Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  And so the very word “Redl” spelled poison to the town. Alfred Redl’s two surviving brothers, Oskar and Heinrich, received permission to change their names to Oskar and Heinrich Rhoden. Stefan Zweig, one of Austria’s belletrists, ordinarily heedless of matters military or political, felt, after the first Redl bulletin, “a noose of terror tightening around my throat.” There was no end to the toxicity of the affair. The Colonel had been among the Army’s most up-to-date careerists, enlisting telegraph and wireless for the transmission of intelligence. Now this demon of forward-mindedness had crashed. It was as if in Vienna any attempt at modernity was doomed. “Redl” affected the city’s dealings with the shape of things to come.

  On June 9, 1913, an avatar of the twentieth century rose from the Black Forest into the air and flew toward the Austrian capital. Longer than the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, it darkened the heavens as the world’s largest dirigible and, by far, the most gigantic aircraft. At a record speed of 101 kilometers per hour, it needed only eight and a half hours to traverse the distance from Baden-Baden to Vienna.

  Vienna’s progressive newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung, called on the populace to hail the skyborne arrival of a great secular archangel “for that is how one prays in the twentieth century.”

  Indeed the Zeppelin appeared over Vienna in angelic perfection, without mishap or delay or even omission of protocol. Passing Schönbrunn Palace, it circled and dipped respectfully while the hoary Emperor on the terrace saluted, for the first time in his life, up instead of down. Many of his subjects, though, could not match his aplomb. Hundreds of children fled indoors from the gargantuan shadow overhead. Grown men flinched, women swooned. A few days later the Arbeiter Zeitung noted drily that at a mass celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm’s reign, twenty-six ladies had keeled over, prostrate with either heat or awe. “In Berlin, it seems, people faint out of reverence for the past; in Vienna, out of fear of the future.”

  The future had never been a great favorite along this bend of the Danube. Now it was less popular then ever. Even a futurist bauble like the cinema—and there were several dozen of them in Vienna now—developed warts. Those phantoms on the screen could burn very real flesh. The extreme flamma-bility of film—a danger hitherto unnoticed—killed three people in a theater fire on June 18. At nearly the same time, a medical journal reported headaches in adult cinema addicts and, in children, a regression of speech patterns by limiting their vocabulary to the primitive phrases of the explanatory titles. When it was reported that an American film producer had come to town to explore the Redl story as a basis for a motion picture, it was like the closing of a viciously modern circle: turning the life of a corrupt young luminary into a corrupting new entertainment. At the center of the circle sat, like a spider, the future.

  “Redl” became an emblem of decay; of the inevitability of degeneration in a monarchy so ancient. Would the Habsburgs, for centuries suzerains of the Holy Roman Empire, ever be able to develop their realm into a great modern power? Serbia, its adversary, was small, defiant, and pulsing with the young passion of nationalism. Until now it had yielded, however reluctantly and belatedly, before Austria’s warnings against its Balkan presumptions. But it never yielded for long. Toward the end of June, Serbia inveigled Greece and Montenegro, its partners in last year’s victory over Turkey, to join her in demanding a re-division of the Turkish spoils at the expense of the fourth partner, Bulgaria. Since Bulgaria was a Habsburg ally, Vienna protested to Belgrade. In vain. Belgrade politely acknowledged the protest and promptly ignored it. Serbia’s troops and those of its cohorts—which Rumania had joined for good measure—massed along the Bulgarian borders. In Vienna, General Conrad once more managed to defeat the Crown Prince’s cautions. The Chief of Staff obtained authorization for an Army Alert. Reservists were called up. The capital’s railroad terminals teemed with mothers hugging their sons who looked like strangers in their sudden uniforms.

  The weather turned queasy. It was still spring, but a breath of humid mid-summer came down on the city. Policemen sweated, in part thanks to Redl. To counteract the Redl malaise, the Police Commissioner devised an Austrian remedy. He decided to fortify the morale of his men with the glitter of their headgear. Instead of light summer caps, the constables must keep wearing the heavy but polished metal helmets of winter.

