Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

by Frederic Morton

  "The whole of our society is snoring ungracefully," a Young Bosnian wrote of the period. "Only the poets and revolutionaries are awake." Ilk and Princip were not only ardently awake but incandescently ascetic. Like most of the Young Bosnians, they did not drink or smoke or engage in sex (just like abstemious young Hitler). One member of the group, who had gotten to know Trotsky while a student in Vienna, wrote the Russian in 1914: "You must believe me when I tell you that all of us follow the rule of abstinence."

  Ilia and Princip observed it passionately. The blood of their young manhood must surge only for the freedom of their fellow South Slavs.

  At the news of the Second Balkan War in 1913, Ilic had walked from Sarajevo to Belgrade (to save money and to escape detection) and joined the Serb army as a volunteer. Hence his nickname "Hadzija" (after the Muslim pilgrim, the Hadji). The Balkan War had also drawn Princip to Belgrade where he had tried to enlist in the komite, the irregular Serb units operating in guerrilla style. But Princip had been rejected, being too young and small. Now, in the first months of 1914, he was back in Sarajevo, back in the tedious school from which he'd already been expelled once for joining an anti-Austrian demonstration. He hated blackboard and homework. He lived for his meetings with Ilic and the Young Bosnians. Inside him grew the need to do something worthy of his favorite verse, Nietzsche's lines:

  I know whence I arrive Unsatisfied like the flame. I glow and writhe. Everything I embrace becomes light, Everything that I leave becomes coal. Flame am I, surely.

  What or whom could this inexorable flame burn? With Ilia and his comrades he had discussed killing the Austrian Governor of Bosnia-Hercegovina, General Potiorek. Yet Potiorek, though the most visible oppressor in the land, was just a tool. It was the heart of Habsburg that must be struck. Toward the end of January, Princip received a letter from a Young Bosnian in France, saying that Franz Ferdinand would be visiting Paris under circumstances favorable to an assassination. By some accounts, Princip replied in his and Ilic's name that he wanted to use the chance to eliminate the tyrant but that he would first acquire weapons and training in Belgrade.

  Of course Franz Ferdinand was not the anti-Serb ogre that seared Princip's mind. And of course the two never met in France. Yet their paths began to converge in February 1914.

  Around the first of that month, Princip did leave Sarajevo, ostensibly to continue his high school education in Belgrade. His brother paid the fare for a detour on the way. Princip stopped over at his native village of Grahovo, in Western Bosnia. Here he was marooned for some weeks by the same giant blizzards that smothered Vienna. And most of that time, his mother was to recall, he spent brooding, staring at the snow.

  ***

  Gavrilo Princip knew nothing of the actual politics or personality of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand. And Franz Ferdinand did not even know of Gavrilo Princip's existence. However, the Crown Prince had heard of another youth, equally modern in his malaise, down to a susceptibility to Nietzsche. He was one of the few Austrian artists who, like the Young Bosnians, saw a radical connection between art and society.

  His name was Oskar Kokoschka, and at twenty-two he had come to the Archduke's attention through his play, produced at a modernist art-students' theater in Vienna in 1909. Also on the bill was a dramatization of The Birthday of the Infanta, a bitter fairy tale by a literary hero of the Young Bosnians, Oscar Wilde. Kokoschka's Murder, Hope of Women, consisted of a chaos of screams, stabbings, and poetic fragments about love practiced as a bloody trial of combat. It happened that the audience included some Imperial Army soldiers from Bosnia's Sarajevo who didn't share Young Bosnia's enthusiasm for the avant-garde. They helped start the lusty riots that followed. The Crown Prince read the newspaper reports the next day and reacted characteristically. "Every bone in that young man's body," he said about Kokoschka, "should be broken."

  It pleased Kokoschka that his work had touched the higher spheres. How wonderful to epater le prince! He stuck to his ways, though painting rather than playwriting became the instrument of his notoriety. Encouraged by his mistress Alma Mahler (composer Gustav Mahler's widow), he had developed, in the early teens of the century, an expressionist imagery at once febrile and morbid, putrescent and electric. Considering Kokoschka's temper and considering Alma's responsiveness to any passing male of talent and virility, their affair was at first oddly stable. Often it produced what was for Kokoschka atypical bliss. But during the first months of 1914 this, like many other things in Austria, began to change.

