by Geert Mak
There was always some reason for excitement at those worn tables. The new play by a certain Oskar Kokoschka, for example, entitled Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen. Or a stunningly bare building, designed by Adolf Loos in his quest for the new purity. Or the composer Arnold Schönberg, who had racked his audiences with tonalities never heard before and was booed out of the hall – people had even thrown chairs. Or the latest erotic novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, in which male slaves were reduced to quivering heaps by robust ladies with whips. Or the ‘secret nerves’ of which psychiatrist Sigmund Freud spoke so compellingly. Or the cuts made in Mahler's rendition of Wagner's Die Walküre, a concession to the composer's many detractors. Or the most recent ‘quarterly figures’ published by Karl Kraus’ anti-newspaper Die Fackel:
Anonymous diatribes: 236
Anonymous threats: 83
Molestations: 1
Now it is Friday evening, and the quiet of a village reigns over the echoing Kärntnerstrasse. A cold wind is blowing. The only sound is coming from a ghetto blaster in the middle of the street. A group of about ten young people are swaying to something that sounds like house music, two girls in checkered outfits up in front, a tawny man at the back, clearly the boss. All the dancers are wearing green jockey caps. Four pedestrians have stopped to watch. A woman hands out pamphlets. The pamphlets say that this is a new church, that Christ will be returning soon, and that no train derails unless it is God's will.
The snow falls softly between the big white buildings of the Hofburg, in the courtyards, on the roofs, the chimneys and the marble heroes.
These days everything revolves around the next ball, and inside the Hofburg the people of Vienna are dancing the gold leaf off the walls. On 22 January was the Officers’ Ball, on 23 January the Pharmacists’ Ball, on 25 January the Hunters’ Ball, yesterday was the Technology Ball, tomorrow there will be the Doctors’ Ball, on 6 February there will be a Hofburg Gala Ball, on 12 February the Scientists’ Ball, and on 13 February the Jurists’ Ball.
‘Everyone knew everyone by name, as though they were all brothers, but they greeted each other as one ruler greets the other,’ wrote Joseph Roth. ‘They knew the young and the old, the good horsemen and the bad, the gallants and the players, the quick-witted, the ambitious, the favourite sons, the heirs to an ancient, time-honoured, proverbial and generally venerated stupidity, as well as the intelligent ones, who would be taking power tomorrow.’
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a textbook example of what anthropologist Benedict Anderson called an ‘imaginary community’, a nation bound together by people who had never met, but who in their minds sensed each other to be family, brothers and sisters.
Emperor Franz Josef I took the throne in December 1848 and held it until November 1916, one of the longest recorded reigns. Throughout all those decades he remained a binding element, partly because he did not try to forge national unities where there were none to be forged. As king of Hungary he spent weeks each year in Budapest, dressed in Hungarian uniform, with Hungarian ministers and a Hungarian parliament. He always spoke of ‘my peoples’, and never of ‘my people’.
He was the heart of this imaginary community. In the Hofburg I had felt the ambience that was still his: in the cabinet conference room with its white walls, right beside his dressing room; in his austere bedroom with the single iron bed; in the bedchamber that once belonged to him and his wife, with Empress Sisi's gymnastics equipment still against the wall; in his study, with the little desk, the portrait of Field Marshal Joseph von Radetzky and his telephone, number 61.
The significance of Franz Josef lay not in what he did, but in what he was. His was a symbolic role, and one he took very seriously. He adhered strictly to Spanish court etiquette, and the story goes that the royal physician who rushed to his deathbed was upbraided by the emperor for the way he was dressed. Unlike the German kaiser, Franz Josef had a sincere dislike of all innovation. Flush toilets were only installed at the Hofburg after persistent requests from the empress; he distrusted telephones and trains, and refused to tolerate electric light because it hurt his eyes.
He lived according to the Habsburg concept of Hausmacht, the unshakable conviction that the Habsburg dynasty was God's instrument on earth. As long as the aristocracy and the people remained true to God and the emperor, all would be well. Revolution and godlessness, on the other hand, could undermine the system swiftly and fatally. In the end, that was exactly what happened.
