Dr. Slatin realized almost too late what was afoot: he was being ushered, euphoniously and piously, toward a trap. If he admitted to more than one bullet, he might also be admitting the possibility of more than one death and therefore the killing of Mary Vetsera. “Since I never had the Crown Prince’s revolver in my own hand,” he would write in a memoir published after his own death, “I could truthfully answer, ‘Nescio, I don’t know.’ Otherwise I would have fallen into the snare of this cunning and jovial prince of the Church.”
Characteristically more blunt in his curiosity about Mayerling was Johannes Brahms. But uncharacteristic for the normally cool North German was his perturbation over the suicide. He even took time off from his rehearsal with Joachim. Because of Mayerling the premiere of his Third Sonata for Violin and Piano must be delayed anyway. In the meantime the master shot off to his publisher in Berlin what was for him quite a shaken letter: “The saying that ‘everything has happened before’ has been dashed to pieces. It is new how emperors and kings kill themselves. They explode, they drown [an allusion to King Ludwig of Bavaria], they kill themselves. And now, in addition to all this, our Imperial tragedy…Would you send me newspapers from your side of the border—but in an envelope, please…”
At the other end of the musical and emotional gamut, Brahms’s antagonist suffered the same shock still more intensely. Anton Bruckner was not merely affected by Mayerling. He was consumed by it.
On an icy mid-February morning, somebody knocked at the door of Bruckner’s young musician friend Friedrich Eckstein. Outside stood the master’s housekeeper, the incomparable and much-tried Kathi Kachelmayer. She had a message. Professor Bruckner had got it into his head to go sleigh-riding in the Vienna Woods with Herr Eckstein, if Herr Eckstein would share the expense, and that’s why she had to go chasing through the cold streets at this unearthly hour. What did Herr Eckstein say to such an idea? The Professor was dying to know in his usual sudden fashion.
Herr Eckstein had a well-to-do father as well as an unquestioning reverence for genius. He was one of Bruckner’s very few true friends. An hour and a half later the two boarded a train at the Southern Railway terminal. Bruckner, in his usual broad-brimmed hat and loden cape, pulled at his enormous scarf and, peculiarly distracted, exclaimed over and over again at how wonderful the fresh snow looked and how marvelous the landscape would be still deeper in the woods. They got out at Baden. Here Bruckner fussed tremendously over the right kind of horse and the suitable sort of sleigh, and it was not until he told the driver to head toward the Monastery of Heiligenkreuz that Eckstein grasped the reason behind the frenzy.
“Here it became obvious,” Eckstein wrote in his memoirs, “what the true subject of Bruckner’s thought was, and the object of his trip. It was about the event that had occupied him so much during the last few days, the entirely unexpected death of Crown Prince Rudolf, the catastrophe of Mayerling. It was barely a week since these things had happened that had filled Bruckner with the deepest horror. Now he began once more, perhaps for the one hundredth time, to discuss the matter with me and to ask my opinion of it. He confessed that the true purpose of the sleigh ride was not his need to breathe fresh air or to enjoy the winter scenery, but the insatiable, overwhelming desire to visit the site of all these horrors, to inspect closely the area itself, and, if possible, to learn from persons living there details about the uncanny events.
“Therefore he had decided to visit first the Monastery of Heiligenkreuz, to find out details from some of the monks, or perhaps even from the Abbot himself, who was his personal friend, and of whom it was said that he had performed the last rites over the corpse…
“After lunch we entered the monastery. Bruckner asked a monk to announce him to the Abbot, who greeted Bruckner very respectfully…
“The conversation was general at first: the seriousness of the times, certain ecclesiastical issues, the musical situation in Vienna, etc. Not a word about the Crown Prince or the catastrophe of Mayerling. Bruckner began to show obvious signs of impatience. I saw that he was getting tired of all this diplomacy. And sure enough he burst out. Really! Would the Abbot not ever mention anything about those certain occurrences! Those critical days at Mayerling?
“The Abbot, so suddenly interrupted in his small talk, actually seemed not to have heard the question. But Bruckner repeated it and became more importunate. The Abbot, at bay, had to give a serious reply.
