The city had other such leaveners, particularly during the warm months. At the start of their lunch break—thirty minutes—the workers went out into the street. They’d settle down on the curb stone; they’d bite into the black bread and cut into the lardy, meatless side of bacon that was cheaper than the leaner stuff. And they watched incarnations of grand Vienna that were not a whit less grand on Ottakring’s dingy cobbles. Even here an imposing personage would pass in a uniform reminiscent of the Foreign Legion, cigarette dangling under a curvature of mustaches, shouldering something like a rifle and accompanied by something like a chariot. The rifle was a birch broom; the chariot, a wheeled dustbin; and the street cleaner himself not so much a remover as a curator of the city’s dust; he gathered it up in one place and deposited it in another, executing a scheme of slow, grave, subtle precision. Indeed the imminence of the All Highest birthday seemed to have lent his design a particular intricacy directed by some high councillor in the Emperor’s own Palace.
On the street corner the Dienstmann or public porter conducted his office with kepi and epauletted jacket, his medal gleaming on his chest. Actually it was not a medal but a tin badge indicating the number of his license. License for what? For being the nerve center of the neighborhood. Especially in districts like these, where many services were not professionally available, the Dienstmann acted as a one-man moving firm, private security agency and message-delivery business. Usually his hair style resembled that of the Emperor who was also a universal genie; but the Dienstmann was cheaper and as a rule older, with silver sideburns. Regardless of age, he possessed a strength as great as his discretion. If the master baker Herr Pfandl had a new trough delivered, it was the Dienstmann who got it down the steps into the basement shop without a single scratch. If Fräulein Oberhuber (just off the train from Lower Austria to start her urban life as salesgirl) needed someone to watch over all her worldly goods for a moment, it was the Dienstmann who would extend his protection, one foot dramatically propped on the papier-mâché suitcase. And if Herr Pfandl ever needed to send a gallant, if extramarital, note to Fräulein Oberhuber, the Dienstmann would accomplish that in a way nobody much noticed.
Well, almost nobody. The workers sitting on the curb would poke each other, grinning. But then they seized on anything piquant during their thirty-minute lunch. Anything that would see them through six more hours of sweat.
The week ground on to its toilsome end. Sunday, however, was a deliverance. If workaday streets could produce spectacle in an Ottakring, Sunday was a bonanza around the Palace in the Inner City. Of course on Sunday the Ottakringers would first go to Mass, which unrolled even in small parish churches with cathedral colors—and never more so than now, what with extra devotions performed in advance for the Emperor’s birthday.
Yet on a good summer Sunday even the pious poor would hurry from church toward the Palace. A family would wear the best-darned trousers and the least-frayed skirts; they would provision the children with a slice each of the Sunday raisin bread that was the week’s great gastronomic treat. To save tram fare, they would walk the two miles to the Inner City. They were off to watch the changing of the guard.
The Franzensring part of the Ringstrasse was our family’s first goal. Here they stopped and congregated at a respectful distance from the regimental band of the relieving troops. After it had assembled they marched behind it, often together with thousands, all faces rigidly at attention. They knew that at this time of the year the Emperor’s ears must be offered the Army’s best music—and there was none better in the world. The bandmaster’s fretted silver staff rose: twelve beats of base drum (drawn by a most darlingly uniformed pony); six beats of snare drum; five echoing cymbal blows and hoooorrray!!!…the entire Ringstrasse fifed and fluted and tromboned and danced with the “Radetzky March” written by Johann Strauss Senior, not for infantry slogging but antelopes leaping.
The band always stopped when it reached the outer Palace yard. In the sudden silence, what fine staccato of commands! What flurry of white-gloved salutes and shining sabers! What a fierce chorus line of boots and rifles! And most exciting of all, the actual changing of the guard that took place during those moments. The entire enormous mansion of Franz Joseph’s was transfigured. It came to life everywhere. All of its eighteen wings, built over the centuries, had doors, portals, gates, posterns and portcullises; and at each of these, two or more sentinels relieved each other with martial and yet childlike pantomime. It was as though the Palace had turned into an infinite cuckoo clock where dozen after dozen of bright-carved figurines popped in and out of innumerable niches…
Twelve beats of bass drum, six of snare drum, five echoing cymbal blows—and off the relieved guard regiment marched down the Ring with flutes and fifes and French horns blazing.
