A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  Even Olga Waissnix, Arthur Schnitzler’s flirtatious pen pal, joined the craze. Usually she tried to impress the intellectualizing young doctor with her profundity; but at the end of March she sent him a visiting card on which was written a single sentence: “Did you, perhaps, write Love Poachers?” Poor Schnitzler had to answer: “No, gracious lady, Love Poachers, like so many other plays, was not written by me. In fact, I haven’t even seen it.”

  Everybody else, though, saw it or intended to. The promotion continued. On April 14, a Herzl feuilleton in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung quite unembarrassedly savaged Paul Déroulède who had drummed up a tumult to make his book of ultramilitaristic verse a best-seller in France. “These poems are not the result of a genuine inspiration,” wrote Herzl. “Not the sort from which a new ‘Marseillaise’ can be created. What will remain of Junker Déroulède? At the most, his name, like that of the inventor of a famous patent medicine. An artist in publicity, he has caused talk for a while.”

  Herzl knew whereof he criticized. Himself a first-rank artist in publicity, he would later harness that art to a genuine inspiration. When the Dreyfuss Affair jolted him into his Jewishness in 1895—he was by then Paris correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse—his call would find him fully armed. He knew how to mobilize and politicize the Jews’ ancient hunger for Zion. Only a Herzl could have accoutered it in fashionable dramatics. It would take a Viennese maestro of sheer manner to insist that all delegates to the First Zionist Congress in 1897 wear formal attire, top hats and tailcoats, for the benefit of reporters and cameras. Herzl led his people toward Jerusalem with a nearly Christian lordliness taught him by his very self-disdain as a Jew in Schönerer’s and Lueger’s Vienna. Before he took it over, Zionism had been considered a messy ghetto zealotry. Herzl’s public relations would raise it to the glamour of a great “Westernized” international movement.

  Meanwhile in 1889 the Court Theater appreciated a playwright who could “cause talk for a while.” Additional performances of Love Poachers were scheduled throughout the year. Indeed the management informed Herzl that his one-act comedy Der Flüchtling (The Refugee) would be produced in May. This time his work would be put on under his own name. Herzl had fulfilled his vow to his friend Schnitzler. He had arrived at the new Court Theater, in its very first season. Now he had the prestige and the means to make definite wedding plans. In June he would slide a gold band over one of those flossy fingers that had been first in Vienna to sport painted nails—his darling Julie’s.

  Rosiness seemed to break out like a rash in an Austria so recently emerged from woe. A long, freshening, April night rain helped Johann Strauss pull entirely out of his “phase.” In a fit of optimism he decided to move to his country seat Schönau in the Vienna Woods earlier than usual in the year, to begin his final assault on his one and only opera.

  Gustav Klimt shook off the doldrums which had set in after the completion of the Court Theater paintings. He shook them off not to work, but “to go to Trieste.” He resumed his so-called fight-hikes on the roughneck Triesterstrasse, leading south from Vienna. With friends he trudged along the highway’s spring mud and looked for horses getting stuck and drivers working brutal whips. Klimt would shout a command to stop the maltreatment, names would be called, fists would fly, and though Klimt’s side did not necessarily win, he did manage to flail away the sulks of idleness.

  Out of town, Gustav Mahler’s directorship at the Budapest Opera had now so thoroughly triumphed over all Magyar troublemakers that even the Viennese newspapers began to applaud. “Herr Director Mahler has made the impossible come true,” Hanslick had to admit in the Neue Freie Presse.

  Franz Joseph, too, harvested an overdue victory. He had gone to the Hungarian capital not only to remove himself from his son’s death but also to help fight a bill through the Budapest Parliament; the one that would preserve German as the Army’s unitary language of command throughout the many-tongued Monarchy. After many weeks of negotiations and demonstrations, Parliament passed the law on April 3. A new ministry was formed, acceptable to both the nationalists and the Crown. Gratefully Franz Joseph ended a long onerous stint.

