"Autumn is magnificent in the Tatra range," he'd written his sister Maria in April 1914. "If we have a fine autumn we shall probably live in the country." The summer of 1914 was too seductive. Lenin didn't wait for fall. In July he and his wife Krupskaya moved to Poronin in the Tatras. Krupskaya suffered from a goiter and couldn't walk far from their cottage. But Lenin took off with knapsack, walking stick, and notebook "clambering up the steeps like a mountain goat." Sometimes he stopped to make notes on the contentious Socialist Con gress scheduled in Vienna for the following month. But for most of July (while the Ballhausplatz hatched the nonultimatum super-ultimatum) Lenin hiked the glorious days away.
Lenin was an occasional visitor in Vienna. Hitler, like Trotsky, had lived there for years. Unlike Trotsky he'd never been drawn to the city's green precincts. He had painted, brooded, ranted, on pavement only; in fact he'd meticulously kept away from the Vienna Woods as if their fragrance might compromise his bitterness. But in this balmy summer he seemed to be haunted by leaf and tree. In July Hitler meandered through Munich's sub-Alpine outskirts, those pointing toward Salzburg and his native Upper Austria. He sketched river shores and villas, often with a garden motif.
That summer the idea of the garden, of nature and nostalgia, also haunted another demon. A virtuous demon, this one, obsessed with morality as others are obsessed with hate. Karl Kraus was the most merciless critic in Austria of Austria. About three times a month he published Die Fackel (The Torch), a magazine of inexhaustible indignation and surgical brilliance. At first it had printed polemics from a variety of writers. But by 1914 no other Jeremiah even approached Kraus's eloquence; by then every syllable in Die Fackel hissed from his pen. His wit seared Vienna's operetta Machiavellis, its hand-kissing nastiness, its whipped-cream ethics. Die Fackel lit up the ways in which the city debased manners and debauched language.
But the summer of 1914 proved that Kraus, Austria's scourge, shared certain sympathies with the late Austrian Crown Prince. Of course both were dedicated haters-the Archduke forever frowning and the torch-hurling Jew. But there was another affinity. Both men were drawn to nature and nostalgia, the dual hallmark of the season. Both loved the garden because it sustained virtue that had withered elsewhere. For the Archduke, the garden-particularly his great garden in Bohemia-was a haven of divine grace; it sheltered him and his Sophie against the godless and malevolent artifice of Vienna's court. For Kraus, the garden was a sanctuary from civilization, which had "betrayed God to the machine."
The Crown Prince loved the garden lavishly, naively, as evidenced by the vast rose beds of Konopiste. Kraus loved the garden mystically. Show him a border of violets, and his acid genius would pulse in an orphic vein. To Kraus, nature occasioned a transfiguring nostalgia. Nature and nostalgia were part of a trinity whose third member was the Maker Himself.
Not long before the summer of 1914, Karl Kraus wrote "The Dying Man," a poem that spies a beacon glimmering from the garden of Creation. It glimmers on through the Fall to guide the fallen toward Redemption; a Redemption whose flowers are the same as those of Genesis.
In the poem God, the Gardener, addresses man, the moribund:
Im Dunkel gehend, wussest Du ums Licht.
Nun bist Du da und siehst mir ins Gesicht.
Sahst hinter dich und suchtest meinem Garten.
Du bleibst am Ursprung. Ursprung ist das Ziel.
(Walking through darkness you surmised the light
Now you are here, you are standing in my sight
Looking back, you sought the garden gate.
Source is your destination. Source, your anchorage.)
But the garden did more than furnish Kraus with apocalyptic metaphor. During July of 1914, he experienced the garden as a very personal, real, blooming, and twittering haven. In the park of Janowitz, the Bohemian estate of his mistress, Baroness Sidonie von Nadherny, he could lean back under chestnut boughs. He could breathe deeply and release himself from his angers. In public he was the mordant aphorist capable of defining a woman as "an occasionally acceptable substitute for masturbation." In private, among Janowitz's groves, he kissed his baroness's slim fingers as they intertwined with his own. In Janowitz Park he relished his rare moments of repose and affection.
