Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

by Frederic Morton

  "He reminded me of a conqueror," said Theodore Dreiser, who never met the man but knew him percipiently through his books, "a conqueror that has taken a city, entered its age-old prisons and there generously proceeded to release from their gloomy and rusted cells the prisoners of formulae, faiths, and illusions which have wracked and worn men for thousands and thousands of years…"

  Such a chieftain might be flexible in strategy; he might array himself in sovereign, iron calm. But he must never compromise his purpose by one-thousandth of an inch. Freud usually aspired to all of these traits. But not during that Roman September of 1913. Not during those feckless weeks before his return to Vienna. It was Europe's last peaceful September before an irremediable explosion. It was the aftermath of his clenched confrontation with Jung. Back and forth Freud went along the via Cavour on his daily pilgrimages to Moses. Back and forth strode the doctor from Vienna with his graying beard and his conquistadorial bent. Peculiarly enough, he was trying to walk his way toward the idea of an unconquistadorial moderation; a moderation he saw embodied in Michelangelo's marble.

  ***

  The statue in San Pietro represents a leader at a moment of imperious fury: Moses, just descended from Mount Sinai, finds Israel dancing around the Golden Calf (a totem!) and is about to dash the Tablets of the Law to pieces. Yet Freud, staring and staring at the curve and thrust of that enormous body, the fall of its robe, the curling of its fingers, reaches a startlingly different conclusion:

  I used to sit in front of the statue in the expectation that I should see how it would start up on its raised foot, hurl the Tablets to the ground, and let fly its wrath. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead the stone image became more and more transfixed, an almost oppressively solemn serenity radiated from it, and I was obliged to realize that something was shown here that could stay without change; that this Moses would keep sitting like this in his wrath forever…

  But why should Michelangelo rein in this most unbiblical Moses? Because (writes Freud),

  Michelangelo modified the theme of the broken tablets; he does not let Moses break the Tablets in his wrath, but makes him be influenced by the danger that they might be broken and makes him pacify that wrath, or at any rate prevent it from becoming an act. In this way he had added something new and human to the figure of Moses, so that the giant frame with its tremendous physical power becomes only a concrete expression of the highest mental achievement that is possible in a man, that of struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he has devoted himself.

  This Moses in Freud's essay "Moses of Michelangelo" is very different from the magisterial avenger in Exodus. And this is a very different Freud, acclaiming nothing less than repression.

  But the surprise does not end here. Apart from inverting psychoanalysis, the essay ignores the Freudian approach altogether. Freud himself called it a "nonanalytic child" of his pen. He had no interest, when he wrote it, later in 1913, in probing deeper motives for Michelangelo's variation of the Moses theme. He doesn't dredge for disguised emotions. He deals, rather, with an overt political aim. Freud reasons that by presenting a restrained Moses, Michelangelo was warning the leader who had originally commissioned the statue, namely Pope Julius II, who

  attempted to realize great and mighty ends, especially designs on a large scale. The Pope was a man of action and he had a definite purpose, which was to unite Italy under Papal supremacy. He desired to bring about singlehanded what was not to happen for several centuries, and then only through the conjunction of many alien forces; and he worked with impatience in the short span of authority allowed him and used violent means.

  The conquistadorial temper confessed to by Freud and observed in him by others-here Freud describes it in a negative context. The conqueror-Pope deserves Michelangelo's reproof.

  And Moses, the martial pontiff of the Jews; Moses of the headlong valor; Moses, slayer of Egyptians and drowner of Pharaoh's army; Moses, the smasher of God's tablets; Moses who smote pagans the way General Conrad wanted to smite Serbs; Moses who ground the Golden Calf to bits and made the Israelites drink of it; Moses who had the Levites kill three thousand idolators-what happened to him?

  Before Freud's eyes he vanished in the hot dust of Rome. In his stead rises a prophet who heroically resists his own vehemence.

  It was in the spirit of the other Moses that Freud decided to end his summer hesitation over the war with Jung. He would forgo even the passive countermove of resigning from the Psycho-Analytical Association of which Jung remained the official head. As his paladin, Ernest Jones, wrote later, Freud would do anything he possibly could at this point to avoid an open schism at which the opponents of psychoanalysis could rejoice. Like his Moses he "pacified his wrath or at any rate prevented it from becoming an act… he struggled successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause to which he had devoted himself." For the sake of psychoanalysis he decided to wait things out quietly, at least for a while, at the end of the world's last calm summer.

