A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  The endowment patent which funded the project declared: “This endowment shall be known as the Emperor Franz Joseph Endowment of the Carmelite Convent at Mayerling…The Carmelites are to pray daily for the salvation of the late Crown Prince the Archduke Rudolf.” A church would be built where the Crown Prince had died so that, in the words of the head of the Lord Marshal’s Commission, “this room and the air space above it can never again be used for profane purposes.”

  What was it again that Freud’s paper had said? The one he was working on while the convent was being built? How did he explain the condition of a hand—that is, of an area that had been “touched by a king,” a spot congested with “surplus” emotion? This is how he explained it: “The relation of this hand to the idea of the king seemed so important to the man’s psychical life that the man refused to let the hand enter into any other relation” (so that it could never be used again for ordinary or profane purposes). The area is “saturated with the memory of the event, the trauma which produced the paralysis.”

  Only one thread connected the new convent to the world. In a house just outside the nunnery proper, the Sisters managed a foresters’ old-age home. From here a telephone wire ran to the village post office at Alland. But after a few months it was disconnected, like a nerve end decommissioned by paralysis. Before long the old-age home itself was relinquished to another order of nuns. The Discalced Carmelites perfected their encapsulation. They devoted themselves wholly to The Memory of the Event: living in strictest claustral retirement; veiled forever in black; keeping vigil and praying for Rudolf daily, week after week, year after year, decade after decade unto this day.

  On their refectory table, in front of the Prioress’s seat, lay a round bone with two sockets, just like the one Rudolf had kept on his desk. A skull.

  Meanwhile the Crown Princess Widow Stephanie had added Rudolf’s “bachelor apartment” to her quarters in the Palace. Since most of the rooms’ appointments were “considered unsuitable for her,” as the announcement phrased it, the furniture was removed to other Imperial residences, and from there still further to the official mansions of Austrian ambassadors abroad, to Rome, Belgrade and elsewhere. Court carriages scattered the Crown Prince’s substance to the four winds. The Palace had to be scrubbed clean.

  Yet further erasing and muffling must be done. In the Emperor’s name and her own, Stephanie conferred the Order of the Iron Crown Second Class on Dr. Widerhofer who had examined the scene in Mayerling. Rudolf’s First Lord Chamberlain, Count Bombelles, received the Grand Cross; his valet Loschek, the Gold Merit Cross with Crown plus retirement with full pension. The rest of Rudolf’s more intimate retinue was also either rewarded or decorated into silence. The regiments which bore the Crown Prince’s name received new designations.

  By the end of February the true Rudolf had been laundered away, as far as the Court was concerned. It had both solemnized and bowdlerized his image. “Dear Bombelles,” Stephanie wrote, perhaps with a straight face, to a man long familiar with her hopeless marriage. “It is a dear duty to send you the oldest saber of my unforgettable husband. Keep it as a souvenir of my precious Rudolf…”

  Chapter 28

  February ended amid ice and ashes. Rudolf, the hope of rejuvenating Vienna, had been blasted away together with the glitter of the season. Over cold pavements blew whiffs of burned-out promise. The Ringstrasse kept announcing greatness to eyes and ears stopped up with gloom.

  But the town was still trying to recuperate. It helped that in the last half of February the weather let up now and then. Some mourning flags were furled. A number of ball committees met to weigh a partial resumption of the carnival. The demands of mourning had to be balanced against considerations of charity and economic necessity.

  Schwender’s Colosseum, the city’s biggest Fasching machine, had already reopened with its ladies’ band, its tunnel of love, and its Turkish coffeehouse featuring tableaux vivants. The Alpine Club bravely staged a delayed ball with a huge glacier, a roaring waterfall, and an eagle circling over a freshly shot chamois on a boulder.

  Few came to any such affairs. Commoners were still too unnerved for revelry. The aristocrats were not there at all. Their Graces, Their Highnesses and Lordships, the Lobkowitzes, Esterházys, Schwarzenbergs et al. preferred to do their celebrating far away in the castles of their estates.