  The couple met in a villa in the Semmering, an idyllic Alpine hamlet near Vienna. One day Kokoschka opened the door to find their trysting chalet literally slimy with an orgy of toads. The warty creatures had escaped from a tank to sliver and hop, slaver and mate, all over the living room rug.

  Recently Kokoschka had begun to suspect Alma of finessing an affair not only with the architect Walter Gropius but with Rudolf Kammerer, a prominent biologist experimenting with frogs. And here seemed to be viscous proof of the second liaison: bulge-eyed, twitching couplings before a window filled with snowy splendor.

  The sight altered Kokoschka's angle of invention. For more than a year he had been at work on The Tempest, one of his central masterpieces. Wild swirls of color suggest a man and a woman resting in what could be either a bed afloat in clouds or a boat adrift in a stream. Some powerful force curls the two against each other-a force that apparently changed nature and color after Kokoschka's encounter with the toads early in 1914: he started to re-tint many of the picture's vibrant Bengal reds to a colder and more ominous blue-green. Ardor dissolved toward phosphorescence. Tenderness turns into trap. "The boat in which we two are being tossed about…" Kokoschka would later write to a friend, "is a house big enough for a whole world of pain which we have gone through together. And I am going to the war, secretly. After… [this painting] I should really go under." "The Tempest," wrote a critic much later still, "has been interpreted in our day as a potent metaphor of 'collapse, dissolution, finis Austriae, the end of time.' "

  "Finis Austriae" is the wisdom of hindsight. In January 1914, the Hitlers, the Princips, the Kokoschkas were either disreputable or, worse, unknown. Vienna concerned itself not with the end of time but with the beginning of carnival. Countess Jenny von Haugwitz hosted the first highlight of the merry season. She gave a "streamlined" ball in the newly redecorated Directoire salon of the Hotel Imperial. The evening prescribed "an automotive theme" for costumes and saw many a shapely Rolls-Royce, Daimler, and Mercedes-Benz cruise across the parquet.

  The Bank Employees' Club tried to top its Bankruptcy Ball of the previous year with a Banknote Forgers' Fest, and nearly succeeded. Even lower class celebrations set high standards. For example, the Public Bath Attendants' Ball at the Stahlehner Hall announced that persons in clown suits would not be admitted for that was much too common, unoriginal, and old-fashioned a disguise. And so a mob of goggled aviators and formidably hatted suffragettes converged on the door.

  The Laundresses' Ball did introduce-though only brieflysome dissonance. The ball itself was fun: lively with authentic pinch-them! young laundresses in the striped stockings and ribbonned blouses of their trade. But most of the young Society bucks who had come to take the girls home "to have their trousers ironed" had to face the next day with their garments as creased as ever. The laundresses refused even the lordliest offers for private breakfast. Early in the morning they went straight from their ball to the Ringstrasse to join their unemployed sisters in a protest march.

  For Vienna that was a somewhat too modern way of capping a carnival night. One week later the Ball at Court in the Imperial Palace[3] provided a lesson on how to pay one's respects to the future more delicately. The old Emperor himself played teacher. He inaugurated the dancing by turning the first few beats of the first waltz with the young, pretty Zita, wife of his grandnephew, the Archduke Karl, who was second in succession. This necessarily discomfited the Crown Prince since his morganatic spouse Sophie did not rate an Emperor's waltz o
n so formal a night. But after returning from the dance, the monarch resolved the embarrassment. He turned to Franz Ferdinand, standing very stiffly at his side. Would Sophie have the kindness, Franz Joseph asked, to join him at his table together with Karl, Zita, and, of course, Franz Ferdinand himself?

  It was a finely balanced distribution of affabilities. Though he left intact every nuance of precedence and protocol, the old gentleman breathed a new feeling of mutual cordiality into three generations of the ruling family.

  On a night shortly thereafter the Habsburgs held their own private family ball. As the carnival's most exclusive affair, it came to pass in the Imperial Palace Apartments of one of the younger Archdukes, Peter Ferdinand, and his Archduchess Marie Christine. Not even an orchestra intruded. Discreetly, a string quartet played Haydn behind a screen. Servants noted that despite its august character the gathering was unusually warm this year, with many Highest hugs and kisses.

