Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  The most inveterate outsiders joined this surge. In Munich, Adolf Hitler had been living without a friend, without a lover, without even the bleak commonalty of Vienna’s Männherheim. “The war,” he says in Mein Kampf, “liberated me from the painful feelings of my youth . . . I fell down on my knees and thanked heaven with an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune to be alive at that time.” Hurrah!

  Dr. Sigmund Freud, outcast from his city’s medical establishment, grim practitioner of the Viennese affectation of despising Vienna—this same Freud now said, “for the first time in thirty years I feel myself to be an Austrian”; that England (hitherto his favorite country) was “a hypocrite” for supporting “Serbia’s impudence”; that “all my libido goes to Austria-Hungary.” Now the war with Jung fell away. Freud hurried from Carlsbad back to Vienna, where his sons Martin and Ernst joined the colors “for the noble cause” to which the over-age Freud himself made a contribution: He refused to give male patients of conscription age Certificates of Nervous Disability; he would not help them evade service to their country. Hurrah!

  Ludwig Wittgenstein was medically exempt from war service, having undergone a double hernia operation in July. He should have been immune to the war spirit since he was a recluse, a maverick, a deviant from norms sexual, semantic, or financial (he had just given away most of the vast fortune left him by his industrialist father). On August 9, he started his notebook exploring the deceptions of language. On August 7, he showed that he was at one with the deceived crowd. He enlisted. Hurrah!

  Years earlier Arnold Schönberg had gone abroad because the Austrian capital grated on him as much as his music grated on it. In the summer of 1914, he returned and joined Vienna’s own regiment, the Deutschmeister. The atonal heretic began to compose military marches for Austria’s glory. Hurrah!

  Oskar Kokoschka made the same fast transition from enfant terrible to waver of flag. Before Savajevo he had spoken of “the personal misery of living in Vienna, utterly alone, without a friend,” and sought opportunities as distant as possible from the Danube, “. . . perhaps a commission for a fresco in America.” After Sarajevo he sold his most valuable painting, The Tempest (showing him with Alma Mahler), to a Hamburg pharmacist. With the proceeds he bought a horse and a cavalry uniform—a light blue tunic with white facings, bright red breeches, and a brass helmet. Now he could volunteer for the 15th Imperial Dragoons who prized war so much that they shaved before each battle. Now Kokoschka’s fellow rebel, the architect Adolf Loos, could print a photograph of the helmeted painter as a postcard publicizing Kokoschka’s hurrah!

  What about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke? Born in Habsburg Bohemia, he was an itinerant solitary, a free-floating mystic who considered Austria and Germany countries to which he was attached “only by language.” In the summer of 1914, he reattached himself with a vengeance. He rhapsodized along with the throngs in German and Austrian streets. His Five Cantos I August 1914 celebrate the War God:

  . .. the Lord of Battle has suddenly seized us Hurling the torch: and over a heart filled with homeland His reddened sky, where He reigns in His rage, is now screaming.

  Hurrah!

  “To be torn out of a dull capitalistic peace was good for many Germans,” said Hermann Hesse. “I esteem the moral values of war on the whole rather highly.” For Thomas Mann, war was “a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers” Hurrah!

  It was a clamorous, resonant, exultant summer, this summer of “progress unmoored from God” It was a summer catapulting men from their separate vacations into a much higher, gallant, and collective holiday. “We saw war” Freud would write some months later “as an opportunity for demonstrating the progress of mankind in communal feeling . . . a chivalrous crusade”

  “What is progress in my sense?” asked Nietzsche, “I, too, speak of a ‘return to nature/ although it is not really a going back but a progress forward—an ascent up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness, where great tasks are something one plays with . . . Napoleon was a piece of’return to nature/ “

  Nietzsche had written this twenty-five years earlier, but he was the patron saint of the summer of 1914. That summer millions began to ascend not to Kraus’s garden of pristine repose but to Nietzsche’s jungled Napoleonic proving ground. It embowered and empowered them. It delivered them from soot, squalor, impotence, loneliness. Here they found what Gavrilo Princip—assassin of the Archduke, disciple of Nietzsche—had invoked when he swore the Black Hand oath: “the sun that warms . . . the earth that nourishes . . .”

