of their fellow South Slavs.
At the news of the Second Balkan War in 1913, Ilic had walked from Sarajevo to Belgrade (to save money and to escape detection) and joined the Serb army as a volunteer. Hence his nickname 'Hadzija' (after the Muslim pilgrim, the Hadji). The Balkan War had also drawn Princip to Belgrade where he had tried to enlist in the komite, the irregular Serb units operating in guerrilla style. But Princip had been rejected, being too young and small. Now, in the first months of 1914, he was back in Sarajevo, back in the tedious school from which he'd already been expelled once for joining an anti-Austrian demonstration. He hated blackboard and homework. He lived for his meetings with Ilic and the Young Bosnians. Inside him grew the need to do something worthy of his favorite verse, Nietzsche's lines:
I know whence I arrive Unsatisfied like the flame. I glow and writhe. Everything I embrace becomes light, Everything that I leave becomes coal. Flame am I, surely.
What or whom could this inexorable flame burn? With Ilia and his comrades he had discussed killing the Austrian Governor of Bosnia-Hercegovina, General Potiorek. Yet Potiorek, though the most visible oppressor in the land, was just a tool. It was the heart of Habsburg that must be struck. Toward the end of January, Princip received a letter from a Young Bosnian in France, saying that Franz Ferdinand would be visiting Paris under circumstances favorable to an assassination. By some accounts, Princip replied in his and Ilic's name that he wanted to use the chance to eliminate the tyrant but that he would first acquire weapons and training in Belgrade.
Of course Franz Ferdinand was not the anti-Serb ogre that seared Princip's mind. And of course the two never met in France. Yet their paths began to converge in February 1914.
Around the first of that month, Princip did leave Sarajevo, ostensibly to continue his high school education in Belgrade. His brother paid the fare for a detour on the way. Princip stopped over at his native village of Grahovo, in Western Bosnia. Here he was marooned for some weeks by the same giant blizzards that smothered Vienna. And most of that time, his mother was to recall, he spent brooding, staring at the snow.
***
Gavrilo Princip knew nothing of the actual politics or personality of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand. And Franz Ferdinand did not even know of Gavrilo Princip's existence. However, the Crown Prince had heard of another youth, equally modern in his malaise, down to a susceptibility to Nietzsche. He was one of the few Austrian artists who, like the Young Bosnians, saw a radical connection between art and society.
His name was Oskar Kokoschka, and at twenty-two he had come to the Archduke's attention through his play, produced at a modernist art-students' theater in Vienna in 1909. Also on the bill was a dramatization of The Birthday of the Infanta, a bitter fairy tale by a literary hero of the Young Bosnians, Oscar Wilde. Kokoschka's Murder, Hope of Women, consisted of a chaos of screams, stabbings, and poetic fragments about love practiced as a bloody trial of combat. It happened that the audience included some Imperial Army soldiers from Bosnia's Sarajevo who didn't share Young Bosnia's enthusiasm for the avant-garde. They helped start the lusty riots that followed. The Crown Prince read the newspaper reports the next day and reacted characteristically. 'Every bone in that young man's body,' he said about Kokoschka, 'should be broken.'
It pleased Kokoschka that his work had touched the higher spheres. How wonderful to epater le prince! He stuck to his ways, though painting rather than playwriting became the instrument of his notoriety. Encouraged by his mistress Alma Mahler (composer Gustav Mahler's widow), he had developed, in the early teens of the century, an expressionist imagery at once febrile and morbid, putrescent and electric. Considering Kokoschka's temper and considering Alma's responsiveness to any passing male of talent and virility, their affair was at first oddly stable. Often it produced what was for Kokoschka atypical bliss. But during the first months of 1914 this, like many other things in Austria, began to change.
The couple met in a villa in the Semmering, an idyllic Alpine hamlet near Vienna. One day Kokoschka opened the door to find their trysting chalet literally slimy with an orgy of toads. The warty creatures had escaped from a tank to sliver and hop, slaver and mate, all over the living room rug.
Recently Kokoschka had begun to suspect Alma of finessing an affair not only with the architect Walter Gropius but with Rudolf Kammerer, a prominent biologist experimenting with frogs. And here seemed to be viscous proof of the second liaison: bulge-eyed, twitching couplings before a window filled with snowy splendor.
