A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

Chapter 10

  By late September, high guests who were very much of this world had begun their travels to Vienna. The great season would begin with an arduous first act. Kaiser Wilhelm’s descent on the city cast a long shadow in advance, gothic and spike-helmeted. “Wilhelm II is making waves,” Rudolf wrote to Moritz Szeps on August 24. “Probably he will soon create much confusion in old Europe. By the grace of God he is dumb, but also energetic and stubborn, and considers himself the greatest genius. I imagine that in a few years he will bring Hohenzollern Germany to the pass it deserves.”

  Words eerily prophetic. But Rudolf was wise enough to know that prophetic is not politic. He despised Wilhelm for his Prussian saber-happy presumption; his anti-liberal Junkerism; his addle-headed bombast about German tradition, blood and honor. He suspected that Wilhelm’s posturings in Vienna might unleash the Teutonic furor for which von Schönerer had been jailed. In fact he shared these thoughts with one of Wilhelm’s employees—Bismarck. The aged Iron Chancellor had not yet been fired by his new young master. But he, no less than Rudolf, looked ahead to the ultimate consequences of Wilhelm’s demagoguery: What would happen if Wilhelm were to succeed in taking Austria’s German-speaking areas for the Reich? Hungary apart, the Habsburg Empire would then consist of twenty-odd million Slavs who might well leave the remnant Empire to join Russia. This would compound, not lessen, the danger to Germany from the East.

  Of course none of this could be uttered aloud in Vienna. Rudolf was aware of that. The government maintained a delicate ambivalence about Prussia. Franz Joseph might partly agree with the Crown Prince’s opinion, but Franz Joseph’s censors would not release such an opinion into print—at least not in so many words.

  Therefore other words would have to be found. Again Rudolf went to Mayerling to think and to write. Again he returned with sheets covered by his bold, curving script. Again the old servant Nehammer zigzagged from the Imperial Palace to arrive at Moritz Szeps’s doorstep as the “masseur for his daughter.”

  Soon a piece in the Wiener Tagblatt described the friendship between the German Kaiser and the Austrian Crown Prince: They were both of the same generation and had the same great vitality and the same high level of ideals, all of which bound together two quite different and yet allied temperaments. This article protected the paper from any charges of obvious bias. It was followed by an editorial, also unsigned, which hoped that the enthusiasm shown to Wilhelm on his arrival would have an Austrian character. To pervert the welcome into a pan-German demonstration would insult Emperor Franz Joseph and “presumably distort the Kaiser’s purpose.”

  Rudolf was cooking up a careful climate for the arrival of His Prussian Majesty.

  Before that arrival, however, Rudolf found more companionable company: Edward, the Prince of Wales. Wales would be the right diversion before the trials to come. The Englishman had just met the Emperor in Croatia to watch Austrian army maneuvers and to do some hunting. Rudolf gladly joined them. Edward was the opposite of Wilhelm and therefore in some ways like Rudolf: he breezed past protocol, evaded ceremony, favored liberal politicians, snubbed the stiffer bluebloods, fraternized with the more enlightened millionaires. He couldn’t match Rudolf’s intelligence nor the Austrian’s ethical and social acuity. But he did radiate a bonhomie that was depression-proof. It worked like balm on the Crown Prince, whose frail nerves were tested still further by the prospect of Wilhelm.

  “I would invite Wilhelm only to get rid of him in some elegant hunting accident,” Rudolf wrote his wife that fall. “…but I like to invite Wales. He’s in fine fettle and wants to see everything, take part in everything. He’s indefatigable, he remains his old self. Nothing seems to tire the old boy.”

  Franz Joseph didn’t always take to Wales’s loose ways, yet he found himself almost helplessly amused by the Britisher. The Emperor got into one of his rare playful moods and teased his guest with his own superb horsemanship. “The weather is still excellent and the riding enjoyable on maneuvers,” he wrote Frau Schratt on September 16. “I tried hard to shake off the Prince of Wales by continued hard trotting and then by sustained gallop. But I didn’t succeed. This chubby man kept right up with me. He showed incredible endurance and esprit, even after he grew a bit stiff. He wore through his red Hussar’s trousers, which was pretty uncomfortable since he had nothing on underneath…”

  Nothing daunted Wales’s jolliness. Shortly afterward Rudolf took him to Vienna, to see The Gypsy Baron at Alexandrine von Schönerer’s Theater an der Wien. For this occasion Johann Strauss rushed out of his sequestered palais in the Igelgasse to conduct his operetta in person. By 1888 this was a very unusual sight. Even more unusual was his reward: a summons to chat with Their Highnesses in the Imperial Box during intermission. As a rule members of the All Highest Family did not ask commoners (however famous) to sit with them in public. Afterward the Crown Princes drove to the Prater for supper in the Sacher Garden. Here Wales invited the leader of the orchestra to the table, again to Rudolf’s delight and to the narrowed eyes of other archdukes present.

