Then the discussions started, and Schuschnigg tried to lower the Germans’ demands; but more than anything, he tried to save face. They haggled over a few details, like frogs competing for the same pond. Finally, Ribbentrop agreed to amend three clauses, and after more laborious negotiations he made a few trifling revisions. The talks came to a sudden halt when Hitler summoned Schuschnigg.
The office is bathed in lamplight. Hitler strides across it. Once more, the Austrian chancellor feels uneasy. And the moment he sits down, Hitler goes on the attack, announcing that he will consent to one final attempt at reconciliation. ‘Here is the draft of the document,’ he says. ‘There is nothing to be discussed about it. I will not change one single iota. You will either sign it as it stands or else our meeting has been useless. In that case I shall decide during the night what will be done next.’ The Führer has never looked more serious or more sinister.
Now Schuschnigg was facing his moment of grace or disgrace. Would he cave in to these second-rate machinations and accept the ultimatum? The body is an instrument of pleasure. Adolf Hitler’s bustles about wildly. He is stiff as an automaton and virulent as a gob of phlegm. Hitler’s body has evidently penetrated our dreams and consciousness; we seem to find him in the shadows of time, on the walls of prisons, crawling under trestle beds, wherever men have sketched the figures that haunt them. So it’s possible that, at the very moment when Hitler was throwing his ultimatum at Schuschnigg’s head, just when the fate of the world, via the capricious coordinates of time and space, found itself for a fleeting instant in Kurt von Schuschnigg’s hands, it’s possible that several hundred miles away, in his asylum in Ballaigues, Louis Soutter was sketching one of his obscure dances on a paper napkin with his fingers. Hideous, terrible puppets skitter on the horizon, over which rolls a black sun. They flee in every direction, skeletons, ghosts, surging from the fog. Poor Soutter. He had already spent fifteen years in the asylum, fifteen years painting his anguish on ratty bits of paper, used envelopes that he fished from the wastebasket. And his obscure little figures, twisted like wire, created just as the fate of Europe was being decided in the Berghof, strike me as omens.
Soutter had returned from an extended stay abroad, far, far away from home, at the other end of the world, in a worrisome state of collapse. After which, he had got by as best he could. A violinist at tea dances during the tourist season, he was dogged wherever he went by a reputation as a nut. His face took on a deep melancholy. And he was institutionalized in the Jura Asylum in Ballaigues. Sometimes he ran away, and they would bring him back, mere skin and bones, half-dead from the cold. Upstairs, in his room, he piled up drawing after drawing, a monstrous heap of sketches, depicting deformed black creatures, great palpitating invalids. His own body was so skinny, so worn out by long rambles in the wild. His cheeks were cavernous and he had lost all his teeth. The arthritis in his hands made it impossible for him to hold a brush or pen, and around 1937, nearly blind, he began painting with his fingers, dipping them directly in the ink. He was almost seventy by then. And that’s when he created his most sublime works: hordes of black, agitated, frenetic silhouettes. They looked like clusters of blood, or grasshoppers in flight. And that frenzied agitation lived in Louis Soutter’s mind like an obsessive terror. But given what was happening in Europe during those long years of reclusion in Ballaigues, we could say that his string of dark, twisted, suffering, gesticulating bodies, those necklaces of corpses, were heralds. We could say that poor Soutter, imprisoned in his delirium, might unwittingly have captured the slow death agony of the world around him. We could say that old Soutter made the whole world parade by, the spectres of the whole world, behind a paltry hearse. Everything became flame and thick smoke. He dipped his misshapen fingers into the small ink bottle and delivered the moribund truth of his times: one big danse macabre.
At the Berghof, they were far from Louis Soutter, his strange timidity, and the dining hall in Ballaigues. They were engaged in more sordid affairs. While Louis Soutter was perhaps sticking his arthritic finger in his bottle of black ink, Schuschnigg was staring fixedly at Adolf Hitler. He would later write in his memoirs that Hitler exerted a magical influence over people. And he added, ‘The Führer drew others to him by magnetic force, then pushed them away with such violence that an abyss opened, which nothing could fill.’ Schuschnigg didn’t stint on esoteric rationales. It justified his weakness. The Reich Chancellor was a supernatural being, the one that Goebbels’s propaganda machine wanted us to see, a fantastic creature, fearsome and inspired.
