Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

by Frederic Morton

  Vienna instructed Cracow police: accommodate Lenin, infiltrate his conspirators not to hinder but to help him. In one of his earliest directives to the just-born St. Petersburg Pravda, Lenin had sponsored an article written by an Austrian agent. Now, in the summer of 1913, under All-Highest approval obtained from Ischl, clandestine operations like his were permitted to expand. The head of Conrad's Counter-Intelligence Bureau (once run by Colonel Redl), Colonel Oscar von Hrani- lovic, was in charge of smoothing things still further for Lenin.

  This convenient Bolshevik leader was allowed to visit Vienna in July 1913. He always enjoyed his sojourns there. (In a letter he once called the Austrian capital "a mighty, beautiful and vivacious city.") This time he came partly to consult doctors about his wife's goiter, partly to meet comrades in Vienna about the upcoming "summer conference" of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party scheduled (under the indulgent eyes of Habsburg authorities) in Austrian Galicia. Suddenly-from somewhere in the neighborhood of Vienna's Ministry of War-money floated into Lenin's hands. Suddenly he could afford to place a large order with a Viennese printer: 10,000 copies of a proposed party resolution and no less than 50,000 copies of a proclamation to be smuggled into Russia; it commemorated the St. Petersburg Bloody Sunday when the Tsar's troops had massacred hundreds of workers and wounded thousands in 1905.

  Leon Trotsky, the hero of 1905, chairman of the short-lived Soviet of that year, was in Vienna during this visit of Lenin's in July 1913. As we know, he had made the capital his headquarters, enjoying, like Lenin, the tolerance of the Austrian Counter-Intelligence Bureau. The two men, however, never met that summer for reasons excellent and ironic.

  Their conflict was coming to a head just then; in fact, it carried echoes of the clash between Franz Joseph and his Heir Apparent. Lenin had established himself as virtual emperor of the Bolshevik wing of Russian socialism through his skilled, tireless manipulation of the Party's Central Committee. Trotsky had defined Lenin's imperial politicking as "egocen- tralism" whose manifesto read "I am confirmed by the Central Committee, therefore I am." As Franz Joseph's reign was ritualized daily through the intricacies of court etiquette, so Lenin finessed his leadership through the tenacities, the niceties, the ambushes, the rhetoric of factional infighting, an art he may have perfected from the camarilla politics of the Empire that was his host.

  Trotsky, on the other hand, played a Franz Ferdinand role in the cast of Russian revolutionaries. He was the brainy, impolitic maverick of a newer generation. He had no patience with Lenin's steely-eyed craft of wearing down the Menshevik moderates within the Party. No, Trotsky, with the brilliance of his Western eloquence (honed at the Cafe Central), Trotsky through his role as pacifist among the Socialist sects, wanted to dazzle and conciliate Mensheviks and Bolsheviks into one camp-then sweep the unified Party into a revolution surging beyond Russia into the world..

  Lenin dismissed this pipe dream of reconciliation. He also sneered at Trotsky's "absurd, semi-anarchist view that the maximum program, the conquest of power for a socialist revolution, can be achieved immediately. " Hence Trotsky's spit at Lenin". that master-squabbler, brewing the deplorable brew of Party bickerings, that professional exploiter of backwardness in the Russian workers' movement… The entire edifice of Leninism at present rests on lies and falsification and bears inside itself the poisonous seeds of its own disintegration."

  For August 1913 Lenin had scheduled his Summer Conference-another "bickering" Committee meeting-at his country residence in the Galician Tatra mountains. Trotsky stayed away from it, just as the Heir Apparent liked to stay away from the Emperor's villa in Bad Ischl or from the Imperial Palace in Vienna. In fact, Trotsky was off to Bulgaria to write about the new Balkan War.

  Within four years, of course, the two revolutionary prodigies would (as Trotsky put it) "amnesty" each other of all their earlier disagreements. Trotsky would join Lenin as his coarchitect of the Russian Revolution. But in the summer of 1913, another feud was cresting, also between a younger and an older leader. And this one hardened into a permanent battle that partisans are waging to this day.

