Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  Once Minister of Education, Count von Sturgkh had started his career as an academic, a frequent resort for impoverished nobility. He was rather pedantic by nature and perhaps for that reason often forced the sort of humor that would make him competitive with the cynical wit of his colleague, Count von Berchtold.

  On that Easter Sunday at the track, Berchtold was spooning coffee ice cream a few boxes away in the Jockey Club enclosure. As we know, Count von Sturgkh was Prime Minister only of Austria while Count von Berchtold’s office of Foreign Minister encompasséd all of Austria-Hungary, with interests far beyond the yawps of complainers on the Ringstrasse. Perhaps it was a sign of how uncouth the times had become that professional concerns should intrude on his Sunday leisure.

  Friends kept dropping by between races, always on some agreeable pretext. Ladies offered the Berchtolds chocolate truffles from silk-lined boxes; gentlemen kissed the Countess’s hand and complimented her on the Capri blue feathers of her hat. And all along they touched on certain questions. The rumors, for example, about the Tsar’s daughter being betrothed to the son of the Rumanian king. Would that align Rumania into Russia’s pan-Slavic stance against Austria? And the stories about impending Russo-British naval exercises off German ports—was that to develop the encirclement of the Central Powers? And could one include in that category the 250 million francs France recently loaned Serbia for armaments? And how serious was the Serb-fomented mutiny that had broken out against the mbret, Austria’s friend on the Albanian throne? And was it true about a clash between Austrian and Italian advisers on the mbret’s Inner Council? And speaking of Italy, in a confrontation between the Triple Entente (Russia, France, Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Austria, Germany, Italy), how reliable would Italy be?

  “And who,” Count von Berchtold answered, “will win the Prezednit handicap this afternoon?”

  His friends laughed. His ice-cream-spooning sang-froid reassured them. The Foreign Minister leaned back in his box seat, in black top hat and gray topcoat, one slim knee crossed over another. A grandee with stables of his own, he knew how to document his racing judgment. Sacher (named after the torte) figured as winner of the handicap. The Foreign Minister, who always weighed the latest intelligence, had learned of a slight problem with the favorite’s right foreleg. He bet on Radoteur.

  Radoteur came in first. The Foreign Minister ate a chocolate truffle.

  The next day, Monday, April 13, Count von Berchtold boarded his salon car in Panama hat and spats. He was off to a sub-tropical clime: Abbazia, the palm-dotted Habsburg resort on the Adriatic, not too far from Miramare where the Crown Prince had, unsuccessfuly, smoked a cigar with the Kaiser.

  In Abbazia the Foreign Minister would be holding a more felicitous meeting—a conference with his Italian counterpart. A few little points needed to be discussed. One of them concerned Albania: Italy wished to participate in the industrial progress of that brand-new country but found Vienna a shade insensitive to its economic interests there. For its part, Vienna felt occasionally baffled by exaggerations in the Italian press about the “oppression” of Italians in South Tyrol.

  Count von Berchtold did not entirely succeed in smiling away all differences between himself and his colleague, the Marchese Antonio de San Giuliano. But the Count, an impeccable host, did treat the Marchese to a dirigible lunch that offered poached salmon, cold champagne, and the view of a long stretch of Illyrian coastline from the gondola of a Zeppelin cruising fifteen hundred feet high. The Count also gave a great garden party in the Marchese’s honor, at a seaside villa hung with Chinese lanterns and filled with the music of strolling violins. To top it all off, he motored with the Marchese to the Imperial and Royal stud farm at Lippiza where the famed white Lippizaner horses performed the subtle arts of dressage for his Italian Excellency. After five days of gastronomy, scenery, and politesse, the Austrian Foreign Ministry could announce with satisfaction that Italy remained as firm a member of the Triple Alliance as ever. Then Count von Berchtold returned to Vienna on April 19, in time for another Sunday demonstration on the Ring.

