Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  It proved unpolishable. The Troyanovskys failed to civilize their guest. He ignored Vienna’s cafes, its suavities, frivolities, balls—even those given by trade unions. With a surly, even pace he kept tramping through the city’s gayest month in pursuit of nothing but his mission.

  “I was in conversation over tea with a comrade,” Trotsky would recall of a very cold day in Vienna, “when suddenly, without knocking at the door, there entered from another room a man of middle height, haggard, with a swarthy grayish face showing marks of smallpox. The stranger, as if surprised by my presence, stopped a moment at the door and gave a guttural grunt which might have been taken for a greeting. Then, with an empty glass in his hand, he went to the samovar, filled his glass with tea, and went out without saying a word.”

  Not that Stalin meant to be rude to Trotsky specifically. The two men had clashed in print before; within ten years they would begin the world-famous duel destined to split Communism on all continents. But on that January afternoon of 1913, when they first came face to face in Vienna, each did not know who the other one was. Stalin took in that dainty comrade with the French novel under his arm and proceeded to behave—like Stalin.

  Frills or manners were not for him. Nor did he bother with pleasantries when talking about his own work. “Greetings, friend” he said early in February 1913 in a letter to a fellow Bolshevik in St. Petersburg, “I am still sitting in Vienna and writing all sorts of rubbish”

  “Rubbish” turned out to be a strategic milestone. In Vienna, Stalin was researching and composing a treatise calculated to enrich his party image. His Marxism and the National Question examined (for its relevance to Russia) the position of prominent Austrian Socialist thinkers like Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. They favored cultural autonomy for minorities under a federalist charter. But Stalin marshalled evidence to conclude that a Socialist commonwealth must go further—far enough to grant nationalities the right to secession.

  This argument had to please Lenin because it suited an imperative he’d often discussed with his disciples: the need to entice more non-Slavic Socialists within the Tsarist empire into the Bolshevist camp, that is, into Lenin’s wing of the Party. Stalin’s essay thus further increased the wonderfulness of the Georgian (non-Slavic himself) in the eyes of the master.

  And the Vienna essay did more. It established Stalin as a theoretician eligible to participate in ideological leadership. Four years later it helped catapult him to the top echelon of the Soviet revolutionary government as Commissar of Nationalities. (In fact, Stalin’s Vienna experience had still further, rather ironic, consequences. When he seized supreme power after Lenin’s death, he resorted to the “Austrian” solution after all. In other words, he dealt with the nationalities problem by giving them only cultural—not political—independence.)

  All in all, Stalin had a great deal of fine-tuning work to do during the Vienna carnival of 1913. He managed impressively, considering his lack of German. Though some comrades helped him with interviews and library sleuthing, he mastered most difficulties himself. At the same time he expedited other chores in the teeth of a pleasure-mad season of a city strange to him. He set up a better coordination system between various international Bolshevist centers, using Vienna as the hub. He devised a mail-forwarding mechanism from Cracow to Vienna and from Vienna to Paris. He located a cheap, serviceable print shop for putting out Party pamphlets and circulars.

  And that done, with the first draft of his essay locked into his wooden suitcase, still impervious to the city’s charm and the Troyanovskys’ chic, he tramped in his boots to Vienna’s Northwest Railroad Terminal on February 16th. In a third-class carriage he rolled away from the Vienna carnival, a grim virtuoso wearing the mask of a clod.

  3

  ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 11, 1913, FRANZ SCHUHMEIER ARRIVED IN Vienna at the same station by which Stalin would leave it five days later. Schuhmeier was returning from a brief overnight trip to the suburbs, but before he could walk out into the streets he must submit to a ritual unknown in any other modern capital. At the Northwest Terminal, as at every principal entrance point, Vienna exacted a consumer’s tax on goods purchased outside the city—a levy going back to the Middle Ages.

  Schuhmeier let a green-capped customs official search his briefcase. He was waved on. A moment later a slight figure in a torn raincoat stepped behind him. “My revenge!” said the little man, drew a Browning from his pocket, and fired a bullet through the back of Schuhmeier’s skull.