  Oh July 13, 1913, Freud left Vienna for the Bohemian spa of Marienbad. He was taking the cure for his rheumatism. He was also conditioning himself for the duel of his life. In a few weeks the Fourth International Psycho-Analytical Congress would start, and the man who would chair it, Carl Jung, whom Freud had installed as President and as his own Heir Apparent-this same Jung had turned against him. An insurrection threatened a precarious kingdom.

  The International Psycho-Analytical Association had been organized as a monarchy similar to the realm in which its creator had been born. "Freud," wrote Ernest Jones, his most faithful Freudian, "Freud was too mistrustful of the average mind to adopt the democratic attitude customary in scientific societies… he wanted the leader to be in a permanent position, like a monarch…" who would exert". a strong steadying influence with a balanced judgment, and a sense of responsibility…"

  Franz Joseph couldn't have put it better. It was a view likely to have been inspired by Austria-Hungary's mosaic of contentiously hyphenated entities. Freud saw man's psyche similarly divided: id-ego-superego. The id, "the parliament of instincts," in Freud's words, resembled the lower legislature on the Ringstrasse, steaming with nationalist passions; the superego recalled the noblesse oblige of an older code to which the Austrian ethos still appealed with its feudal titles and the handkissing chivalry of its etiquette. The ego was the crown at the helm, steering the whole restive and cumbersome enterprise.

  The International Psycho-Analytical Association consisted of members who must chart such tensions in their patients. Therefore they needed an organization much more powerfully centralized than (these are Jones's words) "old and relatively unemotional disciplines" like "geology and astronomy." To cope with the disorderly dramatics of the psychoanalysts' metier, a leader of hallowed power was required, a tiara'd ego whose office warranted not just election but coronation.

  At a previous Psycho-Analytical Association Congress in 1910, Freud had overcome resistance from Viennese colleagues and anointed Carl Jung president. Under Freud's aegis the younger physician from Switzerland wielded the privileges of a Crown Prince. Talent as well as race had brought him to the top. Among Freud's many Jewish disciples, he had the advantage of being Christian. As Freud saw it, "Jews… are incompetent to win friend. for the new teaching. Jews must be content with the modest role of preparing the ground." Jung was therefore most fit "to form ties in the world of general science… I am getting on in years… when the empire I have founded is orphaned, no one except Jung must inherit the whole thing."

  But in 1913 the inheritor, the Franz Ferdinand of psychoanalysis, had not only committed but openly affirmed his high treason. He had discarded the theory of sexuality, a concept no less sacred to Freud than court protocol was to Franz Joseph. As protocol in the Habsburg palace, so sex in Freud's canon governed all aspects of the day; like the court code it was hierarchical: oral sexuality preceded anal in the development of man, and anal preceded genital. Jung recalls Freud's injunction on the first day of his, Jung's, presidency:

  "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory… we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark."

  "A bulwark against what?" I asked.

  To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud"-and here he hesitated for a moment, then added-"of occultism."

  And now Jung, far from defending the bulwark, had begun to assault it. In a series of lectures given in London during the summer of 1913, he shifted emphasis from Freud's individual id to the idea of a collective unconscious. On certain aspects of dream theory he proclaimed "entire agreement" with Alfred Adler, Freud's foe. Most fatal of all was Jung's statement that psychoanalytic theory "should be freed from the purely sexual standpoint. In place of it I should like to introduce an energetic viewpoint into the psychology of neurosis."

  By 1913 all this had become much more than an intel
lectual disagreement. The confrontation was now naked, bitter, manto-man. A few months earlier, Jung, replying to one of Freud's admonitions, had suddenly lashed out in terms as personal as a slap:

  your technique of treating your disciples like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies… I am objective enough to see through your little trick. You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. From sheer obsequiousness nobody dares pluck the beard of the prophet and to inquire for once what you should say to a patient with a tendency to analyze the analyst instead of himself. You would certainly ask him, "Who's got the neurosis?"

