Instead of beating their heads against the prison of their class, instead of deadening themselves with toil or liquor, the masses now had something to kill for. Before Sarajevo, hundreds of thousands had been on strike in Russia. Not long afterwards the factories hummed again all day. At night, toilers massed before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg with torches and holy ensigns, acclaiming the Tsar as their defender. “Wonderful times . . .” said a British diplomat who saw the spectacle. “Russia seems to have been completely transformed.”
In Vienna the transformation was just as wonderful. On May Day 1914, workers had marched on the Ringstrasse with the chant “Frieden, Brot, und Freiheit!” (“Peace, Bread, and Freedom!”). On August 1, many of the same crowd marched again with “Alle Serben miissen sterben!” (“All Serbs must die!”). “The patriotic enthusiasm of the masses in Austria-Hungary seemed especially surprising,” Trotsky wrote in his autobiography. “I strode along the main street of the familiar Vienna and watched the most amazing crowd fill the fashionable Ring, a crowd in which hopes had been awakened . . . What was it that drew them to the square in front of the War Ministry? . . .Would it have been possible at any other time for porters, laundresses, shoemakers, apprentices to feel themselves masters of the Ring? . . . In their demonstrations for the glory of Habsburg arms, I detected something familiar to me from the October days of 1905 [when Trotsky had led a shortlived insurrection]. No wonder that in history war has so often been the mother of revolution.”
In Paris workers had sung the “Internationale” on May Day before returning to their tenements. Now their throats rang with the “Marseillaise” while the Kaiser’s effigy went up in flames. Everywhere life leaped from lonely gray grind to grand national adventure. Hurrah!
But the poor weren’t the only ones grateful for the zest provided by the crisis. The middle classes, too, felt exhausted and baffled. Progress had fed them well. Yet the more meat on their table, the less tang was there to each morsel, the more intolerable the superior cut of somebody else’s steak. No doubt they were dining well. Were they still eating together? They consumed as they produced: aggressively against each other. When worshipping, they knelt on velvet in churches unmoored from a common God. Their mansions brimmed, but they did not feel sheltered. They promenaded in spats and top hats—where from? To what end?
Germany’s most popular almanac for 1913 featured a poem by the writer Alfred Walter Heymel. It was called “Eine Sehnsucht aus der Zeit” (“A Longing in Our Times”).
Im Friedensreichtum wird uns tödlich bang.
Wir kennen Mussen nicht noch Können oder Sollen
Und sehnen uns und schreien nach dem Kriege.
(In the wealth of peace we feel the deadliest dread.
We are bereft of prowess, mission, or direction,
And long and cry for war.)
Hurrah!
The cry came, as the British poet Rupert Brooke phrased it, from “a world grown old and cold and weary.” It came from “this foul peace which drags on and on . . .” as General Conrad wrote to his mistress Gina von Reininghaus. For worker or burgher or poet or Chief of Staff, Mars was the God of Liberation. “A crisis had entered Western culture,” a high Habsburg official would write later, “and many of its representative citizens had been oversaturated into desperation. Like men longing for a thunderstorm to relieve them of the summer’s sultriness, so the generation of 1914 believed in the relief that war might bring.” Their longing for thunder was the new power.
The thunderstorm with its mortal flash—this image shivers ubiquitously through the whole period. In the summer of 1914, Europe’s musical sensation was still Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered a year earlier in Paris, where Nijinsky’s “lightning leaps” celebrated the theme of the ballet, namely the enchantments of death.
In painting, a dominant mode was Futurism, which anticipated the lightning-like strokes of stroboscopic photography; the Futurist manifesto exalted war because it would blast away the stultification of present concepts and structures; as though defining lightning’s lethal beauty, the manifesto proclaimed that “movement and light must destroy the substance of objects.”
“The sense of approaching catastrophe,” wrote a Futurist who didn’t know he was one, in his book Mein Kampf, “turned at last to longing: Let heaven finally give reign to the fate that could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed, and with the thunder of heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries.”
“The war” said German Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg in his book on the subject, “would be a thunderstorm to clear the air.”
“The palpable beginnings of the European crisis reach back a number of years,” wrote Count Ottokar Czernin who would succeed Count von Berchtold as Habsburg Foreign Minister, “. . . certain dynamics must take their course before a thunderstorm discharges its lightning and thunder.”
“I am convinced the storm is coming,” French President Raymond Poincaré remarked to a friend in July of 1914. “Where and when the storm will break I cannot say.”
“There is a crisis in the air,” Freud had written Lou Andreas-Salome as 1913 turned to 1914, referring to Jung yet articulating much more than psychoanalytic weather. “May it soon explode so that the air is cleared!”
