the silver whistle he carried in his waist pocket to summon the platoon. We would all rush toward the sound of the whistle, and only when all of our concentration was complete, would father remove the hat and allow us to inspect and admire the spoil.'
In the town itself, Freud led the 1913 spring outing of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. The event took place after dark and involved the doctor's professional rather than personal family. Members of Freud's flock (some passing near Hitler's lodgings in the adjacent district) converged on the Prater. This was Vienna's favorite pleasance-a huge, exuberant park combined with a midway. Having met at the main entrance, the psychiatrists trooped in the twilight up the in cline of a jasmine-laced path to a terrace. A huge table, lavishly set, awaited them.
So did an ex-patient of Freud's; he paid homage to the master by presenting him with a figurine from ancient Egypt. A witness records that Freud placed the gift in front of his plate, at the head of the table, 'as a totem.' Then two dozen bearded soul-doctors began to feast the night away under the moon, the stars, and the multicolored glow of Chinese lanterns.
The restaurant providing the banquet was called 'Con- stantinhugel' after the man-made hill ('hugel') whose top it occupied; and the hill received its name from Prince Constantine von Hohenlohe, late First Lord Chamberlain to His Majesty; under his aegis the hill had been created at the opening of the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873. Now, in 1913, the perfumes of real blossoms brimmed from an artificial slope and mingled with the bouquet of Gewurztraminer from the psychoanalysts' goblets.
The moon waned but not the doctors' gemutlichkeit. Their chief kept lifting his 'totem' to their toasts. All along a ballet of fireflies danced through a vernal nocturne quintessentially Viennese: nature and culture in ceremonious fusion.
On a night like this, who would suspect civilization of discontent?
The Vienna psycho-analytical society was not the only group holding a spring fete. Much bigger and therefore more widely controversial was the workers' procession on May 1.
It played no part in the life of a nonpolitical man like Sigmund Freud-except as an impediment to his high- speed walks along the Ringstrasse after lunch. Yet this Socialist rite had been charted, of all places, at Berggasse 19, under the very roof where Freud had conceived psychoanalysis.
A quarter of a century earlier, Dr. Viktor Adler had lived here in the house then owned by his father. Viktor was no relation of Alfred Adler. But like Alfred, Viktor was a trained psychiatrist. Like Alfred, young Viktor developed Socialist sympathies. And with Viktor Adler, these sympathies became his life's engulfing mission. Very soon he abandoned medicine for politics to lead the new Social Democratic Party. In 1889, in the apartment soon to be Freud's, he initiated and choreographed what the world came to know as the May Day Parade.
And in 1913 the parade gave, as always, gorgeous hints of its Viennese lineage. May 1, the international proletarian festival, was a descendant of the society corso in the Prater. Every May 1 the Austrian aristocracy in full panoply of escutcheoned carriages, liveried drivers, passengers in princely capes and floral hats used to promenade through the Prater, followed by caparisoned parvenus.
Sic transit primavera. Since 1890 Viktor Adler had the working class celebrate spring with equal pride and comparable showmanship. On May 1 of 1913 the parade was particularly splendid. Every category of labor-from foundry stoker to papermill hand to shoemaker to tanner-assembled at a different inn or coffeehouse early in the morning. At 10 A.M. sharp they sallied forth, phalanx by phalanx, each group in the garb of its craft, be it apron or overalls or smock. But red carnations shone in all their buttonholes; they all wore black armbands to commemorate the recent murder of their deputy Schuhmeier; all their arms were linked into comradely chains. Chanting against war, chanting for livable wages, chanting for bearable housing, the groups merged on the Ringstrasse where the chants united into a hundred-thousand-throated boom. The weather chimed in with sunshine, crisp air, and just enough breeze to make the banners come alive. Chanting, marching, waving their banners in the same cadence, the mass moved toward the meeting ground in the Prater.
***
By 1913, May Day had become familiar. But it still exhilarated the proletarian soul. It still terrified the prosperous. In 'better districts' like Hietzing or Doebling, maids were instructed to hoard food in advance of the critical weekend. Stefan Zweig recalls that well-to-do parents like his had the doors locked so that their children might not stray into the streets 'on this day of terror which might see Vienna in flames.'
The spectacle also shook up at least one man who was not a member of the upper classes, twenty-four- year-old Adolf Hitler.
In Mein Kampf he reports his awe
at the endless rows of Viennese workers marching four abreast in this demonstration. I stood almost two hours with bated breath observing this immense human snake as it rolled by. In fearful depression I finally left the place and wandered homeward.
But why so fearfully depressed? Because these workers rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the 'capitalists'; the Fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie to exploit the working class; the authority of the law as a means to repress the proletariat; school as an institution for breeding slave material, but also for the training of slavedrivers; religion as a means to stupefy the people intended for exploitation; morality as a sign of stupid, sheeplike patience… There was absolutely nothing that was not dragged through the mire of horrible depths.
Spring is the visceral season, felt deep down. The man appalled by these 'horrible depths' was puritan, celibate, and volcanic at once. Eventually he would forge an empire out of the ambivalence. Meanwhile he abhorred the elemental mire. Yet he also watched it 'for almost two hours with bated breath.' The money he'd inherited could have bought him shelter more elevated than the Mannerheim. Yet he lingered for years amidst its primitivities. He rejected the new elemental artists-Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka-who had begun to excite Vienna with their expressionist eruptions; they were so different from the dainty banality of Hitler's own paintings; their 'fleshly' work, he would sneer later in Mein Kampf, might as well have been 'the smears of a tribe of Negroes.' Yet his contempt for 'fleshliness' was also engrossment: He accompanied a friend to the Spittelberggasse where prostitutes drew on black stockings in lit windows. Hitler never touched them-just lashed out at 'the iniquity'-and came back to look and lash out again.
A similar revulsion-obsession made him shiver, at length, at the proletariat thrusting up from below. Since he could not deal with the primal physically or esthetically, he went at it politically-sniffed it, imagined it, fantasized it, developed a mania to tap it, manipulate it, tame it, control it. 'At this time,' he says in Mein Kampf of his Vienna years, 'I formed a view of life which became the granite foundation of my actions.'
His horror of May Day on the Ringstrasse became a permanent inspiration. The elemental obedience of so many thousands to their Socialist chiefs leads him to conclusions prophetically detailed in Mein Kampf:
The masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doc trine tolerating none other besides itself… They are unaware of their shameless spiritual terrorization or the hideous abuse of human freedom, for they absolutely fail to suspect the inner insanity of the whole doctrine. All they see is the ruthless force and brutality of its calculated manifestation, to which they always submit in the end… If Social Democracy is opposed by a doctrine of greater truth but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer.
The italics are Hitler's. An unitalicized sentence two pages later begins and ends with the word summarizing the central lesson he drew from May Day: 'Terror in the workshop, in the factory, in the assembly hall, and on occasion in mass demonstrations, will always be accompanied by success as long as it is not met by an equally great force of terror.'
But terror did not enforce the workers' May Day. It was a voluntary procession and, in the radiant weather, joyous. To Hitler, the sight was apocalyptic.
The apocalypse is the cataclysm through which death convulses into birth. Some day Hitler would summon apocalyptic emotions before a global audience. Meanwhile May of 1913 marked for him, on a modest scale, an end that introduced a beginning. This was the month in which he left Vienna for Germany, '. that country for which my heart had been secretly yearning since the days of my youth.' And though he still lived in the Mannerheim during