  A dark sort of energy did seep back into town. People suddenly began to steal the streets—at least symbolically. In poor districts like Ottakring, street signs and house numbers were unscrewed during the night. The thieves sold them to scrap dealers. Only a few months before, the sweatshop tailors and the jobless cobblers had drunk up their last gulden in the wine gardens, singing the sweetness of Vienna. Now the legend had frozen brittle. Why not dismantle it and sell the rusty parts for junk?

  Perhaps everything that wasn’t stealable was pointless.

  “Why hast thou lived, why hast thou suffered?” demanded Mahler’s Second Symphony, still unfinished in 1889. It was a question Mahler himself must have been asking—not in Vienna, nor in Budapest (where his Royal Opera had resumed after a week’s mourning for the Crown Prince), but in his home town of Iglau. At Iglau he sat by the bedside of his dying father.

  “Why dost thou live?” Young Schnitzler brooded on the theme, though he had a very healthy and prosperous father. He had his Jeanette with whom he had been to bed four hundred and thirty-three times by February 28. He had other girls as well. He had his by-line at last in the prestigious An der schönen blauen Donau. But on February 25, he wrote his friend Olga Waissnix with a self-irony far more severe than his earlier and warmer despairs,

  …things go as well with me as they go badly. The spirit of medicine is easily caught. Hence I have no patients. Apollo gave me song’s sweet lips. Hence I am not produced at the Court Theater. Life is scarcely the highest good of all; which doesn’t seem to keep me from continuing existence.

  There seemed to be little point in living and trying in vain. “I am not fit for society!” Hugo Wolf flung at a friend about the same time. The sentence is from a letter which was a malediction, a curse against the very drive for greatness on which Rudolf had foundered.

  Do I wish to become a famous man? Yes, I was in a fair way of striving toward that goal. Folly! Madness! Idiocy! As if the satisfaction of common vanity would offer compensation for the manifold sacrifices, worries, infamies and outrages that are bound up with the attainment of such an aim! Ten thousand devils may fetch me on the spot if I ever encumber my brain with such anxieties again! The devil of vanity and inordinate ambition will not catch me by the forelock again, and you can depend on that.

  Another man disencumbered himself of such anxieties to the extent of giving up his crown. On March 6, Vienna’s ally in Serbia, King Milan, abdicated. He had no obvious reason. Nominally his twelve-year-old son succeeded him. Actually an anti-Austrian current began to move to power—the first whirl in a vortex which, a generation later, would pull the Empire down into World War I.*

  More immediate and private was the impact of Milan’s act on the House of Habsburg. The ex-King traveled to Budapest to report to Franz Joseph and Elisabeth just why he had given up his reign. The events in Vienna, he confessed to Their Majesties, had upset him unbearably. He was depressed to the point of doing away with himself. Rudolf’s example had made him fear for his sanity. He did not want to die a suicide on a throne.

  It was all Elisabeth needed. She’d already sunk into a neurasthenic trough before Milan’s arrival. Rumors about her condition darkened as they multiplied. The Court was forced to issue a denial: Professor Krafft-Ebing, the great psychiatrist from Graz, had not been summoned to the Empress’s bedside.

  Whatever the truth, a general derangement kept Krafft-Ebing busy. The end of Fasching, March 4, was the traditional date for the gala in Vienna’s insane asylum. Milder cases were allowed to participate, usually in costumes they had made themselves. This year the Mayerling miasma seemed to have produced a horde of go
ry apparitions: executioners, cannibals, Bluebeards, Jack the Rippers, all hopping about frenzied to an all-inmate band “playing” waltzes on papier-mâché instruments. The entire staff of doctors joined in to control the merriment and so did Krafft-Ebing who had just been appointed to take over the University’s psychiatry chair later in the year.

  The life returning to town was either mad or it was death-ridden. The Fiacre Ball held in early March always attracted not only cabbies but young nobility making a cult of the raffish drivers. This year a huger crowd than ever spilled beyond the doors of the Blumensaal. But they hadn’t come to drink or eat or flirt as in other years. They came to listen. They came to hear one man in particular. Patiently they showed appreciation for various favorite vocalists in the fiacre trade, known by such nicknames as “Hungerl” and “Schuster-Franz.” Then the moment arrived for which everybody had been waiting.

