by Rebecca West
Mussolini, indeed, rested his case for the revival of the Code on nothing so acceptable to the high faculties of man as its capacity to further well-being. He recommended it because it had to be applied by violence, which he alleged to be the highest thing in life. But in peace the opportunities for violence are limited and not remunerative. He had to resort to war. He had taught his followers to enjoy the taste of assault, and he had to satisfy this appetite by promising them the wide mass murder of a European conflict; he had raised their material standards by lavish expenditure on social services the state could not afford, and he had to placate their new greed by promising them sea-power like Britain’s and an empire in Asia and Africa. The first step towards any of these ends was the destruction of Yugoslavia. Its Dalmatian coast was necessary if he were to have command of the Adriatic; through its hinterland ran the high-road to Asia. But he lacked the heart for fair fighting. Traditionless, he had not learned what all but the most primitive communities have learned, that it is better for both parties to a conflict if there is no treachery on either side. He therefore strove to win his battle beforehand by fomenting revolution among Yugoslavian nationals in Croatia and Macedonia. But there he made an error. Belonging to the bored and under-employed urban class which is always glad of the excitement of a street fight, he could not understand that peasants quickly tire of guerrilla bands trailing backwards and forwards over their lands, interrupting work vitally necessary to a good harvest. So he looked north, to Austria.
Vienna still stands. That is to say, it is as it was. A great town engenders its tradition, which cannot be destroyed, because it is sown through the brains and loins of all men born within it or under its shadow, and because it determines the form of local customs and thus for ever afterwards constrains those who enter it from other parts to its way of living. So it was with Constantinople, which was made by the Byzantines in the image of their magnificent dreams, which imposed those dreams on the Turks, of wholly alien natural genius, who drove out the Byzantines. So it is with Vienna.
That city seemed at first to accept the destiny it had thrust on itself by its provocation of war. Henceforth it had to be poor; for it had always been that by nature. Only the merciless exploitation of its peasants and its Slav subjects had enabled it to support the extravagance of its aristocracy, the solid comfort of its bourgeoisie. But in its diminishment it might have known an age as great as its own eighteenth century had it reconciled itself to being a small town without vainglory but glorious in its university and its opera, its baroque palaces and art galleries, its lilacs and chestnuts, its abundance of Jewish genius. It could not, however, check the tradition which had struck its roots deeper and deeper during the nineteenth century, which was growing rankly among the ruins of Vienna and was even spreading rankly through another soil.
For this tradition had found its perfect instrument in Adolf Hitler. It must always be remembered that Hitler is not a German but an Austrian, and nothing he has brought to post-war Germany had not its existence in pre-war Austria. There is nothing original in his demonic fancies save their intensity. He is a man of the same class as Luccheni and Mussolini, a recruit to the hopeless and helpless urban proletariat; and like them he is mindless and possessionless, and, so far as the human tradition goes, traditionless. He did not know why the difficult and sometimes dangerous process of thinking is held in esteem; he did not know that fourteen hundred years before an emperor had proclaimed that a ruler ‘must be not only glorified with arms, but also armed with laws,’ and that all communities have been forced to hold that opinion or perish; he had not an inkling that it is actually healthy for the human race to prefer what is agreeable to what is disagreeable. He was a poor craftsman, with no pride in his craft, which was natural enough in the child of one of those parasites on our social system, a douanier. But what he had heard in his childhood lingered in his ears. His father’s native village was only a few miles from the family estate of Schönerer, who founded the Pan-German movement that swept Vienna at the end of the last century, and there is nothing in Mein Kampf which was not in Schöonerer’s programme. There is the same racial pride, the same anti-Semitism, the same hatred of the Slavs, the same hostility to the Church. Schönerer’s movement was, however, stultified by his determination to find his followers among the educated classes. There was a hair-splitting tendency in those who had been exposed to culture which rendered them unable to admire the simplicity and strength of this platform, in which every plank was cut from hatred or vanity. Two leaders, neither of them peasants or workmen, both bureaucrats, recognized that the only hope for their faith lay in spreading it among the Caliban class of urban workers who were outside the trade unions. They started a German Socialist Workers’ party, almost indistinguishable in programme from the Nazi party, which held three seats in the Austrian Parliament of 1911. Hitler is simply an exporter of Austrian goods, which he sells with an energy due to the dynamic passion for blood which is his special idiosyncrasy. For the pleasure he takes in murder is so great that ‘Apis’ now seems a moderate man who sometimes stamped his foot when annoyed.
