Thunder at Twilight

by Frederic Morton

  In April 1914 the people on the wooden benches sang “Wien, Wien” to serenade their sick, dear Emperor. Actually he had become dear only after he had become ancient. But he had been ancient for so long, he seemed to have been dear forever. For generations those silver sideburns had generated fond stories, wonderful rumors, reverent speculations. Austrian patriotism centered on this ikon of infinite anecdotes and wrinkles. Still, the day must come when six horses draped in black would bear him away; when the most unsentimental of Archdukes would roar up in his motorcar to take possession of the Imperial Palace. What then?

  Neither the firmament’s glimmer above nor the reflections in the Danube below answered the question brooding over the vineyard hills. And so the people in the leafy inns resorted to their only ready remedy: to drink; to gossip antique Habsburg gossip again; and, again and again, to sing “Wien, Wien . . .”

  Another tune attained enormous popularity in Vienna’s springtime of 1914—the first international hit of a young American composer, Irving Berlin. It was frequently featured by modish restaurant orchestras like the one in the Ringstrasse’s Grand Hotel. But during late April and early May the music there played to an unusual number of empty tables. Franz Joseph’s pneumonia was taking its toll in these plush precincts, too. The succession, with its perils and uncertainties, loomed ahead. A sudden decline had shaken the stock market. Many of the more loose-pursed tycoons were retrenching and that included patrons of the Grand Hotel restaurant. Nevertheless, some habitués kept coming to enjoy Stuffed Whitefish à la Radziwill (a renowned virtuosity of the chef’s) and to keep au courant with Mister Irving Berlin. Among prominent diners figured Hermann von Reininghaus, the young brewery grand seigneur, and his dusky wife Gina as well as the third element of the triangle, General Conrad, the Chief of Staff.

  The presence of the beloved—even when encumbered by her husband—always cheered the General. What’s more, the good weather promised him, a passionate mountaineer, some fine Alpine tours. But as Gina noted in her memoirs, his smile looked rigid in those days. With reason. The General shared all of Vienna’s fear for the old Emperor. In addition, he must face the probability that the new monarch would dismiss him in disgrace, would send him packing summarily, together with the Hungarian Prime Minister Tisza even as the coffin of Franz Joseph was carried into the crypt of the Capuchin Church.

  Of course an exit in May would only accelerate somewhat the General’s timetable. In the spring of 1914 he had resolved to wait for the Sarajevo maneuvers at the end of June, and then to resign. It was enough. He had been harassed too often by Franz Ferdinand, rebuffed too often each time he requested the punishment of Serbia—which was fomenting a rebellion in Albania right now. Too often had he been frustrated for the sake of “this foul peace which drags on and on,” as he had put it in one of his secret letters to Gina von Reininghaus. The same letter vibrated with impatience for a “ war from which I could return crowned with success that would allow me to break through all the barriers between us, Gina, and claim you as my own dearest wife. . . [a war that] would bring the satisfactions in my career and private life which fate has so far denied me.”

  He would be denied them forever when Franz Ferdinand mounted the throne. Still, at the Grand Hotel restaurant he could bear with fate a little better because here it was cushioned with Gina’s closeness. When the orchestra struck up that rousing new air from America, the General rose to his feet, bowed, requested Herr von Reininghaus’s permission to ask Frau von Reininghaus for the honor of this dance.

  It was granted. General and lady walked to the parquet floor. They began to sway in each others arms. The vocalist sang, in Viennese English, the song most popular throughout the Western world that spring of 1914:

  Come on and hear, come on and hear

  Alexander’s ragtime band,

  Come on along, come on along,

  It’s the best band in the land,

  They can play a bugle call

  Like you never heard before,

  Make it so natural

  That you want to go to war . . .

  17

  REPERCUSSIONS OF FRANZ JOSEPH’S PNEUMONIA SPREAD SOUTHWARD TO the Serbian capital. Before the news reached him there, Gavrilo Princip had been focusing steadily, unblinking, on a climax that drew nearer each day: the June war games of the Austrian Army near Sarajevo, captained by the man who must be killed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

  To help him in the deed, Princip had recruited Nedeljko Cabrinović in Belgrade. In Sarajevo itself Princip’s old confederate Danilo Ilić was waiting. But by April Princip decided that the assassination of the Habsburg Crown Prince was an enterprise requiring yet another partner. He picked Trifko Grabež, a fellow lodger in his rooming house at 23 Carigradska Street in Belgrade.