“Yes, he said, he had given final blessings to a corpse under unusual circumstances, at an unusual hour; but he was still so shaken by the events that it was entirely impossible for him to talk about it. [This was the Abbot who had buried Mary Vetsera.] In addition, he could not grossly violate the silence to which he had been sworn.
“Bruckner, very disappointed, now gave up his effort. We returned to small talk, and before taking our leave, Bruckner had to agree to the Abbot’s request to play the great organ of the monastery for the evening’s blessing.
“Soon afterward I had the good fortune to hear the master make this venerable powerful instrument come alive in the deepest silence of the forest. Bruckner fantasized for a while variations on a choral theme which preoccupied him just at that time, and he knew how to get the most moving effects out of this very simple melody…
“At 6 P.M. we climbed into the sleigh again, but to my surprise Bruckner asked the driver not to return to Baden, but to drive first to Mayerling itself. We reached it after a marvelous journey through wooded gorges now swathed in darkness. Bruckner had hoped to meet a local here or there, and to get him to talk, or to look at the site of these murderous events from up close. Again he was disappointed. The sequestered hunting lodge was quite dark, all entrances locked and barricaded, no human being anywhere. We climbed out of the sleigh to look at the place more closely, but saw no movement. But as we walked along the building, we noticed a feeble light in the last window on the ground floor. Inside we spied a few nuns in black veils who were reading their breviaries by candlelight or whispering prayers. This unexpected sight was so spooky that Bruckner vehemently clasped my arm.
“Now it was obvious that we had no business being there, and that we had no alternative but to return with our purpose unfulfilled. Silently, we returned to our monastery in order to warm and fortify ourselves with its wine. This drink chased away the ghosts of night…”
They did not stay chased very long. Back in Vienna, Bruckner stood in front of the Imperial Palace and counted, over and over again, its many hundreds of windows. At home he tried to find a letter from his friend August Göllerich in Regensburg. It had answered his request to total up the exact number of embellishments on Regensburg City Hall—turrets, weather vanes, gargoyles, etc. Bruckner’s counting mania had come upon him again, as it sometimes did in times of stress: the need somehow to order and structure and contain a great amorphous doom.
Chapter 27
The whole city had become a hive of paroxysms and aberrations centered on the new body in the Capuchin Church. Despite the cold, lines lengthened daily at the crypt entrance. With almost hourly regularity, stretcher-bearers carried out women who had fainted before Rudolf’s coffin. A delegation of gypsies arrived to lay a wreath with the inscription: Oh, great prince, our zithers will moan for you! On the same day all the gold leaves vanished from the giant wreath left by the French press. The widow Rosalia Franzl, praying by the casket, was robbed of her pocketbook with the savings of a year.
Peasants from Dalmatia and the Tyrol came straggling on foot into the city, hoping they would still be on time for the funeral. Some of them mistook the Stock Market for the Palace. This was quite natural. No life stirred at the Palace. But the Stock Market, a neo-Renaissance splendor on the Ringstrasse (diagonally opposite Freud’s house), swirled with top-hatted gentlemen in mourning clothes. With pensive countenance they maintained the firm upward trend in prices.
It was weeks since Rudolf’s death, but grotesqueries would not stop. A special Chinese funeral flag had been sent express fro
m the Emperor at Peking, and the Chinese Ambassador couldn’t be dissuaded from climbing onto the roof of the Hotel Imperial to hoist it personally. He almost fell off. Within two hours the wind tore the flag loose; like a gaudy eagle it floated above the streets. It was joined by a melee of black kites in the sky, for many of the regular funeral flags had pulled free as well.
And the suicide season in Vienna, which had paused for a while as if in awe of superior company, began again. In fact, it took off with almost competitive flamboyance. On February 8, a railway employee named Franz Caspar climbed into a giant copper kettle in the courtyard of the Technological Institute. Not a drop of liquid could seep out of this vessel. Here Franz Caspar cut both his wrists as well as his throat. When he was found, the doctors weren’t sure what he had died of, his wounds or drowning in his own blood.