Hitler, however, was working out his destiny in Germany, and there was no such dramatic figure in Vienna, but only the old actors conscientiously performing the same comedy on the themes of extravagance and Schlamperei. The financiers and industrialists acted their parts with such zest that they not only brought down their own house on their heads: they shattered the economic structure of the whole world. The collapse of the Credit Anstalt in 1931 caused the German crisis which perpetuated the world slump of 1929. These proceedings were unchecked by the political forces of the town, which was as frivolous and factious as it had ever been. The left wing produced some devoted and even saintly trade unionists and too many adherents to the type of international socialism which unfits its disciples for dealing with local problems. All alike were feckless and unaware that when a socialist-elected authority spends money as if socialism were already established, although it is not yet strong enough to overthrow capitalism, it provokes a formidable reaction. The right wing was what might have been expected from a community which was still capable of looking over its teacups and saying to a foreign visitor, ‘Can you tell me if Mr So-and-so belongs to the first or second rank of English society?’ The only hope for Austrian independence lay in comradeship with the Danubian states, who might have formed with her a solid block of defiant young nations, ready to face the rising forces of Nazism and Fascism, with their backs against an even more defiant Russia and Turkey. But Austria was still sneering at all peoples to her east, still vaunting herself as ‘the frontier of Europe.’ She looked west for her salvation, and when, like the rest of the world, she tumbled into the pit of the slump, she conceived a sick fancy that all her troubles would be ended if she were joined in a customs union with Germany. This, with a good sense that has been more than justified by the subsequent course of history, was forbidden by the powers as a threat to European peace; but in any case it was useless as a prescription for Austria’s economic malady, for Germany was as sick as she was, and two states which are bankrupt for precisely similar reasons are not more solvent than one. Some of the right-wing politicians were aware of this, but there was nothing shrewd in their awareness. They were determined to keep their independence, yet fomented this desire for union with imperialist and internationalist Nazism, or else inspired their followers with an equally suicidal enthusiasm for imperialist and internationalist Fascism. To these insane impulses they sacrificed everything: honour, decency, humanity, and that other thing which a man sacrifices when he fails in these qualities towards the people of his own blood. The smoke curled up from a peculiar offering of this sort in February 1934.
One of the most typical features of post-war Vienna were the working-class tenements, built by the Government of Vienna, which was as far left as the National Government was right. These large buildings presented a modern and rationalist appeal to visitors who were already seduced by the lilacs and ches
tnuts of the Viennese gardens; and anywhere the sceptic who looks a housing scheme in the mouth is sure to be denounced as a hard-hearted wretch who grudges poor children a decent home. But the truth is that these tenements were a shocking extravagance for a ruined city. For they were not needed. Though the Vienna of the Habsburgs had been disfigured by abominable slums, the shrinkage in the population made it unnecessary for the poor to inhabit them any longer. They had simply to move up into the accommodation their former masters had vacated. There were acres of villas built, and well built, for the bourgeoisie and upper classes, which now stood in neglected gardens, either unoccupied or occupied by owners who had to starve to pay the taxes. These villas could easily have been subdivided and the gardens cut up into allotments for the new tenants. But instead they were left to decay, and the Town Council of this distressed and dwindling city spent over fourteen million pounds in building sixty thousand flats in the form of isolated blocks containing anything up to seventeen hundred families. A state still carrying on under the capitalist system should not have diverted so large a sum from industry in so short a time: the unemployment rate mounted in direct ratio to these lofty buildings. It is, moreover, extremely doubtful whether families should be encouraged to live in apartments if there is enough ground in the neighbourhood to permit them roomier accommodation with gardens; and these apartments were extremely small. Though there was no measure in the fascination they exercised on foreigners they were in point of fact inferior to many similar working-class tenements in Holland and Scandinavia; and though they were infinitely superior to most English pre-war dwellings of the kind, they fell below the standards applied to our housing schemes during the last twenty-five years.
