye, the Party's sociological journal.

  The Wonderful Georgian had to address a complex issue in a foreign city under unfamiliar circumstances. Especially unfamiliar were Stalin's hosts in Vienna. They didn't resemble the underground comrades he had known in Georgia or the tough pamphleteers of St. Petersburg or the better educated but blunt and hard-eyed pragmatists around Lenin in Cracow. The Troyanovskys who took in Stalin at Schonbrunner Schlossstrasse 20 were elegants. Alexander Troyanovsky, a son of a high Tsarist officer, graduate of Voronezh Cadet School, destined to be Soviet Ambassador to Washington, spoke an aristocratic Russian and played a brilliant game of bridge when partnered with his wife Elena, who was a lawyer born of a noble family. "They have money," Lenin said in a letter describing the couple. Of course they also had impeccable party credentials including some years in Siberia, a region not known for its bridge tournaments. At any rate, the Troyanovskys were the most comme it faut comrades in Vienna. Quite possibly Lenin sent the Wonderful Georgian to them as to a fini
shing school. They were to polish this diamond in the rough.

  It proved unpolishable. The Troyanovskys failed to civilize their guest. He ignored Vienna's cafes, its suavities, frivolities, balls-even those given by trade unions. With a surly, even pace he kept tramping through the city's gayest month in pursuit of nothing but his mission.

  "I was in conversation over tea with a comrade," Trotsky would recall of a very cold day in Vienna, "when suddenly, without knocking at the door, there entered from another room a man of middle height, haggard, with a swarthy grayish face showing marks of smallpox. The stranger, as if surprised by my presence, stopped a moment at the door and gave a guttural grunt which might have been taken for a greeting. Then, with an empty glass in his hand, he went to the samovar, filled his glass with tea, and went out without saying a word."

  Not that Stalin meant to be rude to Trotsky specifically. The two men had clashed in print before; within ten years they would begin the world-famous duel destined to split Communism on all continents. But on that January afternoon of 1913, when they first came face to face in Vienna, each did not know who the other one was. Stalin took in that dainty comrade with the French novel under his arm and proceeded to behave-like Stalin.