black. Black-clad crowds streamed from the tramways. Public as well as private transport was at such premium that many groups hired vans-flagged in black-to take them to outlying graveyards.
They all carried sprays of asters-white bloom vivid against the darkness of the clothes and the gray of the sky. The flowers added yet more brightness to the graves. The night before, nearly each resting place had been given its own glow. Most mourners had placed simple lanterns or glass-covered candles by their plots. Next to noble mausoleums stood footmen in black garb, holding torches. Honor guards with black trimmings held aloft flares by the arcaded crypts of generals.
Into this sea of lights and griefs the throngs were pouring. All Souls' Day was as eloquent a pageant of the devout in late fall as May Day had been a parade of workers in the spring. An endless phalanx of black figures and bright blossoms moved to the beat of some soundless dirge. The bereaved laid down bouquets, hung wreaths, affixed festoons. They prayed for the delivery of their loved ones from purgatory. The choir of their murmurs enveloped the hiss of torches, the crunch of countless feet shuffling along gravel. Incense mingled with the asters' fragrance, with perfume from black-veiled women, and with whiffs of roasted chestnuts from vendors waiting by the cemetery gates. When the Viennese were finished with their dramaturgy, they would be ready for a snack.
The next day, newspapers evaluated graveside accomplishments. What tombs led the field in the most finely nuanced floral designs? At the giant Central Cemetery, Vienna's late and very popular mayor Karl Lueger scored the highest plaudits. Beethoven did very well. Johann Strauss Junior fell a bit short this year: His widow had overdone the garlands. Schubert made a comeback. Some recently deceased industrialists had to be placed at the bottom of the list; they were the victims of vulgar excess.
The city still mastered the esthetics of death. A good sign. A measure of how well, after Redl, Vienna had recovered its poise as 1913 waned to a close. It was poise elegantly maintained despite, and because of, doubts about the Empire's future. Vienna still considered itself the capital of a sensibility that was all the more finely tuned for its precariousness. The legend of this sunset sensibility attracted talents from all continents. They came to visit, to shine and to be judged, together with local talent, by the stringencies of Viennese sophistication.
Enrico Caruso arrived for his engagement at the Court Opera as Rodolfo in La Boheme. Ovations greeted his cadenzas. Yet at least one reviewer thought that the ensemble effect would have benefited if the star had taken more time to rehearse with the cast, and that the same problem flawed the marvels of his Don Jose in Carmen.
Maria Jeritza made an incandescent Minnie in Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West-except for a few instances of overacting.
A child of twelve electrified the Musikvereinssaal. Brilliantly he sped his violin through the difficulties of Paganini's 'Caprices.' Critics admired little Jascha Heifetz's virtuosity. They also wondered about his delectable blond locks: Was this a boy or a girl prodigy?
George Bernard Shaw did not come to Vienna, but his Pygmalion had its world premiere here, in German, at the Court Theater, almost six months before the first London production. Reviewers smiled judiciously at Mr. Shaw, the grizzled enfant terrible. They admitted that in this play he did less ranting and more entertaining than usual, even if, as the Neue Freie Presse sighed, the comedian in Mr. Shaw almost succumbed to the ideologue at the end.
Also at the Court Theater, one of the most unpredictable younger directors, Max Reinhardt, staged the passion play Everyman with touches sometimes breathtaking, sometimes self-consciously ingenious.
Franz Lehar's new operetta, An Ideal Wife, disappointed not because it was bad but simply because the composer had once more failed to match his Merry Widow.
The writer Thomas Mann visited to read early chapters of his new novel-in-progress Felix Krull. He aroused anticipation not only as the author of the best-selling Buddenbrooks but also as brother of Heinrich Mann, the pre- eminent name in German fiction. Readers crowded into the Urania lecture hall and found an interesting, taut, slim figure at the lectern. Some literary correspondents, though, felt that the author's voice could not do justice to his prose. It was too stolid, too flat a vehicle for the picaresque handsprings of his Krull; instead of smiling at his excellent villain, Herr Mann seemed always on the point of a sneeze.
