But music in Vienna was far from being a royal prerogative – Franz Joseph himself, unlike Kaiser Wilhelm, was rarely seen at the opera house, his tastes being distinctly simpler. Nor was music the preserve of the aristocracy, who had hunting instead. Music, rather, was a Viennese religion – for the bourgeoisie in particular (many of whom were Jewish), but ultimately for the city as a whole. Music and theatre were serious. In Vienna, noted Zweig, ‘every flat note’ was remarked upon. ‘Control was exercised at premières not by the professional critics alone’, he wrote, ‘but day after day, by the entire audience, whose attentive ears had been sharpened in constant comparison’:
Whereas in politics, in administration, or in morals, everything went on rather comfortably and one was affably tolerant of all that was slovenly, and overlooked many an infringement, in artistic matters there was no pardon; here the honor of the city was at stake. Every singer, actor, and musician had constantly to give his best or he was lost. It was wonderful to be the darling of Vienna, but it was not easy to remain so; no letdown was forgiven.40
The city had an unerring tradition of celebrating some of its greatest composers after it had allowed them to die in poverty – Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. The notable exception was Johann Strauss, the ‘waltz king’, to whom in 1913 a museum was opened in his wife’s house.41
In these years, Vienna counted eight major orchestras (including the Vienna doctors’ orchestra). There were 247 male choirs, including those of the grocers’ association, the workers of the Ottakring brewery, of individual factories and companies and of particular branches of the civil service. The Wiener Kaufmännischer Gesangverein, the Viennese Salesmen’s Choir, sang concerts of Weber, Liszt and Wagner. (Arnold Schoenberg, the modern Austrian composer, directed the Chormusikverein, the choral music association.) Operettas were professionally performed at the Theater an der Wien, at the Volksoper, or at the Johann-Strauss – including eleven new operettas for the single year 1913. Richard Strauss’ Salomé was not performed in Vienna, failing to pass the Viennese censor. Die Fledermaus, in contrast, was promoted to being acceptable at the Hofoper, thus given the benediction of the guardians of Viennese tradition.
However, there were problems with the picture of Vienna as the city of the waltz, the city of tradition rigorously upheld, a city decaying yet joyous. It underplayed Vienna’s role as a crucible for cultural experimentation. This was Vienna’s signal paradox: that such a bastion of tradition could also be a forcing-house for modernity.
Perhaps the Viennese themselves understood better than anyone else how much the brilliant surface of the city concealed. Sigmund Freud, in his mid fifties by 1913, psychoanalysed his patients (and his society) on a daily basis, publishing Totem und Tabu in that year, uncovering neuroses both individual and collective. The city’s picture-postcard image could be a foil for Vienna’s modernists – be they Karl Kraus, who deconstructed sentimentalism every fortnight in his paper Die Fackel (The Torch) or Adolf Loos, who responded to the over-decoration, and therefore decadence of Viennese architecture as he saw it, by declaring that ‘ornament ist vebrechen’ (‘ornament is crime’). Loos famously put his dictum into physical form with the ‘Haus ohne Augenbrauen’ (‘House without eyebrows’) – so-called because the windows had no decorative lintels – on Michaelerplatz in 1910. (It was said that as a result Emperor Franz Joseph never looked out of his favourite window in the imperial palace again; Hitler got over the problem of the building’s existence by simply putting another in its place in his paintings.42)
Sigmund Freud, an assimilated Jewish intellectual in Vienna, dissected the psychoses of a class, a city and an empire on permanent display. ‘Nowhere in Europe’, noted an American guidebook, ‘is the past so intermingled with the present’.