  The next day, Shrove Tuesday, brought the ultimate in public social glitter. The Duke and the Duchess of Cumberland, bearers (despite its Anglo-Saxon name) of a crest long eminent in Austrian blazonry, gave their annual matinee dan- sante, from 4 to 10 P.M. The scene was the Palais Cumberland, once summer chateau of Empress Maria Theresa. Guests danced in the great ballroom whose roundness conformed to their waltzing and whose frescoes amplified the merriment divinely, catching gods and goddesses at play. The buffet was served in the renowned "treasure suite" with its silvered furniture. Jewelry ministered to gastronomy. Footmen offered caviar on silver plate, pheasant on gold. Each guest departed with a box of chocolate truffles wrapped in silver and stamped with the Cumberland escutcheon.

  Most left in happy haste. For on the same night the Princess Croy-Sternberg presided over an excitingly new-fashioned benefit ball for the Red Cross in the new Konzerthaus. There a thicket of potted orange trees and tromp l'oeil screens, ablossom with orchids and bougainvillea, created the tango tropics in an Austrian winter.

  Then midnight turned into the morning of February 25Ash Wednesday. Lent started. Carnival was over. But in contrast to the previous year, the carnival spirit lingered. In 1914 Vienna seemed to be clinging to fun. The weather gave a hand. After the longest frost in years, March blew in with mild, moist, yeasty breezes. All over the Vienna Woods yellow-pink crocuses leaped out of the ground, tiny harlequins unabashed by melting mounds of snow. In the Danube lagoons, larks trilled and swooped above trees not yet in bud.

  Spring was ambushing the austerity of winter with little guerrilla galas here and there. And the capital's diplomats marked the end of the ball season with yet another event. It was an official, political, real-life costume party that lasted much longer than one evening. It was called Albania.

  14

  Vienna's albanian fling had had a prelude of some four hundred years. For that long the Albanians had lived and seethed under Turkish rule. Partly Christian, mostly Moslem, each of them intractable, they were mountain tribes roaming the interior of the Balkan peninsula on the Southern end of the Adriatic. When the Turkish sultanate began to collapse at the turn of the century, Albania became booty. Italy wanted a part of it as its foothold in the Balkans. Greece craved a piece. Belgrade coveted its coast line for access to the sea. And just because Belgrade wanted a section, Vienna wanted all of it: all of it in the form of a Habsburg client state, to show that Balkan hegemony would not be shared with Serbs but belonged to but one realm-Austria.

  Still, a bit of sharing had to be tolerated. In 1913 a London conference of Europe's leading countries (the Central Powers as well as the Western Allies) had awarded the Albanian Kosovo region to Serbia. Some snippets went to Greece. The rest of the territory, with the major part of its inhabitants and its anarchy, was to be an independent nation.

  The nationhood of that nation did not exist. But Vienna guaranteed the integrity of the phantom. After all, Austria was the illusionist among the great powers. The London Conference made Italy co-guarantor, a partnership Vienna largely, and politely, ignored. It did not want interference and certainly did not need help.

  Shortly before New Year of 1914, Austria had persuaded the Conference to appoint William, Prince of Wied, ruler of Albania. The Albanian term for that office was mbret. The Prince of Wied did not know how to pronounce mbret. He was, however, very good at enunciating Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the royal house of Rumania to which he was related. A tall, fair-skinned Teuton lordling, he had never laid eyes on any of the swarthy goatherds and maize-growers who were now to be his people. He did not speak a syllable of their language. He had never set foot on their land. He had no idea of Albanian customs, traditions, politics, vendettas, difficulties. Most people of "civilized" Europe shared his ignorance. Until it became an international controversy, Albania had been a terra incognita-a remote labyrinthine confusion of ragged chiefdoms. To "guarantee" such a country under such a mbret meant to conjure it out of a plumed hat.

  And just that was a chore congenial to the fabulists by the Danube. During the first three months of 1914, official Vienna conjured away with the skill born of experience. After all, the Habsburg domain had managed to disencumber itself of most connections to drab reality. By 1914 the Austrian Empire was a chimera ancient, iridescent, and almost plausible through its perennial re-invention. Since the Empire's survival depended on it, such self-fabrication was a very serious business. Fabricating "Albania" was not-not quite. But the Albanian challenge tapped a talent the governing Viennese loved to exercise, and so they applied their gift to this game.