  But what country in Europe did not suffer such bouts of “spring fever"? Austria’s potential adversaries were hardly immune. In Serbia, the opposition withdrew all its deputies from the Belgrade parliament, alleging unconstitutional practices by the government in budget matters. In Russia, four thousand workers walked out of the Treugolnik rubber factory in St. Petersburg. They were joined by thousands more at the Siemens electric plant. Comrades in industrial installations in Moscow and Riga followed suit until the strikers numbered nearly one hundred thousand. In France, the elections set for May produced daily clashes between supporters of President Raymond Poincaré, who wanted to keep the three-year conscription period, and the followers of the Socialist leader Jean Jaures who insisted on reducing it. Even England was losing the last of its Victorian seemliness in 1914. In April dozens of special Save Ulster! trains rolled almost daily into London. They brought demonstrators who flooded through the streets with shouts of “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right!” The Protestants’ orange banners cursed the Catholic Irish for wanting to reduce Ireland to the Pope’s footstool. In Dublin green cadres of the Feinians marched for self-government. By the Thames, Parliament shook with debates over the Home Rule Bill. The issue convulsed the British Isles.

  By comparison, the disturbances in Vienna seemed almost minor. Most played out on the Ringstrasse where the architecture absorbed much of what tumult there was into the histrionics of the facades.

  Spring absorbed the rest. Even the most bilious townsman couldn’t help knowing that the Vienna Woods undulated only a few streetcar stops away. And here the lilacs exhaled their sweetness, the baby leaf waved its miracle green, and the zither called from the vintner’s garden. Together they seduced politics into pleasure.

  Soon the only enduring controversies appeared to be deliciously traditional: Was this year’s wine as good as last season’s? Had the Court Opera been right in turning down Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos? Could a soprano like Maria Jeritza, who made her mark as Elsa in Lohengrin, sing Adele in Die Fledermaus?

  How pleasant, the answers. Yes, the new year’s wine promised to match its predecessor. Yes, La Jeritza did prove to be a marvelous Adele. And something in Viennese logic justified the rejection of Ariadne. This logic concluded that the city’s talent was not modernist like Richard Strauss; that the phrase “Wien bleibt Wien” (Vienna remains Vienna) summed up the city’s virtuosity; that timelessness, not timeliness, expressed its soul.

  Princess Pauline Metternich seemed to prove the point. This grand dame was the ancient but ever-buoyant daughter-in-law of the Chancellor who had been Napoleon’s nemesis. At the end of April she gave an Alt-Wiener Jause, that is, an Old Viennese High Tea where select company in Biedermeier dress enjoyed delicacies and three-quarter time offered in the style of a century ago.

  That was how the haut monde perpetuated Alt Wien. For the people at large another Alt Wein rose up in the Kaisergarten. The Emperor’s garden was the Imperial Palace pleasance, and for the occasion His Majesty admitted the public to its lawns. Here they found highlights of a time that was no more, sculpted of papier-mâché, meticulously reproduced in scaled-down size after old paintings or illustrations in yellowed books: razed landmarks like the original Court Theater, romanesque churches perished in wars, early baroque mansions consumed by fires. Reborn here, all their turrets, pediments, gargoyles presented themselves once again to the gaze of a twentieth-century public.

  Wien bleibt Wien. More than ever Vienna remained itself at the end of April 1914. And just then it learned something that was not quite imaginable.

  The First Lord Chamberlain issued an announcement. His Majesty’s cold, having turned into bronchitis, had now developed into pneumonia. Leading specialists were in attendance. His Imperial and Royal Highness, the Crown Prince, had been summoned from Konopiste to the capital.

  Franz Joseph had reigned for sixty-six years. Firmly, if s
ecretly, the notion had established itself, somewhere deep back in the mind of the town, that he would reign for another six hundred. Now Vienna must deal with the absurd possibility that he might not.

  16

  NEVER HAD THE HUGE GATES OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE GROUNDS IN SCHÖN-brunn opened to so many humble vehicles—to quite ordinary taxis. From their doors emerged the physicians who were trying to keep the monarch alive. Grand automobiles of dignitaries also rolled into the broad graveled driveway. Sentinels presented arms as their passéngers emerged: Count von Berchtold, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Count von Krobatin, Minister of War; Count won Sturgkh, the Premier. But unlike the doctors they were not admitted to the All-Highest bedside. His Majesty was too ill. They could only leave their reports, their respects, their wishes, and their prayers.