  The following day the august twosome again blithely violated royal protocol. They lunched on the terrace of the Sacher mid-town restaurant with Baron Hirsch—and Vienna gasped. The Baron was a Jewish banker of near-Rothschild caliber. With Rudolf’s encouragment he had financed Austria’s Eastern Railway to Turkey and thus completed the route of the Orient Express which began to run this year. Again through Rudolf, his capital infusions had saved Austrian shipping lines in the Adriatic from collapse. And he had helped launch—once more through Rudolf’s good offices—newspapers like Moritz Szeps’s Wiener Tagblatt in which the Crown Prince so often ghosted.

  All this did not keep Baron Moritz Hirsch from being a Jew. He had conferred with kings before; usually after slipping into some palace’s side entrance. But here he was on the Sacher terrace, in the blatancy of the noonday sun, sharing champagne and laughter with royal bloods.

  Ordinarily Rudolf was no ready laugher. That mid-September week was one of the last truly happy ones in his life. Shortly afterward the First Lord Chamberlain in Berlin addressed a message to the First Lord Chamberlain in Vienna. Amidst a padding of amenities came a steely hint: “As soon as His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, has made his dispositions, His Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm, will make his own concerning His Majesty’s visit to Vienna.” In plainer words: Wilhelm would not set foot on the Austrian capital unless Wales left it first. Wilhelm wanted to shine in Vienna as its only high visitor.

  Wales was jolly even about that. Nothing else could be expected from a man like his nephew the Kaiser, a man consisting almost entirely of boots and spurs and epaulettes. Wales announced that he would like to go hunting in Rumania for a while before returning to Vienna later. Now the Junker’s dispositions could proceed.

  Franz Joseph had been away from his capital for weeks. He had vacationed in Ischl (working daily, though, from dawn to noon); had attended maneuvers all over the Balkans, and stalked deer in Hungary with such rustic passion that he scratched the knees left bare by his leather shorts. “After these beautiful days,” he wrote his wife Elisabeth, “I must go to Vienna to start preparing myself for the arrival of the German Emperor, an event whose sole enjoyable element is the fact that I’ll be able to see you at last after such a long time.”

  But it was also an event that would prove the importance of his capital. Back in Vienna, he first inspected all the changes made in the Imperial Palace on behalf of his guest. In the so-called Leopold Wing, dozens of apartments were being refurbished to accommodate Wilhelm, his Kaiserin, his retinue and the numerous officers of his guard. Next, the Emperor’s protocol gestures had to usher out all other majesties sojourning in the city.

  “Today at ten minutes before 10 A.M. the Emperor called on King George of Greece at the Hotel Imperial,” stated a Palace communiqué on September 27. “The monarchs exchanged greetings and then repaired to a reception salon. After twenty minutes the Emperor took his leave, being escorted by the King t
o the vestibule. Immediately thereafter King George of Greece was driven to the Imperial Palace to reciprocate with a visit of his own to the Emperor.”

  A day later the King of Greece left Vienna.

  “This morning the Emperor paid a fifteen-minute call on Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, at the Grand Hotel,” stated another Palace communiqué on September 28. “Immediately after the conclusion of the visit, the Prince of Wales called on the Emperor in the Palace.”

  Within twenty-four hours Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, entrained for Bucharest to kill boars.

  The stage was set. On October 1, the flags went up on the Ringstrasse. From roofs and towers they waved, from pediments and cupolas: the black-and-white of the Kingdom of Prussia, the black-red-gold of the German Empire, and, of course, the black-and-yellow of Austria. On October 2, the police finished putting up barricades behind which the crowds could watch the spectacle. On October 3, Wilhelm arrived.

