Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  Concerning my failure to register for the army in the fall of 1909, 1 hope you will have the kindness to realize that this was for me an immeasurably bitter time. I was an unexperienced young man without financial support, and too proud to accept subsidies or to ask for them. Without any help, dependent only on my efforts, the few kronen I earned barely sufficed for a room to sleep in. For two years I had no companion other than worry or penury, no comrade except continually gnawing hunger. I have never known the beautiful word “youth.” Even today, after five years, I retain souvenirs of that time in the form of chilblain sores on my fingers, hands, and feet. And yet I cannot recall the period without a certain satisfaction, since I am now past the worst. Despite my wretchedness and despite the dubious surroundings in which I had to suffer it, I did keep my name free of stain. I have maintained a spotless record in the eye of my conscience and in the eye of the law—except for that one omitted military registration, the necessity for which I was not even aware of.

  I beg most humbly that my petition be received in this spirit and sign

  most respectfully yours

  Adolf Hitler

  artist

  Here is a picture of deprivation raised by a man who— unbeknownst to anyone around him—pocketed the comfortable income from two legacies. In style, his self-portrait to the authorities resembles the stilted landscapes Hitler was selling at the time in Munich (earning a bit of extra money he didn’t need since he lived below his means). In emotionality this supplication recalls his rantings in Vienna’s Männerheim. But now he was using a well-calculated Austrian mixture of protocol and pathos, make-believe and baroque deference. It worked.

  The Linz magistracy granted his request to appear at the Salzburg Induction Center since that venue was closer to Bavaria and “the journey therefore more affordable to the petitioner.” And at Salzburg, following a physical examination on February 5, 1914, the Hitler file was closed with the conclusion: “Unfit for military or auxiliary service; too weak; incapable of bearing arms.”

  13

  SAFELY BACK IN MUNICH, HITLER CONTINUED DOODLING HIS WAY TOWARD destiny. At the same time two young Bosnians joined him in an eerie partnership. The three never met. Hitler stayed in Bavaria. The other two lived in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo; yet during those early months of 1914 they took the first decisive steps toward triggering the first global war without which the man in Munich could never have started the second.

  The zealotry of the two in Bosnia ran opposite to that of the one in Bavaria. His obsessive nationalism was German; theirs, Slav. Still, all three had trouble with the Vienna authorities, and all three were art-minded malcontents. Only the Bosnians’ esthetics—in contrast to Hitler’s—were anything but Victorian.

  At twenty-three, the older of the Bosnian pair, Danilo Ilić seems to have been a rather complicated radical, alloying as he did his nationalism with Marxist and anarchist leanings. He supported himself as proofreader for the Serbian-language paper Srpska Riječ in Sarajevo. Tall, attenuated, neurasthenic, he always wore a black tie “as a constant reminder of death” His stomach ulcer kept him as conveniently out of General Conrad’s army as “weakness” kept out Hitler. Ilić cultivated unorthodox modern literature. Early in 1914 he spent much of his spare time translating into Serbo-Croatian Maxim Gorki’s The Burning Heart, Oscar Wilde’s essays on art and criticism, Leonid Andreyev’s The Dark Horizon, Mikhail Bakunin’s The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State. At the same time others among the Young Bosnians, the secret society of which he was part, translated Kierkegaard, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

  Ilić had been introduced to the works of Nietzsche by a fellow Young Bosnian barely eighteen years old named Gavrilo Princip. Princip, a slight youth with a high, furrowed forehead and eyes of a startling pale blue, was taciturn, restless, absorbed in books and given to actions baffling to his family. He had little patience for the banalities of the Commercial High School into which his parents had placed him. Like Ilić, he savored the darker writers. For his nickname he chose “Gavroche” after Victor Hugo’s boy-hero in Les Miser-ables. Besides Nietzsche, he idolized the most pessimistic of Serb poets, Sima Pandurović.

  But Ilić and Princip did not gloom the day away in literary introspection. Like the other Young Bosnians they wanted to implement the rebel’s view of society, as conjured in their favorite literature, with rebellious action. They aimed to free the Serbs of Bosnia from the dead hand of the Church, from stale tradition and primitive custom, from everything that stifled the unfolding of the individual and the emancipation of women. Above all, they wanted to tear away the shackles put on their people by the Austrian Empire. They burned to unite all Slavs now under the Habsburg’s yoke and join them with their brethren in Serbia and Montenegro into one free and glorious South Slav state.