  It was no ordinary homicide. Every newspaper roared out the news. Both slayer and slain bore front-page names. Schuhmeier had been a very prominent and vastly popular deputy of the Social Democratic Party. Paul Kunschak, his killer, turned out to be the brother of Leopold Kunschak, one of the most dynamic leaders of the opposing conservative party, the Christian Socialists.

  Police interrogation established Paul Kunschak as a mumbling paranoiac convinced that Schuhmeier had been persecuting him personally. He had planned the killing without his brother’s knowledge.

  The significance of the tragedy lay less in its politics than in its timing. The shot in the Northwest Terminal rang out six days after Ash Wednesday, one week after the end of Fasching, Vienna’s carnival. It brought home to a reluctant Vienna that the levity and therapy of Fasching make-believe were over. The Viennese could no longer play-act actuality away. They were stuck with the thing. It stung Paul Kunschak into murder. But it also aggravated many stabler citizens.

  Among the victims of the process may have been Arnold Schönberg. Early in February the avant-garde composer had had his first success by the Danube with a performance of his Gurrelieder in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein. But that had been during Mardis Gras. A few weeks later, Schönberg found himself facing something of a lynch mob in the same Golden Hall. This time he conducted his Chamber Symphony as well as Anton von Webern’s Orchestral Pieces Op. 6 and Alban Berg’s “Songs with Orchestra after Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg.” Berg and Webern were atonalists— musical heretics. Peter Altenberg wrote novel fragments somehow powered by their very incompletion; he also wore sandals in snow storms. While in its carnival mood, the city tolerated such modernists as piquant harlequins. However, Schönberg’s second Musikverein appearance took place in the depths of Lent. In more sober air, Schönberg and Company neither titillated nor amused.

  “Nihilism!” the shouts went up. “Anarchists!” Catcalls multiplied. The concert stopped, but not the commotion. Program booklets became missiles. Hands became fists. Oscar Straus, the famous composer of the operetta Waltz Dream, punched the president of the avant-garde Society for Literature and Music. A physician who had witnessed the imbroglio testified that the effect of the music had been “for a certain segment of the public so nerve-racking and therefore so harmful to the nervous system that many present. . . showed obvious signs of severe neurosis”

  During Lent the very sound or sight of otherness had become taxing. Yet Vienna teemed with “other” people. The police blotter of the University Precinct suddenly filled up with incidents of beer steins flung in student kellers, usually at “individuals of Hebrew descent” whom the flingers accused of “staring.”

  Some of the “others” offended by doing even less. On February 28 a Negro with a top hat strolled down the Prater-strasse. He was attacked by a man in a dinner jacket who shouted “Impostor!” before snatching the black’s headgear, throwing it to the pavement, stamping on it.

  At the subsequent court case, the Negro identified himself as Benson Harrington Adams, a professor of English from Baltimore, Maryland. The dinner jacket, a waiter, said that he “had just felt like having some fun before going to work.” He was sentenced to making a one-sentence apology to the professor.

  The point, of course, was that outside of carnival, a Negro in a top hat was not fun. Nor was excessively original music nor Hebrews in student kellers. They were “nerve-racking.” The city, never a haven of tranquillity, had increasing trouble with its nerves. I
ts traditional trick had begun to fail. No longer could it so easily turn the stress of life into baroque caprice. Not that Vienna’s talent was fading. No, the problem lay with life. Life had become too beset by reality. Fin de siecle Vienna had managed to cover the bleakness of workaday life with scrollwork and grace note. But by 1913 life seemed to tolerate less and less of anything but the rawly real.

  Franz Schuhmeier’s final journey signaled a change. The funeral of the murdered Socialist was the biggest in Vienna’s history, bigger even than Karl Lueger’s, all-time favorite among Viennese mayors, three years earlier.

  Now over a quarter of a million men and women accompanied the coffin to the grave. Housemaids by the many hundreds swelled the procession. The law entitled them to only seven hours off every other Sunday; yet they gave up this Sunday to escort Schuhmeier on his way. Workers, shut in their factories eleven hours daily during the week, sacrificed their weekend rest as they trudged in the cortege. Slowly it moved along the Ottakringerstrasse; whole families streamed out of tenements to join the flow.

