Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  Yet the nature of the Party’s strength also produced its insulation. It was a quasi-Nietzschean elite operating in a most un-Nietzschean ambiance. To become strong, it had purged its members of their Austrian indulgences. Adler had fashioned a political masterpiece against the Viennese grain; therefore its strength stood isolated. Other parties might have connected with it in terms of common strategy, if not program. But in character the Socialists were too alien for coalitions or even negotiations. Austro-Marxism lacked the leverage of brother movements in other countries.

  In 1914 even more than in previous years, Viktor Adler knew that his Party must not be a weak link of the international workers’ alliance. Shadows had begun to jut across Europe’s borders. Governments of major powers speechified louder than ever about national interests, patriotic valor, and automated battleships. France heard German sabers rattling. Germany protested its encirclement by England, France, and Russia. Russia denounced Austria’s pushiness in the Balkans. And Austria countered sharply; statements from Count von Berchtold’s Foreign Ministry on the Ballhausplatz, editorials in the Ballhausplatz-inspired press, all used an especially martial tone to prove that Habsburg was not crippled by the illness of the Emperor.

  Yet at the same time the masses had grown more sensitive to the menace of war. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg had just been tried for inciting troops to mutiny: If Germans were asked to murder Frenchmen—she had said in public— Germans would refuse. A court had sent her to jail for a year, but the sentence did not dim the pacifism of German Socialists or the popularity of their party. In the Berlin parliament their plurality topped their comrades’ in Vienna. No less than 35 percent of all Reichstag deputies wore the red ribbon in their lapels. In France, the people would go to the polls on May 10; all signs pointed to a Socialist triumph bound to reduce the three-year conscription. In Russia the Tsar must face strikes spreading to armament factories.

  Socialist advances elsewhere would soon stare Austro-Marxism in the face. It was in Vienna that the leaders of Europe’s proletariats were to convene for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Socialist International. Their meeting was scheduled to begin on August 23 at the Grosser Musikvereinssaal, with Viktor Adler as host.

  The prospect charged Adler’s agenda in the spring of 1914. It was time to overcome the insulation of his Party; to show comrades abroad and at home that Austrian Socialism could contribute crucially to the International’s chorus: “More Bread, Fewer Guns, No War!”

  For such a purpose, May Day of 1914 would be an exhilarating reveille. Most of Viktor Adler’s politics appealed to the intellect. But May Day spoke to the body’s sensuousness. Therefore it was only appropriate that Viktor Adler had invented the May Day March in the apartment later occupied by Sigmund Freud at Berggasse 19: May Day stoked the Socialist libido. The great march ritualized and rhapsodized ideals presented by the Party much more soberly during the rest of the year. In brief, May Day’s Apollonian orderliness had always carried Dionysian voltage. No wonder that the sight of the march had overwhelmed Hitler at twenty-three, or that its memory in Hitler’s brain would later set brown-shirted ecstatics goose-stepping behind the swastika. No wonder May Day had electrified Gustav Mahler, Viktor Adler’s cohort in their Nietzschean salad days. As Socialist leader, Viktor Adler defined May Day as a “waking call.” As mature composer, Mahler intended to title his Third Symphony The Gay Science (in tribute to Nietzsche’s book of the same name) and began its first movement with a “Weckruf” (waking call) to rouse the dormant Nietzschean life force. No wonder that Richard Strauss was to remark that whenever he conducted Mahler’s Third he would always imagine, during the First Movement, “uncountable battalions of workers marching to the May Day celebration in Vienna’s Prater.” No wonder that Mahler at the end of his career, by then the aging apolitical Director of the Vienna Opera, had suddenly recaptured the ardor of his youth on a May First. Leaving an opera rehearsal, he had run into the workers’ procession by accident, joined it on impulse, stuck with it to the very end, and came home at night “vibrant with brotherliness.”