It is said that the motives which inspired the Viennese municipal authorities to build these blocks were not simple. To be accepted as a tenant the citizen had to satisfy certain tests which in fact guaranteed him as a Social Democrat; if he followed a trade he had to be a trade unionist. Thus these apartments put solid blocks of Socialist voters into various districts that might otherwise have returned right-wing representatives. If this be true, then the Karl-Marx-Hof and the Goethe-Hof rival the Tower of Babel in architectural irony. For in February 1934 there was again an abandonment of the slow legitimate process of civilized existence, a resort to action too swift and too immediate in its logic to be the work of wisdom. Again black figures run out of the text of history and inscribe a magic character in the margin. The Austrian Chancellor, Dollfuss, was a fervent Catholic, Austrian nationalist, and agrarian protectionist, and he hated the atheism, the imperialism, and the economic programme of Hitler. He therefore secretly called on Mussolini for aid, and became virtually an instrument of Italian policy. So too did Prince Starhemberg, a wealthy aristocrat, who had been an early accomplice of Hitler, had turned against him, and was now head of a semi-fascist armed band called the Heimwehr or the Home Guard, which was supporting Dollfuss. In January 1934 it looked as if Dollfuss and Starhemberg were about to be forced by difficult internal conditions to come to a working agreement with the Social Democrats; and indeed the left government then holding office in France had extracted from them definite promises that they should do so. But in the middle of January Mussolini sent a message to Dollfuss to say that the Social Democrats must not be conciliated but destroyed. It unluckily happened that on February the seventh the French Government fell, after the disastrous battle of the Place de la Concorde which revealed to the world the strength of fascist influence in France; and Dollfuss was quick to read the lesson. On February eleventh his Vice-Chancellor, Major Fey, and Prince Starhemberg went out into Vienna and led the police and the Heimwehr in a systematic battue of the Social Democrats. They had very little difficulty in finding their victims as so many of them were residents in these huge blocks of flats. These they surrounded, bombarded, and cleared of their inhabitants. Civil war can keep secret its casualties, and it has never been ascertained how many of these luckless tenants were killed, imprisoned, or turned loose homeless and destitute; but such victims must have numbered many thousands. It was at this holocaust that my chauffeur with the blindish blue eyes had assisted, by driving Major Fey about from massacre to massacre, because he thought it was time somebody did something.
This murder marked a new phase in the genius of murder which has shaped our recent history. It was, of course, not novel in a sense. It bore the familiar thumb-print of its prime mover. Like the degradation of Croatia and Macedonia, it was utterly pointless. It could serve no possible purpose, for had Mussolini marched into Austria it would have been the armies of other countries, not the unhappy tenants of the Karl-Marx-Hof and the Goethe-Hof, who would have resisted him. And the crime is also reminiscent of others committed by Austrians in its cold inhumanity. After the Mayerling tragedy the uncles of Marie Vetsera were summoned by night to the hunting-lodge, confronted with a laundry basket containing the naked body of their niece, were given her clothes and told to dress her, and were made to drive ten miles with her corpse propped up between them to the cemetery where she was to be furtively buried. In order to keep her on the seat it was necessary to use an umbrella as a splint for her spine and neck. None of the court officials found this service too repulsive to exact from these unhappy young men. The callousness of the funeral arrangements for the murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife twenty-five years later showed that this was no passing phase of barbarity, and twenty years later these February massacres were to prove the truth of the saying, ‘Like master, like man.’ The chauffeur’s behaviour can be judged only if one imagines a Cockney taxi-man cheerfully spending some days driving about a ruffian who was making it his business to assault by bombardment and machine-gun the tenants of all London County Council flats, men, women, and children alike. It must further be imagined that this Cockney taxi-driver would be actuated not by indignation over any definite wrong or passion for any cause, but simply by a vague hope that times might be better; and that he was not maddened by poverty, being well fed and well clothed, and able to rely on an amplitude of social services in any emergency.