  Ottakring constituted the largest workers’ district. It was the district Schuhmeier had represented in Parliament and whose wretched statistics he had often shouted from the rostrum. Why? he had demanded. Why did only 5 percent of all people in Ottakring have a room of their own? Why were nearly half the houses in this borough-wide slum without running water? Why, more than a third of the staircases without gas light, let alone electricity? Why was the mortality rate of Ottakring more than twice as high as that of the upper class Inner City district? Why, in the name of the Twentieth Century?

  And why, somebody else had to ask now, was Franz Schuh-meier dead? Why had he not even reached the age of fifty? Why must good men die too soon and by such senseless violence?

  An old bafflement. Yet at the same time Franz Schuhmeier’s funeral produced something new; something not seen before in the demeanor of mourning crowds. That Sunday they broke with Vienna’s tradition of the “Schöne Leiche”—the Beautiful Corpse. For generations, death by the Danube had been cultivated as a good show. A funeral aimed to be like a Singspiel, from the aria of the eulogy to the mobile stage of the hearse, to the chorusing of the wine-happy wake at the end. A funeral was often the only opera a proletarian could afford. While alive he displayed connoisseurship as spectator or as member of its supporting cast. When dead, he was its star.

  The Schuhmeier burial broke with all that. There was no pomp festooned in sable; no black-ribboned horses, no opulence of wreaths, no black-clad band that trumpeted a majestic succession of dirges. Here there was a simple hearse and the oceanlike crowd tiding behind it under frayed caps and wrinkled babushkas, tiding and tiding, sometimes pushing prams, sometimes thumping along on crutches, tiding slowly, tiding in silence, tiding and tiding with the awesome, ominous, unrelenting rhythm of great waves.

  In the late winter of 1913 Vienna woke up to discover that perhaps its poor were not what they used to be.

  Nor were the rich—even the paradigmatic rich: the Austrian aristocrats. No elite in Europe had a more venerable pedigree. Supremacy came to its members as naturally and casually as yawning. They looked (as Consuelo Vander-bilt put it) “ . . . like greyhounds, with their long lean bodies and small heads.” They could impress even a star-spangled bucko like Teddy Roosevelt. When asked what type of person had appealed to him the most in all his European travels he said unhesitatingly, “The Austrian gentleman.” In 1913 the Austrian aristocrat could still ring superlatives from the most hard-eyed Americans by simply being himself.

  There were some two thousand of him, grouped into eighty families. Not one had been founded by a hard-working, clever nineteenth-century tycoon whose son was only the second generation to sport a baronial escutcheon in his Ringstrasse palais. For Austria’s “First Society “ the Ringstrasse was parvenu; Baron was a title denoting a Jew. The princes and counts constituting major nobility usually had as their Vienna seats mansions of dusty rococo raised centuries ago on the cobbles of the Inner City.

  A number of the founders of these clans—the Schwarzen-bergs, the Auerspergs, the Wilczeks, the Palffys, et al.—had been medieval bullies of the first water. Sometimes Habsburg had recruited their prowess by bettering their blazons with a lion rampant or two, sometimes by investing them with a fief that would make them zu as well as von.

  Many of their descendants ignored the twentieth century. They kept on leading lives exquisitely detached from middle-class reason. Their elegance seemed heedless, spontaneous, barbaric, anachronistic, enviable. During sojourns in their country castles, they would often still use the chaise perceé; a small portable neo-Gothic cathedral, it would be borne into the bedroom by footmen whenever the need arose. Highness would enter it as if to make a sacrament of nature’s call. Highness would emerge again; footmen would bear away the temple of digestion.

  It was all still a normal part of country life. In the capital it seemed almost as normal that the First Society would claim as their inalienable estates the twenty-six Parquet Circle boxes of the Court Theater and the Court Opera. Nary a diva dared complain if a blue-blooded latecomer scraped back a chair during a performance. Since the noise came from one of their boxes, it expressed not rudeness but a world that wafted a marvelous distance away from irritabilities lower down.

