Quite simply the Kaiser did not feel up to the nervy part demanded of him by Vienna's script. Therefore the Chancellor must renounce all participation in Libretto B, claiming that Germany had been lured into it by Vienna's seductive bad faith. Almost immediately after the Kaiser had dressed him down, the German Chancellor wired his ambassador at the Habsburg Court:
I regard the attitude of Austria with increasing astonishment… Austria is entertaining plans which it finds advisable to keep secret from us in order to ensure herself of our support in any event… Pray speak to Count von Berchtold with great emphasis…
With great emphasis the Ambassador spoke to Count von Berchtold about Berlin's new position. In effect this position constituted Libretto C, authored posthaste by the Kaiser himself: Vienna should forgo the total knuckling-under of Serbia; instead it should proceed with a temporary and token occupation of Belgrade, just across the frontier, avoiding any further substantial penetration of territory. After this punishment Austria should declare its honor satisfied and withdraw.
***
But Libretto C failed much faster than Librettos A or B. It could not go far without Franz Joseph's approval. However, by the time Wilhelm proposed it to him on July 28, the old Emperor had passed the point of authorizing alternatives to the inevitable. He was now the prisoner of quite another, invincible dramaturgy.
On July 25, his Minister of War had appeared in audience at Ischl to receive permission to mobilize. Franz Joseph gave it, not like a monarch commanding a general but like a puppet controlled by a ghost. "Go…" he had whispered to the Minister. "Go…. I can do no other." A few hours later he walked on foot, as usual, to the villa of Frau Schratt. From the way he stooped his way across the little bridge before her gate, she knew what turn history had taken. "I have done my best," he said to her. "But now it is the end."
"Very quickly," the Tsar of Russia cabled a few days later to his cousin and soon foe, the Kaiser, "I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure brought on me." Not only had Franz Joseph I and Nicholas II been disenfranchised but so had all their august peers.
Their ministers thrashed about impotently. They had been yanked from their vacations, out of their hunting boots, their fishing waders, their beach wear. The crisis had slammed them back into their striped trousers. Now they were pacing around telegraph keys that kept clattering adjurations and avowals from chancellery to chancellery. Vienna cabled St. Petersburg that the Austrian Army had mobilized solely against Serbia. St. Petersburg cabled Vienna that the Russian mobilization was only partial and wholly defensive. Berlin cabled Paris about the dangerous consequences of French mobilization. Paris cabled that it mobilized only to protect French security. Berlin cabled London, urging Britain to stop the mobilization of its allies. London cabled Berlin, asking Germany to ask Austria to use mediation, not mobilization, in the Serbian matter. Austria cabled London its willingness to negotiate but without delaying its "operations against Serbia." London cabled Vienna that it could not remain neutral in a European war. All cables invoked the sacredness of peace. All countries involved kept thrusting bayonets into the hands of their young men.
Power had drained from thrones and chancelleries into the offices of Chiefs of Staff. Clumsily, diplomats tried to bluff their counterparts into peace. Efficiently, each Chief of Staff activated his mobilizing apparatus. Inevitably, the mobilizations accelerated each other.
Now the subordination of Chiefs of Staff to heads of state was only nominal. Now the Chiefs drew their true prerogative from an unofficial but tremendous power. Overnight this power had become visible. It was surging through the streets all over the continent.
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The new power did not wait for proclamations from governments. It needed no galvanizing by propaganda, no goading from the press (which was by no means uniformly militant in the principal countries). The new power had already divided the world into Allies-until-Victory and Enemies-unto-Death. This new power had gathered thousands along the shores of the Danube where they sang, fervently, "The Watch on the Rhine" against France. The new power burned German flags in Paris while cafe orchestras along the Champs Elysees played "God Save the King." The new power raised a sea of fists against the Russian Embassy in Vienna, against the German Embassy in Paris, and its stones shattered eleven windows of the British Embassy in Berlin. Even restaurants felt the fingers of the new power. "Menu cards here in Vienna," Karl Kraus wrote to his beloved Sidonie, "now have their English and French translations crossed out. Things are getting more and more idiotic.. "
But Kraus himself knew better. It wasn't mere idiocy that was governing things now. It was something far more formidable. Sarajevo had only been a flash point of its strength.