Less than fifteen miles away from Janowitz lay Franz Ferdinand's Konopiste. On June 15, when the archducal gardens had opened to the public, Kraus and his baroness had been among the dazzled visitors. This was the ultimate garden. Therefore it was the ultimate antithesis to what Kraus hated most: Vienna's artificiality, especially the kind perfected by the Viennese press with its deliciously concocted slanders, the bribed bias of its reportage, the slick charm of its feuilletonists. Through sheer organic honesty of stalk and leaf and petal, the garden rebuked all such ink-stained turpitude.
Shortly after visiting Konopiste, Kraus fired off a philippic culminating in the declaration
that the preservation of the wall of a manor park, where between a five-hundred-year-old poplar and a bluebell flowering today, all the miracles of creation are salvaged from the wreck of the world-that such a thing is more important in the name of the spirit than the pursuit of intellectual infamy which takes God's breath away!
These words in Die Fackel, vibrating on the rim of "the wreck of the world," were the last Kraus wrote before the shots of Sarajevo.
After Sarajevo (while Berchtold was hatching the nonultimatum super-ultimatum), Die Fackel of July 10, 1914, ran a eulogy of the late Crown Prince that was also a hymn to nature's naturalness as well as the indictment of a culture. "In this era so deplorable for humanity," wrote Kraus, which in our Austrian laboratory of the apocalypse is expressed by the grimace of gemutlich sickliness-in such an era the Archduke had the measure of a man. Only now, as Vienna mimics mourning, do we realize… how much he disdained that indispensable affability used by the powerful to promote their careers… He was no greeter. He had no winning ways to charm the people past their grievances. He did show character through his radical championship of the commonplace against a fake modernity.
He proved himself by his taste. At his estate he opened to the people a floral landscape intelligible on the most popular level, a park with few rarefied pretensions… He was not part of the fancy dynamics of Austrian decay… he wanted to rouse our era from its sickness so that it would not sleep past its own death. Now it sleeps past his.
Even as Kraus wrote that passage, Europe drowsed on toward a great death. In fact, some of his admirers had a hand in both the drowsing and the dying. Many bright young diplomats read him with awe. This included the group under Count von Berchtold laboring on the composition of the missive Berchtold was to unveil exquisitely, explosively, during the second act of his scenario-the nonultimatum superultimatum to be served on Serbia.
"We were all devotees of Karl Kraus," one of the group would later reminisce in a memoir. "We all devoured, fascinated, every issue of Die Fackel. From Kraus we had learned to believe in the magic of the word as the womb of thought… We were the last generation [of Habsburg Foreign Office officials], and our highest aim was to crystallize language into utter perfection. For four weeks we worked on the phrasing of the ultimatum as if we were polishing a jewel."
To Kraus, had he known of it, such adulation would have been abomination. For him "the magic of the word" lay in quarrying the truth, not in tricking it out. Die Fackel aimed to expose, as he once put it, the "difference between an urn and a chamber pot." In July of 1914 his fans on the Ballhausplatz manipulated the word in order to blur just this distinction. They were festooning the chamber-pot crassness of an ultimatum with the adornments of an urn, to be passed on a silver server from Excellency to Excellency.
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Meanwhile excellencies all over Europe continued in the roles assigned to them by Count von Berchtold's Act I. The weather continued as the Count's obedient stagehand. A slumbrous tropical sun made the continent a lotus land. Belgrade announced that the Serbian King would shortly travel to a spa abroad. In London,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, took a languid view of international relations; speaking at a banquet, he said that while some clouds always hovered on the horizon, there were fewer this year than last, and that His Majesty's Government would help to dissipate even those… In Vienna itself, a skeptical journal like the Socialist ArbeiterZeitung relaxed its suspicions of the government. "The quiet and slow pace of events," it wrote, "suggests that no drastic action will be taken against Serbia."
Just past the midpoint of July, rumors skittered along the Ringstrasse. What was happening behind those drawn blinds at the Ballhausplatz? The stock market registered a sudden, though not major decline.
But Count von Berchtold knew how to restore the blandness required by his scenario. On July 18, he visited British Ambassador Sir Maurice de Bunsen at the ambassador's summer residence Schloss Stixstein. The Foreign Minister "was unusually chatty and agreeable," Sir Maurice would later report, "… not a word was let drop that a crisis impended."