Modernity touched even that which was most sacrosanct to the Viennese, music, but not without controversy. On 31 March 1913 Arnold Schoenberg conducted a concert of music by himself and fellow Austrian composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Berg’s Altenberg Lieder led to a riot – as did the much more famous performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris a couple of months later – leading to the entry of the police.43 Arthur Schnitzler challenged the hypocrisies of Viennese society by writing about sex with scandalous frankness. Egon Schiele displayed such frankness on his canvases, as did his mentor Gustav Klimt, the leader of the Sezession (‘Secession’) movement. In the midst of all this Ludwig Wittgenstein, the son of a Jewish steel magnate and patron of the arts, began to develop his challenge to traditional philosophical thinking.44
That such an outpouring of challenges to the established cultural order should happen all at the same time, at the same place, in so many fields, was not pure coincidence. It was, in part, the product of a community, many of whom were Jewish, which viewed German Bildung (self-cultivation) as one of the highest of human objectives. It was also a product of the smallness of this community, an extraordinarily interconnected intelligentsia. Arnold Schoenberg, a noted expressionist painter linked to the Blaue Reiter school as well as a musical composer, wrote in the flyleaf of satirist Karl Kraus’s copy of his Theory of Harmony that ‘I have learned more from you, perhaps, than a man should learn’.45 Sigmund Freud considered Arthur Schnitzler his intellectual double. Stefan Zweig wrote that ‘nothing has contributed as much to the intellectual mobility and the international orientation of the Austrian as that he could keep abreast of all world events in the coffee-house and at the same time discuss them in a circle of his friends’, Zweig’s own favourite being Café Griensteidl, next to Adolf Loos’ ‘Haus ohne Augenbrauen’ on Michaelerplatz.46
But this coincidence of cultural effervescence was also perhaps the product of the particularities of the city in a deeper sense, both as reaction against the city’s tradition and a reflection of the deeper undercurrents in Viennese life. Freud wrote about dreams as wish fulfilment, and about jokes as a product of inner psychic tension: a laughing image concealing a darker reality.47 He could not have written a better description of the city in which he lived.
‘In Europe one knows of Vienna, the place where it is forever Sunday’, wrote Hermann Bahr in 1906. ‘This reputation of a happy city, swaying with dance, of harmless people, a little dissolute, not very active, not very efficient, but of good and kind people, has been retained in the wider world’, he continued.48 This, Bahr suggested, was an illusion. ‘Perpetually swearing’, he wrote, the true Viennese nonetheless wishes to be ‘permanently praised … always complaining, always threatening’. Bahr’s book was banned by the imperial authorities.49 It was too critical. More to the point, it was perhaps too accurate.
In politics, it turned out that the easy-going Vienna of myth was in fact a city which experimented with populist politics – theatrical politics, indeed – which frequently shaded into the lowest common denominator of anti-Semitism. Jewish migration to Vienna had increased over the 1880s and 1890s, with Jews fleeing persecution and poverty further east, particularly in the Russian Empire. Vienna at the time offered the protection of law – equal rights had been guaranteed since 1867 – and the possibility of economic advancement (though Jews were still blamed for the stockmarket crash of 1873). New Ostjuden settled in Leopoldstadt, adding to Vienna’s more long-standing and generally assimilated Jewish population. According to the 1910 census there were 175,000 religiously defined Jews in Vienna, out of an overall population of two million. This was a lower proportion than in Prague or Budapest. Vienna nonetheless developed a particular strain of populist anti-Semitism, led first by Georg von Schönerer and then by Karl Lueger, the city’s mayor from 1897 to 1910.
The newly-arriving Ostjuden were popularly portrayed as poverty-stricken pedlars of cheap goods, foreign and mysterious. (This view was sometimes shared by their assimilated co-religionists, who saw the newcomers as a benighted community apparently unwilling to change their dress, speech or shtetl traditions in order to be inducted into the higher values of German culture.) At the same time, Viennese envy was given f
ull rein against the city’s commercially and professionally successful Jews, who constituted forty per cent of medical students at Vienna university, one-quarter of law students, a large proportion of journalists – and, of course, so many of the city’s intelligentsia: Freud, Mahler, Kraus, Zweig amongst them.50 Karl Lueger did not shy away from using ‘the Jews’ as shorthand for the various forces of modernity ranged against ‘the small man’. To this witches’ brew was added one final, contradictory, element: the image of Jews as anarchists and revolutionaries. The fact that the leader of Austria’s social democrats, Victor Adler, was Jewish was presented as evidence. In the wake of the Russian revolution of 1905, Karl Lueger warned Vienna’s Jews that ‘we in Vienna are anti-Semites’ and that ‘should the Jews threaten our homeland’ no mercy would be shown them.51
In some of the city’s more fevered minds these disparate images of Vienna’s Jews combined to become a picture of an extraordinarily wide-ranging Jewish conspiracy to take over the world – starting with Vienna. For most Viennese such attitudes, while not necessarily being shared in their extreme form, became an accepted part of the city’s background noise, building on an older tradition of Catholic anti-Semitism. Many of the city’s assimilated Jews, however, did not feel particularly threatened in 1913, viewing the whole thing as an exercise in populist rhetoric. Lueger, after all, was not so determinedly anti-Semitic all the time. And Vienna’s assimilated Jews were not only loyal upholders of German culture, they were protected by law. Whether he was remembering or misremembering the past, Stefan Zweig wrote: ‘I personally must confess that neither in school nor at the University, nor in the world of literature, have I ever experienced the slightest suppression or indignity as a Jew’.52 Intermarriage between Jews and Christians was common.