  Meanwhile Elisabeth, his Empress, had been inching out of her depression over Rudolf. The doctors pronounced her well enough for a stay at Ischl in the Salzburg Alps. Franz Joseph traveled with her and at Ischl he met—after a two-month separation—his beloved Frau Schratt. With him he carried a secret new testament which bequeathed a considerable sum to the actress and her son. Franz Joseph had long wanted to take this step and had long hesitated. Now he had gone through with it, to reward himself, as it were, for sticking out a difficult time.*

  Even Dr. Freud seemed to have left behind him a long arid stretch. By now he was beginning to feel almost at home in the pinched cocoon of isolation which his writings on hysteria and hypnosis would not make any more opulent. But on April 15 he opened the Neue Freie Presse to a surprise. Here, for the first time in his life, his name was mentioned on the science page. Vienna’s leading paper devoted nearly a whole page to a review of his German rendition of Hyppolite Bernheim’s treatise on hypnosis, De la Suggestion. The review lauded the translator’s “measured and sensitive” preface. Such recognition was something new and heady. More important still was the friendly tenor of the theoretical part of the article. It welcomed new approaches in psychiatry. Of course Freud’s pet subjects—hypnosis, hysteria, repression and suggestion—remained themata non grata at the University. Just the same, their serious discussion by the Neue Freie Presse lent them, for a while at least, a film of respectability.

  For others in Vienna there were other ameliorations that spring. The Wagner Society made amends for its February rudeness to Hugo Wolf. In late March it gave his Mörike songs a tremendous reception. What he had sworn off a few weeks earlier, Wolf now embraced once again: vanity and society. Unto another familiar temptation he cleaved as well. The good weather let the Köcherts use their country villa in Rinnbach once more, thus easing his trysts with the lady of the house.

  But the happiest event in musical Vienna occurred one April evening at the Rothen Igel restaurant. At 7 P.M. Professor Bruckner appeared with two friends. The waiters were astonished. Usually the peasant maestro ate elsewhere, at the restaurant Zur Kugel on Am Hof Square. And the wonders of the night had only begun. A few minutes later Johannes Brahms marched in, complete with white beard, nimbus and a retinue of three. After a stiff greeting he took a seat at the opposite end of a long table. Even though this was his regular restaurant, whose dishes he knew by heart, Brahms demanded the menu, quick!! Bruckner tried to match the other man’s fierceness by yelling for the same thing in his Upper Austrian dialect.

  For long minutes the two masters frowned up and down the list of dishes. Mutual acquaintances had arranged this “conciliation dinner.” Obviously they had engineered a debacle. And then, at the very same second, both geniuses shouted the same phrase at the waiter. “Roast pork and sauerkraut!”

  The table dissolved into laughter. The impossible ensued: an amiability between opposites, feeding on small talk about pilsner beer and Viennese cuisine. It did not survive long beyond the evening. But for the duration of one dinner the muse knew peace.

  A harmony that lasted longer, and whose achievement was even more delicate, came to pass at the Freudenau track on April 7. It was the first day of the spring races. Vienna society showed that it could surmount brilliantly all the past winter’s bedevilments.

  Just that Sunday the weather had had a setback. The sports crowd found the lawn wilted from the night’s rain, the sky a gruff iron, the track sodden. Yet the turnout was copious and the clothes splendid. Limited Mourning remained in force, but the ladies had simply done wonders with black. They had invented clever striatums of the color with heavy silks and moiré, displayed vivid transitions in texture from brilliant to matte ebony; they just delighted the fashion columnists with the sable trimmings of their dainty gray jackets.

  Naturally the Apponyis put in an
appearance, the Lobkowitzes and Hohenlohes, the Larisches, the Duke of Braganza, the Esterházys, the Károlyis (who had another great horse running), and practically all the members of the Jockey Club. “One could not complain of a lack of piquant interludes,” the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung winked. “In the boxes lively talk went on about the events of the day as well as developments which can’t be discussed publicly.”