To the Italian ambassador, who seemed a bit unnerved by Austria's impassivity after Sarajevo, the Foreign Minister said that the situation was not grave-"it just needs to be cleared up." And the French ambassador, who did not find much clarification in that statement, was assured by Berchtold that Vienna's note to Belgrade would be "reasonable."
The French ambassador duly relayed this news to his government. Paris, not overly alarmed in the first place, let its attention wander. Just then a magnificent scandal was engulfing France. On July 20, a judge's gavel at the Court de Seine started a trial mesmerizing the Gallic imagination. Mme. Henriette Caillaux, wife of the Finance Minister (widely touted to be the next Prime Minister), had pumped six bullets into the body of France's most powerful journalist, the editor in chief of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette. That had been back in March. But now, in mid-July, fireworks between prosecutor and defense counsel lit up the erotic glamor behind this charismatic homicide. Much of the trial revolved around the love letters Caillaux had written Henriette during the extramarital affair that preceded their wedding-letters whose imminent publication in Le Figaro had driven Mme. Caillaux to murder.
The shots at Sarajevo faded rapidly as those from the Figaro office resounded once more in newspaper columns. This was the stuff of prime gossip, made even tangier by a courtroom duel. It enlivened millions of French vacations. Certainly it piqued President Poincare on his summer cruise. About to land in St. Petersburg, he asked to be apprised of every moist detail by cable.
Britain also had an absorbing domestic concern-apart from holiday-making, of course. The Irish Home Rule Bill was roiling tempers very badly. On July 20-on the morning the Caillaux judges assembled in scarlet robes at the Seine Tribunal-His Britannic Majesty summoned the contending parties to Buckingham Palace, taking a very rare step beyond his constitutional role as a reigning, not a ruling, monarch. And King George did manage to postpone the crisis-until a superior urgency submerged it. But who would have expected such an urgency? Where would it come from? The Henley Regatta?
British King and Paris murderess were spear-carriers for Count von Berchtold's stagecraft. They both diverted attention as he readied the surprise climax. Vienna itself remained quiet, basking its way through July. It did generate some official news-though of a literally festive character. The City Fathers were planning the First International Vienna Music Festival, scheduled for June 1915. Newspapers reported a spirited debate on the subject in the Municipal Council. Among the main points discussed were (1) should the program consist of concerts only? and (2) if operas were included, would this be aping Salzburg, whose own first large-scale festival was slotted for August of this year and which would feature the great Felix Weingartner conducting Lotte Lehmann in Don Giovanni?
Vienna, then, looked preoccupied with matters either esthetic or bucolic and at all events harmless. As late as July 20, the Russian ambassador saw no reason for not leaving town on a two-week holiday. He left. From St. Petersburg came an even more conclusive signal of detente. On July 21, the Tsar and his guest, French President Poincare, exchanged toasts that dwelled on the international picture: The Serb-Austrian problem wasn't even mentioned.
But forty-eight hours earlier, while Europe sunned and napped, Count von Berchtold had tiptoed toward the last scene of his first act. On the afternoon of July 19, a number of taxis and private automobiles drew up before his Palais overlooking the Strudlhof Steps. The cars arrived at intervals, avoiding a dramatic convergence. It was Sunday. The scene seemed to point to some weekend social gathering. A passerby, had he cared to notice, would not have spotted a single official limousine.
Yet this was an official occasion, as crucial as it was covert: a cabinet meeting of the Joint Ministers of the AustroHungarian Empire. Berchtold had summoned them to review the text of the note to the Serbian government. On the morning of that day the "jewel" had finally been polished to perfection.
Next morning, on Monday July 20, a courier left the Ballhausplatz for the Emperor's villa at Bad Ischl. He made this trip routinely, every weekday, carrying state papers. On the twentieth he carried "the jewel" for Franz Joseph's inspection. On Tuesday the twenty-first, a brief, laconic item in the official Wiener Zeitung reported that Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold had gone to Bad Ischl "to discuss current business with His Majesty." And that morning, at 9 A.M., he was received by the Emperor.