Most Ottakringers would have preferred to stay and feast their souls on Vienna’s grandness. Our family too. But they didn’t linger. They knew that the Ring, being elegant theater in itself, must not be blemished by too many of their own kind; the Ringstrasse—littered with threadbare gawkers and children trailing crumbs of raisin bread—would no longer be the Ringstrasse. They knew it was important to keep its splendor shined during the Emperor’s birthday month.
They must return to their part of town. Only no one in the family felt like walking back. The father decided to splurge on the horse tramway. It would be easier to relinquish the wonders around the Emperor’s precincts if you could leave in comfort, sitting. And so the horses pulled our Ottakringers away, down the brilliance of the Ringstrasse, past solid burgher houses in the Alsergrund district—and then back into the dismal tenement landscape of their own grounds where there were no Hussars and no palaces, no bandmasters with silver-fretted staffs; just barracks hidden under laundry lines and the crumbling of pseudo-classic stucco.
The father made another decision. He told his family not to get off here. They rode on, for three more stops to the end of the line. Here they disembarked and discovered once more the dream Vienna. Their own dreary region was just an interlude, however sprawling, between the glory of the Inner City and the idyll of the Vienna Woods. Here was the village of Alt-Ottakring after which the desolation of Neu-Ottakring had been named. Here they found the simple, shapely steeple of the parish church, a flock of homey whitewashed Biedermeier houses, and some wine gardens set into the first soft roll of the Alpine foothills.
They walked into one such garden to sit down by a table dappled with salt sticks and leaf shadows. They ordered a strawberry phosphate for the children, and for themselves two glasses of the new wine. They munched the salt sticks costing only a kreuzer each and decided to call that their evening meal. The salt made them thirsty and they ordered two more glasses and then two more, already spending the money meant for a chicken dinner the following week. They ordered two more, spending the replacement of the wife’s old stockings. The wine was miraculous and they drank and ordered still more, having drunk up by now the amount planned for the warm coat their oldest would need in the fall.
But by then it didn’t matter any more. By that time they were singing together with others from the next table, a wonderful song about their marvelous city, about the one little drop it takes, the right magic drop squeezed from the right Viennese vine, to cure a world coming to an end…
* * *
* The actual address was Berggasse 19, and Adler’s apartment was the very one Sigmund Freud was to occupy later. Both psychoanalysis and Austrian socialism began in the same rooms.
Chapter 6
In Vienna the world was often coming to an end, usually to wine-garden songs. But the Empire would go on forever; and so would the Emperor, who had already been on the throne for generations though he was about to complete only his fifty-eighth year. Mid-August had come: the entire realm gathered itself up to celebrate his birthday. Not only on the Ring-Strasse but on the boulevards of all principal cities, barricades were erected for the parades to be held by day, for the torchlight processions by night. From t
he Carpathians to the Tyrolean Alps, peasants dragged logs up high slopes so that three thousand bonfires could be lit on three thousand mountain peaks. Gala performances were rehearsed once more in many theaters in all the Monarchy’s languages. Aviators tried out balloons from which to trail congratulatory messages. No park or square was without workmen setting up candle illuminations. Every child readied its Japanese lantern glowing with the sovereign’s sideburned ikon.
Yet nothing happened on Saturday, August 18, except disappointment.
Hardly any of the festivities planned for the Emperor’s birthday took place on that date. It had begun to rain the night before. It poured throughout the Imperial and Royal dominions. All the public open-air commemoration, set so nicely for that Saturday, had to be canceled on short, wet notice.
