his adjutant, Count Paar, 'So this is the new era? And that kind of creature comes out of it? In our old days something like that would not even have been conceivable.'
The redl monstrosity made the upright splendor of Franz Joseph's 'old days' seem so distant. Yet only forty- eight hours before R dl's unmasking, the ancient Emperor himself had animated an occasion that made those 'old days' young again in Vienna. At the age of eighty-three, the monarch, bareheaded under the morning sun, had walked for two hours at the center of the Corpus Christi procession.
This spectacle was the Church's counterpoint to the workers' May Day, as consummately Viennese in its pagentry and many centuries older. On May 22, 1913, the procession had flowed again like a river cascading with costumes and colors. All the bells in all the city's towers tolled as it started at St. Stephen's Square, swirled past the fountains, gargoyles, log gias of the Inner Precinct, poured on under the eyes of thousands of saints (for all apartment dwellers placed their holy pictures on their window sills) until it reached St. Michael's Square where it stopped for an open-air Mass before flowing back to St. Stephen's Cathedral.
At the head billowed the massed senior clergy in long giltembroidered vestments, bishops and prelates holding aloft ancient gonfalons of the Fifteen Mysteries of the Faith; then came the Lord Mayor of Vienna with his Great Chain of Office; then the Dean of the University and the faculty in their richly hued gowns with their swords in silvered sheaths; then officers of the great orders, first and foremost among them the Knights of the Golden Fleece, their collars wrought of firestone and steel; then the white-gold canopy under which the Cardinal strode in undulations of his scarlet cape, holding the monstrance that was shrouded in incense and heralded by the acolytes' tinkling of sanctus bells and flanked by medieval guards with halberd and cuirass; then, all by himself, surrounded by awed, empty space, walked His Majesty, Franz Joseph I, white-fringed head bare to the sky, a white general's uniform snug on his slightly stooped, still slender frame, green-plumed hat under his left arm, his right holding a candle; he was followed by his First Lord Chamberlain and then by the high members of his Court, the Crown Prince, the Archdukes according to seniority, followed by the Archduchesses down to the most junior, followed in turn by the Crown Prince's wife, followed by the imperial and ducal equerries and ladies-in-waiting-all in full-dress robes, epaulettes, sashes, and decorations…
Though it began early in the morning, the procession did not escape the strong May sun. Newspaper accounts emphasized 'the Emperor's youthful step'-how well he'd taken the strain. Would he have taken it so well had he known that he was marching toward Redl?
The Vienna Derby of 1913 was run on Sunday, June 8, but since it came within two weeks of the Redl revelation, it turned out to be a waste of good weather. Bright was the sun, but not the mood. The Crown Prince smoldered in Konopiste. The Imperial Box at the Freudenau track remained empty. But few missed his frown, and anyway, it would have been the frown of someone almost fifty: The Derby, being a very sporty affair, belonged to the new generation. For Vienna's young bloods it was an annual watershed of fashion: One wore derbies only until the Derby-afterward, summer boaters. The Derby also made a fetching stage for young officers; for their white glace gloves, their casual cigarettes, the ladies on their arms.
This year, instead of shining in their uniforms, many seemed to cringe. There was much less flaunting by lieutenants of the guard, less flirting, and hardly any dining afterward, in the Sacher Garten of the Prater. Colonel Redl had dishonored the tunic they wore.
That sunny day on the race track lit up yet further dimensions of damage. It wasn't just the Imperial and Royal Army that had been soiled. It was a whole class of comers; a class that was about to earn by merit what earlier could only be inherited by birth; a class that advertised its advent through occasions like the Derby and whose most brilliant representatives included Alfred Redl-until now.
Weaned on cabbage soup as the ninth son of a lowly railway clerk, the Colonel had been well on his way to a field marshal's baton. A rising star of comely ascent, he'd been described by the Army's character report mentioned earlier as 'very companionable with excellent manners and frequenting only elegant society…' Yes, the horses of June ran for the Redls of the realm. The Derby was the one social ritual in Austria where the very talented, very ambitious, very presentable arrives could mingle and chat with those who had arrived many generations ago. Now such mingling had proved calamitous. Redl, the only commoner among the Counts and Barons of the General Staff, had turned out to be its only traitor.
