Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

by Frederic Morton

  Princip had now collected the manpower for his kill. He still needed arms and the training to use them. The Young Bosnia organization, whose members met on coffeehouse terraces, would be of limited use. Young Bosnia's program included action to flesh out its anti-Habsburg slogans. But too much of its energy went into the production of patriotic verse.

  Princip turned to a far tougher group. Its name never saw print. But it was led by a man whose photograph sometimes appeared in Belgrade newspapers that spring: an enormous Serbian Army officer, as heavy as he was tall, monolithically bald, with a brute black mustache jutting from a Mongolian face. The caption under his picture identified him as Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, Director of the Intelligence Bureau of the Serbian General Staff. But at Belgrade's political cafes one knew much more than that about him. There, whispers referred to him as Apis-the sacred bull of ancient Egypt.

  Like his namesake he was a myth to his adherents. No ordinary earthly concerns tethered him: no wife, no lover, no family, no children, neither hobby nor recreation. He was not the liver of a life but the demon of an idea. At night he slept a few hours at his brother-in-law's. The rest of his time he spent in the Belgrade Ministry of War, in an office whirring with telephone wires, telegraph keys, decoding devices, couriers arriving and departing. Restaurants and theaters did not exist for him. He was beyond normal frivolities. All his waking hours served one unmerciful passion: to carve Greater Serbia out of the rotting body of the Habsburg Empire.

  Eleven years earlier, in 1903, Apis had been among a band of officers who had dynamited the doors of Belgrade's Royal Palace, hunted for the Austrian toady, King Alexander, cornered him in a closet with his Queen, perforated the couple with revolver bullets, hacked their bodies up with sabers, and thrown them out the window.

  The assassination had placed on the Serb throne the present, much more anti-Viennese Karageorgevic dynasty. A few years later Apis had become leader of Ujedinjeje ili Smrt (Union or Death)-a society known in the coffeehouses by a murmured nickname: The Black Hand. Though its membership included some cabinet ministers and General Staff officers, it had no official sanction or recognition. Its nationalism was far more radical than that of the Serbian government itself. Initiates said that Prime Minister Pasic had appointed Apis Intelligence Chief in order to keep track of the man, to co-opt and control him. Nevertheless, Apis's Black Hand had killed King George I of Greece the previous year, in 1913, for repressing Slav minorities. No doubt the Black Hand had other plans along this line, very clandestine ones. In the coffeehouses the classified section of the Belgrade daily Trgovinski Glasnik received close scrutiny. Here the Society placed innocuously phrased items in the Situations Wanted column; properly deciphered, they were Black Hand messages to its various cells.

  Part rumor, part fact, such things sifted through the mists shrouding the group. In April 1914, Gavrilo Princip knew one thing for sure. He must reach Apis or at least one of his men. They would help him achieve his purpose.

  Just before the month ended, he made contact. Through an intermediary he met an authentic agent of the Black Hand, the Serbian Army Major, Voislav Tankosic. The encounter began awkwardly on the terrace of the Acorn Garland. As soon as the two shook hands, they recognized each other. Twenty months earlier, during the First Balkan War, Princip had come to Belgrade to volunteer for the Major's guerrilla force operating against the Turks. Tankosic had turned down the sixteenyear-old schoolboy for being too young, too short, and too frail. Now Princip was eighteen; despite the adult mustache he had grown, he was as short as ever and looked even thinner. But his light blue eyes did not blink as he explained, softly and calmly, that he would need guns and bombs to blast away the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo.

  This time Major Tankosic did not reject the stripling out of hand. He told him to stand by. "Someone" would have to be consulted.

  "Someone"-obviously Apis-took his time. A week passed. Princip relayed his impatience to the Major. Tankosic sent back a message: "the boy" should read the newspapers; Franz Joseph had fallen mortally sick, and Franz Ferdinand, as the new monarch, would have better things to do than bother with summer maneuvers in Sarajevo. The whole thing was off.

  "The boy," Princip, sent back a note: He did not give a fig about the Emperor's illness. He would kill Franz Ferdinand whether he wore the crown or not, whether he came to Sarajevo or not. Nothing was off. Now, what about the weapons?

  Shortly thereafter a runner came with a second message to Princip's room: "You and your friends, go to Topcider Park now." Princip rounded up Graben and Cabrinovic, shepherded them to Topcider, one of Belgrade's more deserted parks. The three were easy to spot-a thin little youth, flanked by two older, taller companions. As the trio approached the park's main entrance, a man waiting there raised his hand slightly.

