by Philipp Blom
3
1902: Oedipus Rex
No understanding is possible between people, no discussion, no connection between today and yesterday: words are lying, feelings are lying, and our very consciousness is lying.
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Physiology of Modern Love
In Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 18th of March 1902 was one of those dirty, depressing days in early spring with uncertain, leaden skies and squally showers - ideal weather for ducking into one of the city’s many cafés and making use of one of their most attractive features, the dozens of newspapers provided for patrons. One cup of coffee was (and still is) all a customer had to buy in return for the right to sit and read as long as he pleased.
On this dull day the news was very run-of-the-mill. Das Vaterland, a conservative paper, recorded political events at home and abroad: the Vienna parliament debating the reduction of military service from three to two years; the seventieth birthday of Prince Schwarzenberg, one of the empire’s grandest aristocrats; the Hungarian deputies debating the agricultural budget. The Pester Lloyd, a German-speaking Budapest paper for businessmen, led with a lengthy article on developments in the prices for pork fat and bacon. News about the empire’s first families: Archduke Rainer is to visit an exhibition; the confinement of Archduchess Marie Christine is progressing normally.
Developments abroad were slightly more exciting. The Boer War led the foreign pages (as it did in German and French papers, also available in all self-respecting cafés). The British army had been defeated at Tweebosch and Lord Methuen had been wounded, captured, and then sent home by the Boers, who had also thoughtfully dispatched a telegram to Lady Methuen to apprise her of her husband’s return. King Edward, Das Vaterland noted, was not going abroad this year but would instead cruise in British waters; Prince Heinrich of Prussia had arrived in Plymouth aboard the Deutschland; a demonstration in St Petersburg had been stopped by police without violence, but with about one hundred arrests; a petroleum tanker in the Suez Canal had gone up in flames, creating an oil slick; Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) was covered by a thick, unseasonable layer of snow.
Official news always tends to have a familiar ring to it, and the world of this time opens up in a richer way when one turns to the small ads, the local news, and the advertisements. The Wiener Zeitung, the official paper of record, notes on its local pages that the schoolboy Wilhelm Sopka has run away from home and is missing; the housemaid Katharina Rybetcky has been arrested for smothering her illegitimate child; the worker ‘Josefine St.’ has committed suicide by throwing herself out of a third-floor window; a butcher’s assistant has stolen 1,000 Kronen from her employer.
‘Comrades, Workers and Female Workers!’ the socialist Volksbote shouts from the front page, alerting its readers to a ‘people’s assembly’ in the Gisela-Säle on Sunday afternoon. It also reports that after a workers’ rebellion during which the military shot ‘dozens’ of comrades, there is still a state of war declared in Trieste; that sugar will become cheaper, even if the Austro-Hungarian ‘sugar barons’ have tried to prevent this; and that a sacristan in Vienna has been found to have been sexually abusing altar boys in his care. For once, there is no news about injured, sacked or maimed workers, the sad staple fare of the local pages in an age with little safety at work. On the back page, Anton Pollak & Companie offers cheap clothes for boys and men; ‘a decent woman’ wants to take in washing; the Circus Victor announces a performance featuring a comedian and a wrestling match; a pharmacy offers ‘the best home-made Rum with finest spirits, guaranteed 96% proof’ (cheap and powerful enough to knock out anyone after a sixteen-hour day in the factory); ‘rubber goods’ (condoms) are offered, chastely hidden among tubing and washers.
Die Bombe, a humorous weekly magazine addressed mainly to young men about town, carries very different ads: ‘Gratis - Interesting Mail’ promises an ‘artistic studio’ in Hamburg, ‘Photographic Nude Studies’ another. Paris Rubber Novelties for Gentlemen, Rubber goods are advertised by A. Kruger in Berlin and Karl Franke in Leipzig. The more respectable Wiener Zeitung offers much safer fare: the repertoire of all major theatres, museum opening times, and ‘Singing Lessons for Ladies and Gentlemen’.
In an official announcement at the foot of page one, an historic figure appears as in a cameo role:
His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty has most graciously deigned to appoint to an Extraordinary Professorship in hygiene at the University of Vienna, by Supreme Decision of 5 March this year, Private Lecturer Dr Arthur Schattenfroh, and has also through his utmost grace condescended to award the title of University Professor Extraordinary at the same university to the Private Lecturers Dr Sigmund Freud, Dr Julius Mannaberg and Dr Emil Fronz.
Freud’s elevation to ‘university professor extraordinary’ (not the same as a full, tenured position) was a long-overdue acknowledgement, for his method of treating psychological problems - he called it psychoanalysis - had won international acclaim. It had come very late. For a long time, the medical establishment had refused to recognize the Jewish doctor or his method, and even now Freud had to use the contacts of a wealthy patient to get the ball rolling. Now he had made it. At forty-four he had finally achieved a degree of public recognition.