The Emperor himself observed his birthday on time with accustomed simplicity, attending a Mass in the Ischl parish church and then dining with his family and the sweet Schratt in his rooms. But not until the twentieth could the fireworks go off, the drums start rolling for the great processions. By then it was Monday, though, a hastily appointed holiday, still moist, still blue from Monday-ness.
And in Vienna something flawed even the delayed festivity.
At the Western Railway terminal a crowd of four thousand gathered, with faces much too grim for birthday celebrants. They had come not to honor Franz Joseph but to cheer Georg von Schönerer. Schönerer led the small but zealot anti-Semitic pan-German Party. In Parliament he represented a district in Upper Austria whose constituents included not only Anton Bruckner but the customs inspector Alois Hitler and his wife, Klara, who had just become pregnant.
Which was of no importance on August 20, 1888. For the crowd milling by the railroad station in Vienna, Schönerer was important. They gasped when he finally stepped from the train. His mustache and his beard were gone. He had shaved them in compliance with a regulation of the jail awaiting him that day.
A few months earlier, Schönerer had stormed into the offices of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt.* With twenty companions he had beaten up the “Jewish pig scribblers,” broken typefaces, hacked up the desks and pulverized the lighting fixtures. He had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to what his followers considered martyrdom—three months in jail. Now four thousand pan-Germanists surrounded his coach as it rumbled slowly toward the prison on the Landesgerichtsstrasse.
Down with Habsburg!…Down with Austria!…Down with the Jews!…Long live Germany!
A shouting, howling caravan tramped along the streets, scarring the Emperor’s birthday.
The incident also marred the good wishes tendered to Amalie Freud, Sigmund’s mother. She had transposed her vital statistics from the Jewish to the Christian calendar in a way that made her birthday fall on the same date as Franz Joseph’s. The Schönerer demonstration shook the whole Freud family.
It even touched Theodor Herzl. In 1888 he lived and wrote on an esthetic elevation far above politics and at a rather careful distance from all matters Jewish or anti-Jewish. But in the third week of August he had been jarred by something unexpected. The week brought not only Franz Joseph’s birthday but a special day for the Herzls. On August 20, Father and Mother Herzl celebrated their wedding anniversary as well as their reunion with their son. The family sat around a festively decked table in the dining room of the Hotel Hirsch in Bad Gastein. From his travels in England young Theodor had brought gifts for his parents and a smartly tailored London frock coat. Passing through Germany on his way home, he had acquired something else. A shock, a pallor in his cheeks. Written rudely on his face was the discovery that he was nothing but a Jew pig to some people.
A couple of days earlier, in a music hall in Mainz a crowd of students had pointed at his nose and beard. “Hep!…Hep!…” came the jeer immemorial in German lands. Herzl had known the more ideological kind of anti-Jewish prejudice before. In Mainz he’d had a new experience. Street anti-Semitism had exploded directly in his face for the first time.
On the day following the senior Herzls’ anniversary, on August 21, another family passed a milestone, also not entirely smoothly. The Crown Prince’s thirtieth birthday was observed at his summer residence, the Castle of Laxenburg in the Vienna Woods. It appeared to be a rather idyllic ceremony.
The castle chapel had been decorated with pine branches. Court Chaplain Mayer conducted Solemn High Mass. Afterward Rudolf’s tiny daughter Elisabeth presented him with a bouquet of roses as snow-white as her crinoline dress. In her little voice she recited a birthday poem and read aloud congratulatory telegrams from the Emperor and Empress. For once the Crown Princess Stephanie did not look like “the Flemish peasant” as nasty Palace tongues called her behind her back. She couldn’t help the puffy jaw peculiar to the Royal House of Coburg (her father was the Belgian king). But her latest slimming diet had obviously taken and she moved with animation.
The Crown Prince himself was at his beguiling best. When his retinue filed past him with their bows and curtsies he had a different pleasantry, a special individualized word for everybody, down to the lowliest beater of his hunts, down to the most junior mess boy from Ruthenia. He seemed gracefully unaware of any lingering glances. At the Emperor’s birthday dinner in Ischl only seventy-two hours earlier, he had still worn a beard. At his own red-letter day only the mustache was left. His exposed face looked handsome but also disturbingly haggard, and his blue eyes were hard—harder than eyes should be in a great prince who was only turning thirty.