  In their airless slums, the poor perspired, too. Suddenly there were more of them at the end of June: The Imperial and Royal Telephone Administration dismissed three hundred workers, thus adding to the record number of jobless in recent years. After all, mobilization cost money, and the government must cut expenses somewhere. The discharged three hundred demonstrated on the Ringstrasse, joined not only by fellow unemployed but by some of the more affluent Viennese who had been waiting for months to have their first telephones installed and now would have to wait still longer.

  The jobs were not restored; the premature heat would not let up. But a number of the disadvantaged benefited from the experience of their counterparts in America. The Arbeiter Zeitung reported that indigents of a still more sweltering metropolis, namely New York, found a bit of relief by spending the night outdoors. They’d bed down in Battery Park, hoping for cool breezes from New York Bay. To keep lights from flashing into their eyes, they’d turn their backs to the Statue of Liberty, already blazing brightly with electric bulbs for the Fourth of July. And so many a Viennese pauper made himself a bed of rags or blankets on a sidewalk. Instead of zephyrs from New York, he had whiffs from the Vienna Woods—and no Statue of Liberty by which to be either disturbed or deceived.

  For men of means it was a very different summer. Like others of their class elsewhere, they dealt with the city heat by leaving it. But in contrast to their peers outside Austria, their travels often took them not to the newly chic but to the fashionable old: the Alps’ Salzkammergut, traditionally the hunting and pleasure grounds of Habsburg.

  Here, in the heart of this lake district south of Salzburg, lay Bad Ischl, the summer mecca of Vienna’s theater world. Here Franz Lehar, composer of The Merry Widow, sovereign of the operetta, maintained a baronial chalet by the banks of the River Traun. Here, in a villa close by, his predecessor Johann Strauss had summered. At the Patisserie Zauner, Lehar munched Mohr im Hemd and exchanged gossip almost as delicious with tenors, sopranos, directors, conductors, actors of note, tragedians, and comic talents, all of whom also did their rusticating here.

  The theater represented the most glamorous of the arts. One would think that its luminaries would stake out a vacation terrain of their own toward which their public would then flock. But this was Austria. Vienna’s show folk, rather than create a new modish arena of their own, congregated around a spectacle of Habsburg ancien regime, produced bucolic-style, in Bad Ischl. In 1913 it was produced again.

  A major figure in this scene was one of the stage world’s own—Katharina Schratt, long a leading actress of the Court Theater. For twenty-seven years (before Franz Joseph had been widowed in 1898 and after) she had been the Emperor’s lady. She still was. For twenty-seven summers the pair could be observed at Bad Ischl, his kepi bobbing alongside her flowered hat, his walking stick swinging close to her parasol, striding together between the snow-white lily beds and the bosky chestnut stands of the Spa Park.

  By 1913 they looked like a pair bonded by a passion practiced through decades. What lay behind them instead was a quarter of a century of abstention. In 1888 Frau Schratt had offered to become her monarch’s mistress. “Our relationship must be in the future what it has been in the past” the Emperor had replied (characteristically) by letter, referring to their chastity, “that is, if that relationship is to last, and it must last for it makes me so very happy”

  These words had been written in his wife’s lifetime; they remained in force after he was widowed. Celibacy would in the future, just as it had in the past, legitimize their ardor; restraint, well embellished, charmingly straitjacketed, would preserve the impulse forever. />
  And so Franz Joseph and Frau Schratt continued to be lovers in everything but raw fact. They never met between the sheets. Yet in Vienna or Ischl they practiced the entire range of stagecraft that surrounds the bed: all the ardent preambles of passion and the gallant postscripts, the avowals of desire, denials of indifference, impetuous confidences, embarrassed explanations, and the obligatory sulks and quarrels. These emotions they poured into countless letters. He addressed them to “My Dear Good Friend,” she, to “Your Imperial and Royal Majesty, my Most August Lord.”

  They enacted their roles with a persuasiveness that appeared to obviate consummation. In Vienna, their play unfolded invisibly: behind the garden walls of Schönbrunn Palace or over the coffee table in her breakfast room across the street from Schönbrunn. But in Ischl the octogenarian swain and his fifty-year-old inamorata produced their romance in the open, beneath the summer sun. They simulated to perfection the trappings of a liaison.