An unmistakable contrast: Corpus Christi and the Derby. The Corpus Christi procession, two days before Redl's suicide, had displayed Old Austria's continued virtuosity in dramatizing its own myth. But the Derby, after Redl, disclosed a loss of image and of nerve among the dynamic young. Now the new generation could not enact 'honor' or 'dash' with the elan expected of them in Vienna. The case had shown up the hollowness of Redl's parvenu mask as well as the hollowness of General Conrad's attempt to cover horror with yet another masking. The art of illusion itself had been compromised-the future of its practice in the twentieth century. A Viennese essence was in jeopardy.
And so the very word 'Redl' spelled poison to the town. Alfred Redl's two surviving brothers, Oskar and Heinrich, received permission to change their names to Oskar and Heinrich Rhoden. Stefan Zweig, one of Austria's belletrists, ordinarily heedless of matters military or political, felt, after the first Redl bulletin, 'a noose of terror tightening around my throat.' There was no end to the toxicity of the affair. The Colonel had been among the Army's most up-to-date careerists, enlisting telegraph and wireless for the transmission of intelligence. Now this demon of forward-mindedness had crashed. It was as if in Vienna any attempt at modernity was doomed. 'Redl' affected the city's dealings with the shape of things to come.
***
On June 9, 1913, an avatar of the twentieth century rose from the Black Forest into the air and flew toward the Austrian capital. Longer than the tower of St. Stephen's Cathedral, it darkened the heavens as the world's largest dirigible and, by far, the most gigantic aircraft. At a record speed of 101 kilometers per hour, it needed only eight and a half hours to traverse the distance from Baden-Baden to Vienna.
Vienna's progressive newspaper, the ArbeiterZeitung, called on the populace to hail the skyborne arrival of a great secular archangel 'for that is how one prays in the twentieth century.'
Indeed the Zeppelin appeared over Vienna in angelic perfection, without mishap or delay or even omission of protocol. Passing Schonbrunn Palace, it circled and dipped respectfully while the hoary Emperor on the terrace saluted, for the first time in his life, up instead of down. Many of his subjects, though, could not match his aplomb. Hundreds of children fled indoors from the gargantuan shadow overhead. Grown men flinched, women swooned. A few days later the Arbeiter Zeitung noted drily that at a mass celebration of the twentyfifth anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm's reign, twenty-six ladies had keeled over, prostrate with either heat or awe. 'In Berlin, it seems, people faint out of reverence for the past; in Vienna, out of fear of the future.'
The future had never been a great favorite along this bend of the Danube. Now it was less popular then ever. Even a futurist bauble like the cinema-and there were several dozen of them in Vienna now-developed warts. Those phantoms on the screen could burn very real flesh. The extreme flammability of film-a danger hitherto unnoticed- killed three people in a theater fire on June 18. At nearly the same time, a medical journal reported headaches in adult cinema addicts and, in children, a regression of speech patterns by limiting their vocabulary to the primitive phrases of the explanatory titles. When it was reported that an American film producer had come to town to explore the Redl story as a basis for a motion picture, it was like the closing of a viciously modern circle: turning the life of a corrupt young luminary into a corrupting new entertainment. At the center of the circle sat, like a spider, the future.
'Redl' became an emblem of decay; of the inevitability of degeneration in a monarchy so ancient. Would the Habsburgs, for centuries suzerains of the Holy Roman Empire, ever be able to develop their realm into a great modern power? Serbia, its adversary, was small, defiant, and pulsing with the young passion of nationalism. Until now it had yielded, however reluctantly and belatedly, before Austria's warnings against its Balkan presumptions. But it never yielded for long. Toward the end of June, Serbia inveigled Greece and Montenegro, its partners in last year's victory over Turkey, to join her in demanding a re-division of the Turkish spoils at the expense of the fourth partner, Bulgaria. Since Bulgaria was a Habsburg ally, Vienna protested to Belgrade. In vain. Belgrade politely acknowledged the protest and promptly ignored it. Serbia's troops and those of its cohorts-which Rumania had joined for good measure-massed along the Bulgarian borders. In Vienna, General Conrad once more managed to defeat the Crown Prince's cautions. The Chief of Staff obtained authorization for an Army Alert. Reservists were called up. The capital's railroad terminals teemed with mothers hugging their sons who looked like strangers in their sudden uniforms.