Our politicians [Kraus said in Die Fackel of July 1914] are unconsciously right in their suspicion that "behind this schoolboy… who killed the Archduke and his wife stand others who cannot be apprehended and who are responsible for the weapon used." No less a force than progress stands behind this deed-progress and education unmoored from God…
A key sentence on the century's key moment as nations were turning themselves into regiments. Kraus did not amplify here on the God from whom progress had severed mankind so fatally. He had done that earlier elsewhere, in his poem "The Dying Man." There God meant the Presence in the pristine garden that was both "source and destination." But now men had paved over His soil and their souls. Concrete had strangled the "source." They had lost their sense of origin and of final purpose. Therefore they must claw from the barrenness a new "destination"-an angrier destiny. Under the oppressiveness of a loss, the new power had been forged.
It had forged the life of Gavrilo Princip, modernity's foremost assassin, who had triggered the crisis. The family of "this schoolboy" had lived for centuries in an approximation, however imperfect, of Kraus's garden. As a zadruga, that is, as a tight-knit, farm-based Bosnian clan, the Princips had raised their own corn, milled their own flour, baked their own loaves, and worshipped a God close enough to their roof to be their very own protector.
Progress had broken all that apart. Princip's father could no longer create bread from his earth. He could no longer live his livelihood. He must earn it with the estranged, endless trudgings of a postman. His son Gavrilo, more educated than his father, more sensitive, more starved for the wholeness that is holiness and thus more resentful of the ruins all about him, had to seek another garden. He sought something that would satisfy his disorientation and his anger; something which, as his readings of Nietzsche suggested, would restore the valor of the vital principle that his race had lost. He found it in the Black Hand. It conjured "the earth that nourishes… the sun that warms." It was part of the new power. It offered him the cohesion, the communal fortitude and faith of the shattered zadruga.
Progress had shattered numberless zadrugas by hundreds of other ethnic names, from the hamlet of Predappio in Italy's Romagna where a blacksmith named Mussolini had a son named Benito, to the village of Didi-Lilo in Russia's Transcaucasia where a cobbler named Dzhugashvili sired a boy later called Stalin. The Stalins, Mussolinis, Hitlers, Princips were the monsters of progress. Progress had abused and bruised them, but they could turn the sting outward and avenge the injury. There were many millions like them with less fury in their bafflement, less steel in their deprivation: the lumpen-proletariat on whose backs Europe rode toward the marvels of the new century. Their anonymous pain fermented the new power.
A year before Sarajevo, Vienna's Arbeiter Zeitung published a survey documenting that it was always the most rapidly industrializing areas which produced among the poor the highest rate of alcoholism, of syphillis and tuberculosis, of emotional pathology, and by far the highest rate of suicide. Their sickbeds and their graves marked the trail of "progress unmoored from God." But now Princip's deed was inspiriting its live and able-bodied victims. With two shots he had set in motion a firestorm that was to burn meaning into the numbest slums.
Instead of beating their heads against the prison of
their class, instead of deadening themselves with toil or liquor, the masses now had something to kill for. Before Sarajevo, hundreds of thousands had been on strike in Russia. Not long afterwards the factories hummed again all day. At night, toilers massed before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg with torches and holy ensigns, acclaiming the Tsar as their defender. "Wonderful times…" said a British diplomat who saw the spectacle. "Russia seems to have been completely transformed."
In Vienna the transformation was just as wonderful. On May Day 1914, workers had marched on the Ringstrasse with the chant "Frieden, Brot, and Freiheit!" ("Peace, Bread, and Freedom!"). On August 1, many of the same crowd marched again with "Alle Serben mussen sterben!" ("All Serbs must die!"). "The patriotic enthusiasm of the masses in AustriaHungary seemed especially surprising," Trotsky wrote in his autobiography. "I strode along the main street of the familiar Vienna and watched the most amazing crowd fill the fashionable Ring, a crowd in which hopes had been awakened… What was it that drew them to the square in front of the War Ministry?… Would it have been possible at any other time for porters, laundresses, shoemakers, apprentices to feel themselves masters of the Ring?… In their demonstrations for the glory of Habsburg arms, I detected something familiar to me from the October days of 1905 [when Trotsky had led a shortlived insurrection]. No wonder that in history war has so often been the mother of revolution."