  Grabež, too, had been a former high school student in Austrian Bosnia who had crossed the border into Serbia and now lounged about Belgrade coffeehouses between odd jobs. But Grabež’s exile differed from Princip’s. It lacked politics. In a dispute over grades, Grabež had punched his teacher in the nose before running away. Vagabonding, adventuring, womanizing, appealed to Grabež much more than ideology. Yet Princip liked the lad’s pluck and brawn. And so thin little Princip began to talk to Grabež, whose muscular frame towered over him. He kept talking softly, steadily, in the seclusion of his room. Unblinking, he talked with a voice barely audible yet of an overwhelming intensity. When he finished, the big fellow had become the little one’s obedient disciple. In two days, juvenile delinquent had changed to zealot. Grabež was ready to do anything at his leader’s command.

  Princip had now collected the manpower for his kill. He still needed arms and the training to use them. The Young Bosnia organization, whose members met on coffeehouse terraces, would be of limited use. Young Bosnia’s program included action to flesh out its anti-Habsburg slogans. But too much of its energy went into the production of patriotic verse.

  Princip turned to a far tougher group. Its name never saw print. But it was led by a man whose photograph sometimes appeared in Belgrade newspapers that spring: an enormous Serbian Army officer, as heavy as he was tall, monolithically bald, with a brute black mustache jutting from a Mongolian face. The caption under his picture identified him as Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, Director of the Intelligence Bureau of the Serbian General Staff. But at Belgrade’s political cafes one knew much more than that about him. There, whispers referred to him as Apis—the sacred bull of ancient Egypt.

  Like his namesake he was a myth to his adherents. No ordinary earthly concerns tethered him: no wife, no lover, no family, no children, neither hobby nor recreation. He was not the liver of a life but the demon of an idea. At night he slept a few hours at his brother-in-law’s. The rest of his time he spent in the Belgrade Ministry of War, in an office whirring with telephone wires, telegraph keys, decoding devices, couriers arriving and departing. Restaurants and theaters did not exist for him. He was beyond normal frivolities. All his waking hours served one unmerciful passion: to carve Greater Serbia out of the rotting body of the Habsburg Empire.

  Eleven years earlier, in 1903, Apis had been among a band of officers who had dynamited the doors of Belgrade’s Royal Palace, hunted for the Austrian toady, King Alexander, cornered him in a closet with his Queen, perforated the couple with revolver bullets, hacked their bodies up with sabers, and thrown them out the window.

  The assassination had placed on the Serb throne the present, much more anti-Viennese Karageorgević dynasty. A few years later Apis had become leader of Ujedinjeje ili Smrt (Union or Death)—a society known in the coffeehouses by a murmured nickname: The Black Hand. Though its membership included some cabinet ministers and General Staff officers, it had no official sanction or recognition. Its nationalism was far more radical than that of the Serbian government itself. Initiates said that Prime Minister Pašić had appointed Apis Intelligence Chief in order to keep track of the man, to co-opt and control him. Nevertheless, Apis’s Black Hand had killed Ki
ng George I of Greece the previous year, in 1913, for repressing Slav minorities. No doubt the Black Hand had other plans along this line, very clandestine ones. In the coffeehouses the classified section of the Belgrade daily Trgovinski Glasnik received close scrutiny. Here the Society placed innocuously phrased items in the Situations Wanted column; properly deciphered, they were Black Hand messages to its various cells.

  Part rumor, part fact, such things sifted through the mists shrouding the group. In April 1914, Gavrilo Princip knew one thing for sure. He must reach Apis or at least one of his men. They would help him achieve his purpose.

  Just before the month ended, he made contact. Through an intermediary he met an authentic agent of the Black Hand, the Serbian Army Major, Voislav Tankosic. The encounter began awkwardly on the terrace of the Acorn Garland. As soon as the two shook hands, they recognized each other. Twenty months earlier, during the First Balkan War, Princip had come to Belgrade to volunteer for the Major’s guerrilla force operating against the Turks. Tankosic had turned down the sixteen-year-old schoolboy for being too young, too short, and too frail. Now Princip was eighteen; despite the adult mustache he had grown, he was as short as ever and looked even thinner. But his light blue eyes did not blink as he explained, softly and calmly, that he would need guns and bombs to blast away the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Sarajevo.