  It was a way of love, a way of life, that came natural to Franz Joseph, the weathered centerpiece of a patinaed court. Under his reign animation had petrified into decor. Decor—not dynamics—governed his affections as well as his politics. Both the Emperor’s empire and the Emperor’s affair were artifacts. Neither had much fleshly reality. Therefore both must draw their vigor, their tang, their long lives from etiquette and accoutrement. Both represented the triumph of form over substance. They were both masterpieces of survival through sheer style.

  When Franz Joseph strode with Frau Schratt through Ischl’s parks, detectives discreetly preceded and followed them. When he walked alone, he forbade all such protection. In Vienna there was his state coach with six snow-white steeds; his braided, epauletted retinue of equerries, adjutants, and chamberlains. In Ischl he furloughed them all. Protocol, too, took a holiday. Several times a week Franz Joseph strolled past the gate guards of the Kaiservilla, entirely by himself. This bearer of seventy-two august titles, this breathing legend that had occupied for sixty-odd years the West’s most venerable and resonant throne, this master over life and death of many millions, this symbol holding together, against odds, an improbable empire ranging from yodelers on the Swiss border to muezzins chanting from minarets by the Turkish frontier— this near-divinity joined passérs-by on the common sidewalk.

  If the hour was very early, before seven, it found him off for his coffee with Frau Schratt in her Villa Felicitas. If it was later in the morning, he’d be wending his way toward the town church for Mass. He would stroll behind a babushka’d maid, laden with shopping, or next to a spa guest puffing a cigar. Often they didn’t realize for seconds that The Presence was among them. In his blue uniform but without any of his countless decorations, His Imperial and Royal Majesty looked like any officer, long pensioned but still well barbered, trim, as he stepped with a certain circumspection off and on the curb. He glanced at the store windows as he passéd and sometimes, like a typical vacationer, he squinted westward up the Ischl sky to see what the day’s weather might bring.

  Why? Why this charade of ordinariness? Perhaps for His Apostolic Majesty the ordinary had the allure of the exotic. His letters to Frau Schratt breathe a need for the commonplace. He inquires about the effectiveness of the garbage pick-up on her block in Vienna. And how comfortable were the new taxi cars in Vienna? As for himself, he will confess, in detail, that his corns hurt while he stood up to toast the King of Bulgaria. In other words, the Emperor wished to indulge a little in the plain prose of life—for the most part he was imprisoned in his own exaltedness.

  And he may have had other reasons for impersonating a pedestrian in Ischl. In the Emperor’s sundry capitals— Vienna, Budapest, Prague—the machinery of pomp manufactured the Habsburg charisma. In Ischl, Franz Joseph proved that he needed no courtiers, no supporting players, no footlights, no props. He could wreak magic alone, stepping over a dog turd on the Ischler Hauptstrasse. With a flash of wispy white sideburns on wrinkled cheeks, he could hush each street corner into a throne room. Traffic crunched to a halt at his sight. Drivers whipped off their hats. Women froze in mid-chat. The street turned into a tableau of bows and curtsies past which the Emperor ambled, responding now and then with a salute that seemed friendly but also a bit puzzled. It was as if he’d just been greeted by a nice fellow-officer whose name escaped him but which he might remember right after appreciating the Doboschtorte displayed there in the Patisserie Zauner’s window.

  For many years Ischl had seen Franz Joseph conjure imperial radiance next to a burgher storefront. But by the teens of the twentieth century his saunterings had taken on yet other aspects. In 1898 his Empress had been stabbed to death as she walked unescorted along the quai of Geneva. Since then even the presence of guards had been unable to prevent the spurting of royal blood. Earlier in 1913 an attempt had been made on the life of the Spanish King. The King of Greece had been murdered. Franz Joseph’s solo rambles in Ischl were well-known enough to be downright provocative. Behind every doorway a revolver or a stiletto might be poised. What Franz Joseph was staging, after the gunning-down of Franz Schuhmeier, after the sudden Redl nightmare, was the theater of fatalism.