And in the end, Schuschnigg gave in. Worse, he equivocated. He said he was ready to sign but he mumbled one last objection, the most timid, irresolute, and craven of all: ‘I want to make it quite clear,’ he added, in a perceptible mix of spite and weakness that must have contorted his features, ‘that my signature alone can be of no value whatsoever to you.’ At that moment, he must have savoured Hitler’s look of surprise. He must have savoured the one small spark of superiority over Adolf Hitler that he was able to snatch from fate. Yes, he must have revelled in that feeble gesture. The silence that followed his retort lasted an eternity. Schuschnigg felt invincible and puny. And he squirmed in his seat.
Hitler looked stunned. What was this man telling him? ‘According to our constitution,’ Schuschnigg went on in professorial tones, ‘cabinet members are appointed by the head of the State, the President, just as it is only the President who can grant an amnesty.’ So that was it: he wasn’t content merely with giving in to Adolf Hitler; he also had to hide behind someone else. Suddenly, when his power became a poisoned chalice, the little autocrat agreed to share it.
But the strangest part was the reaction of Hitler, who stammered back, ‘So, you have the right . . .’ as if he couldn’t quite grasp what was happening. Objections of constitutional law were beyond him. The man who, for the sake of his propaganda, did all he could to keep up appearances, must suddenly have felt disoriented. Constitutional law is like maths, you can’t cheat. He stammered again, ‘You have to . . .’ And Schuschnigg must really have been relishing his triumph – he’d got him at last! With his law, he’d got him; with his law studies and his degree! The brilliant attorney had snared the ignorant little agitator. Yes, constitutional law exists, and it’s not for mice or termites, but for chancellors, true statesmen. For a constitutional regulation, sir, can block your path just as effectively as a tree trunk or police barricade!
That’s when Hitler, in high dudgeon, yanked open his office door and yelled into the vestibule, ‘General Keitel!’ Then, turning back to Schuschnigg, he hissed, ‘I shall have you called later.’ Schuschnigg left, and the door closed.
At the Nuremberg Trials, General Keitel related the scene that followed. He was the sole remaining witness. When the general walked into the Führer’s office, Hitler simply asked him to be seated, then sat down in turn. Behind the mysterious wooden doors, the Führer declared that he had nothing in particular to say to Keitel, then sat still and quiet for a moment. No one moved. Hitler was absorbed in thought and Keitel sat beside him, saying nothing. The chancellor, in fact, saw Keitel as a pawn, a mere pawn, nothing more, and was using him as such. That’s why, strange as it might seem, over the long minutes of their consultation, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. At least, that’s Keitel’s story.
During this time, Schuschnigg and his adviser feared the worst, including their arrest. Forty-five minutes went by . . . With Ribbentrop and von Papen, they continued mechanically to discuss the clauses of the accord. But what was the point, since Hitler had already stated he wouldn’t change an iota? It must have been Schuschnigg’s way of reassuring himself; at all costs, the situation had to appear entirely normal. And so he continued to act as if this were really a summit meeting between heads of state, and he still the representative of a sovereign nation. But in reality, he was only trying to avoid making his painful situation look official, and therefore irremediable.
Finally, Hitler called Kurt von Schuschnigg ba
ck in. And then – the mysteries of charisma, when one blows first cold and then hot, when the tone changes from one act to the next – the thorns suddenly disappeared. ‘I have decided to change my mind – for the first time in my entire life,’ Adolf Hitler announced, as if granting a magnanimous favour. At that instant, Hitler might have smiled. When gangsters or lunatics smile, they are hard to resist; best to get it over with quickly and restore peace. And besides, between two bouts of emotional torture, a smile no doubt possesses a special charm, like a clearing sky. ‘But I warn you,’ Hitler added, mixing gravity with confidence, ‘this is your very last chance. I have given you three more days before the agreement goes into effect.’ At which point, even though nothing had changed, though the minuscule amendments he’d negotiated had just gone out of the window and the time limit had been cut by more than half, Schuschnigg accepted without turning a hair. Worn down, as if he had gained some major concession, he got behind an agreement that was even more calamitous than the first.