Only one performer met every expectation. For two weeks that fall he was the star attraction at the Apollo Theater, the town's leading variety house. He was so famous that each evening the Apollo arranged the coming of his physical presence in stages, quite as if he were the messiah: At first the hall darkened and there flashed on a screen photographic slides of his earlier career-showing for the most part his bulging arms raised over the sprawled body of an opponent; then came motion picture clips of him pummeling a sandbag or running half a marathon, then newsreels of his most famous triumphs in the ring. Then suddenly the screen was whisked away, and there under a spotlight, standing naked to the waist, in the gleaming, formidable blackness of his fleshthe Heavyweight Champion of the World, Jack Johnson. He bowed, he punched two punching bags at the same time, he juggled bar bells as if they were swagger sticks, he boxed an opponent with one hand tied behind his back… only to be swallowed by darkness in which nothing could be seen but from which surged the recorded sound of a New York fight arena-a mob braying at a knockout count, an ecstasy that roared and faded… and transmuted somehow into music that, in turn, regenerated the spotlight. And here was the champion again, but now in white tie and tails, a gallant arm around his petite white wife in her ball gown. To Johann Strauss's 'Tales from the Vienna Woods,' athlete and lady waltzed their way into the very hearts of the audience. Night after night they brought the house down. Night after night, said the ArbeiterZeitung, many of the poor came here to spend their bitterly earned kronen on the exploitation of tinseled brutality.
The Socialists brought to town a world champion of their own, this one from Germany. They invited Emanuel Lasker, the globe's best chess player, to appear at the chess club of the Arbeiterheim Cafe-the coffeehouse of the Workers' Center. Playing twenty-six games at once, he won twenty-two, drew four, and made a speech. The times were over, he said, when laborers had been poor, dumb, passive pawns. Now the worker was beginning to see himself as the central figure in the economy. He was no longer dumb, he had stopped being passive, and the time would come when he would no longer be poor. All he had to do was to use his mind fearlessly, and chess was a good way of sharpening his faculties.
England contributed a notable who also enlisted his talent in the cause of the underprivileged. The Volksbiihne (The People's Stage) produced a German translation of John Galsworthy's Justice. In November the author himself traveled to Vienna to supervise rehearsals. The play told of the misfortunes of a junior clerk trapped in a class-biased criminal justice system. When the curtain came down on opening night, cries of 'Author! Author!' resounded together with ardent applause. Mr. Galsworthy turned out to be too shy a gentleman to take a bow on stage. However, he was reported to be very pleased by the printed accolade in the Arbeiter Zeitung some days later.
Emile Zola was not alive to sojourn in Vienna that fall, but through his work he was John Galsworthy's comrade-in-thearts. A film being shown in the working-class districts proved continuously popular. It was based on Germinal, Zola's harrowing, heart-breaking evocation of the coal miner's lot.
Not that Vienna's proletarians had to learn about wretchedness from a motion picture screen. Nor did they need the nasty Serbs to give them a sense of crisis. The prospect of winter was enough. How would they keep warm? Where find money for fuel? Bad times were getting worse. In Vienna manufacturing was on the decline. The ethnically fragmented Empire, with its many levels and styles of consumer demand, prevented the economies of standardized mass production practiced elsewhere in the West. Despite protective tariffs Austrian industry kept losing markets-inside and outside the borders-to competitors abroad. The machine shops, domi nant employers in the capital's industrial precincts like Hernals and Ottakring, had to shut their doors against thousands seeking work: Nearly a third of the city's metal workers had lost their jobs over the past two years. Most cotton mills were open only four days in the week now. And construction had dropped so drastically that the Developers' Association appealed to the government for subsidies and for the lifting of import duties on certain building materials.
In the slums, dinner was a matter of makeshift and makedo. Horsemeat edged out even the cheapest cuts of pork. The 'stale' counter in bakeries drew more customers than that selling fresh bread. Before the exhaust gratings of the great army laundries gathered nightly crowds, silent, ragged, fearful: The cold was holding off, but in case it came they wanted the warmth of laundry fumes. Others took refuge in the municipal warming rooms where they could rest, if not sleep, sitting upright on wooden benches; or they could try to crowd into the city's three Homeless Asylums-concrete warrens that offered straw cots and horse blankets. In 1913, vagrants had received such shelter half a million times in the fairy-tale metropolis of two million.
Before the year ended, just under fifteen hundred Viennese had tried to end their lives. Over six hundred