  “The whole of our society is snoring ungracefully” a Young Bosnian wrote of the period. “Only the poets and revolutionaries are awake.” Ilić and Princip were not only ardently awake but incandescently ascetic. Like most of the Young Bosnians, they did not drink or smoke or engage in sex (just like abstemious young Hitler). One member of the group, who had gotten to know Trotsky while a student in Vienna, wrote the Russian in 1914: “You must believe me when I tell you that all of us follow the rule of abstinence.”

  Ilić and Princip observed it passionately. The blood of their young manhood must surge only for the freedom of their fellow South Slavs.

  At the news of the Second Balkan War in 1913, Ilić had walked from Sarajevo to Belgrade (to save money and to escape detection) and joined the Serb army as a volunteer. Hence his nickname “Hadzija” (after the Muslim pilgrim, the Hadji). The Balkan War had also drawn Princip to Belgrade where he had tried to enlist in the komite, the irregular Serb units operating in guerrilla style. But Princip had been rejected, being too young and small. Now, in the first months of 1914, he was back in Sarajevo, back in the tedious school from which he’d already been expelled once for joining an anti-Austrian demonstration. He hated blackboard and homework. He lived for his meetings with Ilić and the Young Bosnians. Inside him grew the need to do something worthy of his favorite verse, Nietzsche’s lines:

  I know whence I arrive

  Unsatisfied like the flame.

  I glow and writhe.

  Everything I embrace becomes light,

  Everything that I leave becomes coal.

  Flame am I, surely.

  What or whom could this inexorable flame burn? With Ilić and his comrades he had discussed killing the Austrian Governor of Bosnia-Hercegovina, General Potiorek. Yet Potiorek, though the most visible oppressor in the land, was just a tool. It was the heart of Habsburg that must be struck. Toward the end of January, Princip received a letter from a Young Bosnian in France, saying that Franz Ferdinand would be visiting Paris under circumstances favorable to an assassination. By some accounts, Princip replied in his and Ilić’s name that he wanted to use the chance to eliminate the tyrant but that he would first acquire weapons and training in Belgrade.

  Of course Franz Ferdinand was not the anti-Serb ogre that seared Princip’s mind. And of course the two never met in France. Yet their paths began to converge in February 1914.

  Around the first of that month, Princip did leave Sarajevo, ostensibly to continue his high school education in Belgrade. His brother paid the fare for a detour on the way. Princip stopped over at his native village of Grahovo, in Western Bosnia. Here he was marooned for some weeks by the same giant blizzards that smothered Vienna. And most of that time, his mother was to recall, he spent brooding, staring at the snow.

  Gavrilo Princip knew nothing of the actual politics or personality of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand. And Franz Ferdinand did not even know of Gavrilo Princip’s existence. However, the Crown Prince had heard of another youth, equally modern in his malaise, down to a susceptibility to Nietzsche. He was one of the few Austrian artists who, like the Young Bosnians, saw a radical connection between art a
nd society.

  His name was Oskar Kokoschka, and at twenty-two he had come to the Archduke’s attention through his play, produced at a modernist art-students’ theater in Vienna in 1909. Also on the bill was a dramatization of The Birthday of the Infanta, a bitter fairy tale by a literary hero of the Young Bosnians, Oscar Wilde. Kokoschka’s Murder, Hope of Women, consisted of a chaos of screams, stabbings, and poetic fragments about love practiced as a bloody trial of combat. It happened that the audience included some Imperial Army soldiers from Bosnia’s Sarajevo who didn’t share Young Bosnia’s enthusiasm for the avant-garde. They helped start the lusty riots that followed. The Crown Prince read the newspaper reports the next day and reacted characteristically. “Every bone in that young man’s body,” he said about Kokoschka, “should be broken.”