  That day the entire Vienna garrison was called out “to gratify Kaiser Wilhelm’s military inclination,” as the official Wiener

  Zeitung put it. The malls of the Ringstrasse and the roadway of the Mariahilferstrasse (a thoroughfare leading from the Western Railway terminal to the Ring) were sky-blue with row upon row of crack infantry regiments standing at attention.

  Gold-caped and crimson-trousered, the Hussars set on horseback, facing the station from the east. White-tunicked Dragoons on black steeds faced it from the south. The sun gleamed on silvered helmets, tier after tier. Baroque Vienna knew how to stage a show; it enlisted the very sky. Not the puniest cloud dared blemish the perfection.

  In the station itself the Friedrich Wilhelm Infantry Regiment (named after the Kaiser’s father) had taken up position in their carmine trousers, their blue coats and silver sleeves. In front of them stood Franz Joseph wearing the uniform of the Prussian Grenadier Regiment of which he was “Proprietor” and Honorary Colonel. On his head rested the helmet whose bronze eagle on top was swathed in a snow-white plume made of bleached buffalo hair. He was waiting, silent and motionless, along with the rest of the Imperial Family, at the precise spot where Wilhelm was to leave his car.

  At 1 P.M. sharp the Kaiser’s private train blustered slowly into the station. The locomotive bore a huge shield with the Royal Prussian arms. To a solemn great hiss of steam it stopped at the proper mark. There was silence—and a moment of confusion. It turned out that the Kaiser had changed the sequence of railway carriages designated in the protocol. His saloon car had come to a halt sixty yards away from where the Austrian Emperor expected him. Franz Joseph was therefore forced to run to meet his guest.

  It was the day’s one mishap, quickly overcome by the Emperor’s fleetness. At fifty-eight he was still light of foot and met the young German Emperor in time. Wilhelm descended with his renowned slow swagger, splendid in the uniform of his Austrian regiment, his withered left arm propped on the hilt of his sword.

  Franz Joseph stepped close to him, saluted, removed his hat. The two sovereigns embraced and kissed each other three times, sideburns against mustaches. Crown Prince Rudolf, also embroidered in a Prussian uniform, followed suit. Introductions and greetings between the highest dignitaries of both entourages. Heels clicked. Spurs jingled. All over the capital one hundred and twenty cannon thundered twenty-one times in echoing, re-echoing salute.

  Then trumpeters on the platform blew a fanfare that was taken up by other trumpets outside the station, then by still others on the Mariahilferstrasse. Like lightning the signal leaped from shining brass to shining brass, all the way to the Imperial Palace.

  Meanwhile the two Emperors had entered the street. Commands rang out like whipcracks. In a thousandfold flash of polished rifles and braided sleeves, the regiments presented arms. Massed bands began to heave with the anthem whose music both Empires had in common. The Austrian lyrics were “God protect our Emperor…” while the Prussian Reich’s, not yet notorious, were “Deutschland über Alles…”

  From windows and roofs and sidewalks the throng roared out its cheer. Then the Emperors boarded the Imperial Coach of State, a gilded, scrollworked baroque mountain on wheels. The hooves of escorting cavalry began to clatter. Stately, the procession flowed eastward toward the Palace. The sun, golden and unclouded still, moved the other way, toward the west.

  During that first week in October Jack the Ripper stalked through the world press. Nearly every morning dawned over a new mutilated whore’s corpse in Whitechapel, and the Viennese newspapers reported the horrors. But Vienna’s eyes were elsewhere. It even paid less attention than usual to the fact that October 4 was Franz Joseph’s name day. All heads turned to the Kaiser; his presence straddled the city. Used to Franz Joseph’s simple deportment and Rudolf’s subtler charms, Vienna was astounded by an All Highest boor. A cloddish emperor—what grandiose scandal!

  To begin with, Wilhelm managed to vulgarize his own state of mourning. Because of his father’s recent death he could not attend the opera. Hence the opera attended him. That is, the Court Opera orchestra trooped to the Palace on October 4, to play for what was essentially an audience of one. And that one, the Kaiser, talked and laughed noisily throughout the performance—despite the fact that the selections were mostly from Tannhäuser and Parsifal to please the Kaiser’s professed taste for Wagner.

