Less than twenty-four hours after Willy's final telegram to Nicky, Willy rose from his desk in the Star Room of his palace. It was a desk made from the wood of Lord Nelson's flagship Victory-a gift from Willy's grandmother Queen Victoria. On this desk he had just signed the order that let his soldiers flood across the borders of Luxembourg and then of Belgium. "Gentlemen," he said hoarsely to the military dignitaries assembled around him, "you will live to regret this."
Shortly afterward he sent a note to the British ambassador: Let King George of England be informed that he, Wilhelm, would never ever, as long as he lived, wear again the uniform of a British Field Marshal. Coming from the Kaiser, this signified ultimate bitterness. As usual, his statesmanship became a matter of epaulettes. From now on his role would be to gesticulate. Others commanded.
In these commanders the new power now began to manifest itself quite nakedly. They were the ones who controlled the final libretto, Libretto D, the libretto of Kraus's progress crescendoing toward a titanic fusillade. The spotlight, after shifting from the futility of Excellencies to the helplessness of Majesties, now came to rest on the supremacy of generals.
On July 31, German Chief of Staff von Moltke sent his Austrian counterpart a cable whose imperatives bluntly bypassed the Ministers of War in Vienna and in Berlin; a telegram which ignored both Emperors, theoretically the AllHighest decision-makers. "Stand firm!" von Moltke cabled Conrad. "Austria must fully mobilize at once!"
"How odd," Foreign Minister von Berchtold said when Conrad showed him the message. It contradicted the tenor of two other cables, one from the German Chancellor to himself, the other from Wilhelm to Franz Joseph. "Who rules in Berlin?"
He might just as well have asked: "Who rules in Vienna?" By then his own cables were following almost verbatim General Conrad's proposals.
Who ruled in Russia? "I shall smash my telephone," the Russian Chief of Staff General Janushkevich told the Russian Foreign Minister. By which he meant that he would refuse to do again what he had done the day before, namely to rescind mobilization on telephoned orders from the Tsar. His pressure forced the Tsar to renew the order. "Now you can smash your telephone," said the Foreign Minister meekly.
Who ruled in France? Not Rene Viviani, though he was Prime Minister as well as Foreign Minister. His problem: He was a Socialist and peace-seeker. He had wept at the bier of the great pacifist Jean Jaures slain on July 31. He had given his arm to the widow walking behind the coffin on the way to the grave. Therefore it didn't matter that he was the Chief Executive of the Republic while Raymond Poincare as President was only the symbol of state. It did matter that Poincare had been born in Lorraine, the province lost by France to Germany in the War of 1870 and which must be won back again. It mattered that Poincare had a stake in the war to come. Hurrah!
Under Poincare's secret manipulation, the French Embassy in St. Petersburg stopped being an instrument of Foreign Minister Viviani and became a tool of General Joseph Joffre, Chief of the French General Staff. The French ambassador withheld from his Foreign Minister news of the martial intentions of the Russian General Staff. But he did convey General Joffre's encouragement to his Russian colleagues "to commence an offensive against East Prussia soonest." The ambassador deliberately delayed Viviani's very different, moderating words to St. Petersburg until it was too late.
"Russian troops," Poincare announced to the French cabinet on August 2, "will be in Berlin by All Saints' Day." Hurrah! The Zeitgeist vested in him the power withheld by the French constitution.
Who ruled in Britain? On July 29, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill wrote his wife that he would "do my best for peace and nothing would induce me to wrongfully strike the first blow." Yet the same letter confessed that "war preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity." Two days later he mobilized the fleet, against the explicit decision of the British cabinet. "Winston," said Prime Minister Asquith indulgently, "has his war paint on." "The lamps are going out all over Europe," said Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. "We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." The shores darkened. Churchill's dreadnoughts fanned out across the North Sea. Hurrah!
***
Who ruled the world? In Habsburg's Prague, the insurance official Franz Kafka was just developing some notions on the subject. At another time he was to refer to himself ruefully as "the nerve end of humanity." Right now, on July 29, 1914, the day after Austria's declaration of War on Serbia, two days before Germany's ultimatum to Russia, the name "Josef K" appears for the first time in Kafka's journal. That week he began to sketch out ideas for The Trial"[6]-the novel registering in a personal compass an evil erupting internationally: some incalculable force, insidious, inexorable, operating beyond all normal jurisdictions, closing in on its victims.
With what phrases did such power enter history? This was the time when ambassador after ambassador appeared before Foreign Minister after Foreign Minister to declare that he had the honor to inform His Excellency that his government, in order to protect the security and integrity of its realm, was forced to consider itself at war.
Honor? Security? Integrity? Excellency?
On August 9, 1914, while such words were still being intoned, Ludwig Wittgenstein began to ruminate systematically about the disjunction between language and truth. On that day he began the notebook that led to his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. The Tractatus, purging language of its routine shams, was born on the grandest proscenium of such shams, Imperial Habsburg. Flourish, not fact, held the realm together; flourish painted the mirage of dynastic communality between crown and people. Progress was corroding all things communal, but flourish painted over the corrosion. In the Empire of the flourish, Wittgenstein developed the philosophy that punctured, on the deepest modernist level, the theatrics of style. And here Kafka wrote the paradigmatic modernist novel, steeped in the angst underlying our daily charades.
Meanwhile great charades of state lit up the horizon. On August 4, the Kaiser stood on the balcony of his Berlin palace. He had not wept, like the Tsar, when the declaration of war had been published. But his face (in Grand Admiral von Tirpitz's description) "looked ravaged and tragic." The thousands who had come to hear him didn't notice. They only saw that their sovereign wore a spiked helmet under which his mouth shouted its mustachioed duty from the speech text handed him: "We draw the sword with a clean conscience and clean hands… from now on I no longer know parties. I only know Germans!"
Hurrah!
The masses cheered. They cheered him and their own relief. Hurrah! Here in Berlin as well as in Paris, in London, in Vienna, in St. Petersburg, war had freed them from politics, from partisanship, from all apartness. Until now they had been mutually separated. Competition had driven them against each other. Or poverty had marooned them. Or they had been isolated in their cocoon of envy and alienation. Now it was all marvelously different. Now the worn-down unemployed, the trodden-under scullion, the unfulfilled genius, the bored coupon-clipper, the jaded boulevadier-they could all link arms and walk forward together in the same electrifying adventure, against the enemy. Now they were Germans together, Frenchmen together, Englishmen together, Russians together and-most astounding-ethnically motley Habsburg subjects together. The enemy made it possible for them to break through to one another. Now the same patriot warmth embosomed them all. "Hurrah!" they all cried with one voice. "Hurrah!"
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 Mannher- heim. "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 fe
el 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 AustriaHungary." 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 Schonberg 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 / 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 Schonbrunn 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-scene," Lady de Bunsen had mused of these revels, "was wonderful."
And now, as they departed, the mise-en-scene 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 Elysees, 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 c
elebration.
The World War had come to the city by the Danube, dressed as a ball. Tra-la… Hurrah!..
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 Graben and Nedeljko Cabrinovic. These three were under-age for the death penalty. Danilo Ilk, the oldest of the team, was sentenced to be hanged.
Ilic was executed on February 3, 1915. Princip, Graben, and Cabrinovic were removed to the Bohemian fortress at Theresienstadt (later site of the concentration camp under the Third Reich). At Theresienstadt, Cabrinovic died on January 23, 1916, of tuberculosis. Graben 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.
Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 Page 28