  It pleased Kokoschka that his work had touched the higher spheres. How wonderful to epater le princel He stuck to his ways, though painting rather than play writing became the instrument of his notoriety. Encouraged by his mistress Alma Mahler (composer Gustav Mahler’s widow), he had developed, in the early teens of the century, an expressionist imagery at once febrile and morbid, putrescent and electric. Considering Kokoschka’s temper and considering Alma’s responsiveness to any passing male of talent and virility, their affair was at first oddly stable. Often it produced what was for Kokoschka atypical bliss. But during the first months of 1914 this, like many other things in Austria, began to change.

  The couple met in a villa in the Semmering, an idyllic Alpine hamlet near Vienna. One day Kokoschka opened the door to find their try sting chalet literally slimy with an orgy of toads. The warty creatures had escaped from a tank to sliver and hop, slaver and mate, all over the living room rug.

  Recently Kokoschka had begun to suspect Alma of finessing an affair not only with the architect Walter Gropius but with Rudolf Kammerer, a prominent biologist experimenting with frogs. And here seemed to be viscous proof of the second liaison: bulge-eyed, twitching couplings before a window filled with snowy splendor.

  The sight altered Kokoschka’s angle of invention. For more than a year he had been at work on The Tempest, one of his central masterpieces. Wild swirls of color suggest a man and a woman resting in what could be either a bed afloat in clouds or a boat adrift in a stream. Some powerful force curls the two against each other—a force that apparently changed nature and color after Kokoschka’s encounter with the toads early in 1914: he started to re-tint many of the picture’s vibrant Bengal reds to a colder and more ominous blue-green. Ardor dissolved toward phosphorescence. Tenderness turns into trap. “The boat in which we two are being tossed about. . .” Kokoschka would later write to a friend, “is a house big enough for a whole world of pain which we have gone through together. And I am going to the war, secretly. After . .. [this painting] I should really go under.” “The Tempest,” wrote a critic much later still, “has been interpreted in our day as a potent metaphor of ‘collapse, dissolution, finis Austriae, the end of time “

  “Finis Austriae” is the wisdom of hindsight. In January 1914, the Hitlers, the Princips, the Kokoschkas were either disreputable or, worse, unknown. Vienna concerned itself not with the end of time but with the beginning of carnival. Countess Jenny von Haugwitz hosted the first highlight of the merry season. She gave a “streamlined’, ball in the newly redecorated Directoire salon of the Hotel Imperial. The evening prescribed “an automotive theme” for costumes and saw many a shapely Rolls-Royce, Daimler, and Mercedes-Benz cruise across the parquet.

  The Bank Employees’ Club tried to top its Bankruptcy Ball of the previous year with a Banknote Forgers’ Fest, and nearly succeeded. Even lower class celebrations set high standards. For example, the Public Bath Attendants’ Ball at the Stah-lehner Hall announced that persons in clown suits would not be admitted for that was much too common, unoriginal, and old-fashioned a disguise. And so a mob of goggled aviators and formidably hatted suffragettes converged on the door.

  The Laundresses’ Ball did introduce—though only briefly— some dissonance. The ball itself was fun: lively with authentic pinch-them! young laundresses in the striped stockings and ribbonned blouses of their trade. But most of the young Society bucks who had come to take the girls home “to have their trousers ironed” had to face the next day with their garments as creased as ever. The laundresses refused even the lordliest offers for private breakfast. Early in the morning they went straight from their ball to the Ringstrasse to join their unemployed sisters in a protest march.

  For Vienna that was a somewhat too modern way of capping a carnival night. One week later the Ball at Court in the Imperial Palace* provided a lesson on how to pay one’s respects to the future more delicately. The old Emperor himself played teacher. He inaugurated the dancing by turning the first few beats of the first waltz with the young, pretty Zita, wife of his grandnephew, the Archduke Karl, who was second in succession. This necessarily discomfited the Crown Prince since his morganatic spouse Sophie did not rate an Emperor’s waltz on so formal a night. But after returning from the dance, the monarch resolved the embarrassment. He turned to Franz Ferdinand, standing very stiffly at his side. Would Sophie have the kindness, Franz Joseph asked, to join him at his table together with Karl, Zita, and, of course, Franz Ferdinand himself?

  It was a finely balanced distribution of affabilities. Though he left intact every nuance of precedence and protocol, the old gentleman breathed a new feeling of mutual cordiality into three generations of the ruling family.