The Dual Monarchy, Freud’s home for most of his life, has vanished from the map, and yet there are still people alive today who were born under the double-headed eagle that overlooked some 20 per cent of Europe, from Czernowitz (today Chernivtsy in the Ukraine) on the Romanian border to Bregenz on the shores of the Swiss Lac Leman, from the northern Reichenberg (today Liberec in the Czech Republic) and Krakau (today Kraków in Poland) right down to Trieste (now in Italy) and then hundreds of miles along the Adriatic coast to the small heavily fortified town of Budua, today’s Budva in Montenegro. Second only to Germany in terms of population, and ahead of Great Britain with Ireland and France (45 million each), the 50 million Habsburg subjects formed not so much one population, as several different and rival ones: Germans (as the German-speaking inhabitants called themselves), Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenes, Slovenes, Serbo-Croats, Italians, Bosnians and Romanians, to say nothing of national and religious minorities.
The map reveals not only the Dual Monarchy’s power and extent, but also its fatal flaw: Austria-Hungary was not a country but a collection of lands belonging to the Habsburg family, a political relic from the Middle Ages. Czechs, Poles and Hungarians were demanding political and cultural independence, education in their own language, control over taxes, and ever-stronger political representation in direct competition with other nationalities, and while most people in Austria proper ate Bohemian cuisine for the simple reason that most cooks hailed from there, Czech-speakers would no more attend Hungarian theatres than would Germans pick up a novel written in Czech, Italian or Serbo-Croat. Prague was divided in two between the Czech and German populations, each insisting on its own newspapers, schools, football clubs, cafés, and even on separate universities. German-speaking intellectuals who had lived in the city all their lives, among them Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel, were much more likely to know Latin, ancient Greek or French than Czech. A typical case is Kafka himself, who famously learned Yiddish, the better to understand the culture of his ancestors, while his knowledge of Czech was limited to ‘kitchen Bohemian’, the pidgin German of its day, used to communicate with domestic staff from the provinces. Throughout the empire, the overall situation could only give the impression of stability because no single national group was large and powerful enough to assure its dominance. The immediate ancestry of Austria’s foreign minister in 1914, Count Leopold Berchtold (or to give him his full name: Count Leopold Anton Johann Sigismund Josef Korsinus Ferdinand Berchtold von und zu Ungarschütz, Frättling und Püllütz), made him part German, part Czech, part Slovak and part Hungarian. When a journalist pressed him on his sense of nationality he simply answered: ‘I’m Viennese.’
For many decades, the government’s way of dealing wit
h this patchwork of allegiances had been to smother national and cultural differences under the thick folds of imperial ermine, but the calls for self-determination were growing louder every day. Even the sessions of the imperial parliament in Vienna were regularly interrupted by scuffles between members, and when sensitive cultural legislation was introduced some national minority parties were known to resort to a very unparliamentarian kind of noise, produced on rattles, pot lids and children’s trumpets, to drown out opposing speakers and sabotage proceedings. In response to all kinds of political unrest, the imperial administration had cultivated the noble art of formalized inertia: improvising, stalling, waiting, granting a little here and taking it away with the other hand, never facing the important questions, always hoping that the problems might simply go away if only the administration proved more patient than had history.
In this empire without a national identity, the only truly unifying idea was the Emperor himself, in this case the ageing Franz Josef I (1830-1916), whose full title was:
His Imperial and Apostolic Majesty, Franz Josef I, by the Grace of God, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary and Bohemia, King of Lombardy and Venice, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem etc., Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków, Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and of the Bukovina; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, of Auschwitz [Oświęcim] and Zator, of Teschen [Cieszyn/Ceský Těšín], Friuli, Ragusa [Dubrovnik] and Zara [Zadar]; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trent [Trento] and Brixen [Bressanone]; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and in Istria; Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc.; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro [Kotor], and in the Wendish Mark; Grand Voivode of the Voivodina of Serbia etc. etc.
Presiding over an empire of unresolved questions, the grandly titled Emperor was a thoroughly average man, a punctilious office worker who spent endless hours, always in his cavalry uniform, at his desk in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, scribbling comments and decisions in the margins of untold files. The very incarnation of service and duty, he was as disciplined as he expected his civil servants to be, but was only really happy when he was able to take time off and visit his mistress Katharina Schratt in his villa in Bad Ischl, where he liked to don local costume and go for walks in the mountains. For his subjects, the old man was omnipresent, peering from official photos with cool, watery eyes at schoolchildren, civil servants and at married couples in their beds.
Peering down with watery eyes:
Emperor Franz Josef I, the lynchpin of
stability.