Two days later a jeweler’s assistant, Joseph Enderle, set for himself and his five children a sumptuous Sunday table of high tea: coffee, cake, cookies, whipped cream, gingerbread—treats quite beyond his threadbare means. Sunday night the six were dead. Herr Enderle had laced the coffee with strychnine.
Two days later still, a soldier pointed a gun at himself and pulled the trigger. His act would not have received very prominent notice, especially since he survived his severe wound. But he had tried to kill himself while doing sentry duty at Laxenburg, Rudolf’s summer residence.
Soon things began to happen that showed how deeply the Crown Prince’s fate had stained the imaginations of young men. One of these was David Mosé, a gifted art student of eighteen. He obtained permission to sketch the Crown Prince’s lying-in-state at the Court Chapel. His drawing attracted the approval of the monarch himself, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office acquired reproduction rights for twenty gold ducats. Mosé collected the honorarium at the bureau of the Palace Paymaster; on his way home—he lived at Berggasse 22—he suddenly lapsed into delirium. To passers-by on the Ringstrasse he shouted his name, and that of his parents, and “Mayerling.” An ambulance carried him away.
Another painter, Georg Hartmann, was well embarked on a successful career. He enjoyed commissions from the highest aristocracy. The news of the Crown Prince’s death, though, pushed him into nervous exhaustion. He took to his bed. The only sentence he would speak to visiting friends was “I am also thirty years old…I am also thirty years old…” After a week he went back to the easel. But he changed the half-finished landscape on his canvas to the portrait of a young man lying in state. Then, within the space of a week, he stabbed himself with a scissors, slashed himself with a razor, and jumped from a third-floor window. On the sixteenth of February he was committed to Professor Meynert’s psychiatric clinic at the University.
This was the clinic to which Dr. Freud had not been admitted as a physician. By 1889 Freud had drifted away still further from the neurological orientation of his old teacher Meynert. And he was not the man to hide either drift or rift. He had the inner armor to take both the penalties and the rewards of the outsider.
But he was no maverick when it came to being a Habsburg subject. The Imperial charisma touched him as it did others. It was not insignificant that his mother had translated her birthday from the Jewish to the Christian calendar so that it coincided with Franz Joseph’s on August 18. Freud himself transmitted to his children this fascination with the Crown. His son Martin recalled fond stories his father told about the Emperor. And: “We Freud children were all stout royalists, delighting to hear or to see all we could of the Royal Court. We were always entranced to see a Hofwagen, a coach of the Court, and we could tell with precision the extent of the passenger’s importance by the color of the high wheels and the angle at which the magnificently liveried coachman held his whip.”
Freud’s principal biographer, Ernest Jones, relates that Freud was “greatly shocked” by the drowning of King Ludwig of Bavaria in 1886. Even the death of a more remote prince like that of Alfonso XII of Spain in 1885 made (again in Jones’s words) “a deep impression.” Yet Freud was quite provoked by his own disturbance: “The complete stupidity of the hereditary system is seen through a whole country’s being upset by the death of a single person.”
What, then, did Dr. Freud say about the suicide of the Crown Prince, whose Palace lay fifteen minutes away from the Freud residence? What did a cataclysm so heavy with psychiatric overtones signify to him? What did he, inevitably sensitive to Imperial symbols, insignia and anecdotes, think about Mayerling?
Nothing whatsoever, in print. Not a syllable of comment has come down in any book. Not one word about it in any article, monograph, published letter or even oral mention chronicled by others.
It would seem a remarkable feat of abstention—except. Except that the subject muffled in this Freudian silence bulks unnamed but imperfectly neutralized and quite unmistakable in the work that occupied the young doctor during the days of Mayerling, as well as before and after it: the paper he wrote, and kept rewriting, in French on the cause of paralysis.