  This time Major Tankosic did not reject the stripling out of hand. He told him to stand by. “Someone” would have to be consulted.

  “Someone”—obviously Apis—took his time. A week passéd. Princip relayed his impatience to the Major. Tankosic sent back a message: “the boy” should read the newspapers; Franz Joseph had fallen mortally sick, and Franz Ferdinand, as the new monarch, would have better things to do than bother with summer maneuvers in Sarajevo. The whole thing was off.

  “The boy,” Princip, sent back a note: He did not give a fig about the Emperor’s illness. He would kill Franz Ferdinand whether he wore the crown or not, whether he came to Sarajevo or not. Nothing was off. Now, what about the weapons?

  Shortly thereafter a runner came with a second message to Princip’s room: “You and your friends, go to Topcider Park now.” Princip rounded up Grabež and Cabrinović, shepherded them to Topcider, one of Belgrade’s more deserted parks. The three were easy to spot—a thin little youth, flanked by two older, taller companions. As the trio approached the park’s main entrance, a man waiting there raised his hand slightly.

  He led them to a remote spot in the greenery. He gave them a wooden box containing three revolvers and a cardboard box filled with ammunition. He pointed to the stump of an oak tree shaped rather like a human body. He showed them how to load; how to aim; how to fire.

  He showed them day after day. The sun shone, the pistols blazed, the Park echoed, the oak stump splintered. When the two weeks’ course was over, Princip emerged as the best student. From a standing position “the boy” scored six hits out of ten shots at a distance of more than 200 yards. At a distance of 60 yards he scored eight absolutely perfect hits. And he was almost as sharp a marksman while running. Grabež and Cabrinović did not match his skill but had become fair shots.

  After their last class the three went to the Golden Sturgeon cafe for a discreet celebration. Since Princip enforced abstinence, they ordered mineral water. His blue eyes did not blink and he did not smile when he asked his friends to raise their glasses to the health of the old Emperor of Austria. His Majesty’s recovery would bring Franz Ferdinand into convenient range. At least on one coffeehouse terrace in Belgrade, it was an exciting spring.

  18

  IN SARAJEVO, DANILO ILIć NURSED THE SAME MURDEROUS HOPE FOR Franz Joseph’s recuperation. Ilić, Gavrilo Princip’s earliest co-conspirator, was awaiting his fellow-assassins’ arrival in the Bosnian capital.

  Meanwhile he began to write for Zvono, a new Socialist paper with avant-garde leanings. Though only a very junior comrade, he lost no time in attacking the Socialist Party leadership in Bosnia. “It is strange” he wrote, “that the words of our Party bosses should accord with those of the Austrian Foreign Minister who favors independence for Albania while denying the same right to the South Slavs. . . The consequence of such foolish Socialist leadership is a diminishing Socialist consciousness.”

  Now, the bosses of Bosnia’s small Socialist Party received their cues from headquarters of the much larger movement in Vienna. Which is to say, they were guided by Viktor Adler, doyen of working-class opposition throughout the Habsburg Empire. In assailing “the bosses” Ilić really assailed Adler— not quite fairly.

  Adler’s Arbeiter Zeitung often did mock the farce of Albanian independence. It often did deplore the suppression of South Slav autonomy. But in 1914, Austrian Socialism also felt the need to combat the spread of unemployment, the pauperization of the employed in their slums, the acceleration of armament production everywhere. In this press of problems, Adler’s support of Slav rights was incidental rather than insistent. Ilić felt it was inexcusably casual.

  There were other differences between Ilić and Adler; between the Sarajevo Socialist itching to get an Archduke into his gun sights, and the Vienna Party chief championing, but not forcing Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Ilić was the son of a cobbler; Adler, the scion of a stockbroker. Ilić was twenty-four; at sixty-two Adler was the Emperor’s junior by more than twenty years and yet, in Ilić’s eyes, also a worn dynast ruling his domain too long. Ilić, always in white shirt and black tie, was an unrelentingly neat rebel. Adler, on the other hand, with his gray mane uncombed, his thick glasses loose on his nose, his perpetually strained voice (whose cracked eloquence struck Trotsky)—Adler must have seemed to Ilić like the Herr Professor of a passé revolution.