Yet the anti-Semitic refrains of everyday Viennese life serviced a dangerous set of entrenched assumptions and prejudices – prejudices which would later prove fatal. To some Jews, they already suggested that assimilation was a dead end. Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist who had accepted Stefan Zweig’s manuscripts for the Neue Freie Presse during his editorship of that journal’s essay pages, began to see a Jewish homeland as the only way out. Zionism, which became the name of Herzl’s movement, was criticised by many of Vienna’s Jewish intellectual elite for appearing to give up on assimilation, and its rabbis for being essentially ethnic rather than religious. But the movement gathered pace nonetheless, eventually selecting Palestine as a possible home for Europe’s Jewish population and supporting Jewish emigration there. In September 1913, nine years after Herzl’s death, the eleventh Zionist congress opened its doors – in Vienna.
In the same month that Vienna hosted the Zionist congress, the city hosted a much larger set of meetings on public health and the prevention of disasters. Dr Rosner of the Vienna ambulance corps delivered a paper on the first dressing of injuries. Mr Greil spoke of the importance of fireproof curtains in theatres, separating the stage from the audience. A Mr Wortmann spoke about something still more important, and more concerning, the indication of a society which was perhaps psychically unwell. In 1912, he told his international audience, there had been 1,387 cases of suicide in Vienna, a number that was ‘constantly and rapidly increasing’.53
The year 1913 had started no differently to previous years. In January, London’s Standard newspaper opened its New Year’s coverage of the Austro-Hungarian capital, a city it already described as having the highest rate of suicides in the world, under the headline ‘Morbid Vienna Youths: Triple Suicide in a Café’.54 Three boys, aged eighteen, seventeen and sixteen, were reported as having gone to a coffee house together around midnight, where they ordered coffee, added potassium cyanide to it, drank it, and died writhing on the floor a few minutes later. One of the boys wrote a letter to his mother and father explaining that he had had some trouble with work. The others wrote no such notes. Instead, the three had a photograph of themselves taken together, and they sent this picture on to their parents. A girl was supposed to have received a further copy of the photograph but, the Standard reported, ‘there appears to be no love affair’. The story was off the newspapers the next day. Three dramatic and tragic deaths amongst many others, rapidly forgotten – a statistic.
It was another suicide, later in the year, which was to give Stefan Zweig ‘waking dreams’ of fear – a personal episode that nonetheless stood as the symbol of the extent to which Austria-Hungary was now morally and politically compromised, a contribution to an uncertain atmosphere beneath a surface insouciance.55 It concerned the case of Alfred Redl, former chief of military intelligence. In 1912, it had emerged that Russia, Vienna’s prospective military opponent should Austria-Hungary ever decide to intervene against Serbia in the Balkans, was fully apprised of the main Austro-Hungarian battle plan. The plan had been stolen. The armed forces, one of the few pillars of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had a mole.
Redl had by this time moved from his position as head of military intelligence to a role in Prague, as chief of staff to the local force commander. He was therefore unaware of extraordinary measures taken by his successor to uncover the spy within the army’s midst. Suspicious letters were opened and read, hundreds daily. One in particular invited the attention of the investigation, a package addressed to Nikon Nizetas, posted from Eydtkuhnen in eastern Prussia, a few miles from the Russian border.56 The package contained 6,000 Austrian shillings, a not inconsiderable sum to leave in the trust of the Austro-Hungarian postal service. It was, moreover, linked to an address known to be used by Russian intelligence. The package arrived at the main Vienna post office on the Fleischmarkt – and there it remained, awaiting the mysterious Mr Nizetas to pick it up. Police officers were installed in a room in a building close by, connected to the post office by an electric wire. When Mr Nizetas showed up, a post office employee would press a hidden button, and a bell would ring at Postgasse, number 10. Here they waited for six weeks, from seven in the morning till eight in the evening.