But the crime was, in one sense, terrible in its novelty. The people who assassinated Prince Danilo of Montenegro and Prince Michael of Serbia were individuals holding certain ideas who wanted to kill nationalists. The man who assassinated the Empress Elizabeth was not an individual, he was a representative of the undifferentiated human mass, who killed an individual, who was the representative of the class which he held responsible for allowing that portion of humanity to lose its differentiation and sink back into the mass. The people who assassinated Alexander and Draga Obrenovitch were for the most part individuals who were nationalist and objected to individualists who should have been nationalist but had been corrupted by an alien imperialism, and for the lesser part individuals who enjoyed murder. The murder of Franz Ferdinand was as pure a case as could be imagined of a nationalist individual murdering an imperialist individual. But these February butcheries represented mass murdering mass. Mussolini was destroying people of his own sort, not for any motive that could actuate an individual with a mind, with traditions and with an interest in maintaining stable conditions, but out of some elementary reaction such as might make an embryo kick in the womb. For the first time in the modern age the individual had been squeezed out of history. He was neither the subject nor the object of a crucial action which was to affect the destiny of many millions. This meant that henceforth events must take a violent and unreasonable course; embryos cannot control a complicated world made by adults. It meant also that existence must decline from what ease and dignity it had attained to a hitherto unknown level of pain and humiliation: adults cannot be happily governed by embryos.
The first result of the Viennese massacres was the famous Nazi ‘Blood Bath’ of June the thirtieth, 1934. Till now murder had played a minor part in Hitler’s programme; his mainstay was a combination of torture and imprisonment, and he had only occasionally resorted to the assassination of some specially dangero
us personality. But Vienna suggested to him that perhaps, if one were sufficiently powerful, one could murder people, even a lot of people, with impunity. He acted on that suggestion by killing without trial and without warning about twelve hundred people, many of whom loved and trusted him, during the course of a single night. He thus at one and the same time fed his appetite for murder, and enacted a fantasy that all of us have played with in our infancy. Few children have not lain in their cots like little Timurlanes and prayed that in the night all the unkind and difficult world might be swept away, so that in the morning they might have a new Daddy and Mummy and Nurse, a new kindergarten. With such baby ferocity Hitler included among his victims the manager and two head waiters of the Munich restaurant which he and his party had frequented in earlier days. This too was murder of the mass by the mass; but here subject was so identical with object that this murder was no more true murder than masturbation is sexual intercourse. Many of those slaughtered were so conscious of their unchangeable identity with the Nazis that they assumed themselves to be victims of an anti-Nazi rising and died crying, ’Heil, Hitler!‘ However, Hitler’s enjoyment of the experience, such as it was, led him to venture on the more mature form of indulgence before another month was past. On July the twenty-fifth he arranged for a Nazi uprising in Vienna, which had for its main purpose the assassination of Dollfuss. For this victim nobody need shed a tear. He had acquiesced, if indeed he had not actively collaborated, in the slaughter of his fellow-countrymen at Mussolini’s behest. But the murder was disgusting enough without the element of personal pity being involved, both in the barbarity which left Dollfuss to lie in his blood for hours, vainly asking for a priest and a doctor, and the gross cowardice which sent the conspirators scampering in every direction before they had time to realize their further plans. These, however, were bound in any case to be abortive. They could not lead to the annexation of Austria by Germany, because, as must have been foreseen by any sane observer, the first rumour of the uprising brought Mussolini’s troops up in force to the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria. Whether the Blood Bath of June the thirtieth served any purpose is impossible to say, for civil war keeps its own secrets, and many of the victims were so wholly submerged in the Nazi party that they were unknown to any human being outside it; but the murder of Dollfuss was astonishing as an example of the pointlessness characteristic of historical events determined by the dictators.