Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  His correspondence is full of frustration about the state of things: there is not enough money, not enough translators, not enough of anything to do a proper job of revolution. In January, Vladimir suggests his former lover Inessa Armand have a dress made with a special pouch in which the last remaining Bolshevik party funds in Switzerland can be hidden and transported abroad if need be. Conspiracy is a way of life. He is hungry for information–from Russia, from Germany, from anywhere. In Zurich, he has made himself an authority on the factional struggles within the Swiss socialist movement. When a Russian prisoner of war escapes from Germany by swimming across Lake Constance, Lenin is keen to pump him for his impressions. Impatient, insistent exclamation marks pepper his letters like gunshot pellets.

  Occasionally, summoning all his prestige as Lenin, the veteran of the Russian revolution of 1905, Vladimir gathers together Zurich’s anti-war socialists in one of the city’s bars. Naturally, he tends to dominate such events, speaking for an hour or so himself and then announcing that there is no time left for questions. Moderates accuse Vladimir of running head first into a brick wall with his revolution-at-any-cost approach. His embrace of violence as a political necessity strikes some as overdone. Who does Ulyanov speak for anyway? His Russian networks are largely blown (a couple of senior Bolsheviks turn out to be informants for the Tsar). Lenin is hardly a household name amongst the Petrograd proletariat. Who is he to lecture the socialists of Western Europe? After some initial success–as many as forty men and women crammed into the bar–Nadya notes a thinning-out in subsequent meetings, until there are just a couple of Poles and Russians left staring morosely into their beers.

  In January, Vladimir gives a talk to a group of young Swiss socialists at the Zurich Volkshaus, twelve years to the day since the outbreak of revolution in 1905. He tries to arouse their enthusiasm, and instruct them in the lessons to be drawn from his experience. Yet there is an ambivalence here. ‘The monstrous horrors of the imperialist war’, he says, ‘engender a revolutionary mood.’ But when will that erupt into revolution? In six months? A year? Ten years? ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution’, Vladimir admits, ‘but I can, I believe, express the confident hope that the youth which is working so splendidly in the socialist movement of Switzerland, and of the whole world, will be fortunate enough not only to fight, but also to win.’ Will revolution happen within his lifetime? The impatient revolutionary sounds uncertain.

  THE FRONT LINE: It used to be simple to draw. A line on the map from the North Sea to the Alps in the west, slicing through Europe in the east, and dividing Italy and Serbia from Austria in the south. Things get more complicated in Africa, and in the Middle East, of course, where the Ottoman Empire fights as ally to the Germans and the Austrians.

  But where is the front line now? In this war, it is everywhere. It runs through towns and cities, across rivers, and through mountains. The front line is on the factory floor and in the fields. It is in the chemistry laboratories where scientists develop new ways of making stretched resources go a little further and invent new products to kill the enemy or prevent disease. The front line is in Europe’s tax offices, in war bonds departments, and in the marketplaces of global finance, where money is borrowed to fund the war (increasingly, in America). It is in recruiting centres from Bombay to Brisbane, where Europe’s empires try to persuade their subject peoples to join their struggle, shipping thousands off from Asia and Africa to fight the enemy. The front line is in the human mind, where the horror of war is in continual combat with the dream of victory. This war is constant. It never stops. Everyone is involved. Armies and navies are just the leading edge of whole societies in conflict.

  There is little fighting of the old-fashioned variety this winter. Long periods in the trenches with nothing to do are punctuated by sudden, shocking violence. An Italian soldier sitting on the front line with Austria–Hungary just north of Trieste writes in his diary: ‘snow, cold, infinite boredom’. Rations have been cut again. Stewed salt cod and potatoes for supper on Christmas Day; and a miserly half a dozen panettone to share amongst over two hundred soldiers. Cholera is spreading. The soldiers have fleas. Men returning from leave mutter about chaos back home. ‘A government of national impotence’.