  In a swallowtail coat Bratfisch mounted the dais. He sat down on a stool like a coach seat, so ingrained was his habit of performing from the driver’s seat. He began to sing and to whistle—the crowd’s favorites and his own and those of his dead master. One song in particular he had to repeat over and over again. It ended with the refrain, “Wo bleibt die alte Zeit und die G’müthlichkeit? Pfirt di Gott, mein schönes Wien!” “Where is the old time, the Gemütlichkeit? Fare thee well, my beautiful Vienna!” The entire crowd applauded and wept together, the bakers’ apprentices in their rented dinner jackets cheek to wet cheek with playboys in their silken lapels.

  As March went on, the darkness in the city became more abrasive. By the middle of the month Josef Bratfisch was not only heartbroken but furious—furious enough to sue.

  An anti-Semitic paper in Vienna had published a story stating that Bratfisch had auctioned off articles he had received from “a high personage.” At the same time a certain Johann Hartmann addressed a letter to the Fiacre Guild accusing Bratfisch: “He has sold certain articles to Jews. And other Jews, seeing the high prices these fetched, began to sell a great number of items which they called ‘Bratfisch items.’ This was done with Herr Bratfisch’s permission, and he received a percentage of the profits of these faked presents.” Bratfisch filed a libel suit against Hartmann as well as against the anti-Semitic sheet.

  Anti-Semitism grew to be a dominant note of that March’s nastiness. It boiled over during the City Council elections on the eighteenth of the month. Dr. Karl Lueger, the rising young Jew-baiter who was a representative in Parliament, commanded a gang of bravos in his local district of Margareten. They had identified in advance voters known to cast a liberal vote. “Jew!…Jew lackey!…Jew!” they chorused to scare such people away. And Lueger’s candidates won not only in Margareten but in other districts too.

  As usual, the hard times were convenient times for a demagogue—in this case Lueger. And the times were bad during those March weeks. Strife and stress increased everywhere. People complained that the city could not bear the tax load and that welfare costs had gone out of control. Bankruptcies multiplied. The Neue Freie Presse cited an invidious statistic on the front page: Budapest, though a smaller city, ate three paprika chickens for each Backhendl—fried chicken—consumed in Vienna.

  It wasn’t funny. To the Vienna burgher the fried chicken was his Bird of Contentment, an emblematic species presently endangered. No wonder there was a hiss in the streets. A new, ugly sound along the streetcar tracks.

  Only a few months ago the horse tramways of the town had still been rolling drawing rooms. As you boarded, the conductor bowed and wished His Lordship good day and wondered if perhaps His Lordship were in need of a ticket. You said, yes, you would be pleased to have one. The conductor handed you one with a chamberlain’s flourish and received in return not only the fare to which a tip had been added, but also a counterflourish. The conductor bowed a fine arc and thanked His Lordship, and you bowed a bow only a shade less deep, accompanied by a hand wave implying that such gratitude, though overgenerous, was appreciated all the same.

  Now the streetcars had turned sullen. The Tramway Conductors’ Ball did poorly. But a series of midnight meetings of drivers and conductors pulled large and increasingly wrathful throngs throughout March. They’d had enough, their leaders said. Enough of a company rule penalizing drivers who took more than forty-seven minutes to traverse the route from the Währing district to the Prater; which made no allowance for delays caused by funeral parades or blocking freight coaches. They’d had enough of a fourteen-hour day filled with hard work, enough of grubbing for puny tips with incessant courtesies. They wanted more than starvation wages and more than a half-hour lunch break. And they wanted it now.

  The company gave them—an evasive statement. Whereupon trouble started in the tramway garage on the Kronprinz Rudolf Strasse. Strikers beat with clubs at nonstrikers who wanted to enter. The police were called, the paddy wagon came galloping, arrests were made. Nonetheless the streetcars stopped running on a number of lines.