  As the decorations for the last costume ball of carnival 1914 were dismantled, the city buckled down in earnest to the construction of the Albanian fantasy. Its hero, the Prince of Wied, planned to enter his fairyland in March. For his escort Vienna recruited an Albanian Volunteer Brigade for which a wonderfully imaginative uniform was devised; it combined hussar and dragoon motifs with the Balkan tang of a fez-like helmet. These colorful apparitions made a fetching background to another design, namely the monochrome elegance of the Prince's state dress: tunic, trousers, tassels, and braids shading from gray to black, setting off the blaze of medals on his breast, a few of which were also freshly concocted.

  Vienna then proceeded to style special Albanian postage to welcome the new potentate. A stamp series displayed the Albanian double eagle (looking like a nephew of the Habsburg bird) superimposed on two dates: 1467 and 1914. The first designated the victory of Skanderbeg, Albania's legendary champion, who had vanquished the Turks back then; the second spoke of the national redeemer now, getting ready in his tassels of gray and black.

  At the end of February 1914, the mbret still could not pronounce his title. On the other hand, he had a very successful last fitting. Therefore he was ready for statesmanship.

  He began a triumphal progress south. The Austrian state yacht Taurus, guarded by three cruisers, floated him down the Adriatic. On March 7 he stepped onto a red-carpeted dock in the harbor of Durres; behind him, a retinue of sashes and cummerbunds that resembled a toy version of the Habsburg court.

  At three that afternoon the mbret displayed himself on the balcony of the biggest local house that was still within the protective range of Austrian naval guns. A well-rehearsed crowd of Albanian folk-the men in starched white kilts, the women in very laundered babushkas-waved flags with the nephew-double-eagle and intoned Albanian hoorays. Flowers were tossed, white doves released, blessings uttered by mullahs and Greek Orthodox priests-all on cue. The chorus of Aida could not have done better.

  After the enthusiasm subsided punctually, the mbret held his first State Council. It addressed three problems. (1) What were the best shoots in the most secure areas? (2) What game was there to shoot? (3) What European princes should be invited to the hunt?

  Official Vienna smiled. Serbia was not amused. "I saw," said a skeptic among the witnesses, "the beginning of a tragic operetta."

  A week after the Prince of Wied came to Albania, the Bosnian schoolboy Gavrilo Princip came to Belgrade. Wied's advent a
s mbret produced headlines all over Europe. Princip's arrival was noted only in the police registration form he filled out on March 13, 1914, in a cheap lodging house at 23 Carigradska Street. Very soon the Prince of Wied became forgotten news. Today, three quarters of a century later, Princip is celebrated as Yugoslavia's principal martyr; a bridge in the capital bears his name; a museum documents his life; his footprints preserve his memory in concrete.

  But in March 1914, he professed to be just another student at the First Belgrade High School. He was preparing himself for his sixth-class examinations: that was the reason for his stay as stated on the police form. For that purpose his family paid his expenses. The weekly remittance they sent him was not a huge sum; still, it put a certain burden on what his father earned as village postman in Austrian Bosnia.

  The postman had no idea that Gavrilo spent much of his money and his time at the Golden Sturgeon Cafe on Green Wreath Square, one of Belgrade's major marketplaces. The Golden Sturgeon served hot tea on rusty tables to a special breed of students; they sipped, huddled, whispered, and hardly ever bent over a copybook. Most were from Austrian Bosnia-beardless firebrands who had volunteered for Serbia during the Balkan wars. Now it would be dangerous to return. A sympathetic Serb government had extended scholarships to many of them-but school-bench sitting was dull for young men who had seen action. Study bored them. Politics consumed them.

  They all hated the Austrian regime which they saw throttling their native land. They all pronounced "Habsburg" with a hiss. But Gavrilo Princip's hiss came from a depth remarkable in a body so thin and small. He did not talk much. But his pale blue eyes could flash a light that stopped the talk of others. There was a hypnotic edge to his low voice, his quiet, constant movements, even to his silence. The friends he made at the Golden Sturgeon became a following.