The shots of Sarajevo sounded like an answer to many prayers in many nations. Afterwards some tried in vain to push back the bolt that came down from the blue—for example, in Paris on the sudden death of Jean Jaures, the French Socialist leader and Europe’s most eloquent voice against war. On July 31, as he sat in the Café du Croissant, a nationalist zealot gunned him down. His comrades organized a pacifist parade around his body. They were swamped by a mob of conscripts. Brand-new lieutenants graduated from St. Cyr led the warriors, shouting, “We’ll go into battle with white plumes on our kepis and with white gloves on our hands!” Behind them young men roared by the happy thousands. The French General Staff planned for 87 percent of called-up reservists to appear at induction centers; 98.5 percent did. Hurrah!
In Austria, where Viktor Adler had groomed the worker to be a thinker and a doer, the proletariat accomplished not a single thoughtful act to halt disaster. Adler himself, though, did intervene in history without knowing it. During the anti-Russian hysteria in Austria, Habsburg constables in Galicia arrested Lenin “as a Tsarist spy” on August 8. In response to an appeal from Lenin’s wife, Adler went to the headquarters of the political police in Vienna, cited their own sponsorship of this useful Bolshevik as an enemy of the Tsar and thus as a friend of Austria (Hurrah!), and obtained Lenin’s release and safe passage first to Vienna, then to Switzerland. A few days later he helped usher Trotsky across the Swiss border. In other words, Adler put into place the preliminaries of the Russian Revolution three years later.
He also couldn’t help collaborating in the genesis of its most important preliminary, namely that of the Great War. No matter that his Arbeiter Zeitung had published many warnings against the threat of international slaughter. On August 5, the day before Austria issued its first declaration of war against a major power—Russia—this same Arbeiter Zeitung intoned, “However the fates decide, we hope they will decide for the holy cause of the German people.” Hurrah! Two days earlier Adler’s paper had reported that his German comrades, the Socialist deputies to the Reichstag in Berlin, had joined the other parties in voting the government the war credits it needed. This action marked, said the Arbeiter Zeitung, “... the proudest and loftiest exaltation of the German spirit.” Hurrah!
Two men made dogged, last-ditch attempts against that inexorable hurrah. They were Nicky and Willy. That was how the two Emperors signed their respective cables, which started jittering, on the night of July 29, between the palace of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg and the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Potsdam. Nicky “in the name of our old friendship” begged Willy to stop his Austrian ally from going too far. Willy, in turn, declaring himself to b
e Nicky’s “sincere and devoted friend and cousin” said he was sure that Nicky as a fellow monarch wanted to see the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince duly punished. Nicky thanked Willy for “the conciliatory and fraternal” message but in view of it voiced astonishment at the ominous tone of the note just delivered by Willy’s ambassador to his, Nicky’s, Foreign Minister. Willy answered that just because Nicky shared so cordially the wish for peace, he hoped Nicky would agree to remain “in a spectator role” in the Vienna-Belgrade conflict, for only by localizing the matter and by not taking Russian military measures could Nicky avoid “involving Europe in the most horrible war ever witnessed.” In reply, Nicky, “grateful for the speed of your answer,” assured Willy that all Russian military measures were purely precautionary with no offensive intent and should therefore not interfere with Willy’s “much-valued role as mediator with Vienna.” Willy’s response regretted that he could not mediate in Vienna while Russia persisted in mobilizing. To which Nicky answered that it was “technically impossible” to stop Russian military preparations but that since, like Willy, he was very far from wishing war, he gave Willy his solemn words that “my troops shall not commit any provocative action.” Whereupon Willy thanked Nicky for his telegram but said that “only immediate, clear, unmistakable, and affirmative answer from your government can avoid endless misery.” And he begged Nicky to order his troops “on no account to commit the slightest act of trespassing over our frontiers.”
This cable, ending the series, leaped from Berlin to St. Petersburg on August 1, at 10:30 P.M. Three and a half hours earlier, at 7 P.M. , the Kaiser’s ambassador had presented the German Government’s declaration of war to the Russian Foreign Minister.
It was no longer important what Willy said to Nicky when. Quite aptly the two Emperors had reduced themselves to diminutives: two sashed little figurines raising toy scepters against the storm. The storm paid little attention. All over the continent young men filed into barracks in clockwork fulfillment of mobilization plans. Troop trains kept hurtling toward frontiers.
The martial hurrah of multitudes kept echoing on the square before Wilhelm’s palace. Through his Lord Chamberlain the Kaiser thanked his subjects for this show of loyalty but asked them to disperse “so that His Majesty can attend undisturbed to the challenges of leadership.” The hurrahs continued.
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 bypasséd the Ministers of War in Vienna and in Berlin; a telegram which ignored both Emperors, theoretically the All-Highest 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 Poincaré as President was only the symbol of state. It did matter that Poincaré 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 Poincaré had a stake in the war to come. Hurrah!
Under Poincaré’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,” Poincaré 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 warpaint 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*—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; flouris
h 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!”
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