Once the documents had been sent to the secretaries’ office, the conversation resumed on a friendlier note. Hitler now called Schuschnigg ‘Mr Chancellor’, which took the biscuit. Finally, everyone signed the typewritten copies, and the Reich Chancellor proposed that Schuschnigg and his adviser stay for dinner. They politely declined the invitation.
THE ART OF INDECISION
In the days that followed, the German army indulged in intimidation tactics. Hitler had asked his best generals to simulate preparations for an invasion. The extraordinary thing is that, while we have seen all kinds of feints throughout military history, this one was different. It wasn’t a piece of strategy or manoeuvring, since no one was at war. It was simply a psychological ploy, a threat. It’s hard to imagine German generals lending themselves to this make-believe offensive. They must have gunned the engines, spun the propellers, and, with a smirk, let their troop carriers idle at the border.
In Vienna, in the office of President Miklas, panic was rising: ploys can be effective. The Austrian government imagined the Germans were indeed getting ready to invade. And so they dreamed up all sorts of follies. They figured they could appease Hitler by making him a gift of his native town, Braunau am Inn, with its ten thousand inhabitants, its Fischbrunnen fountain, its hospital, its taverns. Yes, let’s give him back his hometown, the house where he was born, with its lovely scalloped fanlights. Let’s give him this scrap of his childhood and maybe he’ll leave us alone! Schuschnigg, desperate to hold on to his little throne, didn’t know what to think up next. Fearing an imminent German attack, he begged Miklas to endorse the agreement and appoint Seyss-Inquart as Minister of the Interior. Seyss-Inquart is not a monster, Schuschnigg wheedled, he’s a moderate Nazi, really just a patriot. And besides, this keeps everything among the right sort of people – for Seyss-Inquart the Nazi and Schuschnigg the little dictator whom Hitler tyrannized were practically friends. They had both studied law, skimmed through Justinian’s Institutes. They had both published papers: one, a short scholarly note on masterless slaves, a mysterious concept handed down from Roman jurisprudence; the other, a much-discussed report on some controversial point or other of canon law.
On top of which, both were crazy about music. They especially admired Bruckner, and together they sometimes chatted about his musical vocabulary, in the Chancellery offices where the Congress of Vienna had taken place, in the corridors that had witnessed Talleyrand’s sharp-toed boots and sharper tongue. Schuschnigg and Seyss-Inquart talked of Anton Bruckner in the shadow of Metternich, that other specialist of peace; they talked of Bruckner’s life of piety and modesty. At those words, Schuschnigg’s glasses fogged up and his voice grew husky. Perhaps he was thinking of his first wife, the horrible car accident, the years of remorse and sorrow. Seyss-Inquart raised his little scarab-like glasses and mulled over long sentences, near the corridor windows. He whispered, moved, that Bruckner – the poor man – had been interned, for three months. Schuschnigg looked down. And Seyss-Inquart, pensive, a vein throbbing on his forehead, said that Anton Bruckner, during his very long and monotonous strolls, would count the leaves on the trees; that with a kind of secret, sterile obstinacy he went from tree to tree, watching in tormented anxiety as their numbers grew. He also kept count of cobblestones, of windows on houses, and when he chatted with a woman, he couldn’t help making a quick mental count of the pearls on her necklace. He counted the hairs on his dog, the hairs on passers-by, the clouds in the sky. They labelled this an obsessive-compulsive neurosis; it was like a fire consuming him. As such, added Seyss-Inquart, staring at the chandeliers in the grand hall, Bruckner separated his musical themes with mocking silences. Apparently, his symphonies were even based on a very subtle organizing principle, a regular succession of themes. In them, murmured Seyss-Inquart, letting his hand glide along the banister of the grand stairway, we find particular progressions obeying a logical foundation that is so strict, so implacable, that it was impossible for him to finish his Ninth Symphony. He had to stop working on the last movement for two years; and in some cases, his constant revisions left behind up to seventeen versions of a single passage.