  Such defiance was, purposely, unforgivable. Jung hurled it at Freud in an era when the distance between leader and led still remained sacral. In 1913 the Austrian Court Gazette still used routinely the phrase "by All-Highest Decision" because direct reference to the Emperor might compromise his transcendence. In 1913 Kaiser Wilhelm's anniversaries were still celebrated by subjects shouting "Hurrah!" while falling to their knees. In 1913 Russian film theaters showing a newsreel of the Tsar required the audience to stand at attention with heads bared; after the imperial image had departed the lights would go on, the anthem would be sung, and only then could the audience sit and the lights dim again to let ordinary shadows inhabit the screen.

  Under this Zeitgeist the Jung rebellion came to pass. Indeed Jung's boxing of Freud's ear was lese-majeste much worse than Trotsky's gibe at Lenin. After all, mutiny came natural to revolutionaries "vomiting their feelings like blood" as Rilke observed of arguments among Russian exiles. The International Psycho-Analytical Association, on the other hand, had seemlier ways. Though its members probed the underbelly of morality, they were Herr Doktors with academic dignities, well-shined shoes, watch-chainfestooned waistcoats, carefully knotted cravats. In 1913 they constituted a professional body, as subject as any other in the Imperial and Royal Crownlands of the House of Austria, to a hallowed sense of rank.

  And Carl Jung's revolt shocked more than Alfred Adler's abandonment of the articles of faith two years earlier. In Adler's case the doctrinal often still veiled the personal. But in his letter Jung brazenly announced his intent "to pluck the beard of the prophet." He accused the founder of psychoanalysis of foisting his maladjustment on the psyche of his rivals. It went beyond heresy. It was a spit at the throne.

  Freud's reply displayed well-mannered firmness a la Franz Joseph:

  We have a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own bit of neurosis. But someone who behaves abnormally yet keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely. I shall lose nothing by it, for my only emotional tie with you has long been a thin thread-the lingering effect of past disappointments…

  These lines had been written early in 1913. But now it was July. In less than two months Freud would have to face Jung occupying the head chair of the Munich Psycho-Analytical Congress. The man he'd made President would now wield the gavel against him. This prospect loomed over Freud as he sipped the alkaline waters and walked the pinewood paths of Marienbad. The shadow under which he moved darkened as July approached, but it was a shadow that had engaged him all year. His latest manuscript, Totem and Taboo, dealt with the violent overthrow of a chief. As he would later admit, the theme contained an unconscious link to Jung, the usurper. And quite consciously Freud deployed Totem and Taboo as a weapon in this war. His essay explored the prehistoric lore of the "primal horde" from which the totem evolved. Freud was staking out systematically, possessively, areas of myth and primitive religion that were Jung's turf.

  The king had counterattacked the rebel. But the king couldn't rest easy. A month of taking the waters from mid-July to mid-August did little to relieve his rheumatic right arm. "I can scarcely write," says his note from Marienbad to Ernest Jones; ". we had a bad time here. The weather was cold and wet." Nor was his mood sunny. His daughter Anna, who kept him company, would later report that this was the only time she remembered her father being depressed.

  On August 11 the Freuds (daughter, wife, paterfamilias) traveled to San Martino di Castrozza, a lovely aerie of a resort 5,000 feet high in the Dolomites. Freud loved mountaineering but could spare little time for sparkling Alpine hikes. The Congress-and therefore combat with Jung-was now only a month away. His lieutenants in the International PsychoAnalytical Association were gathering around him at San Martino and took rooms next to his at the Hotel des Alpes. Sandor Ferenczi came from Budapest; Karl Abraham arrived from Berlin. Together they had long grim strategy sessions amplified by correspondence with Ernest Jones, Freud's field marshal in England.

  The council ratified Freud's decision to continue his Franz Joseph stance: firmness, dignity, moderation. Neither Ferenczi nor Abraham was to assail Jung. Freud himself would read a paper-"The Predisposition to Obsessional Neuro- sis"-that was rather neutral in the context of the conflict. Only Jones would produce a paper criticizing, in measured tones, recent positions of the adversary.