  9

  On Sunday August 3, 1913, the Austrian resort of Bregenz marked its summer season with an unusual climax. It took place on the spacious promenade winding along the foothills that cup the eastern end of Lake Constance by the Swiss border. Many Viennese spent their summer holidays at this scenic, tonic spot, far from the urban dog days. With other tourists they strolled above the leafy shoreline to enjoy the view and the breeze of Central Europe's largest lake.

  On August 3, however, the promenade drew a crowd extraordinarily large even for a weekend blessed by golden weather. On that Sunday the International Peace Conference held an open-air mass meeting there. Seven thousand pacifists converged on the lakefront, not only from the AustroHungarian Empire but from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France. Some 5,000 vacationers became their impromptu comrades. They heard the Viennese Socialist leader Karl Renner (Trotsky's debating partner at the Cafe Central and later first Chancellor of the first Austrian Republic in 1918 as well as first President of the second Austrian Republic in 1945). Renner talked about the timeliness of the occasion. Just a few days earlier the latest little Balkan war had ended. The Bulgarians, in full retreat, had signed an armistice with the Serbs, the Rumanians, and the Greeks. Hostilities had lasted less than a month. Yet Renner emphasized that modern weaponry could expedite a bloodbath very fast. For Bulgaria alone, a country of just over four million, the dead and wounded were estimated to exceed 150,000. In a war involving major powers like Austria, whole generations of young men would turn into corpses or into physical and mental cripples.

  Therefore, said Renner, this latest peace just made in the Balkans was a peace that should make people think. It was an uneasy peace. At the Bucharest Conference where the victors' terms were to be signed into a treaty, the Serbs would emerge as the chief gainers. A strengthened Serbia might aggravate tensions at Austria's southeastern border. Belgrade and Vienna might goad each other into the most dangerous bravado. Because men had invented such efficient murder machines, peace had become more precious than ever. The life-saving necessity for peace was coming home to more and more people. That so many had gathered here for the cause of peace was a fact as bright as the lakeside sun.

  Foghorns from steamers joined the applause. The throng dispersed into a spell of midsummer sweetness that lingered into fall.

  ***

  When vacationers returned to Vienna they found in its streets a mellowing temper. The weather helped. During July and August frequent showers had punctuated sunshine. Rain had washed away most blossoms; but it had kept foliage juicy. As a result the proletariat of the outer districts, where their tenements adjoined the Vienna Woods, could stroll into green whose freshness ignored autumn. A few hellers would buy them a stick of horsemeat salami from stands by the vineyard inns; a few more coins would bring a bottle fermented from local grapes. Very soon they would lean against each other, sitting on the wine garden's hard wooden benches as happy as if on Sacher Hotel plush, singing of
"the wine that will still sparkle when we no longer breathe, the girls that will laugh long after we are gone…… enjoying an evanescent, convivial, inexpensive, very Viennese binge in a bower.

  Possibly it was the clement air as well as the Party's stand on capital punishment that made the widow of Franz Schuhmeier, the murdered Socialist deputy, send a request for lenience to the Minister of Justice; the killer's brother remained a leader of the Conservative Party, but just the same she asked His Excellency to commute the death penalty imposed on the man who had assassinated her husband.

  There were other amicable gestures, some quite unexpected. The first prominent fall event unfolding in the whiteand-gold rococo of the Musikvereinssaal was not a concert but the Eleventh International Zionist Congress. Nine thousand attended, including a visitor from Prague, the labor-insurance official and would-be litterateur Franz Kafka, in town to give a speech at the concurrent Second International Conference on Accident Prevention.

  His seven days in the Austrian capital pushed Kafka into insomnia, malaise, and the necessity for constant cold compresses. But another voice, then much more widely heard and known for its abrasive bigotry, took on a sudden gemutlich tone. The newspaper Reichspost, cutting edge of Austrian antiSemitism, hailed the Jewish event in the Musikvereinssaal as proof of Vienna's cosmopolitan importance, its pre-eminence as a congress city.