In Paris workers had sung the "Internationale" on May Day before returning to their tenements. Now their throats rang with the "Marseillaise" while the Kaiser's effigy went up in flames. Everywhere life leaped from lonely gray grind to grand national adventure. Hurrah!
But the poor weren't the only ones grateful for the zest provided by the crisis. The middle classes, too, felt exhausted and baffled. Progress had fed them well. Yet the more meat on their table, the less tang was there to each morsel, the more intolerable the superior cut of somebody else's steak. No doubt they were dining well. Were they still eating together? They consumed as they produced: aggressively against each other. When worshipping, they knelt on velvet in churches unmoored from a common God. Their mansions brimmed, but they did not feel sheltered. They promenaded in spats and top hats-where from? To what end?
Germany's most popular almanac for 1913 featured a poem by the writer Alfred Walter Heymel. It was called "Eine Sehnsucht aus der Zeit" ("A Longing in Our Times").
Im Friedensreichtum wird uns toedlich bang.
Wir kennen Muessen nicht noch Koennen oder Sollen
Und Sehnen uns und schereien nach dem Kriege.
(In the wealth of peace we feel the deadliest dread.
We are bereft of prewess, mission, or direction,
And long and cry for war.)
Hurrah!
The cry came, as the British poet Rupert Brooke phrased it, from "a world grown old and cold and weary." It came from "this foul peace which drags on and on. " as General Conrad wrote to his mistress Gina von Reininghaus. For worker or burgher or poet or Chief of Staff, Mars was the God of Liberation. "A crisis had entered Western culture," a high Habsburg official would write later, "and many of its representative citizens had been oversaturated into desperation. Like men longing for a thunderstorm to relieve them of the summer's sultriness, so the generation of 1914 believed in the relief that war might bring." Their longing for thunder was the new power.
The thunderstorm with its mortal flash-this image shivers ubiquitously through the whole period. In the summer of 1914, Europe's musical sensation was still Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiered a year earlier in Paris, where Nijinsky's "lightning leaps" celebrated the theme of the ballet, namely the enchantments of death.
In painting, a dominant mode was Futurism, which anticipated the lightning-like strokes of stroboscopic photography; the Futurist manifesto exalted war because it would blast away the stultification of present concepts and structures; as though defining lightning's lethal beauty, the manifesto proclaimed that "movement and light must destroy the substance of objects."
"The sense of approaching catastrophe," wrote a Futurist who didn't know he was one, in his book Mein Kamp f, "turned at last to longing: Let heaven finally give reign to the fate that could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed, and with the thunder of heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries."
"The war," said German Chancellor von BethmannHollweg in his book on the subject, "would be a thunderstorm to clear the air."
"The palpable beginnings of the European crisis reach back a number of years," wrote Count Ottokar Czernin who would succeed Count von Berchtold as Habsburg Foreign Minister, "… certain dynamics must take their course before a thunderstorm discharges its lightning and thunder."
"I am convinced the storm is coming," French President Raymond Poincare remarked to a friend in July of 1914. "Where and when the storm will break I cannot say."
"There is a crisis in the air," Freud had written Lou AndreasSalome as 1913 turned to 1914, referring to Jung yet articulating much more than psychoanalytic weather. "May it soon explode so that the air is cleared!"
The shots of Sarajevo sounded like an answer to many prayers in many nations. Afterwards some tried in vain to push back the bolt that came down from the blue-for example, in Paris on the sudden death of Jean Jaures, the French Socialist leader and Europe's most eloquent voice against war. On July 31, as he sat in the Cafe du Croissant, a nationalist zealot gunned him down. His comrades organized a pacifist parade around his body. They were swamped by a mob of conscripts. Brand-new lieutenants graduated from St. Cyr led the warriors, shouting, "We'll go into battle with white plumes on our kepis and with white gloves on our hands!" Behind them young men roared by the happy thousands. The French General Staff planned for 87 percent of called-up reservists to appear at induction centers; 98.5 percent did. Hurrah!