  That had been in 1905. Now it was 1914. Mahler was dead. Viktor Adler was old, suffering from cardiac edema. Yet he remained as determined a workers’ leader as ever. This year of all years, the May Day march needed juice, resolve, will. Yet just this year the march faced unusual jeopardy. At any moment the Emperor might die. His successor Franz Ferdinand might cancel all celebrations. True, so far Franz Joseph had survived a fever that would have killed most other octogenarians. Yet his very lingering posed a problem for May First. In many an Austrian Socialist there lurked a covert monarchist. Would there be a reluctance to join the Red festival while the father of the country fought for breath?

  At most of the twenty-five May Days so far, the sky had been clear and comradely in Vienna. This year weather forecasters were wary. Still, May 1, 1914, dawned with a plenitude of sun. What’s more, the Emperor’s pneumonia did not dampen class consciousness. Workers poured out of the slums. By the hundreds they gathered as craft groups at many different assembly points: tailors, bakers, mechanics, glove-makers. By the thousands the groups merged on the Ringstrasse, adding multitudes as they went. By the tens of thousands they crossed the Danube Canal bridges. As a host of hundreds of thousands they converged on the Prater. There in the park they were the First Movement of Mahler’s Third become flesh, ready for the crescendo.

  At that point it was just past noon. Above a moving sea of heads the heavens had turned from blue to gray. But clouds had become irrelevant. There was such brightness surging through the streets: band after band intoning the “Internationale” or playing workers’ songs; banners calling for an eight-hour day; banners demanding apartments with plumbing; banners condemning alcohol as the capitalists’ confederate; banners exhorting the government to recall Parliament, to spend less money on guns, to ease conscription, to keep peace.

  Arms locked, the marchers chanted their grievances and sang out their hopes. And this May Viktor Adler had added a new touch—"Red Cavalry,” made up of battalions of bicyclists. Their legs pistoning in unison, their bike wheels festooned with red carnations, they held trumpets to their mouths and made the town echo with fanfares that galvanized onlookers into cheers. Topping it all were delegations from abroad as heralds of the International’s Congress to come: carpenters from Germany in their guild dress of top hats, black scarves, and gray bell-bottom trousers; French steel workers in blue aprons and metal caps; booted Italian miners waving lit lanterns.

  The entire, enormous crowd came to a halt on the largest Prater meadow, just as the first drops fell. Thunder overrode the greetings of the intial speaker. Within a minute rain flooded down. Hail peppered the deluge. The throng fled into the Prater’s inns, restaurants, and coffeehouses. Here labor’s holiday continued in jam-packed solidarity but also in an unscheduled key. Had the weather held, the workers would have listened in orderly rows as orators outside exhorted them to valor and temperance and discipline for the ongoing struggle. Now, munching sausage, sitting on each other’s laps or even on banners condemning liquor, they toasted their comradeship with bottles of Gumpoldskirchner. Of course at the Inn to the Brown Stag where Viktor Adler himself had taken refuge, one drank only coffee or orange soda. Still, Adler must have known that this May Day had come to an end more Viennese than planned.

  19

  SPRING WAS TAKING A PRECARIOUS TURN FOR ALL THREE OF VIENNA’S GRAND old men. The downpour spoiled Victor Adler’s fete; it exacerbated his asthma for the next few days. Helpless stethoscopes surrounded Franz Joseph’s bed. And the patriarch of psychosomatic medicine found his health in straits just as his Emperor’s pneumonia reached a crisis. The coincidence may not have been coincidental.

  During the winter of 1914 Freud had been suffering intermittently from colitis. In mid-April his symptoms persisted to a worrisome degree. He began to suspect a tumor of the colon.

  Things were greening and sprouting in the Vienna Woods, but this sp
ring the doctor lost his taste for mushroom hunts. He felt too tired for noontime walks around the Ring. What energy he had, he gave to his work and to the fisticuffs disguised as monographs within the International Psycho-Analytical Association.

  Especially to the last. The association’s politics, like those of the Balkans, had been steadily tensing. Until the end of 1913 Freud had hoped if not for peace, at least for a truce with his Swiss adversary, Carl Jung. In the course of the year Freud’s allies had rallied around him in lectures and papers; they’d directed a scholarly scorn at the “dogmas from Zurich” (particularly at Jung’s de-sexualization of the libido into general psychic energy). Freud himself, however, had refrained from all personal sallies. As if to fortify his restraint he kept refining his “Moses of Michelangelo,” that essay in praise of conciliation. Yet at the same time he took a certain partisan pleasure in the response to his recent Totem and Taboo. The psychoanalytic intellegentsia took note that Totem scintillated on the symbology of primitive man, the very field Jung claimed as his own.