  Thus the battle plan; so the execution. When the Fourth International Psycho-Analytical Congress opened in Munich on September 7, Jung sat at a table apart from Freud with his phalanx of Swiss analysts. Two years earlier "the Crown Prince" had done his presiding with cordial humor. Now, at the 1913 Congress, his face was taut, his manner brusque, his gavel partisan. He cut off arguments, ruled inconvenient points out of order, recognized speakers whenever it suited his offensive against Freud. At the final session the filling of the next presidential term had to be settled. Despite everything, Freud suggested to his followers that they re-elect Jung, who therefore won the vote. But out of 82 members present, 22 withheld their ballots-an unprecedented and significant number. (To Jones, one of the abstainers, Jung spoke one short sentence that spoke racial volumes: "I thought you were a Christian.")

  Freud's gesture was noblesse oblige of majestic proportions, a theatrical flourish masterfully Viennese. By comparison, his Zurich opponent looked mean and crude. When it was all over, Jung remained in possession of the title, but Freud walked away with much of his prestige and power intact. He could not arbitrarily strip Jung of the presidency. However, Freud proposed to his adherents that the Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest chapters petition Jung-without crass quarreling-to dissolve the International Association. On Jung's refusal they would quietly resign, thereby triggering resignations in England and America and signalling the probability of a new international group under Freud. All this needed to be done slowly, slowly enough for a face-saving interval during which Jung could evaluate the prospect and sue for peace.

  The plan disquieted Freud's retinue. To them the moment called for outspokenness and action, not for gradual, indirect maneuvers. Jung was Serbia. Dr. Karl Abraham and Dr. Ernest Jones, Freud's two principal generals, took the line of General Conrad, the Austrian Chief of Staff: a harder, quicker, more damaging countermove must be made.

  Of course the ultimate decision was Freud's. But in the days and weeks that followed, Freud, strangely enough, did nothing-nothing except hesitate.

  The day after the Psycho-Analytical Congress ended, on September 10, 1913, Freud took the express from Munich to Italy. In Rome he continued his hesitation in a way that was so ambivalent that he left two contradictory accounts of his sojourn. To Jones he wrote a letter mentioning the "delicious days" in the Eternal City. But later he would confess to the peculiar and pensive compulsion that marked his irresolute stay:

  Every day for three lonely weeks in September 1913… I mounted the steps of the unlovely Corso Cavour where the deserted church [of San Pietro in Vincoli] stands… [Every day for three weeks] I stood in the church in front of the statue…

  The statue was Michelangelo's monumental Moses, originally creat
ed for Pope Julius II's tomb in the Vatican. Moses mesmerized-and paralyzed-Freud during those unsure days after his collision with Jung. Of course, Rome itself had for years touched off an odd resonance inside him. Long before he had been able to afford traveling there, Freud's wishes and fantasies had centered on Rome to a degree he himself had called "neurotic" in lines to a colleague. The Rome fixation had also emerged in his self-analysis in The Interpretation of Dreams. Here he connected it to his boyhood worship of Hannibal, the Carthaginian (and hence Semitic) generalissimo who conquered much of the Roman Empire-except Rome itself.

  In other words, it was Freud's conquistadorial self that wanted to complete a glory not attained by his hero. When he had finally reached Rome in 1901, he'd found his way quickly to Michelangelo's Moses, for that, too, was a familiar fascination ever since he had seen a copy of the statue in the Vienna Academy of Art. Like Hannibal, Moses was a great Semitic conqueror. He had overcome Egypt and had led his people to greatness without himself reaping its fruit: He had died outside the Promised Land just as Hannibal had not lived to capture the Capitoline Hill. But on that very hill, Freud had walked year after year since 1901, with much more than a tourist's abandon.

  Was this his will for the conquistadorial absolute? Did he want to outdo his foremost models? Did he mean his conquests to exceed even theirs? His close friend Hans Sachs observed that "in the execution of his duty he was untiring and unbending, hard and sharp like steel, a'good hater' close to the limits of vindictiveness."