  He led them to a remote spot in the greenery. He gave them a wooden box containing three revolvers and a cardboard box filled with ammunition. He pointed to the stump of an oak tree shaped rather like a human body. He showed them how to load; how to aim; how to fire.

  He showed them day after day. The sun shone, the pistols blazed, the Park echoed, the oak stump splintered. When the two weeks' course was over, Princip emerged as the best student. From a standing position "the boy" scored six hits out of ten shots at a distance of more than 200 yards. At a distance of 60 yards he scored eight absolutely perfect hits. And he was almost as sharp a marksman while running. Graben and Cabrinovic did not match his skill but had become fair shots.

  After their last class the three went to the Golden Sturgeon cafe for a discreet celebration. Since Princip enforced abstinence, they ordered mineral water. His blue eyes did not blink and he did not smile when he asked his friends to raise their glasses to the health of the old Emperor of Austria. His Majesty's recovery would bring Franz Ferdinand into convenient range. At least on one coffeehouse terrace in Belgrade, it was an exciting spring.

  18

  In Sarajevo, Danilo Ilic nursed the same murderous hope for Franz Joseph's recuperation. Ilk, Gavrilo Princip's earliest co-conspirator, was awaiting his fellow-assassins' arrival in the Bosnian capital.

  Meanwhile he began to write for Zvono, a new Socialist paper with avant-garde leanings. Though only a very junior comrade, he lost no time in attacking the Socialist Party leadership in Bosnia. "It is strange," he wrote, "that the words of our Party bosses should accord with those of the Austrian Foreign Minister who favors independence for Albania while denying the same right to the South Slavs… The consequence of such foolish Socialist leadership is a diminishing Socialist consciousness.

  Now, the bosses of Bosnia's small Socialist Party received their cues from headquarters of the much larger movement in Vienna. Which is to say, they were guided by Viktor Adler, doyen of working-class opposition throughout the Habsburg Empire. In assailing "the bosses," Ilk really assailed Adlernot quite fairly.

  Adler's ArbeiterZeitung often did mock the farce of Albanian independence. It often did deplore the suppression of South Slav autonomy. But in 1914, Austrian Socialism also felt the need to combat the spread of unemployment, the pauperization of the employed in their slums, the acceleration of armament production everywhere. In this press of problems, Adler's support of Slav rights was incidental rather than insistent. Ilia felt it was inexcusably casual.

  There were other differences between Ilk and Adler; between the Sarajevo Socialist itching to get an Archduke into his gun sights, and the Vienna Party chief championing, but not forcing Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Ilk was the son of a cobbler; Adler, the scion of a stockbroker. Ilk was twenty-four; at sixty-two Adler was the Emperor's junior by more than twenty years and yet, in Ilk's eyes, also a worn dynast ruling his domain too long. Ilia, always in white shirt and black tie, was an unrelentingly neat rebel. Adler, on the other hand, with his gray mane uncombed, his thick glasses loose on his nose, his perpetually strained voice (whose cracked eloquence struck Trotsky)-Adler must have seemed to Ilk like the He
rr Professor of a passe revolution.

  Yet Ilia and Adler had surprisingly much in common. Nationalism with a Nietzschean twist had launched them both into politics. Ilia had joined Young Bosnia, the student group of teetotalers. Their South Slav "Will to Power," fueled by Nietzsche, troubled Austrian authorities in 1914. Nearly forty years earlier Austrian authorities had been troubled by Adler's friends for similar reasons. In Vienna, police agents had monitored a student organization that mixed vegetarianism, populism, and a pan-German weltanschauung into a radical brew. At its meetings young Gustav Mahler had pounded out "Deutschland, Deutschland fiber Alles" on the piano, young Viktor Adler had declaimed insurrectionary verse, but its lodestar-like Young Bosnia's decades later-had been Friedrich Nietzsche, then still alive and unwell, seething brilliantly among his sleeping potions and headache pills. Indeed on Nietzsche's birthday, October 18, 1877, Viktor Adler had signed a letter to the master, acclaiming him as "our luminous and transporting guide."

  What had inspired Adler's group in the 1870s appealed to Princip and Ilia in 1914-Nietzsche's pronunciamento that for the fulfilled life man needed to be doubly divine: divine like Dionysus, god of the orgiastic joy harvested from the heroic deed (a deity often represented by an Apis-like bull!); divine also like Apollo, god of the serenity harvested from contemplative reason.