  Often the serious-faced Excellencies would then direct their chauffeurs to drive from Schönbrunn, in Vienna’s southwest, to Castle Belvedere in the southeast. Here the Heir Apparent resided and waited—but not for them. Other visitors’ cars remained parked far longer at the Belvedere. They belonged to members of the Crown Prince’s shadow cabinet about to move into the sun.

  Who were these, and what did their comings, goings, stayings, portend? In the late April days of 1914 such questions dominated a third meeting ground, namely the restaurant Meissl & Schadn. Its facade on the Kärntnerstrasse pictured all five continents, reflecting the concerns of its clientele: key officials of sub-cabinet rank of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of War. They would be the caretaker team between monarchs. In a special back room of Meissl & Schadn—the Extra Stuberl—they enjoyed the establishment’s vaunted Tafelspitz while caucusing on the problems of transition in the Palace.

  It was bound to be dramatic. They’d already heard that almost the entire court planned to stand down the moment last rites were administered at the All-Highest bed. The First Lord Chamberlain, Prince Montenuovo, had in hand letters of resignation written in advance by himself as well as by equerries, adjutants, lords-in-waiting. These instruments would be signed and dated minutes before the old Emperor’s death. That would prevent the new ruler from cashiering the retinue en masse with a consequent loss of their pensions.

  But the prospect of Franz Ferdinand striding toward the throne also raised an issue far graver than retirement benefits of cup-bearers. The back room at Meissl & Schadn worried over nothing less than civil war.

  At Castle Belevedere a post-accession plan had been drawn up. To anyone in the upper circles of government its content held few secrets. It would implement the Crown Prince’s absolute determination to remove the Hungarian Prime Minister Tisza and to change Hungary’s suffrage laws by which Tisza maintained power. At present the electoral system was heavily skewed in favor of the landed gentry—Tisza’s political base. The new Emperor would grant equal votes to all Magyars. Agricultural workers, landless and therefore voteless until now, would be able to ballot their bosses out of office. Three million Croats, semi-enslaved within Hungarian borders, would gain a strong voice against their suppressors. Beyond that, Franz Ferdinand intended to radically revise the constitution of the entire Habsburg realm. Under him “Austria-Hungary” would be superseded by a “United States of Austria” With the Empire federalized, many present bedevilments would vanish.

  Other nationalities would not starve while Hungarian barons feasted. Vienna’s central control would apply to military and some financial matters. Outside of these, the Crown would respect and enforce the autonomy (cultural or otherwise) of Bohemia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galicia, Transylvania, Illyria, Dalmatia, and—neither last nor first—Hungary. To all such domains the Emperor of Austria would serve as equitable King. He would give his Slavic subjects the parity which had long been their due.

  Of course none of the Meissl & Schadn habitués had ever heard of an article an obscure Bolshevik had compiled in Vienna the year before. Had they read Stalin’s “Marxism and the National Question,” they would have been astonished by its structural resemblance to Franz Ferdinand’s scheme. At any rate, most of the sub-Excellencies at Meissl & Schadn admitted that the post-accession plan made sense; perhaps urgent, one-minute-before-midnight sense. And just because it made sense it would make trouble.

  Hungary’s bearded, formidable Prime Minister Tisza no doubt anticipated Franz Ferdinand’s intentions. He was not the man to put up with them. The Meissl & Schadn consensus believed that Tisza might not hesitate to mobilize the Hungarian militia against the new Emperor. He had practically said so. “If Franz Ferdinand wants to use the army against me,” Tisza had been quoted even before the present crisis in the old Emperor’s health, “I will have the last word.” And this is what the Crown Prince had said loudly, to the head of his Military Chancellery shortly after the Emperor had fallen ill: “Twenty-four hours after I am in, Tisza will be out.”

  The Meissl & Schadn crowd had even gotten word on who was to put Tisza out. The car of Joseph von Kristoffy, a former Hungarian Minister of the Interior, could be found more often in Vienna than in Budapest these days—usually at a side entrance of the Castle Belvedere. He was Franz Ferdinand’s choice for Premier of Hungary. By that same entrance, just as often stood the automobile of General Karl von Terstyanski, the Crown Prince’s favorite to succeed General Conrad as Chief of Staff. He was already commander of the Budapest garrison. His assignment: to make Tisza reliquish his office, if necessary by force.