The sight altered Kokoschka's angle of invention. For more than a year he had been at work on The Tempest, one of his central masterpieces. Wild swirls of color suggest a man and a woman resting in what could be either a bed afloat in clouds or a boat adrift in a stream. Some powerful force curls the two against each other-a force that apparently changed nature and color after Kokoschka's encounter with the toads early in 1914: he started to re-tint many of the picture's vibrant Bengal reds to a colder and more ominous blue-green. Ardor dissolved toward phosphorescence. Tenderness turns into trap. 'The boat in which we two are being tossed about…' Kokoschka would later write to a friend, 'is a house big enough for a whole world of pain which we have gone through together. And I am going to the war, secretly. After… [this painting] I should really go under.' 'The Tempest,' wrote a critic much later still, 'has been interpreted in our day as a potent metaphor of 'collapse, dissolution, finis Austriae, the end of time.' '
'Finis Austriae' is the wisdom of hindsight. In January 1914, the Hitlers, the Princips, the Kokoschkas were either disreputable or, worse, unknown. Vienna concerned itself not with the end of time but with the beginning of carnival. Countess Jenny von Haugwitz hosted the first highlight of the merry season. She gave a 'streamlined' ball in the newly redecorated Directoire salon of the Hotel Imperial. The evening prescribed 'an automotive theme' for costumes and saw many a shapely Rolls-Royce, Daimler, and Mercedes-Benz cruise across the parquet.
The Bank Employees' Club tried to top its Bankruptcy Ball of the previous year with a Banknote Forgers' Fest, and nearly succeeded. Even lower class celebrations set high standards. For example, the Public Bath Attendants' Ball at the Stahlehner Hall announced that persons in clown suits would not be admitted for that was much too common, unoriginal, and old-fashioned a disguise. And so a mob of goggled aviators and formidably hatted suffragettes converged on the door.
The Laundresses' Ball did introduce-though only brieflysome dissonance. The ball itself was fun: lively with authentic pinch-them! young laundresses in the striped stockings and ribbonned blouses of their trade. But most of the young Society bucks who had come to take the girls home 'to have their trousers ironed' had to face the next day with their garments as creased as ever. The laundresses refused even the lordliest offers for private breakfast. Early in the morning they went straight from their ball to the Ringstrasse to join their unemployed sisters in a protest march.
For Vienna that was a somewhat too modern way of capping a carnival night. One week later the Ball at Court in the Imperial Palace[3] provided a lesson on how to pay one's respects to the future more delicately. The old Emperor himself played teacher. He inaugurated the dancing by turning the first few beats of the first waltz with the young, pretty Zita, wife of his grandnephew, the Archduke Karl, who was second in succession. This necessarily discomfited the Crown Prince since his morganatic spouse Sophie did not rate an Emperor's waltz on so formal a night. But after returning from the dance, the monarch resolved the embarrassment. He turned to Franz Ferdinand, standing very stiffly at his side. Would Sophie have the kindness, Franz Joseph asked, to join him at his table together with Karl, Zita, and, of course, Franz Ferdinand himself?
It was a finely balanced distribution of affabilities. Though he left intact every nuance of precedence and protocol, the old gentleman breathed a new feeling of mutual cordiality into three generations of the ruling family.
On a night shortly thereafter the Habsburgs held their own private family ball. As the carnival's most exclusive affair, it came to pass in the Imperial Palace Apartments of one of the younger Archdukes, Peter Ferdinand, and his Archduchess Marie Christine. Not even an orchestra intruded. Discreetly, a string quartet played Haydn behind a screen. Servants noted that despite its august character the gathering was unusually warm this year, with many Highest hugs and kisses.
The next day, Shrove Tuesday, brought the ultimate in public social glitter. The Duke and the Duchess of Cumberland, bearers (despite its Anglo-Saxon name) of a crest long eminent in Austrian blazonry, gave their annual matinee dan- sante, from 4 to 10 P.M. The scene was the Palais Cumberland, once summer chateau of Empress Maria Theresa. Guests danced in the great ballroom whose roundness conformed to their waltzing and whose frescoes amplified the merriment divinely, catching gods and goddesses at play. The buffet was served in the renowned 'treasure suite' with its silvered furniture. Jewelry ministered to gastronomy. Footmen offered caviar on silver plate, pheasant on gold. Each guest departed with a box of chocolate truffles wrapped in silver and stamped with the Cumberland escutcheon.