In addition to the Hausmacht, there was also a clear-cut hierarchy of high-born nobility and ‘service nobility’, the nobility appointed for reasons of merit. Only high-born nobility and officers were hoffähig and allowed to attend the court. Consisting of no more than eighty families, they spent from December to May attending each other's parties and funerals, and intermarried to such an extent that they were indeed one big family.
In France and England, the wealthier citizenry had broken the power of the aristocracy; in Vienna that had not happened, and the well-to-do never succeeded in merging with the aristocracy. Strictly speaking, the liberal citizenry ruled along with the emperor and his nobles, but they did not have the upper hand. In addition, an enormous chasm yawned between the sensual, loose culture of the aristocracy and the orderly, rational and puritanical culture of the bourgeoisie. The middle-class citizen of Vienna remained a desperate onlooker, a failed parvenu, a person dying to belong, who lived behind façades, staircases and vestibules full of aristocratic ornaments, but who, in the long run, lacked the means, the language and the culture.
But during the second half of the nineteenth century, something strange occurred: real life began slipping away from beneath the imaginary kingdom. The empire became an increasingly hollow shell, believed in by the nobility and citizenry only for lack of an alternative.
The rebel nationalists, however, had no part in the fantasy: in The Radetzky March, for example, Joseph Roth's Hungarian officers begin excitedly chattering away in their own language when they hear of the attempt on Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand's life in Sarajevo in 1914: ‘We are in agreement, my compatriots and I, that we can only be pleased if the swine really is dead!’
Excluded from the fantasy, too, were the millions of farmers and poorer citizens, who led real lives and had real problems. From no other nation were the people so eager to emigrate: between 1900–19, 3.5 million Habsburg subjects left for America, more than from any other country. And in no other army – except for the Russian – was desertion as widespread in the First World War as from the Austro-Hungarian Army. The number of Habsburgers taken prisoner (2.2 million) was twelve times that of the British (170,000). At the end of The Radetzky March, the high-born protagonist, Lieutenant Trotta, plunges into the fray. Soldier Onufrij, his valet, simply goes into hiding in his village. ‘The harvest was about to begin. In the imperial and royal army, there was nothing left for him to do.’
It is Sunday. I go to the Stephansdom for edification. The priest welcomes us with a hearty ‘Grüss Gott’ and notes that last night at Klagenfurt the temperature plummeted to eighteen degrees below zero. The congregation sings hesitantly, the psalms rising up in clouds from their fur collars. The priest tells a story about the legendary mayor of New York, Fiorello Henry La Guardia. When still a judge, La Guardia once tried a poor man for stealing a loaf of bread. He sentenced him to a fine of ten dollars, then pulled out his own wallet and gave the man ten dollars with which to pay his fine. ‘Justice,’ the priest says, ‘must always go hand in hand with compassion.’ ‘Amen,’ everyone nods, and we all turn and shake each other's hands. Then a Japanese girl comes strolling up the aisle, looks around in surprise and starts taking pictures of the congregation.
Does anything ever really happen here? At Ottakring station, a woman in a fur coat is sitting on the lap of a man in a fur coat. A drunken man staggers down Kärntnerstrasse. At the central train station, a pretty woman walks by, the first one I've seen in Vienna. She has dark hair, light, almond-shaped eyes, but the most striki
ng thing about her is the dignity in her movements. She is pushing a little cart; her job is to empty the rubbish bins and sweep the floor. That, apparently, is how she earns her living. These are the only things I have to report from this city.
Today, on this Sunday, I am on my way to put a rose on the grave of the unknown waif. Along the Danube, behind the neglected shipyards and the last dusty silos, lies the graveyard for bodies washed up from the river, the Friedhof der Namenlosen. Here lie all the unknown persons who jumped from bridges in desperation at the beginning of the twentieth century, a regular occurrence in the highly strung Vienna of that day.
The wind roars through the bare branches. My rose ends up beside a few faded plastic flowers, on the grave of someone who turns out to have a name after all, Aloisia Marscha (1877–1905).
All the city's bells are rung at eventide, the air is silver with their tolling. Stephansplatz is deserted, except for a few tourist carriages. The moon above the old houses is full and yellow. It is freezing hard. On the street the vendors are offering chestnuts and roast potatoes.