  Tisza, however, had an iron grip. It seemed inevitable that after Franz Joseph’s death the implacable new sovereign would collide with the immovable Hungarian. Would the monarchy become a battlefield? Through what constitutional juggling or political stratagem could one contrive a compromise? Or did the problem no longer permit a peaceful option? The sub-Excellencies at Meissl & Schadn sighed. To bring their parleys to a Viennese conclusion they liked to order Linzer torte, another spécialité de la maison. But when they walked out of the restaurant into the May evening, it was not the taste of the torte that lingered. It was the sigh.

  The All-Highest illness weighed on the city. Pacers in the corridors of power failed to enjoy a fine spring. So did Vienna’s lesser folk. They couldn’t afford to probe the Empire’s future over bone china and Bohemian crystal. Instead, they gathered on plain benches of the vineyard inns in the Vienna Woods. The moon dappled the beech leaves, the wine gladdened the tongue, but the idyll was laced with apprehension. People stared into their goblets. They shook their heads over the latest medical bulletins from the Palace. Those doctors had become so terse. It wasn’t right that the kindly, ageless legend of Franz Joseph should terminate in “severe pulmonary complications.” The phrase seemed too blunt and newfangled— something like the frown on Franz Ferdinand’s portraits.

  The plain people on the plain benches knew hardly anything pleasant about their future ruler. His long absences from the capital implied little fondness for Vienna. His official stare revealed nothing. And so the people tried to fill that sullen void. They talked about an article series featured in the tabloid Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt just then. Its subject, though dating back almost twenty years, was timely. It concerned another Habsburg sickbed; Franz Ferdinand himself had lain in that one, in 1895, when tuberculosis had been eroding his lungs.

  Then, too, the bulletins had grown terse. But the Archduke’s fierce will had prevailed not only over the disease but over its exploitation by his enemies at Court. Quickly and quite publicly the camarilla had written him off as successor. Ceremonials and privileges of an heir apparent had been transferred to Franz Ferdinand’s younger and much flightier brother, the Archduke Otto. Until then Otto had been famous chiefly for the champagne-happy night during which he had strolled through the Sacher Hotel lobby naked except for the badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece hanging from his neck. That had not kept the Emperor’s First Lord Chamberlain from asking Otto to inaugurate theaters, open bridges, visit new hospitals. From 1894 to 1895 the Court Gazette had treated Otto as the de facto Crown Prince. And even
after Franz Ferdinand had regained enough fitness for a longer journey, he had not been included in the great state visit of 1896. Archduke Otto had accompanied Emperor Franz Joseph to St. Petersburg for a meeting with the Tsar.

  Of course the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt could only hint at the high-altitude malice of those years. But now, in late April of 1914, the stories around it ran as vintage gossip through Vienna’s inns: Perhaps the bitterness of his young, sick years had put the scowl on Franz Ferdinand’s face? Perhaps the aggravations of his morganatic marriage had deepened it? In the inns, people wondered, conjectured, drank. For a while they felt a bit better. How good to merge Franz Ferdinand tales into Habsburg legendry, to fit him into a traditional scheme! Encouraged, the vineyard drinkers sang a song written just a few months earlier. It came from the pen of a municipal bureaucrat yet it had grown to be the rage all over Europe; it had even spread to England and America. The whole world was hymning something fragile and sweet:

  Wien, Wien, nur Du allein

  Sollst stets die Stadt meiner Träume sein

  Dort wo die alten Häuserln stehn,

  Dort wo die lieblichen Mädchen gehn . . .

  (Vienna, Vienna, none but you,

  Can be the city of my dreams come true

  Here, where the dear old houses loom,

  Where I for lovely young girls swoon . . .)

  Actually “Wien, Wien” was just the latest and by far the most famous example of the genre Wiener Lieder. Over a hundred Wiener Lieder had been composed in the last eighty years. All were songs of lyric wistfulness. They sighed of a love not for a woman or a man but for Vienna; for that rainbow of a town fraying away exquisitely between vineyard and Danube; for streets in which the girls were beautiful because the houses were old; for a world whose doom was its enchantment.