  In early 1914 Freud had begun to take a more decided role in the campaign. He used a paper begun during his Roman summer of 1913. Then, between trips to the Moses statue in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, he had blocked out “On Narcissism: an Introduction.” Later, in Vienna, polishing the essay during the spring of 1914, he fashioned it into something of a stiletto: He included a very pointed though still civil revision of Jung’s ideas on the subject.

  Meanwhile the enemy was not sitting still. Jung was preparing to pluck once more at the prophet’s beard through upcoming lectures in Scotland. Rumors to that effect filtered fast to Vienna. As if to confirm them, Jung publicly protested against Freud-inspired “aspersions on my bona fides” and resigned as editor of the Psycho-Analytic Yearbook.

  For Freud this was a signal to stop all appeasement. He had long repressed the militancy of his resentment. The speed with which it surfaced now can be gauged from two sentences from two different letters. “I have no desire for separation” he had written about Jung on June 1, 1913,“. . . perhaps my Totem paper will bring on the breach against my will.” On January 12, 1914, he wrote, working on another paper, “. . . I expect that this statement of mine will put an end to all compromises and bring about the desired rupture.”

  General Conrad could not have expressed better his impatience with formal ties to a foe. After all, Belgrade still maintained diplomatic relations with Vienna, just as Jung was still President of Freud’s International Psycho-Analytical Association. In contrast to the General, however, Freud wore the crown of his realm and could fire off ultimatums at will. “This statement” that would cause “the desired rupture” was a manuscript he had started just before New Year’s when he also labored on “Narcissism” and “Moses of Michelangelo.” For Freud it was a season of astonishingly diverse industriousness that continued as the months grew warmer and his colitis worse. Yet regardless of other worries or chores, Freud kept working on this “statement” designed to kill all “compromises” with the Jungians. He wanted to publish it in the next issue of the Psycho-Analytic Yearbook from which Jung had just resigned.

  The “statement” was a “polemic” as Freud himself more closely defined it. Its title: “On the History of Psycho-Analysis.” Despite the neutral tag, it articulated (in the words of the editor of Freud’s Standard Edition) “the fundamental postulates and hypotheses of psycho-analysis to show that the theories of . . . Jung were totally incompatible with them.”

  Advance word of the Freud offensive reached Jung in the early months of 1914. Soon afterward the Freud-controlled Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psycho-Analyse loosed a barrage of hostile comment at Jung-influenced monographs. The strategy took. On April 20 Jung completed the breach. He resigned from the Presidency of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.

  “I am tired of leniency and kindness” Freud made that confession in a letter of May 17, three months after finishing the Moses essay in which he had embraced leniency and kindness. How well tuned he was to the world’s mood in 1914. How quickly his Apollo had changed to Dionysus. And how mortal he remained, just like the world’s other Dionysians. In mid-May his intestinal symptoms, ever worsening, forced him to comply with his physician’s demand. He submitted to a detailed examination by a specialist on cancer of the colon.

  20

  ON MAY 12, 1914, TWO MEN IN CIVILIAN CLOTHES, YET ATTENDED BY orderlies, had tea in the sitting room of a hotel suite in Carlsbad. One of them had obviously come to the spa for a purpose other than a cure. At sixty-two General Conrad was trim and fit, still a terrier primed to pounce. The tic of his left eye punctuated his energy, the crispness and speed of his motions. His handsome face, topped by the mane of gold and gray, glowed with a tan earned on horseback during spring maneuvers.