  On a night shortly thereafter the Habsburgs held their own private family ball. As the carnival’s most exclusive affair, it came to pass in the Imperial Palace Apartments of one of the younger Archdukes, Peter Ferdinand, and his Archduchess Marie Christine. Not even an orchestra intruded. Discreetly, a string quartet played Haydn behind a screen. Servants noted that despite its august character the gathering was unusually warm this year, with many Highest hugs and kisses.

  The next day, Shrove Tuesday, brought the ultimate in public social glitter. The Duke and the Duchess of Cumberland, bearers (despite its Anglo-Saxon name) of a crest long eminent in Austrian blazonry, gave their annual matinee dansante, from 4 to 10 P.M. The scene was the Palais Cumberland, once summer chateau of Empress Maria Theresa. Guests danced in the great ballroom whose roundness conformed to their waltzing and whose frescoes amplified the merriment divinely, catching gods and goddesses at play. The buffet was served in the renowned “treasure suite” with its silvered furniture. Jewelry ministered to gastronomy. Footmen offered caviar on silver plate, pheasant on gold. Each guest departed with a box of chocolate truffles wrapped in silver and stamped with the Cumberland escutcheon.

  Most left in happy haste. For on the same night the Princess Croy-Sternberg presided over an excitingly new-fashioned benefit ball for the Red Cross in the new Konzerthaus. There a thicket of potted orange trees and tromp l’oeil screens, ablossom with orchids and bougainvillea, created the tango tropics in an Austrian winter.

  Then midnight turned into the morning of February 25— Ash Wednesday. Lent started. Carnival was over. But in contrast to the previous year, the carnival spirit lingered. In 1914 Vienna seemed to be clinging to fun. The weather gave a hand. After the longest frost in years, March blew in with mild, moist, yeasty breezes. All over the Vienna Woods yellow-pink crocuses leaped out of the ground, tiny harlequins unabashed by melting mounds of snow. In the Danube lagoons, larks trilled and swooped above trees not yet in bud.

  Spring was ambushing the austerity of winter with little guerrilla galas here and there. And the capital’s diplomats marked the end of the ball season with yet another event. It was an official, political, real-life costume party that lasted much longer than one evening. It was called Albania.

  * * *

  * The last such ball ever held.

  14

  VIENNA’S ALBANIAN FLING HAD HAD A PRELUDE OF SOME FOUR HUNDRED years. For that long the Albanians had lived and seethed under Turkish rule. Partly Christian, most
ly Moslem, each of them intractable, they were mountain tribes roaming the interior of the Balkan peninsula on the Southern end of the Adriatic. When the Turkish sultanate began to collapse at the turn of the century, Albania became booty. Italy wanted a part of it as its foothold in the Balkans. Greece craved a piece. Belgrade coveted its coast line for access to the sea. And just because Belgrade wanted a section, Vienna wanted all of it: all of it in the form of a Habsburg client state, to show that Balkan hegemony would not be shared with Serbs but belonged to but one realm—Austria.

  Still, a bit of sharing had to be tolerated. In 1913 a London conference of Europe’s leading countries (the Central Powers as well as the Western Allies) had awarded the Albanian Kosovo region to Serbia. Some snippets went to Greece. The rest of the territory, with the major part of its inhabitants and its anarchy, was to be an independent nation.

  The nationhood of that nation did not exist. But Vienna guaranteed the integrity of the phantom. After all, Austria was the illusionist among the great powers. The London Conference made Italy co-guarantor, a partnership Vienna largely, and politely, ignored. It did not want interference and certainly did not need help.

  Shortly before New Year of 1914, Austria had persuaded the Conference to appoint William, Prince of Wied, ruler of Albania. The Albanian term for that office was mbret. The Prince of Wied did not know how to pronounce mbret. He was, however, very good at enunciating Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the royal house of Rumania to which he was related. A tall, fair-skinned Teuton lordling, he had never laid eyes on any of the swarthy goatherds and maize-growers who were now to be his people. He did not speak a syllable of their language. He had never set foot on their land. He had no idea of Albanian customs, traditions, politics, vendettas, difficulties. Most people of “civilized” Europe shared his ignorance. Until it became an international controversy, Albania had been a terra incognita—a remote labyrinthine confusion of ragged chiefdoms. To “guarantee” such a country under such a mbret meant to conjure it out of a plumed hat.