  Now, in the spring of 1914, Ilic's friend Princip acted out the Dionysian principle of his favorite Nietzsche poem:

  Everything that I have becomes coal.

  Flame am I, surely…

  Dionysian bullets were singing through a man-shaped tree stump in a Belgrade Park. In Munich, Adolf Hitler-another young temperance fanatic-was burning to lead a Dionysian master race. (Hitler's last birthday gift to Mussolini in 1943: The Collected Works of Nietzsche.) In Vienna during the Great War, Viktor Adler's son Friedrich-named after Friedrich Nietzsche-would commit a Dionysian crime; he would shoot and kill the Austrian Prime Minister von Stdrgkh at the restaurant Meissl & Schadn. Adler Senior, however, as befits an elderly asthmatic revolutionary of middle-class origins, had fallen back on Nietzsche's more sedate Apollonian aspects. By 1914, he no longer saw the superman as the hero of some magically wild folk poem but as a rational social being, no longer as the superb Teuton but as the emancipated proletarian. To help the worker liberate his brethren, the Party must give him an education.

  The new proletarian didn't need to storm the Bastille. But he had to master a syllabus. Only by unshackling his mind could the worker free himself of injustice. "The revolution of consciousness," Adler had written, "must progress along with the revolution in economics."

  By 1914, Viktor Adler had been spearheading that revolution for twenty-five years. Since he had led it in Vienna, he'd had to lead it against Vienna. He had to fight the genius loci that let the poor waltz through their poverty. He had to take on the elan with which the city painted carnival across squalor; fight the handkissing done in rags; fight the wine songs sung by starvelings; fight the heraldic fairy tales framing lives of grime.

  "One thing is needful," Nietzsche had said, "namely, giving style to one's character." Victor Adler made the worker acquire character by cultivating a new style. Instead of whining sentimental ditties about Alt-Wien, Socialist choirs rehearsed songs about union organizers. Instead of all that tavern reminiscing about Empress Elizabeth, the people rediscovered the revolution of 1848 through slide shows at the Party's Adult Education Centers. Instead of dissipating their leisure with alcohol or gambling or prostitutes, they joined the Party's Gymnasts' or Alpinists' or Bikers' clubs. The Party organized and sanitized the workers' lives, and thus vitalized their resistance against exploitation.

  Through all that, Austro-Marxism had produced "the world's most educated proletarians." Furthermore it elected a plurality envied by its competitors. At the Austrian Parliament dissolved in 1914, the Socialists commanded 84 out of 504 members. This stood out as an impressive number in a legislature that was a crazy quilt of many little ideological patches.

  Yet the nature of the Party's strength also produced its insulation. It was a quasi-Nietzschean elite operating in a most un-Nietzschean ambiance. To become strong, it had purged its members of their Austrian indulgences. Adler had fashioned a political masterpiece against the Viennese grain; therefore its strength stood isolated. Other parties might have connected with it in terms of common strategy, if not program. But in character the Socialists were too alien for coalitions or even negotiations. Austro-Marxism lacked the leverage of brother movements in other countries.

  In 1914 even more than in previous years, Viktor Adler knew that his Party must not be a weak link of the international workers' alliance. Shadows had begun to jut across Europe's borders. Governments of major powers speechified louder than ever about national interests, patriotic valor, and automated battleships. France heard German sabers rattling. Germany protested its encirclement by England, France, and Russia. Russia denounced Austria's pushiness in the Balkans. And Austria countered sharply; statements from Count von Berchtold's Foreign Ministry on the Ballhausplatz, editorials in the Ballhausplatz-inspired press, all used an especially martial tone to prove that Habsburg was not crippled by the illness of the Emperor.

  Yet at the same time the masses had grown more sensitive to the menace of war. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg had just been tried for inciting troops to mutiny: If Germans were asked to murder Frenchmen-she had said in publicGermans would refuse. A court had sent her to jail for a year, but the sentence did not dim the pacifism of German Socialists or the popularity of their party. In the Berlin parliament their plurality topped their comrades' in Vienna. No less than 35 percent of all Reichstag deputies wore the red ribbon in their lapels. In France, the people would go to the polls on May 10; all signs pointed to a Socialist triumph bound to reduce the three-year conscription. In Russia the Tsar must face strikes spreading to armament factories.