While the Emperor continued to function like a mechanical doll, there was a sense of emptiness and falsehood at the heart of all this stuccoed magnificence. Only Greek myth could have produced a family more dysfunctional and more glaringly immoral than his own. Empress Elisabeth (1837-1898), more famous as Sisi, had acquired a romantic aura, but her life had been a string of tantrums, fits of anorexia, and long, erratic journeys around the Mediterranean in search of the elixir of youth. Her popularity was only rescued when an anarchist fatally stabbed her in Geneva, in 1898. The brilliant and liberal-minded Crown Prince Rudolf had broken with his father and finally shot himself and his mistress at his hunting lodge Schloss Mayerling in 1889, and his cousin, the jolly Archduke Otto (who once appeared in society wearing only a sabre), was so ravaged by syphilis that he had to wear a leather nose when appearing in public. As for the current heir, the boorish, philistine Archduke Franz Ferdinand: the Emperor cordially detested him.
The place where the empire’s moral heart was supposed to beat was empty. Franz Josef himself, an ardent theatregoer in his youth, inadvertently strengthened this perception. An imperial box was reserved for the Emperor and his family in every theatre in the empire, a crowning - and crowned - centrepiece to its architecture, draped in red velvet and topped by the imperial double eagle. After the death of his wife, Franz Josef hardly ever went to the theatre. The imperial boxes from Lemberg to Trieste stood empty for decades, and instead of linking faraway cities to imperial glory, they merely served as a constant reminder of the void at the centre of the Habsburg universe.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the Emperor’s fiction of unity was not sustainable. Instead, individual and competing groups (national, social, or political) filled the Habsburg void with content of their own choosing: with manners, art, hedonism, and ideas of national greatness. All these projections were allowed, as long as nobody called the imperial bluff.
The Great Cover-up
Literally as well as metaphorically, covering up the obvious became the central principle of life in Habsburg Vienna. ‘The more a woman wanted to appear a “lady”, the less her natural shape was allowed to be noticeable; the entire fashion followed this doctrine and thus followed the general moral tendency of the time, which was principally concerned with covering up and hiding things,’ the novelist Stefan Zweig remembered of his youth.
The imperial city itself practised what it demanded from its women. The Ringstrasse, Vienna’s grand boulevard, was dressed up in splendid historicism, an expression of changing times as an affirmation of eternal values and a proclamation of greatness. Every building was erected in an historical style appropriate to its purpose, from Gothic (after Flemish citizen wealth) for the city hall, to the two neo-baroque museums of art history and natural history, the Hellenizing parliament and the neo-Renaissance university. Always under the watchful eye of the old Emperor, the turn-of-the-century city was a place of grand façades, opulence, decorum and apparent certainties. Stefan Zweig describes in his memoirs how full of faith and optimism the world appeared to those fortunate enough not to go hungry: ‘Everything in our thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on durability…Only this security made our lives worth living. Today ... we know that this world of certainty was nothing but a castle in the air. And yet, my parents inhabited it like a house built of stone. Not once did a storm or even a sharp draft disturb their warm, comfortable existence.’
Historicist splendour, grand façades: the Parliament and City Hall on
Vienna’s Ringstrasse.
To preserve this comfort, it was necessary to accept more than a little make-believe. Politically, the Habsburg empire was beset by nationalist agitation inside it and rival powers around it. Its enormous rural hinterland lagged far behind other European countries in terms of economic development and infrastructure, while its entrenched poverty and social hierarchies would have made anything on the scale of the opening up of the American West impossible, even if there had been the will to do it. Still, the face put on this struggling body was magnificent, and for many in the Dual Monarchy this imperial trompe l’æil soon became the preferred version of the world. ‘With the premiere of [ Johann Strauss’s operetta] Die Fledermaus in 1873,’ writes Bruno Bettelheim shrewdly, ‘Vienna began once again to dominate the world ... not the real world, but that of operetta.’ The troubled empire was determined to forget its problems over a good time, and the joke went that Habsburg diplomacy was like a Viennese waltz: first swirling right, then left, and round and round, until one finally arrived where one had started from, always on the move and never getting anywhere.
In this world of concealed, uncertain substance, style was everything, as Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) wrote into the libretto of his sumptuous rococo fantasy Der Rosenkavalier (1911, music by Richard Strauss), in which everyone acts out of pure hedonism: the Marschallin with her young lover Octavian, Octavian by courting the pretty Sophie, who is, in turn, sold to the bumptious Baron Ochs so that her father, the rich manufacturer Faninal, can gain entry to aristocratic circles. Everyone pretends to act from high moral principle and in the interest of others; only Ochs, the comic figure of the piece, is at times honest about his lecherous love. In a world of iron rules, morality was the first casualty.
As in Viennese oper
ettas, the official rigidity had its accepted flipside. If duty and the strict façade of public morals threatened to become overwhelming, there was always a pretty shop girl to console a man (the cult of Vienna’s ‘sweet girls’ hid a widespread practice of de facto prostitution). For men at least, some entertainment always beckoned in theatres, concert halls, beer halls or the many country inns dotted around Vienna, where a whole area of the city, the Prater, had been set aside as a permanent amusement park where everything from a glass of beer to a little company could be found almost around the clock.