  All eyes, it went without saying, were on the box customarily occupied by Alexander Baltazzi, his brother Aristide, and by his niece, the Baroness Mary Vetsera, alias the Turf Angel. At first the seats were empty. Then, well before the first race, the Messrs. Baltazzi appeared in top hat and morning coat as befitted a Derby-winning family. The Turf Angel was not with them. Eight weeks before, Alexander Baltazzi had jammed a broomstick between her body and her dress, to make the corpse sit upright on its nocturnal ride out of Mayerling.

  Today all that was so far past that perhaps it had never occurred at all. Today the Baltazzi brothers lifted hats to Prince Schwarzenberg, they bowed before the Archduke Leopold Salvator, they kissed the hands of Princess Metternich and the two pretty Comtesses Hoyos. Piquant interludes transpired, lively talk bubbled through the boxes, binoculars rose to saucy eyes and dropped back on vibrant bosoms, the bell rang, mounts converged on the paddock, betting windows jammed, the totalisateur clattered out odds, the starting gun boomed, hooves surfed along the muddy course, highnesses leaped to stand on their seats, baronesses waved black parasols in fastidious passion…and Count Albert (Ali) Károlyi’s Sophist placed a close second in the 1600 meter handicap.

  The racing season was on, smart as ever.

  * * *

  * Franz Joseph was to change his will again. Frau Schratt was not mentioned in his final testament, having been provided for—handsomely and discreetly—during his later years.

  Chapter 30

  Mayerling had not happened, and it kept on happening. Just five days before the races opened, an agent of the Court Marshal’s Office opened the register of deaths at Alland parish and wrote into it the name of Marie Alexandrine Baroness Vetsera, a very belated, very quiet entry. And the same week, on the night preceding the start of the racing season, a candelabra-lit resurrection took place in the crypt of the Capuchins. Members of Rudolf’s Court, dissolved months ago, came together again with full livery and sword. They watched in silence. The wooden coffin enclosing their master was being lifted into a magnificent metal costume. Positioned between the caskets of Empress Maria Theresia and Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, the late-Renaissance sarcophagus lay embossed with laurels framing lion heads, with the Crown Prince’s personal escutcheon, and with the inscription: Rudolphus Princeps Hereditarius Imperii Austriae, Regni Hungariae etc…etc…

  While workmen soldered the lid shut, sealing it forever, the courtiers stood at attention; the Capuchin monks breathed prayers; the candles smoked; the soldering flames hissed. Then they all left. Rudolf had become an exhibit for tourists.

  The official Rudolf, that is. The unofficial one was a shadow that climbed up the steps of the crypt and mingled with the world and became a thousand things to millions of people.

  His slim figure began to hover here and there, all over the Monarchy and even outside its borders. While alive he had already been half-legend. Now he became all vision, myth, fleet chimera and stubborn fable. He was glimpsed with a beautiful blonde principessa in the window of a campanile in Florence. Footmen whispered that the Jesuits kept him in a red-silk dungeon deep under the Imperial Palace in Vienna. Vintners by the Danube heard him calling from the keep of Castle Dürnstein, which had shut in Richard the Lionheart seven hundred years before. In Galicia peasants told of meeting him in strange disguises, as he prepared to liberate the people from their suffering. Hungarian shepherds saw him again and again, galloping across the steppe, a skeleton on horseback with shako and Hussar’s cape, a headlong specter that would become flesh once more on the stroke of redemption.

  The progressive-minded, of course, were haunted by a different Rudolf. They were possessed by the mirage of what might have been. Had Rudolf survived to reach the throne…had he at least been given his due voice in the Empire’s councils…how destiny might have improved! He might have turned Austria away from the Prussian alliance toward ties with France and England; away from the Kaiser’s Gothic swagger toward democracy, industry and reason; away from domestic quarrels which the Crown Prince might have mediated better than most Habsburgs; away, ultimately, from those Balkan nationalist tensions that exploded with the gunshots at Sarajevo to set off World War I.

  All that he might have done if. But if had an obverse side. What if Rudolf’s early death just lent him a nimbus his continued career would have mocked? Franz Joseph did not die until 1916. How could the son have withstood the weight of his father’s longevity—the pressure of being the nonsucceeding successor for another twenty-seven years?

