I cannot begin to tell you the flavor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a ramshackle affair but it was charming, gay and I experienced more kindness [here]…. than ever before or since in my life. Times past can't return, but I wish they were back.
— JAMES JOYCE, TO A FRIEND
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
— T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land
To M. C. M.
To my two dearest viennese: my parents, Frank and Rose Morton
and to Elisabeth and Lester Coleman, for so much
In july 1916, Fritz Mandelbaum, a junior officer in Austria's Seventh Army on the Russian front, near the river Dnjestr, was shot in the abdomen and died shortly thereafter. Twenty-four years later the name suffered erasure again. This time it was borne by a refugee boy arriving in New York in 1940. His father changed the family's name. Fritz Mandelbaum became Frederic Morton.
In a way this book is a memorial to the first Fritz Mandelbaum-my uncle-and to the more than ten million who died with him in the Great War. But since much of this book is set in Vienna, it is also an exploration of history backstage. The baroque died in Vienna with flamboyant afterquivers while at the same time some peculiar force here generated energies that would shake the new century. Here were streets uniquely charged with both nostalgia and prophecy. Three of my recent books have tried to penetrate the phenomenon.
My novel The Forever Street centered on a family of Jewish manufacturers in Austria, from fin de siecle to Anschluss; it is based on the real-life Mandelbaum factory whose machines stamped out Habsburg military decorations, then political badges for the successor republic; then, suddenly and just as smoothly, Wehrmacht medals after the Nazis took it over in 1938.
My nonfiction work A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 is an account of the months before and after the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf. The story ends on the Saturday of the Easter weekend of 1889, when Rudolf's sarcophagus was consecrated at the hour of Adolf Hitler's birth.
The present book deals with the events, ideas, unpredictabilities and inevitabilities surrounding the death of the next Crown Prince, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The bullet that tore into his jugular sounded the initial shot in the most devastating slaughter mankind had known so far. It set off the dynamics leading to World War II. In other words, it galvanized a Zeitgeist whose consequences live today in the international news, on the street corner, in encounter sessions, on the canvases of Soho galleries. Many of the threads of the scene all around us were first spun along the Danube in the year and a half preceding the thrust of that pistol at the Archduke's head.
Imperial Austria has become a byword for melodious decay. It also stoked-crucially-the ferment that is the idiom of modernity. Why did that happen just then and just there? And how? In what twists of the labyrinth did the world of the first Fritz Mandelbaum fragment into the world of the second? Is there a pattern to the maze? The pages that follow attempt an answer.
— F.M.
On the evening of January 13, 1913, Vienna's Bank employees' Club gave a Bankruptcy Ball. It was the height of pre-Lenten carnival-in mid-winter at its meanest. Ice floes shivered down the Danube, galas sparkled inside baroque portals, and the bankruptcy gambol really warmed the Viennese imagination.
A number of ladies appeared as balance sheets, displaying voluptuous debits curving from slender credits. Others came as collateral. Their assets, ready to be garnisheed, were accented sometimes with a decolletage, sometimes with a bustle. Thin men were costumed as deposits, fat men as withdrawals. Sooner or later everybody ended up at Debtors' Prison-the restaurant of the Blumensaal where the festivity was held. Here mortgage certificates served as doilies for Sachertortes. Ornamented with the bailiff's seal, eviction notices made colorful centerpieces; each was topped by a bowl of whipped cream. If you wrote your waiter an I.O.U., he would pour you a goblet of champagne.
The merriment increased steadily until 5 A.M. when the orchestra leader stopped his men, suddenly, in the middle of the Emperor Waltz. To great laughter he announced that since the musicians still hadn't been paid, there would be no more music.
The next day parliament voted on the flotation of a bond issue; its proceeds would subsidize the installation of plumbing into apartments that had none. In working class districts like Hernals and Favoriten most families must use outside toilets and corridor sinks. The bill was killed. Such news would anger the toiling poor when they read about it later. It did not affect their carnival routine. Many trudged to work with their ball clothes in a paper bag. Changing at home would have meant an extra streetcar ride beyond their means. Therefore they went directly from wee-hours waltz to morning shift. Before the lunch bell sounded, soot had grayed the confetti in their hair.
That week glacial winds punished the streets. But-rare for Vienna in the winter-the sun shone. In the center of town the Ringstrasse, a palatial wreath of a boulevard, glowed like a mirage. The snow capping its hundreds of rooftop statues looked more marmoreal than the imitation marble of the figures. During carnival everything Viennese seemed to revel in being what it was not.
On the night of January 18, for example, Prince Auersperg gave a 'Bucolic Lark' at his palais. The Duke of Teck made an entrance in the homespun of a shepherd. Prince zu Win- dischgratz honed his sickle with a weariness as peasant-y as his leather-shorts. Princess Festetics and Countess Potocka, milkmaids, in dirndls authentic down to the grease stains on their bodices, swung pails.
The greengrocer Mataschek, on the other hand, threw a Fancy House Ball in his basement store. Turnips and potatoes had been cleared away to make a dance floor. Produce crates impersonated tables and chairs. For the price of a beer, Mataschek's uncle, though blind at eight-two, had agreed to scrape some three-quarter time out of a violin borrowed from the pawn shop around the corner. He struck up the first bars of the Fledermaus overture when-behold! — Alois, the cobbler's apprentice, sauntered over to Nandl, the chambermaid. A blue-blooded lieutenant of the hussars could not have improved his bow. She curtsied almost as impeccably. Together they swept into the waltz.
In the Vienna of January 1913, illusion and reality embraced elegantly, seamlessly. The smoothness of their mingling affected even the publisher of The Truth. He was a firebrand from Russia, in charge of a Vienna-based monthly that became a fortnightly whenever he could scrounge enough funds. He called his paper Pravda-that is, The Truth as seen by his cause, the revolution. Vienna was not an ideal place of exile, as he would write later in his autobiography: He would have preferred Berlin, but the police were more lethargic by the Danube.
Still, under that January's arctic sun, he entered wholeheartedly into the Viennese spirit of intimate contradiction. With his wife and his two blond boys he began the day by freezing in style. During winter the family occupied a villa in the fashionable suburb of Huetteldorf-at a very low rent. It was not winterized. When it became too cold, he left the house to warm up the Viennese way, in a coffeehouse. On the street, this professional insurgent, nemesis of the upper classes, showed a touch of the lordly flaneur. His clothes were simple but well cut; his black hair handsomely combed. Even the pince-nez on his nose managed a certain dash. Under his arm he carried the latest French novel. He read it on the tram ride to the center of town.
A ceremonious welcome awaited him at the Cafe Central. 'Oh, a very good morning, Herr Doktor Trotsky,' the headwaiter said. 'My compliments. Compliments also from Herr Doktor Adler who much regrets he will not be available for chess today as he has a psychoanalytic emergency. A mocha as usual? And the London Times? The Berlin Vorwdrts?'
Dr. Trotsky nodded. He sipped his steaming mocha. His scrutiny of newspapers in various languages produced political jottings in his notebook. But he also played litterateur among the literati; argued rather charmingly with a neighbor about Stefan Zweig's feuilleton in the Neue Freie Presse; exchanged repartee here, kissed a hand there-in short, practiced the Viennese brand of courtliness, that is, the art of maintaining an entirely pleasant mask over a psyche of usually mixed emotions.
It was a courtliness he would preach nine years later from the Kremlin as co-ruler with Lenin over the Soviet