  This concert was followed by a reception where the Kaiser awarded the Black Eagle Order with Diamonds to Count Kálnoky, Franz Joseph’s Foreign Minister; the Black Eagle Order to Koloman Tisza, Prime Minister of Hungary; the Red Eagle Order, Second Class, to lesser notables like Herr Uhl, Mayor of Vienna—and nothing, nothing whatsoever to Count Eduard von Taaffe, Prime Minister of the Austrian half of the Empire. The omission expressed not only Wilhelm’s dislike of Taaffe’s reliance on Slavs in his government coalition; but also harbored a hint that the “Austrian half,” being really German, did not merit separate recognition.

  Rudolf, for his part, disliked Taaffe’s reactionary bent. But the affront to the Prime Minister was an affront to his native region of the Habsburg patrimony. Wilhelm’s rudeness recalled an even more egregious snub four months earlier. At that time Wilhelm had sent a special representative to Vienna to announce his accession to the throne. The envoy carried individual messages for most members of the Imperial House. For the Crown Prince there was none. From the first Wilhelm had made it clear that he considered Rudolf an intellectualizing sissy who would never be able to make Austria strong. Franz Joseph’s heir would be lucky to keep the Danubian crazyquilt together. And Rudolf, as this man’s host, would now have to smile for days! For his health he’d have to raise glass after glass!

  October 4 ended with the state dinner in Wilhelm’s honor. Franz Joseph, who gave it in the Redoutensaal ballroom of the Palace, did not have a very smooth time of it either, as his letter to Frau Schratt confessed: “I was terribly afraid of the toast I had to offer, but I managed to get through it without getting stuck and without needing a prompter…Luckily I am surviving the current festivities…”

  For his son the evening must have been much more painful. Once Rudolf had published an anonymous pamphlet which called on the Austrian aristocracy in rather peremptory terms to do more working and learning, and less idling and attitudinizing. As if by way of answer, Rudolf’s cousin Otto had appeared amid the red plush of the Sacher Restaurant one night, his Imperial and Royal person entirely nude except for the Order of the Golden Fleece gleaming on a hairless chest. On October 4, dozens of such elevated drones pranced in the Redoutensaal all too fully dressed, on their meticulously best behavior. To Rudolf it compounded their inanity. They took such pains over this of all occasions.

  They tripped on parquet covered with Oriental rugs for this one night, postured against Gobelin tapestries brought specially from Imperial storerooms. More than three thousand candles flickered from chandeliers, from sconces and candelabras. The flames lit up all those archdukes, grand dukes, princes and miscellaneous highnesses curvetting about the Prussian and his gracel
essness. They were like gazelles thrilled silly by a gorilla. They loved the way he sat with his arms akimbo; or poured down mineral water between sips of champagne; or tapped his foot so cockily out of beat with the “Simplizius” waltz conducted by Edi Strauss, Johann’s brother; or how he adjusted his monocle baldly at the cleavage of a simpering comtesse…“Herr Uhl, the Mayor of Vienna,” reported the Wiener Tagblatt, “did not succeed in thanking Kaiser Wilhelm for the decoration he had received. His Majesty was too closely surrounded by aristocrats.”

  From the Vienna populace Wilhelm aroused a much thinner response. Rudolf upstaged him. He hadn’t been able to budge Franz Joseph from belief in the necessity of this state visit: it would display the continued solidarity of the Central European powers. But he had managed to persuade his father of another need as well. The Kaiser must be kept on a tight leash in Vienna.

  Wilhelm was dying to do a solo strut that might easily provoke a pan-German riot. Rudolf intervened. Rudolf’s own popularity was so potent, the sight of the Crown Prince would bring on Habsburg cheers to drown any Teutonic dissonance. Hence he did what was personally repugnant and politically paramount. He stuck to Wilhelm like grim death—with his father’s permission. “The Emperor wishes me to tell you,” he wrote Count Kálnoky, the Imperial Foreign Minister, “that he is in full agreement that I should take part in the déjeuner given by Reuss (the German Ambassador), but he was of the opinion that the matter must be done with extreme care, so that the real intention, not to let the German Emperor walk about alone in Vienna, cannot be discerned.”

  And so a slim shadow accompanied all of squat Wilhelm’s posings. Most of the cries the Kaiser heard were “Long Live the Crown Prince!” Again and again the liberal press ended its description of a round of appearances by the German Emperor with the same phrase: “It was a beautiful Austrian day.”