  Yet Ilić and Adler had surprisingly much in common. Nationalism with a Nietzschean twist had launched them both into politics. Ilić had joined Young Bosnia, the student group of teetotalers. Their South Slav “Will to Power,” fueled by Nietzsche, troubled Austrian authorities in 1914. Nearly forty years earlier Austrian authorities had been troubled by Adler’s friends for similar reasons. In Vienna, police agents had monitored a student organization that mixed vegetarianism, populism, and a pan-German Weltanschauung into a radical brew. At its meetings young Gustav Mahler had pounded out “Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles” on the piano, young Viktor Adler had declaimed insurrectionary verse, but its lodestar—like Young Bosnia’s decades later—had been Friedrich Nietzsche, then still alive and unwell, seething brilliantly among his sleeping potions and headache pills. Indeed on Nietzsche’s birthday, October 18, 1877, Viktor Adler had signed a letter to the master, acclaiming him as “our luminous and transporting guide.”

  What had inspired Adler’s group in the 1870s appealed to Princip and Ilić in 1914—Nietzsche’s pronunciamento that for the fulfilled life man needed to be doubly divine: divine like Dionysus, god of the orgiastic joy harvested from the heroic deed (a deity often represented by an Apis-like bull!); divine also like Apollo, god of the serenity harvested from contemplative reason.

  Now, in the spring of 1914, Ilić’s friend Princip acted out the Dionysian principle of his favorite Nietzsche poem:

  Everything that I leave becomes coal.

  Flame am I, surely . . .

  Dionysian bullets were singing through a man-shaped tree stump in a Belgrade Park. In Munich, Adolf Hitler—another young temperance fanatic—was burning to lead a Dionysian master race. (Hitler’s last birthday gift to Mussolini in 1943: The Collected Works of Nietzsche.) In Vienna during the Great War, Viktor Adler’s son Friedrich—named after Friedrich Nietzsche—would commit a Dionysian crime; he would shoot and kill the Austrian Prime Minister von Sturgkh at the restaurant Meissl & Schadn. Adler Senior, however, as befits an elderly asthmatic revolutionary of middle-class origins, had fallen back on Nietzsche’s more sedate Apollonian aspects. By 1914, he no longer saw the superman as the hero of some magically wild folk poem but as a rational social being, no longer as the superb
Teuton but as the emancipated proletarian. To help the worker liberate his brethren, the Party must give him an education.

  The new proletarian didn’t need to storm the Bastille. But he had to master a syllabus. Only by unshackling his mind could the worker free himself of injustice. “The revolution of consciousness” Adler had written, “must progress along with the revolution in economics.”

  By 1914, Viktor Adler had been spearheading that revolution for twenty-five years. Since he had led it in Vienna, he’d had to lead it against Vienna. He had to fight the genius loci that let the poor waltz through their poverty. He had to take on the elan with which the city painted carnival across squalor; fight the handkissing done in rags; fight the wine songs sung by starvelings; fight the heraldic fairy tales framing lives of grime.

  “One thing is needful,” Nietzsche had said, “namely, giving style to one’s character.” Victor Adler made the worker acquire character by cultivating a new style. Instead of whining sentimental ditties about Alt-Wien, Socialist choirs rehearsed songs about union organizers. Instead of all that tavern reminiscing about Empress Elizabeth, the people rediscovered the revolution of 1848 through slide shows at the Party’s Adult Education Centers. Instead of dissipating their leisure with alcohol or gambling or prostitutes, they joined the Party’s Gymnasts’ or Alpinists’ or Bikers’ clubs. The Party organized and sanitized the workers’ lives, and thus vitalized their resistance against exploitation.

  Through all that, Austro-Marxism had produced “the world’s most educated proletarians.” Furthermore it elected a plurality envied by its competitors. At the Austrian Parliament dissolved in 1914, the Socialists commanded 84 out of 504 members. This stood out as an impressive number in a legislature that was a crazy quilt of many little ideological patches.