  “If we must go under” he had remarked more than once to an aide-de-camp, “we better go under decently.” Mortality was an art in Austria, in 1913. Passing through his mortal eighties, the monarch was its leading adept. He did not show how the end was to be avoided. He showed how it was to be risked and approached: with composure and balance and a certain stoic grace. He walked along the Hauptstrasse, through the homage of his subjects, among mingled scents drifting from the Spa Park: lilac, jasmine, rose, spiced faintly with the perfume of perdition.

  8

  ON JUNE 30, 1913, THE DISPUTE BETWEEN SERBIA AND BULGARIA OVER Macedonian territory reached its boiling point. Serbia, inveterate Habsburg foe, declared war on Bulgaria; Turkey, Greece, and Rumania joined the Serbian side. The Second Balkan War had started.

  Throughout the first week of July, General Conrad belabored the telephone from Vienna to Ischl on behalf of yet another ultimatum to be fired at Belgrade. From the Belgian North Sea resort of Blankenberghe, the Crown Prince was on the wire, roaring for prudence and caution. And a cold rain kept coming down on the Alps around Ischl. The Emperor felt triply beleaguered.

  “Dearest Friend,” said his letter brought by courier on July 9 from his Ischl residence to Frau Schratt’s Villa Felicitas a mile away.

  Dearest Friend:

  Just a few lines to welcome you back at the Felicitas. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart that you came here despite the inclement skies in order to cheer me up . . . Let me ask if I may visit you as usual at 7 A.M. No reply will signify that you expect me. Therefore I will report to you tomorrow by telephone if I can come by foot or if the weather will force me into a carriage. In the former case, please leave the small door unlocked. In glad expectation of a much longed-for reunion.

  Loving you most deeply,

  Franz Joseph

  He loved her most deeply, and never touched more than the woman’s shoulder. Under clearing skies the air remained chill in Ischl; he walked without aides or surcoat to Frau Schratt’s villa. Couriers brought him more bulletins from the Balkan War. The telephone ringing in his adjutant’s office did not respect either the Alpine idyll in the window or an old gentleman’s need for rest. Each day demanded another decision.

  He vetoed the bend-or-break demand on Serbia that his Chief of Staff requested. He did permit his Foreign Minister to send Belgrade a monitory letter. He also allowed Conrad to tighten enforcement of conscription laws and to shore up security in the South Slav province of Bosnia by the Serbian border. Through cloud or sun Franz Joseph steered a policy that was mannerly, stately, steady, decorative. He directed it at a world of rude and enigmatic chaos.

  On General Conrad’s orders, the crackdown on draft evaders now also included those already past conscription age but who, once caught, would have to serve retroactively. Under that category came one “Hietler [sic], Ado
lf, last known address Männerheim, Meldemannstrasse, Vienna, present whereabouts still unknown in ongoing investigation,” as the constable entrusted with the task had to report on August 22, 1913.

  General Conrad also had three hundred suspected sedition-is ts rounded up in Bosnia as well as Croatia. But instead of deterring, the action incited. At noon of August 18 a solemn Mass at the Zagreb cathedral celebrated the Emperor’s birthday in the presence of the new Imperial Governor of Croatia, Baron Ivo Skerletz. As the Baron walked out of church, a Croatian house painter named Stjepan Dojčić lunged forward with a pistol. A moment later Baron Skerletz lay on the cathedral step, his elbow shattered by a bullet, bleeding through his heavily braided sleeve. A month later Dojčić was sentenced to sixteen years of hard labor. The policemen who dragged him from court to jail could not stop his shout: “After me will come others!”

  They came and they kept coming. No sooner had Dojčić begun to serve his time than an informer’s tip led to the arrest of a member of another terrorist group, also in Zagreb. One Lujo Aljinovic, a student at a local teacher’s college, was seized with a revolver in his pocket as he boarded a train to Vienna. Interrogated by the police, he less admitted than proclaimed his intention “to kill Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and General Conrad for preparing to attack Serbia . . . Franz Ferdinand is the enemy of all South Slavs and I wished to eliminate this garbage which is hampering our national aspiration.”