In Austria, where Viktor Adler had groomed the worker to be a thinker and a doer, the proletariat accomplished not a single thoughtful act to halt disaster. Adler himself, though, did intervene in history without knowing it. During the antiRussian hysteria in Austria, Habsburg constables in Galicia arrested Lenin "as a Tsarist spy" on August 8. In response to an appeal from Lenin's wife, Adler went to the headquarters of the political police in Vienna, cited their own sponsorship of this useful Bolshevik as an enemy of the Tsar and thus as a friend of Austria (Hurrah!), and obtained Lenin's release and safe passage first to Vienna, then to Switzerland. A few days later he helped usher Trotsky across the Swiss border. In other words, Adler put into place the preliminaries of the Russian Revolution three years later.
He also couldn't help collaborating in the genesis of its most important preliminary, namely that of the Great War. No matter that his ArbeiterZeitung had published many warnings against the threat of international slaughter. On August 5, the day before Austria issued its first declaration of war against a major power-Russia-this same Arbeiter Zeitung intoned, "However the fates decide, we hope they will decide for the holy cause of the German people." Hurrah! Two days earlier Adler's paper had reported that his German comrades, the Socialist deputies to the Reichstag in Berlin, had joined the other parties in voting the government the war credits it needed. This action marked, said the ArbeiterZeitung, "… the proudest and loftiest exaltation of the German spirit." Hurrah!
Two men made dogged, last-ditch attempts against that inexorable hurrah. They were Nicky and Willy. That was how the two Emperors signed their respective cables, which started jittering, on the night of July 29, between the palace of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg and the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Potsdam. Nicky "in the name of our old friendship" begged Willy to stop his Austrian ally from going too far. Willy, in turn, declaring himself to be Nicky's "sincere and devoted friend and cousin," said he was sure that Nicky as a fellow monarch wanted to see the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince duly punished. Nicky thanked Willy for "the conciliatory and fraternal" message but in view of it voiced astonishmen
t at the ominous tone of the note just delivered by Willy's ambassador to his, Nicky's, Foreign Minister. Willy answered that just because Nicky shared so cordially the wish for peace, he hoped Nicky would agree to remain "in a spectator role" in the Vienna-Belgrade conflict, for only by localizing the matter and by not taking Russian military measures could Nicky avoid "involving Europe in the most horrible war ever witnessed." In reply, Nicky, "grateful for the speed of your answer," assured Willy that all Russian military measures were purely precautionary with no offensive intent and should therefore not interfere with Willy's "much-valued role as mediator with Vienna." Willy's response regretted that he could not mediate in Vienna while Russia persisted in mobilizing. To which Nicky answered that it was "technically impossible" to stop Russian military preparations but that since, like Willy, he was very far from wishing war, he gave Willy his solemn words that "my troops shall not commit any provocative action." Whereupon Willy thanked Nicky for his telegram but said that "only immediate, clear, unmistakable, and affirmative answer from your government can avoid endless misery." And he begged Nicky to order his troops "on no account to commit the slightest act of trespassing over our frontiers."
This cable, ending the series, leaped from Berlin to St. Petersburg on August 1, at 10:30 P.M. Three and a half hours earlier, at 7 P.M., the Kaiser's ambassador had presented the German Government's declaration of war to the Russian Foreign Minister.
It was no longer important what Willy said to Nicky when. Quite aptly the two Emperors had reduced themselves to diminutives: two sashed little figurines raising toy scepters against the storm. The storm paid little attention. All over the continent young men filed into barracks in clockwork fulfillment of mobilization plans. Troop trains kept hurtling toward frontiers.
The martial hurrah of multitudes kept echoing on the square before Wilhelm's palace. Through his Lord Chamberlain the Kaiser thanked his subjects for this show of loyalty but asked them to disperse "so that His Majesty can attend undisturbed to the challenges of leadership." The hurrahs continued.
Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 Page 27