  It was only the start of what promised to be an evil spring. Rudolf’s still-temporary coffin in the Capuchin crypt was robbed again and again of precious decorations—in mid-March, of seven silver leaves from the great laurel wreath. Criminal hands desecrated something else held dear by the city, namely its wine. Thieves kept breaking into the trains bringing Lower Austrian vintages into town, drained half the barrels into their own receptacles and then filled up the barrels with water.

  On Ash Wednesday children playing in a cemetery found the dug-up corpse of an old woman, its breasts sliced off. The perpetrator was believed to be suffering from some weird superstition. And the malevolence continued into Lent. It was not limited to crooks and fiends. It lived in the souls of very civilized young men.

  “Gisela M. is boring,” notes Arthur Schnitzler’s diary on March 19. “She made mistakes in her dress, which disgusted me. I was brutal with her and bothered no more about her. Jeanette bores me too. I prefer a prostitute to her, anything, new lips, a new sigh. The ‘third pillow’ lies beside us…the invisible pillow on which lies another head, and I embrace another when Jeanette holds me tight…” By the end of March, the diary records, Jeanette’s boring thighs had held him tight four hundred and sixty-five times.

  Impatience, callousness, violence simmered in the most upright circles. It was in March that two of young Schnitzler’s crowd, both bucks of the haute bourgeoisie, clashed blades in fencing practice. The exchange grew heated. The foil-tip of one partner—Max Friedmann—broke through his opponent’s mask, punctured an eye, pierced the brain, and killed the man on the spot.

  “At the time Max Friedmann and I were seeing a lot of each other,” Schnitzler wrote. “Often we went to masked balls together. I therefore considered it my duty to visit him the day after the accident and to commiserate with him. I was strangely affected by the fact that not only in conversation with me but also with others, Max dealt hardly at all with his unfortunate victim but seemed solely occupied with the question of whether or not the courts would find him in any way delinquent…The investigation was terminated a few days later because of a lack of incriminating evidence; and sooner than any of us would have thought possible, friend Max was back in the fencing arena.”

  Newspaper reports of the incident struck Bruckner, who knew none of the parties involved but was a connoisseur of death. His niece had just died, and on March 14, he wrote a short note to his sister, enclosing twenty gulden to help meet expenses for the funeral. With no logical connection to his preceding lines he added: “P.S. Yesterday a young officer son of a very rich burgher was stabbed to death at a fencing exercise.”

  His preoccupation with the beyond did not in the least exempt Bruckner from the aggressiveness in the world all around him. He and his small band fought defensive skirmishes against archfoe Brahms and against Brahms’s redoubtable artillery general Hanslick. During those harsh bellicose days the underdog Brucknerians even tried a counteroffensive. At the end of February their organ, the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, had neatly chewed up a
recent recital of the enemy’s songs:

  Though Brahms often writes with genius, he just as often reaches for the pen when he has no inspiration. Four out of five songs…were not good…Despite Brahms’s personal participation the performances were received rather poorly. Some time ago one could read black-on-white in a newspaper of high repute [i.e., Hanslick in the Neue Freie Presse] that Herr Brahms’s Zigeuner Lieder had dropped to earth like a gift from heaven. This meteorological event can be less easily documented than one that is more remarkable still: At the Bösendorfer Hall yesterday, during the rendition of those Brahms Lieder, the audience fell from the clouds.

  A few weeks later the Zigeuner Lieder were sung again, this time in the big Musikvereinssaal, and again the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung assaulted the great Brahms bravely. And in another article on the same page you could read:

  Our famous native composer Bruckner has made such rapid progress with his Ninth Symphony that it may be ready for performance next season. The first movement and the scherzo are almost finished. The second movement, a serenade, is already sketched out. The master believes that this new symphony will give him his greatest satisfaction. It seems probable that the new symphony will be first performed abroad—naturally. This is the fate of all our native composers. [Brahms of course, was German, not a native of Austria.] Our own artists receive recognition only if they are first valued beyond our borders.

  Freud, around the corner from Bruckner, was much younger and less experienced in being an unappreciated prophet. But that spring he too jumped into a feud, all the way.