  In the fall of 1913 Vienna even seemed to make peace with the future without jeopardizing its stature as a virtuoso of the past. In this matter the Emperor himself provided an example. Until now he had shrugged aside the new century's contraptions. Franz Joseph's adjutants-never His Majesty-picked up the telephone. He never climbed into a motorcar unless forced by etiquette-say, in the company of an automobile addict like the Kaiser. But in Bad Ischl, on August 19, the day after his eighty-third birthday, he consented to view Mr. Thomas Edison's newest invention, the Kinetophone. This machine coordinated the wizardries of the film projector with those of the gramophone. At a special premiere in the Ischl Town Theater, the monarch and his lady took their seats in the first row. Frau Schratt heartily applauded the image of Enrico Caruso intoning do re mi fa sol. The Emperor's clapping was, well, polite. Still he sanctified new technology with his presence.

  Forty-eight hours earlier he had made a move which, while also not necessarily enthusiastic, carried greater significance. He had dispatched a document with his seal to Bluehnbach Castle near Salzburg; this was one of Franz Ferdinand's hunting estates where the archduke was currently shooting stag. The sovereign's handwritten letter appointed his nephew Inspector General of all Imperial and Royal Armed Forces-the most powerful post given the Crown Prince so far. This ele vation, a surprise considering the queasy relationship between the two, was effective immediately-and immediately made public. It, too, was seen as an ancient ruler's concession to tomorrow.

  When the Court Train took Franz Joseph from Ischl back to Vienna on September 3, the city had been given, as it were, an All-Highest license to welcome modern things.

  This it proceeded to do, with a baroque bow, of course. On some of the broader thoroughfares leading to the center of town, for example, the mayor established special lanes for motorcars in a hurry. Behind chauffeurs driving along these "fast strips" sat gentlemen registering, just as fast, the fall fashions of 1913. You could see them whiz by (at a velocity almost equaling the Crown Prince's Graf & Stift) in suits of the latest English "country cut," tweeds of informal blue gray. And though it wasn't cool enough as yet, the ladies went even further, anticipating winter's first harbingers from the Paris fashion houses: Directoire collars high in back to plunge rather heedlessly in front, crepe de chine dresses with ermine trimmings, huge "fantasy necklaces" of amber, coral, or lapis lazuli.

  Most of such forward-minded feminine elegance could not be risked in automobiles. Their speed undid the perfection of the coiffure, not to speak of the plumage on the hat. No, ladies preferred the more leisured showcase of the fiacre. This horsedrawn cab, banned for a while, now received renewed municipal blessing. Indeed, to encourage fiacres against the proliferation of the fume-spewing taxi, they were permitted to dispense with set tariffs and to arrive at fares by mutual agreement. The fiacre, said the Mayor's office, would "return to the street scene a dear Viennese tradition."

  Similar concerns touched a committee preparing, months in advance, the Industrialists' Ball-bound to be a highlight of the 1914 carnival season. The committee announced that there would be music from two orchestras as well as from six gramophone discs to be specially recorded in Buenos Aires by Los Caballeros; it was a band famous for that new rage, the tango (whose risque modernity had just led Kaiser Wilhelm to forbid all German soldiers from even listening to it while in uniform). On the other hand-and all rumors to the contraryVienna's Industrialists' Ball would be opened by an eighteenth-century cotillion, according to custom. In the fall of 1913 the city seemed readier than ever to absorb onward thrusts of the future into its own timeless choreography.

  The Habsburg government applied the technique to its increasingly huffy little Balkan opponent. Flushed with victory over Bulgaria, the Serbs had once more deepened their raids into Albanian territory. Belgrade argued that Vienna used Albania as a staging ground for agents who fostered sedition among Albanian ethnics within Serb borders. Vienna militants contended that these complaints were a blind for Serb expansionism growing more rampant daily.

  In his Chief of Staff's office Baron Conrad paced, dictating letter after letter to the Emperor; each paragraph tried to impress on His Majesty the outrages Belgrade visited in Albania on Austria's stature. From Belvedere Palace the Crown Prince countered with a letter to Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold stating that "all such Serb horror stories leave me cold."