To Moritz Szeps he wrote that week: “The age of thirty marks the dividing point in life and one that isn’t very pleasant either. Much time has passed, spent more or less usefully, but empty in real action and success. We live in a slow, rotten time. Who knows how long this will continue…Each passing year makes me older, less keen and fit. The necessary daily routine is in the long run very tiring. And this eternal living-in-preparation, this permanent waiting for great times of reform, weakens one’s best powers…”
Rudolf’s mood seemed to touch the city’s as it approached its great season. One overture to that season was the Congress of Austrian Rifle Clubs in Vienna. It started on a macabre note. On September 3, before an assembly of nine thousand marksmen from all over the Monarchy, the heir apparent raised a glass “to our most gracious Emperor beloved by us all.”
Whereupon fifty-two bands from fifty-two of the biggest clubs began their parade by marching across the Reichs Bridge. A man in an officer’s cape, ostensibly a parade official, led the procession. Briskly he stepped to the trumpet’s blare until, just as briskly, he scaled the bridge rail and jumped into the river.
Pulled out half drowned but alive, the man would not give a motive. Documents on his person identified him as one Albert Last, owner of the first large lending library in Vienna. The Crown Prince had witnessed the scene and asked if he could help. Herr Last just shivered and bowed deeply and requested permission to drive away wet in a fiacre.
The incident left its mark on Rudolf. In recent times it had not escaped his staff how closely he followed press accounts of people who had killed themselves. And the year had been rich with suicides in Vienna; this summer the newspapers had reported some spectacular instances. A few weeks ago, for example, an elegant young woman had boarded the Budapest express, taken a small suitcase into a toilet, emerged in bridal gown with veil and train, opened the car door and leaped out of the speeding train. She was found dead by the rails, her snowy lace brilliant with blood.
Then there was the recent case of the courting couple who picnicked on capon and champagne outside the gate of a cemetery before going inside. Here the young man placed a pistol in the girl’s mouth. After exploding her skull he blasted his own. The pair had permission to marry; they were attractive and rich and members of the jeunesse dorée—and they had chosen to blow out their brains. Was it because they lived “in a slow, rotten time…empty of real action and success?” It seemed as if these people tried to overcome an uncontrollably failing life with a controlled, will
ed, carefully shaped death.
* * *
* The Neues Wiener Tagblatt had been founded by Rudolf’s friend Moritz Szeps. Szeps left it in 1886 to start the Wiener Tagblatt, the newspaper which figures frequently in this book.
Chapter 7
Vienna had not only more suicides per capita than most European cities, but a particularly high incidence among the upper bourgeoisie. Yet Rudolf felt that this very class would be decisive for the survival of the realm. “The true basis of a modern state,” he had written a few years earlier, “is the great bourgeoisie.”
Where was that greatness in his country? Vienna’s middle class had enjoyed much economic growth but gathered only very little emotional substance. We have seen that its baroque nature kept it from developing a more modern idiom or a distinctly modern soul. It never acquired the toughness of other Western burgherdoms. Politically it could not seem to come into its own. Austria had no counterparts to bourgeois statesmen like France’s Gambetta or the Whig dynamos of England. Despite their numerical strength, Austrian Liberals were ineffective in Parliament. In 1888, in fact, Rudolf had not been able to prevent an alliance directed against them from strata above and below. Some aristocrats had begun meeting with leaders of the Catholic proletariat. Nobleman and working man were about to form a huge joint power, the Christian Socialist Party, which would soon outnumber the Liberals. And of course there was that other soon-to-be-born giant, the Social Democratic Party. Together those two forces would endow the worker with a combativeness, a self-respect far transcending that of the middle class. Toward the end of the century Vienna’s entrepreneurs discovered that it was easier to found a factory than to establish a social identity.
A Nervous Splendor Page 6