  And the sun shone on, over Bad Ischl with its hills and parks but no longer with its Emperor Franz Joseph. On July 27 he settled down to the last official act he was to perform in his Alpine villa. He revised the “Manifesto to My Peoples” written in his name. From a phrase characterizing Serbia he deleted “blind insolence.” He struck the words “inspired by traditions of a glorious past” from a sentence describing the Empire’s armed forces. The same day he had said to General Conrad: “If the monarchy goes under, let it go under with dignity.” If war must be proclaimed to his peoples, let it be a proclamation without bathos.

  Karl Kraus, the scourge of verbiage, was awed by the proclamation. He called it, “An august statement . . . a poem.”

  To the end Franz Joseph remained the steward of Imperial taste. Now the end was close.

  On the morning of July 29, he left Ischl for Vienna, never to return. On August 6, when war was declared between Austria and Russia, he quietly removed from his uniform a decoration he had worn for sixty-five years: the Cross of St. George, Third Class, conferred on him in 1849 by Tsar Nicholas I. For the twenty-six months that were left of his life, he never stirred from Schönbrunn Palace.

  The disorder he had sought to cure after Sarajevo had lapsed yet further into an unforeseen disarray, into a derangement whose wild pyrotechnics dazzled Europe. The librettos of his Foreign Minister had been exploded; the populace applauded the glow of the fragments. Machine guns were beginning to perforate the bows and hand-kisses of the stage Franz Joseph had commanded for two thirds of a century. But the bowers of bows and the kissers of hands did not know yet that they were bleeding. All they felt was a thrill and a tingle.

  Franz Joseph felt something more final. A change in the Emperor’s will detailed how his descendants would receive his fortune, should the family lose the crown. The last principal of the Habsburg drama prepared to retreat into the wings.

  His retirement was partial and discreet. Other exits had official character. Sir Maurice de Bunsen, British Ambassador to Austria, turned out to be the last Western diplomat to leave the capital. On August 12, he made this sad statement to Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold: “As of twelve o’clock tonight, Great Britain and Austria will be in a state of war.” Berchtold, ever the gentleman, bowed and assured His Excellency that “though Austria must accept this challenge, the two states are still associated politically and morally by tradition and sympathies and common interests.”

  Two days later, on August 14, the Ambassador and his wife left their residence for the West Railroad Terminal where Berchtold had arranged a private salon train for them, bound for neutral Switzerland.

  Much of the town’s anti-Allied anger had dissipated, though it had not lost its patriotic exhilaration. The de Bunsens encountered no hostility. They were accompanied by police in dress uniform, resembling an honor guard, and by their own wistful thoughts. It was hard to say good-bye to this city. Eight months ago they had taken up their posts, in December of 1913, during the swirl of the social season. They had leased a castle from Count Hoyos, “a dream of beauty,” according to Lady de Bunsen’s diary. The whole Danubian ambiance had enchanted them, especially Vienna’s carnival, which had begun shortly after their arrival. “The mise-en-scène,” Lady de Bunsen had mused of these revels, “was wonderful.”

  And now, as they departed, the mise-en-scène maintained its wonder.
On the way to their train they met an artillery regiment also en route to a railway station. Green sprigs bounced from the kepis of the soldiers, roses garlanded the cannons, a band lilted the “Radetzky March” the march that is more polka than march. Housewives waved kerchiefs from windows, children skipped along, girls popped sweets into the recruits’ pockets, all prancing and laughing and never missing a single musical beat. It was an alfresco dance, festive with sun, sporting happy masks.

  Of course similar scenes enlivened other capitals as well. They sparkled on the Champs Elysées, at Picadilly Circus, along the Nevsky Prospekt, and up and down the Wilhelmstrasse. But Vienna—origin of this great international midsummer frolic—Vienna out-waltzed friend and foe alike in celebration.

  The World War had come to the city by the Danube, dressed as a ball. Tra-la . . . Hurrah! . . .