Berchtold's diary records a Franz Joseph braced, tart, taut, not at all octogenarian.
"Well, Berchtold, ever on the go?"
"Yes, Your Majesty, one has to be. These are fast-moving times."
"Exactly, as never before. The note is pretty sharp."
"It has to be, Your Majesty."
"It has to be indeed. You will join us for lunch."
"With humble pleasure, Your Majesty."
Hoyos, whom Berchtold had brought along to the audience, took the official copy of the demarche from his briefcase. Franz Joseph initialed it. "The Jewel," already endorsed by the Joint Ministers, now bore the Imperial imprimatur.
Actually this was only the formal ratification of action taken twenty-four hours earlier. On Monday the Emperor had read and approved the note handed him by the courier. On that same Monday it had been wired to the Austrian Embassy in Belgrade. It was ready to be thrust at Serbia by the time a white-gloved footman set down a tureen before Franz Joseph, Berchtold, and Hoyos at midday of July 21.
In summary, the note said
1. that preliminary investigations prove that the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince was planned in Belgrade; that Serbian officials and members of the government-sponsored Naradna Obrana [5] had provided the culprits with arms and training; that chiefs of the Serbian frontier service had organized and effectuated passage of the culprits into Austrian territory….
2. that even before the outrage, Belgrade had encouraged for years terrorist societies and criminal actions aiming to detach BosniaHercegovina from the Habsburg realm….
3. that in view of the above, and in order to end this intolerable, long-standing, and ongoing threat to its territories and to its tranquillity, the Imperial and Royal Government of the Austro-Hungarian Empire sees itself obliged to demand from the Royal Serbian government
(a) the publication on the front page of Belgrade's Official Journal of July 26, 1914, of a declaration by the Serbian Government which regrets, condemns, and repudiates all Serbian acts, official or nonofficial, against Austria, and all Serbian violations of rules governing the comity of nations-and that such a declaration be also published as "Order of the Day" by the King of Serbia to the Serbian Army.
The Austrian Government further demands
(b) a guarantee from the Serbian Government that it will henceforth suppress any publication inciting hatred against Austria or menacing Austria's territorial integrity; that it will dissolve any and all societies engaged in propaganda, subversion, or terrorism against Austria, and that it will prevent such societies from continuing their activities under another name or form�
��
The Austrian Government further demands
(c) that the Serbian Government will eliminate instantly any and all educational materials in Serbian schools that are anti-Austrian in character…
The Austrian Government further demands
(d) that the Serbian Government will remove from the Serbian Army and the Serbian administration all officials guilty of anti-Austrian acts, including specific individuals whose names and activities will be detailed to the Serbian Government by the Austrian Government; and that the Serbian Government will accept the participation of Austrian Police in the suppression and apprehension of antiAustrian subversive groups, particularly those involved in the Sarajevo crime…
Finally, the Austrian Government demands
(e) that the Serbian Government will notify the Austrian Government without delay of the execution of these measures… and to convey unconditional agreement to all of the foregoing at the latest by Saturday, July 25, 1914, at 6 P.M.
This was the super-ultimatum. In the words of the British Foreign Secretary, it constituted "the most formidable document ever addressed by one state to another." It was also the nonultimatum. Though its tone left no doubt over the consequences of noncompliance, it did not mention the possibility of war, and therefore arrived at the Austrian Embassy in Belgrade labeled as a mere "demarche with a time limit."
And there were other fine aspects to Berchtold's game. The sledgehammer message came phrased in fastidious diplomatic French, the last such "final notice" to be written in that language. Last but not least, Berchtold used precision timing, always important in a theatrical enterprise. Belgrade relied on two principal protectors, Russia and France. Just then the French Head of State was finishing his visit with the Tsar. Berchtold did not want the two to react jointly when the "demarche with a time limit" struck. Through German diplomatic sources, Berchtold had learned that President Poincare would end his stay at the Russian capital in the early afternoon of Thursday, July 23. By 5 P.M. he would be floating away on the cruiser France. Berchtold instructed the Austrian Ambassador in Belgrade to deliver the "demarche" at 6 P.M. sharp.
Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 Page 25