  BUDAPEST, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: In the first days of 1917 the city of Budapest nurses an imperial hangover. It is a week since the newly elevated head of the Habsburg line, Emperor Charles I of Austria, was rushed from Vienna to be crowned a second time, as King Charles IV of Hungary, adding another royal title to the gazette of lesser honorifics inherited from his dead great-uncle, the bristly Franz Joseph.

  Amidst the toasts to tradition and the oaths of blood fealty from Charles’s varied subjects–Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, Austrians, Romanians, Croatians–journalists huddle around field telephones to call in their latest coronation story. Film cameras whirr and click, recording the scene for the empire’s newsreels, while a Hungarian Jew who will later make his name in Hollywood directs the film crews this way and that to catch the essence of the moment. One camera’s gaze settles for an instant on the lolloping figure of a plump bishop, mounted uneasily on horseback, clinging on to his crozier for dear life while a soldier draws his horse past the cheering crowds. Another captures an undulating sea of hats–top hats, bowler hats, felt hats, fur hats, Tyrolean hats, fedoras, military caps and unseasonal straw boaters–as varied as the peoples of the empire. The war wounded are nowhere to be seen. For half an instant, it feels like 1914 all over again. Charles trots on horseback through the streets of Budapest, his moustache clipped in the modern fashion, smiling and nodding brightly in all directions, followed by a posse of slouching nobles with short legs and thick fur mantles, looking for all the world as if they have just stepped out of a Holbein group portrait. He swears to uphold the constitutional bargains at the heart of the old empire, whereby the Hungarians manage one half of his estate and Vienna manages the other half, and the Emperor sits on top trying to hold the whole thing together.

  Budapest’s streets are quieter now. The clip of cavalry hooves on cobblestone has been replaced by the more familiar sounds of daily life. The decorations which festooned the procession route, prepared in great haste by the scenery department of the Budapest opera, have been taken down. Police reports on the public response have come back: ‘too much pomp’, the citizens of Vienna grumble. Plans for a huge statue of Franz Joseph to be cast from captured Russian cannons proceed slowly for lack of funds. The dignitaries who travelled to Budapest to see the Austrian Emperor’s second coronation as King of Hungary have now returned home. They are bombarded with questions about the new King-Emperor. One question above all: will he bring peace?

  Charles is twenty-nine years old: a handsome man, but with a weak face, more like a character from Proust than a leader of an empire at war. (His wife Zita is not quite twenty-five.) It is three years since the assassination of his cousin Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo unloosed this war. It was never meant to last this long. Charles now proclaims his desire for peace with honour to save his creaking empire, the product of several hundred years of dynastic accumulation, an unwieldy structure in which a kaleidoscope of nationalities live in moderate happiness under the Habsburg Crown, and which people have been trying to reform for years, but cannot quite work out how.

  But peace cannot just be wished. Success depends on the willingness of others to play along–both one’s enemies and one’s allies. Yet Charles’s most powerful ally, the German Kaiser Wilhelm, feels no deference to his junior partner-in-war. With each passing month, Austria’s fate is bound tighter and tighter to that of Germany. Without a negotiated peace, what started as Austria–Hungary’s war is likely to end up either as Germany’s victory–with Austria reduced to vassal status–or with the collapse of both. Charles fears the possibility of imperial break-up or revolution amongst his peoples. Demands for independence have been growing for years. The war has made them louder.

/>   There is a second current of revolution running through Charles’s empire in the first days of 1917: an intellectual revolution, a revolution of the mind. For now, that revolution is self-proclaimed. It exists on paper, amongst the initiated. The inner cabal–somewhere between a study group and a secret society (their leader thinks of them as his ‘adopted children’)–denote their cause symbolically: with the Greek letter Ψ, or psi. More widely–which is not widely at all outside the hospital ward and the university–this revolution is known as ‘psychoanalysis’. The revolution’s father figure, based in Vienna, refers to the cause as a Geistesrichtung, a spiritual movement.

  His disciples exchange a constant stream of letters, gossiping about patients and swapping insights. Topics of enquiry are varied. Karl Abraham, a German army doctor serving at a Prussian military hospital, takes time between tending to the war wounded to finish his paper on premature ejaculation and its relationship to early childhood. In Budapest, Sándor Ferenczi struggles with a study of the symbology of castration. Last winter a series of public lectures were organised in Vienna on the subject of psychoanalysis. It is said one of Emperor Charles’s cousins popped in to hear a few.