  As always, the Emperor had to arbitrate. In the spirit of the fall of 1913, Franz Joseph's government decided to combine the latest of mailed fists with an old-fashioned diplomatic smile. The Minister of War, Baron von Krobatin, announced that four more dreadnoughts would be built at a cost of 106 million kronen each; the ships would boast every twentiethcentury advance in armor and cannon; together they would constitute the most formidable task force in the Adriatic. At almost the same time Count von Berchtold held his fall reception for accredited ambassadors at the Ballhausplatz where he remarked, between toasts of champagne, that the sole purpose of Austrian strength was peace-especially peace with Serbia.

  If Serbia didn't believe in pleasantries amidst goblets, it did take seriously the looming of the dreadnoughts. Early in October the Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pasic visited Vienna. After an interview with Count von Berchtold, Panic's office issued a communique: he and the Austrian Excellency could not agree on the issue of Austrian interference in the southern Balkans, but he did promise that Serbia would not invade Albania and he hoped that his pledge would fortify the possibilities of amity between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Coming from the chief executive of a pugnacious upstart of a country, this was an almost chastened statement. Perhaps it also reflected a weakening of Serbia's international support that autumn. The saber that its protector could rattle was tarnished for the moment; the Tsar was beset by domestic trouble. Credit for that belonged, at least in part, to Lenin and therefore to Lenin's hidden hosts in Austrian CounterIntelligence. At the Bolshevik summer conference in Austrian Galicia-held at virtually the same time as Freud's PsychoAnalytical Congress in Munich and as contentious and important-Lenin had forced through a controversial resolution: It directed the Bolshevik parliamentary deputies to the St. Petersburg legislature to form a caucus separate from the more moderate Mensheviks with whom they had till then formed a common Social Democratic front. In word and action they were now free to push their own much more drastic program.

  Very soon the move made itself felt through much of industrialized Russia. The Bolshevik-controlled Pravda in St. Petersburg mercilessly scourged "Menshevik spinelessness" and Trotskyite "nonfactionalism." In the Duma, Bolshevik speaker
s called on workers to stop being slaves. Their fierceness unfettered, Lenin's men drew more attention from major trade unions. They also gained more influence. Scattered but steady strike activity spread in the factories, guided by Bolshevik headquarters in Austria. Here Lenin enjoyed freedom to operate and to politick in ways that made Habsburg smile. Occasionally Lenin smiled back. In his talks on the Nationalities Question he said more than once that Vienna handled the problem far better than St. Petersburg.

  But in the second half of 1913 you didn't have to be a Bolshevik to consider Austria morally prettier than Russia. By autumn the damage from the Redl case was fading in Habsburg lands; at any rate it receded before the disgrace happening under Romanov. In October the Tsar's district attorney in Kiev prosecuted, with anti-Semitic zeal, a ritualmurder trial against a Jew named Mendel Beilis.

  The spectacle reeked of medieval viciousness. Indignation ran through Europe, not least along the Danube. To support their brother so unjustly accused, Vienna's Jewish Community organized a huge meeting at the Musikvereinssaal. The famous (non-Jewish) physiologist Julius Wagner-Jauregg was among three Austrian scientists giving testimony in defense of Mendel Beilis's innocence. Internationally, on Beilis's behalf, a petition was addressed to the Tsar; notables signing it included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Engelbert Humperdinck, Anatole France, Kathe Kollwitz, Selma Lagerlof, H. G. Wells, Frank Wedekind, as well as Viktor Adler, the Jewish leader of Austrian Socialism, and Hermann Bahr, the non-Jewish Austrian writer.

  When the Russian court had to acquit Beilis in the first week of November, it was an Austrian variety-show producer who first offered him a personal-appearance contract worthy of his red-hot celebrity. Mr. Beilis begged off because of stress caused by the trial.

  Meanwhile the first cold gusts helped yellow the leaves on oak and beech all over Vienna's parks. But whether or not it was the contrast to Tsarist barbarism, the Western Powers seemed to warm not only toward Austria but also toward its German ally. England's First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, made a very well-tempered speech at Manchester; he noted an improvement in relations between his country and the Reich and proposed a mutual reduction in the building of new battleships. America contributed a friendly sound from even higher up. A German publisher brought out a translation of President Woodrow Wilson's The State-Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. It marked a highlight of the fall publishing season, not least because of the preface specially written by the author for this edition. In it the American President praised the profundity of German thought, which had furnished not only his book but many other American works with inspiration.