There is a peculiar drawing of the Michaelerplatz, made in 1911 or 1912. In it, the young artist A. Hitler depicts the square in its entirety, with the exception of one building. That building housed a haberdashery, and was put up by the modernist architect Adolf Loos in 1910. The artist has replaced that building with one copied from an eighteenth-century drawing. Loos’ ‘house without eyebrows’ was already famous at the time, but Hitler would not allow it to exist.
These days the Loos building is home to a bank. At first glance, to our eyes, it blends in quite well with the surroundings. The portico is made of beautiful green marble, with two huge round pillars, and the interior is marked by warm wooden walls and ceilings. Beside Loos’ quiet façade, the neighbouring house front is a potpourri of flowers, wreaths and other gaudy bits and pieces. From the square itself you can see how the portico of the Loos house recedes elegantly from the sweep of the Michaelerplatz, how it provides an ironic retort to the pomp of the Hofburg. This building plays with its surroundings, and that is an uncommon thing.
The Loos house, plain and without ornament, was a plea for candour in the arts, and an early example of modernist architecture. It was a reaction to all those ‘neo’ styles that dominated the major cities of Europe until 1914. But in the eyes of many Viennese citizens of the day, the house was a monstrosity. It was a textbook case of all of the dangerous modernity being dumped on the German race by the liberals and the krummnasige Hebräer. All things ‘historically healthy’ had to be protected against this ‘corrupt art’, and whether Adolf Loos was actually a Jew or not is of no real concern. For many German and Catholic citizens, ‘Jewish’ and ‘modern’ were synonyms. This was, however, not completely wide of the mark: without Mahler, Wittgenstein, Freud, Schnitzler, Zweig, Roth, Herzl, Kraus and all the rest of the city's Jewish talent, Vienna would never have been such an important cultural centre.
Almost everything that would prove formative to the twentieth century was already lying dormant within Vienna in 1900. That also went for the politicians. The street here was ruled by the same characters one came across later all over Europe: the ideologist, the populist, the pioneer and the social democrat, all of whom would, in time, set everything right.
Let us first consider the last of these. The founder of Austrian socialism, Victor Adler, was born a Jew and baptised a Christian, he was a humanist, a liberal and, in his younger years, even a German nationalist. He felt that a great working-class revolution was inevitable; in the meantime, it was up to the socialist movement to prepare to take over the country's reins. He devoted himself, therefore, to advocating all forms of adult education, public libraries, workers’ groups and other social-democratic organisations. In 1905 he organised a general strike to force the introduction of universal suffrage. In 1907 he finally got his way: the social democrats won eighty-seven seats on the imperial council.
Adler in this way became the nexus of a parliamentary movement that was peppered with radical slogans, but which, in practice, focused less and less on the class struggle and more and more on the welfare of the community as a whole. His son, Friedrich Adler, had other ideas. He chose the path of violent revolution. In 1916, he assassinated the prime minister.
The second prototype that Europe would come to see often was that of the nationalist ideologue. Georg Ritter von Schönerer was short and stocky, and ‘his fat, red, beery face did not make an unpleasant impression at first,’ as a contemporary put it. ‘But as soon as he opens his mouth, this man shows himself to be very different. Then the otherwise tired eyes begin to shine, the hands begin to move and the face takes on a lively expression, while the words that roll from his lips resonate loudly through the chamber.’ Schönerer, however, lacked the charisma needed to mobilise a mass following. His influence was derived from street violence and heated rhetoric.
In his early years, Schönerer had been a progressive landowner, the founder of schools and libraries, a father to his subordinates. He had worked closely with Victor Adler and other progressive liberals. Later, however, like many liberals, he became obsessed with the idea that ‘his’ superior Germans were being besieged within the Habsburg Empire by a circle of Slavic peoples. The only real liberals, he felt, were German liberals; only they were the bearers of the true cultural heritage. He had the words Heil, Bismarck! chiselled in huge runes on boulders at his estate.