It was a stringently scientific tract, framed in scholar’s language. Yet in it can be heard eerie echoes of the hunting lodge in the Vienna Woods. For example, it explores at length the difference in brain disease between organic and hysteric paralyses. Hysteria, the paper said, produces a so-called functional lesion which is “indeed a lesion but one of which no trace can be found after death.” These lesions, “although they may not persist after death, are true organic lesions even if they are slight and transitory.”
This sounds like a furtive postscript to the autopsy report on Rudolf. Echoes of Rudolf become still stronger as the paper examines the problem of an arm that refuses to move.
“I will give a suitable example,” Freud wrote. “…I only ask permission to move on to psychological ground—which can scarcely be avoided when talking about hysteria…I will begin with some examples drawn from the social side. A comic story is told of a loyal subject who would not wash his hand because his sovereign had touched it. The relation of this hand to the idea of the king seemed so important to the man’s psychical life that he refused to let the hand enter into any other relation…Savage tribes in antiquity, who burned their dead chief’s horse, his weapons and even his wives along with his body, were obeying this idea that nobody should ever touch them after him.”
In the same way, Freud wrote, a hysterically paralyzed arm “is not accessible to conscious associations and impulses because…[it] is saturated with the memory of the event, the trauma which produced the paralysis.”
And as if the undertow of this weren’t strong enough, Freud then proceeded to a discussion whose terms exactly fit the psychic aftermath of the Rudolf-shock. He dealt with the “surplus” feeling an event may produce through “subconscious associations.” The surplus can be “abreacted,” i.e., discharged. “If the subject is unwilling or unable to get rid of this surplus, the memory of the impression attains the importance of a trauma and becomes the cause of permanent hysterical symptoms.”
Here Freud used for the first time the word “subconscious.” For the first time he employed the crucial principles of repression and abreaction—so new to himself that he was naming them for the first time. For the first time he used examples from anthropology to flesh out his ideas. For the first time he fully unloosed an intuition that was encyclopedic, heterodox, unpredictable; ranging from neurological scholarship at the start of the paper to nuances scooped “from the social side” at the end.
The paper, with its Mayerling subtext, was a seedbed of psychoanalysis. What’s more, in doing all this Freud may also have shored up his own sanity against the demons roaming the streets since January 30. There is a therapy to which only the creative are privileged. Freud “abreacted” his Mayerling trauma by using it to construct an insight—about abreaction. And when it came to publishing the paper, he repressed the abreaction. “For accidental and personal reasons,” as Freud put it, without ever explaining, the paper did not see print until 1893.
Two weeks after the Crown Prince’s d
eath Franz Joseph took a number of steps which proved Dr. Freud a precise case-historian of Mayerling and, incidentally, Anton Bruckner an accurate spy.
Rudolf’s testament bequeathed Mayerling to his little daughter Elisabeth. The Emperor lost no time in buying it from her, very quietly, sometime in mid-February. A few days later the Lord Marshal’s Commission, still taking inventory at the lodge, found itself interrupted again. Now it was not the Papal Nuncio but another spiritual personage: Maria Euphrasia Kaufmann, Prioress of the order of Discalced Carmelites at Baumgarten near Vienna. She was accompanied by the architect Josef Schmalzhofer. It was His Majesty’s command, Herr Schmalzhofer said, to build a new Carmelite nunnery on the site. For that purpose he had to do some surveying here. And very soon, even before the arrival of masons, the Carmelite Sisters began to take over Mayerling. Bruckner had glimpsed their dark, hooded figures that winter night. He may have been among the first outsiders to know a fact which was not announced until April 9.
The architect’s instructions were to bury the hunting lodge under the convent. The walls of the bedroom that had enclosed Rudolf’s end were pulled down, and the parquet floor ripped up. The spiral staircase was demolished together with the rarely used matrimonial bedroom to which it led. On the roof, the chimneys were plucked away. All the outer contours of this wing were changed and enlarged so that it might serve as the convent church, with altar, sacristy and side chapel. Suitable remodeling in the rest of the building provided for the nuns’ dormitory and for dining and reception rooms, etc. Even the garden was replanted and its dimensions changed. All the fences around the property were rebuilt to a greater height.
A Nervous Splendor Page 26