On Saturday 24 May 1913, a man in a grey suit and dark hat arrived at the post office just before five in the afternoon, claiming a package for him under the name Nizetas. Accounts differ as to exactly what happened next. One version suggests that the policemen lost track of Nizetas, and only caught up with him through multiple strokes of luck: someone remembered the number of the taxi in which the man in the dark hat had departed, the policemen stumbled across the same cab twenty minutes later, and, although its original passenger was no longer at the Café Kaiserhof to which he had been taken, a boy at the taxi rank remembered a man answering to Nizetas’ description had taken a second cab on to the Hotel Klomser. Another version suggests that the policemen followed the cab themselves, a little behind, arriving in time to interrogate the cab driver as to his customer’s destination, to which Nizetas had proceeded on foot. But the accounts do agree that the police had an additional piece of good fortune. In the back of the cab Nizetas had left the sheath of a pocket knife he used to open his correspondence. The sheath of the pocket knife was taken to the Hotel Klomser and left on display at the reception, where the receptionist was to say it had been left by a cab driver. Nizetas picked it up. Nizetas was Alfred Redl.
Why had Redl done it? Principally because he was blackmailed over his homosexuality, of which the Russians had been aware for over ten years. But he had been impelled to continue because he had then developed expensive tastes, and a dangerous sense of his own inviolability. He made the mistake of claiming the pocket-knife sheath, which, as an experienced intelligence officer, he should have known to leave alone. A subsequent search of Redl’s apartment in Prague would reveal unfinished love letters to Stefan Horinka, a lieutenant in the army who wished to break off a homosexual relationship, and with whom Redl had argued on the day that he was picked up. Redl was said to give Horinka some 900 crowns a month. Such details inevitably leaked out over the next few weeks and months.
It would at least be possible for Redl and the army to avoid the embarrassment of a
drawn-out court case. That evening, no doubt already aware that the net was closing around him, Redl dined with an old friend, observed by the police. On returning to his hotel, he was confronted with his treason. He requested and was lent an army pistol. Some time after one in the morning the cobbled streets around the Hotel Klomser echoed briefly with the sound of a gunshot as Alfred Redl became the latest of Vienna’s suicides for 1913.
Then the calm of night returned. In a few hours’ time dawn would break over the imperial palace, and the Emperor Franz Joseph would awake again. News of the previous day’s events would be summarised for the emperor, and a plan for the day ahead laid out. The Riesenrad would begin to turn. The Habsburg empire would carry on.
ST PETERSBURG
Eastern Colossus
At Easter 1913 Tsar Nicholas II gave his wife Alexandra a remarkable present: a golden Fabergé egg. Its exterior was sumptuously decorated with golden double-headed eagles, imperial crowns and eighteen exquisite miniature portraits of the Tsars and Tsarinas of the Romanov dynasty stretching back to Nicholas’ distant forebear Tsar Michael, who had become Russia’s leader exactly 300 years previously.1 But the egg’s true masterwork was on the inside. There, a globe of blued steel showed the frontiers of Muscovy in 1613, and those of the Russian Empire in 1913. The contrast was suitably impressive. For now the double-headed eagle could be seen from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Black Sea to Central Asia, from the borders of China to those of Prussia. All in all, these domains constituted the largest contiguous empire on the face of the earth – the largest contiguous empire in world history – one which had continuously expanded, decade-by-decade, over three centuries, the absolute justification of Romanov rule.
Over the course of that year the Romanov tercentenary was celebrated everywhere across this vast territory. Biographies of Tsar Nicholas were published, monuments erected, crosses and icons blessed, and new churches dedicated, including one that could hold 4,000 worshippers near St Petersburg’s Nikolaevskaya railway station. Countless performances of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar commemorated the heroic sacrifice of Ivan Susanin, who was said to have saved Tsar Michael Romanov’s life by tricking the Tsar’s foreign enemies into following him deeper and deeper into a midwinter forest, from which neither they nor he would ever escape alive.
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