  More important yet: Could Rudolf have dealt with the misfortunes of the cause he championed?

  That cause, liberalism, had begun to go wrong palpably toward the end of his lifetime. The liberal intelligence had dreamed the great nineteenth-century dream of equality and riches. There would be greater abundance for all through greater production; there would be freedom perfected through democracy; through science there would be new technology and greater knowledge. That was the promise. This was the delivery: new rootless poverty and new excessive wealth equally rootless; new forms of inner and outer want; new envy, new doubt, and an entirely new furious bewilderment.

  It was bewildering because the liberal cause was, after all, the cause of “progress” itself. Even its most intelligent supporters saw its adversities as imposed only from the outside by foes, never as the result of interior dynamics. Like most liberal gallants, Rudolf hoped to save liberalism with its own latest engines. Yet just these—the abstractions of technology, the demands of centralizing efficiency, the absolute ambition inherent in the idea of absolute freedom—all sliced away at life livable on a human scale. They sliced away at the rooted nook, the warm detail, the answering particularity. Whatever was local, familial, personal, had to fall under the steamroller that ground on toward modern greatness.

  What happened to the Bohemian tailor whose untidy place was superseded by a sleek factory? He got a rote job in the plant. His hours might be fewer, his wages higher. But before, he’d served the needs of specific men. Now he was a nameless lackey to faceless machines. Having no shop to pass on, he sent his children to Vienna. There his unlettered son, desperately unemployed, became an anti-Semite under Lueger; and the bookish son, teaching school, a pan-Slavist fanatic.

  The industrial flowering, into which Rudolf put so much hope, meant in the end the debris of a million hearths. And the hearth-dwellers who had thus lost their sense of home tried to find it, come next generation, as nationalists screaming for the salvation of their race. In obsessive and artificial greatness they tried to recapture the small breathing community that had perished.

  If Rudolf misunderstood the consequences of liberalism, others misunderstood his contemporaries in the avant-garde. The Emperor thwarting his heir apparent followed the same impulse as the university professor who would go on ignoring Freud; as the concert manager who would keep refusing Mahler; the theater producer who would turn down Schnitzler’s La Ronde; the gallery director who would exclude Klimt as soon as he became—Klimt. Each arbiter thought, as did Franz Joseph, that he was defending tried, good values against destructive novelties.

  The truth was different. These “destroyers” only rendered audible or visible or thinkable a distress already existing and deepening with the forward march of occidental culture. Their innovations were really alarms of loss, or dreams of restoration. The angst in Mahler’s huge surges clutched at primal beginnings. Freud reached for a pre-Puritan libido. Herzl called for a return to the land of milk and honey. Klimt contorted his nudes into ancient Oriental opulence. Bruckner cried out for the freshness that lay forgotten in folk and
faith.

  All these talents served an intuition maturing first in Vienna; something important and green had turned golden and sick and petrified.

  “Nervousness is the modern sickness,” the Tagblatt said that spring. “It is the sickness of the century…Outside, everything is gleam and gorgeousness. One lives only on the outside, one is led astray by the dancing phosphorescence…one no longer expects anything from the inner life, from thinking or believing.”

  Only in Vienna would a leading liberal journal devote a frontpage article to nerves. Only in Vienna had the bourgeoisie, this sustaining class of modernity, been born so psychically frail. Here it sickened faster of the machines and the depersonalizing schemes of its own making. And here it became especially nervous at those rooting about in the malaise, namely artists and thinkers. It had to be in Vienna that a predominant psychiatrist like Theodor Meynert denounced young Freud’s concept of male hysteria as being by definition nonsensical; only to make a deathbed confession to Freud in 1891 that he, Meynert, had fought so hard because he himself had been a classic case of a male hysteric.

  In Vienna the middle class had no rugged burgher hide which could resist, at least for the time being, the rough gusts ahead. In these streets nerves were exposed dangerously and stung prophetically; the future evoked clairvoyant expression and pathological revulsion at once. Here stood the baroque hospital that saw the birth of the twentieth century. Of all Western capitals it was Alt Wien which telegraphed the crisis of the New Man.