  Socialist advances elsewhere would soon stare AustroMarxism in the face. It was in Vienna that the leaders of Europe's proletariats were to convene for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Socialist International. Their meeting was scheduled to begin on August 23 at the Grosser Musikvereinssaal, with Viktor Adler as host.

  The prospect charged Adler's agenda in the spring of 1914. It was time to overcome the insulation of his Party; to show comrades abroad and at home that Austrian Socialism could contribute crucially to the International's chorus: "More Bread, Fewer Guns, No War!"

  For such a purpose, May Day of 1914 would be an exhilarating reveille. Most of Viktor Adler's politics appealed to the intellect. But May Day spoke to the body's sensuousness. Therefore it was only appropriate that Viktor Adler had invented the May Day March in the apartment later occupied by Sigmund Freud at Berggasse 19: May Day stoked the Socialist libido. The great march ritualized and rhapsodized ideals presented by the Party much more soberly during the rest of the year. In brief, May Day's Apollonian orderliness had always carried Dionysian voltage. No wonder that the sight of the march had overwhelmed Hitler at twenty-three, or that its memory in Hitler's brain would later set brown-shirted ecstatics goose-stepping behind the swastika. No wonder May Day had electrified Gustav Mahler, Viktor Adler's cohort in their Nietzschean salad days. As Socialist leader, Viktor Adler defined May Day as a "waking call." As mature composer, Mahler intended to title his Third Symphony The Gay Science (in tribute to Nietzsche's book of the same name) and began its first movement with a "Weckruf" (waking call) to rouse the dormant Nietzschean life force. No wonder that Richard Strauss was to remark that whenever he conducted Mahler's Third he would always imagine, during the First Movement, "uncountable battalions of workers marching to the May Day celebration in Vienna's Prater." No wonder that Mahler at the end of his career, by then the aging apolitical Director of the Vienna Opera, had suddenly recaptured the ardor of his youth on a May First. Leaving an opera rehearsal, he had run into the workers' procession by accident, joined it on impulse, stuck with it to the very end, and came home
at night "vibrant with brotherliness."

  That had been in 1905. Now it was 1914. Mahler was dead. Viktor Adler was old, suffering from cardiac edema. Yet he remained as determined a workers' leader as ever. This year of all years, the May Day march needed juice, resolve, will. Yet just this year the march faced unusual jeopardy. At any moment the Emperor might die. His successor Franz Ferdinand might cancel all celebrations. True, so far Franz Joseph had survived a fever that would have killed most other octogenarians. Yet his very lingering posed a problem for May First. In many an Austrian Socialist there lurked a covert monarchist. Would there be a reluctance to join the Red festival while the father of the country fought for breath?

  ***

  At most of the twenty-five May Days so far, the sky had been clear and comradely in Vienna. This year weather forecasters were wary. Still, May 1, 1914, dawned with a plenitude of sun. What's more, the Emperor's pneumonia did not dampen class consciousness. Workers poured out of the slums. By the hundreds they gathered as craft groups at many different assembly points: tailors, bakers, mechanics, glove-makers. By the thousands the groups merged on the Ringstrasse, adding multitudes as they went. By the tens of thousands they crossed the Danube Canal bridges. As a host of hundreds of thousands they converged on the Prater. There in the park they were the First Movement of Mahler's Third become flesh, ready for the crescendo.

  At that point it was just past noon. Above a moving sea of heads the heavens had turned from blue to gray. But clouds had become irrelevant. There was such brightness surging through the streets: band after band intoning the "Internationale" or playing workers' songs; banners calling for an eighthour day; banners demanding apartments with plumbing; banners condemning alcohol as the capitalists' confederate; banners exhorting the government to recall Parliament, to spend less money on guns, to ease conscription, to keep peace.

  Arms locked, the marchers chanted their grievances and sang out their hopes. And this May Viktor Adler had added a new touch-"Red Cavalry," made up of battalions of bicyclists. Their legs pistoning in unison, their bike wheels festooned with red carnations, they held trumpets to their mouths and made the town echo with fanfares that galvanized onlookers into cheers. Topping it all were delegations from abroad as heralds of the International's Congress to come: carpenters from Germany in their guild dress of top hats, black scarves, and gray bell-bottom trousers; French steel workers in blue aprons and metal caps; booted Italian miners waving lit lanterns.