  On the other hand, Austrian aristocrats were most sensitively subject to what the outside eye did not even recognize as the done thing. They knew it wouldn’t do to dance a left-turn waltz with an archduchess; that it was gauche to take the reins of a one-horse coach; that it was all right to order caviar for a ballet girl at the Sacher bar or to treat her to a chocolate eclair at Demel’s—establishments devoted to princes and their peccadilloes; that it was not all right to do the same at restaurants like the Bristol Hotel’s, designed for the gawking monocle of the arriviste. They knew what worn lederhosen to don for the chase and what game to hunt when: the stag in the fall; the black chamois in the winter; the woodcock, heathcock, and capercaillie in the spring; the red roebuck in the summer. They knew how to greet each other the right way by the right name. They didn’t say: “Guten Tag, Nicholas” They said: “Servus, Niki.” It was Niki and Kari and Koni and Turli—a code of rarefied diminutives.

  In the late winter of 1913 the Nikis and Konis still met and joked and kissed hands (more often ironically than ardently) at the right At Homes at the right times of the week. On Sundays at the Princess Croy. Mondays at the Countess Haug-witz. Tuesdays at the Countess von Berchtold in the Ballhaus-platz Palais, the office of her husband, the Foreign Minister. Wednesdays at the Countess Buquoy . . . and so on to the Saturdays of Countess Ferenczy, lady-in-waiting to the late Empress Elizabeth.

  But there was a “but.” By 1913 most such gatherings had become afternoon receptions, grayed by the winter sun. Where was the dash of nightly galas that once continued into spring? What had happened to the post-Lent soirées of yesteryear?

  Money was blamed: Soirées demanded extra footmen, who nowadays demanded higher pay; so did midnight musicians. Therefore one made do with one’s in-house staff serving Do-boschtorte at 4 P.M. The mobility of modern times was blamed: Vienna emptied after the carnival; too many of the Nikis and Konis suspected that they might be missing something at St. Moritz, at Biarritz, or on the Riviera. Do-Somethingness was blamed: gossiping over champagne was no longer enough; one had to do something like join the bridge tournaments at Countess Larisch’s or the weekend ski outings to the Semmering Alp organized by Countess Sternberg.

  But all this compulsive busyness smelled of a wholesale grocer sweating his way toward a bankruptcy. It did not become a Niki or a Koni. The top was still the top—but did it still have its instinct for the au fait?

  Many thought that the First Society needed, urgently, one paramount and centering social leader. Once upon a time, of course, the Emperor had played that role. Now he had become too old, too reclusive. Pauline Princess Metternich, daughter-in-law of the great chancellor, was almost as ancient and sti
ll quite robust. But though her parties enjoyed a good press, they were so full of waltzing Jewish bankers that she had acquired the title of Notre Dame de Zion.

  Who else could be the center? Crown Prince Rudolf with his ingratiating wit, his fascinating quirks, had shot himself a quarter of a century ago in the Vienna Woods. The new lodestar should have been his successor, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. His Imperial and Royal Highness, however, displayed none of the grace of Rudolf; none of the bonhomie of Edward, Queen Victoria’s Prince of Wales, whose visits had set aglow so many Viennese salons. By contrast, Vienna’s own heir apparent did nothing but disquiet the town—with his absences, for one thing.

  Of course his principal seat was here, the magnificent Belvedere. Not one but two palaces defined this domain within the city; they were joined by a French garden splashing with fountains, perfumed by rose beds, mazed with yew. Franz Ferdinand’s shadow cabinet worked on both sides of the maze, ready to take over a moment after the old Emperor’s last heartbeat.

  As for the Crown Prince himself, he seldom stayed at his official residence—less than ever as the icicled March of 1913 thawed reluctantly toward Easter. The weeks were raw and squall-wracked. The rumors were evil. They whispered that Franz Ferdinand was quarantined in his Bohemian castle at Konopiste. His fits had passéd beyond sanity. Sober observers like Wickford Steed, correspondent of the London Times, heard alarming reports: The Crown Prince lay all day on the floor of his children’s playroom at Konopiste, busy with their toys; anybody entering was commanded to lie down, too, to help hook up electric trains. Other accounts had the Archduke using his clock collection as a pistol range where any moving second hand became his target. One persistent story claimed that half the lackeys in Konopiste were really psychiatrists dressed in footmen’s breeches.