Schuschnigg must have been fascinated by this deranged system, all hesitations and reversals. This might have been why he and Seyss-Inquart especially loved – as a witness at the time has related – conversing about Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, with its grandiose brass, its harrowing pause, then the whisper of a clarinet, and the moment when the violins slowly spit their little stars of blood. Then they evoked the conductor Furtwängler, his tall forehead, his gentle bearing, and that baton that he held like a twig. Finally, they came to Arthur Nikisch. And via Nikisch, who performed Beethoven under the direction of Richard Wagner; via Nikisch’s simple beat that could bring out the full sonority of the orchestra, as if those small, sovereign movements could liberate the essence of the work from the ink marks on the score; via Nikisch, who was directed by Liszt, himself a student of Salieri, providence gave them Beethoven and Mozart. And at the far end of their rapture they encountered Haydn, and stone-cold poverty. For Haydn, well before becoming the tireless and celebrated composer of operas, symphonies, masses, oratorios, concertos, marches, and dances, was the poor son of a wheelwright and a cook, a miserable vagabond on the streets of Vienna, who scraped by as a performer at funerals and weddings. But such struggles were not Schuschnigg and Seyss-Inquart’s domain. No, they’d rather branch off onto a different path, and traipse with Liszt through the elegant salons of Europe.
For Seyss-Inquart, however, the stroll would end much worse than for Schuschnigg: after holding offices in Krakow and The Hague, he finished his pathetic career as a walk-on at Nuremberg. And there, of course, he denied everything. The man who played a major part in Austria’s incorporation into the Third Reich, had done nothing; who was awarded the honorary SS rank of Gruppenführer, had seen nothing; who was minister without portfolio in Hitler’s government, had heard nothing; who represented the Governor-General of Poland and was implicated in the brutal put-down of the Polish resistance, had ordered nothing; the man who ultimately became Reichskommissar for the Netherlands and according to the Nuremberg indictments had more than four thousand people executed, who as a zealous anti-Semite eliminated Jews from every position of responsibility, who helped craft the policies that entailed the deaths of a hundred thousand Dutch Jews – this man knew nothing. And while the trumpets of Judgement sounded, for him this time, he dredged up his legal training, pleaded his case, referred to document after document, painstakingly shuffling through reams of evidence.
On 16 October 1946, at the age of fifty-four, the son of the school headmaster Emíl Zajtich (who had swapped the family name for something more Germanic), having spent his early childhood in Stannern in Moravia and moved to Vienna at the age of nine, found himself standing above the void in Nuremberg. And there, on the scaffold, after weeks in a cell, watched day and night under lamplight as blinding as an icy sun; after he’d been informed the night before that his final
hour had come; after he’d descended the several steps to the courtyard and advanced shakily between rows of soldiers, then been the last to mount the scaffold; after the other nine convicts were dead, now it was his turn to stumble as he walked the line. In the makeshift structure where the gallows had been set up, which looked like a rickety fairground stall, Ribbentrop had been the first to go. Not arrogant, as he so often was, nor inflexible, as during the negotiations at the Berghof, but overwhelmed by his approaching death. A limping old man.
After Ribbentrop went the eight others, until it was time for him, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. He took a step towards the hangman, John C. Woods, his last witness. And beneath the floodlights, Seyss-Inquart, like a dazed butterfly, caught sight of Woods’s beefy face. A medical evaluation, full of clumsy and self-contradictory jargon, states that Woods was mentally deficient – but who else could stand to do a job like that? Other witnesses have spoken of a pathetic loser, a boastful drunkard. They say that towards the end of his career as an executioner, after fifteen years of loyal service and with a dozen whiskeys in him, he would brag of having hanged three hundred and forty-seven convicts, though this number has been contested. Whatever the case, by that day in October, he had already dispatched quite a few from this world since his modest beginnings; and a photo shows him on another day in 1946, when with the help of Johann Reichhart, a fellow hood-and-rope man, he went about executing some thirty convicts: the left-hand row for Woods, the right-hand one for Reichhart, who for his part had already killed thousands for the Third Reich, and whom the Americans had recruited for the cause. It was that ruddy round face – for in the final account, death makes do with what it has – that would usher Seyss-Inquart into the Beyond.
The Order of the Day Page 3