In anti-Semitism, too, he was exceptionally fanatical. He demanded that Jews be expelled from most professions, institutions of learning and the newspapers – yea, from the German people as a whole: ‘Durch Reinheit zur Einheit’. On 18 February, 1884, at a party meeting, he became the first political leader in Europe to have posted a sign saying ‘JUDEN IST DER EINTRITT VERBOTEN’. Hundreds of clubs – gymnastics, music, mountaineering, cycling, student, walking and book clubs – followed his example.
In the long run, Schönerer's movement developed into a kind of pseudo-Germanic cult with symbols and rituals of its own: runes, ‘heil’ salutes, solstice celebrations, bonfires, battle songs, all under the leadership of a single führer. Before being allowed to marry, his followers first had to prove their Aryan descent and ‘biological’ health. Anyone not wishing to contribute to the ‘Reinheit des deutschen Blutes’ was a ‘traitor to the German people’ and a ‘Judenknecht’.
In the end, Schönerer went too far in his singularly un-Viennese fervour. In 1888, he and a few political associates barged into the editorial offices of the Neue Wiener Tageblatt, destroyed the presses of ‘this Jewish rag’ and beat up the editors. In liberal Vienna this could not go unpunished. Schönerer was sentenced to prison and lost his right to vote or hold office for five years; after that, he spent his time primarily in agitating on the margins of political life. But his influence remained considerable: anti-Semitism as a political goal, mass nationalism, blood, soil and German mysticism, the concept of völkische art, even the Führerprinzip – Central Europe was infected for good.
The third Viennese figure to play a formative role in Europe was the Christian Democrat populist Karl Lüger, a caretaker's son. He had a perfect ear for the sentiments of the average German-Viennese citizen, the common man, the shopkeeper afraid of industrialisation and whatever else the modern age brought with it. As the city's mayor, he was also an early pioneer of urban socialism. He had a great many new schools built, he set up a municipal gas, water and electric company and an excellent tram network, he organised a food programme for undernourished children and was far ahead of his time when it came to public housing and urban renewal.
Karl Lüger was a master of public relations; a term which, had it only existed in that day, would have fit him to a tee. He kept himself unsullied by the corruption within Vienna's administrative machinery; even his most fervent opponents had to admit that his behaviour was unimpeachable. In everything he did it was clear that he loved the role of the good-hearted, jovial city father who showed up at countless birthday celebra
tions and jubilees wearing his chain of office, a mayor so concerned with ‘the little man’ that, in his own words, he wished he ‘could place a hansom cab at the disposal of every citizen who has had a few drinks too many’.
In his populism, Lüger went further than most Christian Democrat politicians. After Schönerer's fall, he immediately adopted the slogans that had brought Schönerer such success: Aryan purity, the nationalisation of big companies that had ‘fallen into Jewish hands’, the struggle against capitalism, down with the ‘Jewish press’ and modern art. In this regard, Lüger's vitriol was legendary. In 1894 he shouted to the national assembly that ‘anti-Semitism will only meet its demise when the last Jew has met his’. And when confronted with his own statement that he ‘could not care less whether Jews were shot or hanged’, Lüger corrected his critic immediately: ‘Shot or beheaded! That's what I said!’
In part, such popular opinions shared common roots with those in Berlin: the stock market crash of 1873, jealousy of more successful Jewish rivals, the longing for a scapegoat, an aversion to the flood of immigrants, and a fear of the modern age, seemingly personified by the Jews. In conservative, Catholic Vienna, Jewishness was synonymous with a particular mindset: freethinking, internationally oriented, nonconformist, without ties to church or nation – everything, in other words, the Viennese lower-middle class despised.
The Jews’ non-national character gave rise to bad blood as well. They took no part in the sophisticated power plays between nationalities; they were really the only ones who had no nationality at all. Nor were they anxious for such a status, for they had no need of it. As Hannah Arendt rightly noted, the Jews in Austria were the darlings of the state par excellence: ‘Thus a perfect harmony of interests was established between the powerful Jews and the state.’ And in his celebrated Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske wrote: ‘The emperor and the liberal system offered the Jews a status without desiring from them a nationality; they became the supranational people of a multinational state, the only ones to follow in the footsteps of the old aristocracy.’ Nationalists such as Lüger and Schönerer wanted to see a 180-degree change: they hated the multinational state, and above all they hated the state's multinational darlings.