  * * *

  * The other cornerstone of modernist fiction also saw birth on Habsburg soil: in March 1914, in Trieste, James Joyce started to write Ulysses.

  AFTERWORD

  ON OCTOBER 28, 1914, THE SARAJEVO DISTRICT COURT SENTENCED Gavrilo Princip to twenty years of hard labor, with a fast once a month; one day a year—June 28, the date of the assassination—he was to spend on a hard bed in a darkened cell. The same sentence was imposed on Trifko Grabež and Nedeljko Cabrinović. These three were under-age for the death penalty. Danilo Ilić, the oldest of the team, was sentenced to be hanged.

  Ilić was executed on February 3, 1915. Princip, Grabež, and Cabrinović were removed to the Bohemian fortress at Theresienstadt (later site of the concentration camp under the Third Reich). At Theresienstadt, Cabrinović died on January 23, 1916, of tuberculosis. Grabež died here, also of tuberculosis, on October 21, 1916. Princip died in Theresienstadt of the same disease on April 28, 1918. It is probable that malnutrition and prison conditions contributed to these young deaths.

  On a wall of Princip’s cell, the following lines were found, written in pencil:

  Our ghosts will walk through Vienna

  And roam through the Palace

  Frightening the Lords.

  AFTERWORD TO THE DA CAPO EDITION

  WHEN I FINISHED THESE PAGES IN 1989, THE BALKAN MAP REVEALED only half of the devastating truth in Max Weber’s observation: “History is a web of unintended circumstances.” In response to the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serb Gavrilo Princip in 1914, Austria intended to uphold the honor and integrity of its realm by declaring war on Serbia. Consequence: By 1918, the Hapsburg empire lay shattered into jagged pieces.

  Princip’s intention, on the other hand, seemed to have prospered. The bullet he put through the archduke’s neck did more than punish an Austrian oppressor; it kindled the global conflagration whose aftermath saw the South Slavs unite into one country. Yugoslavia, Princip’s dream, emerged from the slaughter as a breathing reality. During World War II the Nazis abrogated it briefly. In 1946 it revived, continued on under communism, and persisted after Tito’s death into the late 1980s.

  But soon after 1989—the year of this book’s publication—history dropped the other shoe. With cannon and sniper it began to disembowel Princip’s utopia.

  Today, in 2001, Yugoslavia is a minefield rather than a country. It consists of Serbia in turmoil clutching a simmering Montenegro. Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia have fought themselves apart into separate states. The province of Kosovo is an explosive UN. protectorate. Two adversarial entities—one Muslim, one Serb—form Bosnia, each with its own parliament, police, and army. Croat troops ruined much of the Gravoho valley where Princip first brooded over his Pan-Slav ideals.

  In the course of the last century, a pageant of the futilities Max Weber had in mind has moved past the corner of Appel Quai and Rudolf Street in Sarajevo. Here on a bright June morning in 1914 the two most fateful pistol shots of all time rang out. After the deed, Austria erected here a column in honor of the slain archduke. This yielded to a memorial to the slayer, put up by postwar Yugoslavia: The spot where Princip had pointed his weapon was marked, Hollywood-fashion, by footprints sunk in concrete. They celebrated Gavrilo Princip as megastar of Serb valor. Then, in 1997, the Muslim-dominated municipality of Sarajevo, hostile to all Serb insignia, used a jackhammer to pulverize Princip’s sidewalk immortality.

  One irony succeeds another. For what authority will prevent Serbs from avenging this insult to Princip’s remembrance? It is the office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, instituted by the international community of fifty-five nations signing the Dayton Peace Accord in 1995. And who enforces the directives of the High Representative to keep the peace among ethnic strains and to establish democracy in Bosnia? A contingent of 25,000 NATO-led troops. Its headquarters are located in Ilidze, near Sarajevo, bristling with barbed wire and sandbag revetments. In 1914 this very building, then known as the Hotel Bosna, was the final lodging of the archduke and his wife before their murder the next morning. The landscape teems with paradoxes.