  In January, the revolution’s latest front is opened in an article in Budapest’s leading literary periodical entitled ‘An Obstacle in the Path of Psychoanalysis’. It makes for uncomfortable reading for the city’s literati. Their pupils dilate. Their synapses flash. Ink smudges onto sweaty fingertips. The chief impediment to the spread of psychoanalysis, the article proclaims accusingly, is ourselves. It has always been thus. It is our self-love, our narcissism, which makes us refuse the genius of the greatest of our scientists. First it was Copernicus, who had the temerity to tell humans that the sun and stars did not turn around us, but us around them. Then it was Darwin, who upturned the aggrandising idea that God made humans in His image to rule the earth, but showed rather that we are mere animals, super-brained monkeys in three-piece suits, evolved but not separated from our genetic forebears.

  Now is the hour of the third revolution against which human narcissism rages, blindly and in vain. And this revolution is the most disturbing blow of all to human self-regard, for it shows that we are not masters even of ourselves. A deep breath, a sip of water. Budapest’s trams scrape and rumble by outside, unheard. The readers’ pulses race. The mind, they learn, is a ‘labyrinth of impulses, corresponding with the multiplicity of instincts, antagonistic to one another and incompatible’. There is no coronation ceremony in the world which can change the facts: control is an illusion, order is fleeting. ‘Thoughts emerge suddenly without one’s knowing where they came from’ and, once brought to mind, these ‘alien guests’ cannot be so easily removed. Such is the terrifying image conjured into life by the article’s author, the man most closely associated with the psychoanalytic creed: the conscious and unconscious are held in constant tension, our minds are forever simmering with psychical revolt. This is a conflict that no earthly peace deal can resolve.

  STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN: The Nobel Prize Committee receives a letter from an Austrian physicist recommending a former patent clerk in Switzerland, now working at one of the German Kaiser’s most prestigious scientific institutes in Berlin, for the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Over the next few days, several more letters pile up suggesting the young Albert Einstein, still only in his mid-thirties, for the award.

  PLESS CASTLE, SILESIA, THE GERMAN REICH: The German Kaiser is in no mood for compromise. ‘The war’, he explains, ‘is a struggle between two Weltanschauungen, the Teutonic-German for decency, justice, loyalty and faith, genuine humanity, truth and real freedom; against the worship of mammon, the power of money, pleasure, land-hunger, lies, betrayal, deceit.’ He blames his enemies for the war’s continuation. They have rejected his latest (thoroughly disingenuous) peace initiative. He writes to nervous Emperor Charles: ‘before God and before humankind the enemy governments will carry alone the awful responsibility for whatever further terrible sacrifices may now come to pass’. The matter is out of his hands.

  In a conference room deep in a medieval castle the Kaiser and a few military men take a fateful step. Germany is suffering a slow suffocation at the hands of a British naval blockade. Its children are starving. Yet Britain is free to receive imports of food and weapons from around the world, both from the empire but also from supposedly neutral countries such as the United States. As the generals see it, Germany could disrupt this flow and force the war to an end in months by using submarines.

  There is a catch. For maximum effectiveness of the campaign, submarine captains must be empowered to strike without warning and without mercy when they spot a target on the high seas. Fire first, ask questions later. They cannot wait to check the ship’s nationality or the content of its hold. Law and morality must be set aside. To engage in such a war will spark condemnation. It will upset American public opinion. But it is a calculated risk. ‘Things cannot be worse than they are now’, the group is told by Field Marshal Hindenburg, who, with General Ludendorff, runs Germany’s war.

  Wilhelm has hesitated for months. He plays at being the decisive war leader. The truth is that he is never sure what he should do until he has done it. The generals try to sideline him as much as possible, leaving him to flitter-flutter around in his bubble of hunting excursions, meetings with foreign leaders and road trips along the Rhine. But on this issue, the Kaiser cannot be ignored. The generals resort to another technique: seducing him with the promise of a great victory achieved by the Kaiser’s very own navy, and simultaneously dropping broad hints that they will resign if he does not do what they ask. It works.