  His German counterpart slumped in an armchair as though he were much more than only four years older. General Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of Staff of the Kaiser’s armed forces, needed the healing waters badly. Ungainly, flabby, bald, he was not at all well in stomach or kidney. Nor fortunate with certain wrinkles in his disposition. To offset these he read Nietzsche as the Muse of Power and he often talked about Thomas Carlyle’s books showing that history was made by heroes. Still, he couldn’t help proclivities odd for the principal warrior of the Junkers. He was a cello-playing Christian Scientist with a penchant for esoteric cults. At night, when nobody was watching, he translated Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Mélisande from the French. He suggested a frayed, bruised poet, possibly androgynous, definitely overweight.

  The Kaiser called Moltke “der traurige Julius” (sad Julius). High-echelon wags in Berlin claimed that he was not sad, just hurting with bruises from his falls from the saddle. As a source of many a grin, the horsemanship of the Chief of Staff contributed to the lighter side of official life in Berlin. One of his celebrated tumbles had been in front of the equestrian statue of his uncle, the Helmuth von Moltke, the great Field Marshal von Moltke, victor over Napoleon III in the war of 1870.

  The comparison afflicted the lesser von Moltke all his life. So did the conflict between his duty, which must be remorseless, and his intelligence, which was considerable. “The next war,” he had told the Kaiser a few years earlier, “will be a national war. It will not be settled by one decisive battle but will be a long wearisome struggle with an enemy who will not be overcome until his whole national force is broken . . . a war which will utterly exhaust our own people even if we are victorious.” Yet here he sat, in May 1914, discussing the next war. It was von Moltke’s job to map out the catastrophe of victory.

  Of course General Conrad suffered from none of his colleague’s pangs or qualms. He had journeyed to Carlsbad ostensibly to underline in person what he had written Berlin in several memoranda; namely that Serbia’s provocations in Albania and elsewhere could no longer go unanswered. Belgrade, he told the German Chief of Staff, was presuming too much on the patience of Conrad’s Imperial masters (an allusion to Crown Prince Ferdinand’s pacifism and the caution of Franz Joseph, now so sick). A day of reckoning was at hand. It would put the German-Austrian alliance to a test. Conrad said he wanted to make sure that he and his Berlin confrere agreed on all the mechanics of the partnership.

  Conrad, in other words, was fishing for reassurance. If Russia and France rushed to Serbia’s aid, could Austria count on instant, unconditional German support? Conrad did not ask the question outright. But it hung in the air. Obviously it was the reason for his visit.

  In his response von Moltke had to take into account his Imperial master’s philosophy. The Kaiser preferred easy braggadocio to nasty hard work like conducting a major war. And so von Moltke said that he hoped the world’s peace would not be hostage to some petty Balkan adventurism. But he also said—swallowing a liver pill with a bitter grimace—that Kaiser Wilhelm was not the kind of leader who ever let his guard down. Germany could not ignore recent developments like those huge French loans to Russia and Serbia that
were so plainly meant to finance armaments; or Russia’s feverish overhaul of her transportation system to speed troop movements to the German border. The Triple Entente—von Moltke shrugged a weary shoulder as he referred to the camp consisting of Russia, France, and Great Britain—always carried on about German aggressiveness. These countries didn’t realize that Kaiser Wilhelm would never raise his mailed fist except in defense of his or his ally’s legitimate interests. All the hysteria in the Russian press, for example, about the naval implications of the recent widening of the Kiel Canal. True, German battleships could now steam directly from the North Sea to the Baltic. But that was a safeguard necessary in view of moves made by the Triple Entente—like the joint British-Russian fleet maneuvers planned in the Baltic Sea.

  Conrad nodded with a vengeance: just what he was always emphasizing in Vienna—the Central Powers were only catching up—in fact, not catching up fast enough, wouldn’t His Excellency agree?

  Von Moltke’s counternod lacked his colleague’s vim. Still, it was a nod. Yes, von Moltke said. Russia in particular was moving swiftly toward readiness. The later the showdown, the worse. “Before I took my leave,” Conrad would write in his memoirs, “I again asked General von Moltke how long, in his view, the double war against Russia and France would last before Germany could turn with a strong force on Russia alone. Moltke: ‘We hope to be finished with France six weeks after the commencement of operations, or at least finished to a degree that we can transfer our main strength to the East.’“