  Not least among them is the background of Wolfgang Petritsch, the High Representative himself, appointed on the eighty-sixth anniversary of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. He has the power to dismiss Bosnian officials high or low and to dissolve parliament. His job before his present position was as Vienna’s ambassador to Belgrade. He is, of all things, one of Austria’s most brilliant diplomats. Letters threatening his life are often addressed to “His Honor Franz Ferdinand Petritsch.”

  And so Vienna 1914 ghosts through Sarajevo 2001. The future keeps mocking the past. The past, in eerie resilience, keeps shadowing the present.

  —F.M.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WRITING THIS BOOK HAS MEANT INCURRING DEBTS OF GRATITUDE ON TWO continents.

  In the United States, my thanks go for vital assistance extended to me to Dr. Wolfgang Petritsch, head of the Austrian Information Service for North America, and his deputy, Dr. Irene Freudenschuss; to Dr. Wolfgang Waldner, Director of the Austrian Institute in New York, and to Friederike Zeitlhofer, the ever-patient, ever-forthcoming librarian of the Institute; to Dr. Walter Klement of the Austrian National Tourist Bureau in New York whose office has been generous with maps and geographical advice. I have also benefited from the tremendous resources of the New York Public Library. Pucek Kleinberger proved a source of comfort. Jonathan Kranz of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York aided this project with significant research. Martin Tanz and Dale Coudert were also helpful, as was David Kahn with his expertise on the history of military intelligence. I am also grateful to Minister Philip Hoyos of the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C.; to Roberta Corcoran; Sylvia Gardner-Wittgenstein; Dr. and Mrs. Erwin Chargaff; and my excellent copy editor, Gypsy da Silva.

  In Britain, Dr. Edward Timms of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, has generously shared his erudition with me.

  In Austria, the staff and stacks of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek have been indispensable to my labors and so has Dr. Brigitta Zessner-Spitzenberg of the Bildarchiv. I am much obliged to the Literarische Verwertungsgesellschaft— and to its President, the novelist Milo Dor—for grants awarded me. I owe Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg many thanks for fine-tuned information on diplomatic and aristocratic aspects of the period covered in this book. Hetti von Bohlen und Halbach provided valuable access to the unpublished memoirs of her father, Prince Alois von Auersperg. I have been the beneficiary of Count Michael von Wolkenstein’s advice and of his liberality with Mohnstriezel. The editors of the Socialist Arbeiter Zeitung furnished photocopied back volumes of their newspaper and thereby gave me the sort of education without which this book could not have been written. Inge Santner-Cyrus and Adolf Holl have been wonderful cultural hosts by the Danube. Further support and ideas have come from Hilde Spiel, Ernst Trost, Peter Marboe, Ernst Wolf Marboe, Alfred Payrleitner, Dr. Kurt Scholz of the office of Mayor Zilk of Vienna, and, at a rough estimate, at least five other people I have left out because of lamentable holes in my memory. Last, and far from least, I want to me
ntion Wolfgang Kraus among my Viennese helpmeets. As President of the Österreichische Gesellschaft fur Literatur and as a personal friend, he has been a treasure.

  Now I come to a special category of thanks owed. There is my brother, Henry, Professor of Political Science at Queens College, CUNY. I have learned from his acumen and I have profited from the scholarship of his colleague, Professor Keith Eubank (History Dept., Queens College), who has given me crucial advice on researching facets of the genesis of the Great War. Robert Stewart, my editor at Scribners, has been the guardian angel of this book every step of the way. My wife, Marcia, was—as always—of incalculable help in shaping the manuscript.

  —F.M.

  SOURCE REFERENCES

  Periodicals are referred to by the following abbreviations:

  AZ Arbeiter Zeitung

  Fackel Die Fachel

  Fremd. Fremdenblatt

  IWE Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt

  INSJ Intelligence and National Security Journal

  NFP Neue Freie Presse

  NWT Neues Wiener Tagblatt

  WMW Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift

  WZ Wiener Zeitung

  Books are referred to by author’s last name except where more than one work by that author is cited in the Selected Bibliography, in which case an abbreviation of the title is included. Thus, Tuchman, Guns, and Tuchman, Proud Tower; Dedijer, Tito, and Dedijer, Sarajevo.

  CHAPTER 1 (pages 1-14)