  There is one final obstacle: the Kaiser’s appointee as the nation’s civilian leadership, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. But once the Kaiser has been persuaded, the Chancellor is presented with a fait accompli. This is Germany’s ‘last card’, he warns the generals. What if it goes wrong? The military men push back: ‘energetic’ and ‘ruthless’ methods are now needed to bring about victory before the Austrians start to fall apart. ‘We must spare the troops a second battle of the Somme’, Ludendorff tells the Chancellor. And if America joins the war? Hindenburg is confident: ‘we can take care of that’. The war will be over before any Americans arrive.

  The Kaiser signs the order that evening. He affects a strange insouciance as to its likely consequence: America’s entry into the war. The order will come into effect on the first day of February. It will not be made public until the day before, the last day of January. Even the Austrians are not told of the final decision until it is too late to rescind.

  VIENNA, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: Outside a few learned societies and the local Jewish welfare organisation, the name Sigmund Freud signifies little in the Austrian capital in 1917. Though a true son of the Habsburg Empire–a Moravian-born Jew who has made it in the capital–Freud’s fame, as he himself puts it laconically, begins at the border. The first time he feels he might really one day be famous is in 1909, when he catches a cabin steward reading one of his books on an ocean liner crossing from Europe to America.

  Freud’s outward style of life is that of an ever-so-slightly eccentric gentilhomme of his generation (university class of 1881) and milieu (a medical professional). His daily schedule is regular: writing, hourly slots with patients, a light lunch, a brisk walk, and letter-writing before bed. Like Lenin, he lives above a butcher’s shop, though his spacious family apartment at Berggasse 19 compares quite favourably with Vladimir and Nadya’s spartan digs in Zurich. Freud has achieved sufficient prosperity to be able to spend reasonably freely on a few particular private passions: books, his family, holidays in Italy or in the Alps, cigars, ancient artefacts. But, generally, he is careful with money. He invests his savings in Austro-Hungarian state bonds and life insurance. He rarely drinks. He never goes to the opera, preferring silent contemplation in his study to the noise of music. (There is no piano in the Freud apartment and the doctor’s study is situated as far as possible from the rooms of his mus
ically inclined sister-in-law, ‘Tante’ Minna.) Though an avid card-player, Freud sticks to what he knows: the classic establishment game of tarock. The value he most admires, and demands, is loyalty.

  Freud is far from being a political firebrand. He takes pleasure from the coincidence that Victor Adler, the leader of the Austrian socialists and one-time correspondent of Lenin, used to live at the same address as the Freuds. The fact that Victor’s son Friedrich is currently in police custody, charged with assassinating the Austrian Minister-President at a popular Viennese restaurant the previous autumn, adds a certain frisson to the connection. But Freud’s own radical heroes are of the past. His son Oli is named after Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Parliamentary forces in England’s Civil War. Wide-eyed modern revolutionaries–too certain of their right to remake the world in the reflection of their ideals, too unforgiving of human nature–are foreign to Freud’s sensibilities. The concept of the revolutionary masses scares him. He calls the French ‘the people of psychical epidemics, of historical mass convulsions, unchanged since Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame’. Freud prefers the English.

  Not that he is immune to the gusts of the popular mood. In the emotional atmosphere of the summer of 1914, as his daughter Anna rushed back from an unfortunately timed trip to England, Freud briefly metamorphosed from a Viennese man of the world into an Austro-Hungarian patriot. As Austrian soldiers tramped off to face the Russians and the Serbs, Freud declared himself willing to donate his libido to their fight. (For a Freudian, there is no greater gift.) That was three years ago. These days Freud ruminates daily on the savage impulses war has unloosed. He takes no pleasure in having been proved correct: the war has set the stage for humankind’s psychic dramas to play out en masse. Individuals have been transformed into stampeding hordes, the surface of civilisation has been peeled back. The sickness is deeper than even he had feared.