town. He had an excellent reason for coming to Vienna a day early, as soon as the factory let out, even if he had to take the milktrain back to Wiener Neustadt for the Saturday morning shift. He and other young bucks of his particular craft had a motive for taking some extra trouble: On the night of Friday, January 24, the Sophiensaal in Vienna gave an Automobile Mechanics Ball.
In Vienna almost every walk of life generated its own carnival festivity. Even the Insane Asylum at Steinhof held a Lunatics' Gala. But 'there was no fete for psychiatrists. Sig mund Freud, fifty-seven years old and becoming globally controversial as arch-analyst and founder of the psychoanalytic faith, stooped alone over his desk at Berggasse 19. He was filling page after page of a big lined notebook. Outside the windows of his study, the city was transmogrified into a masked ball. Inside, the master explored the origins of the mask-the primeval mask, the totem. In January 1913 he was finishing an essay called Totem and Taboo. It turned out to be a subject eerie not only in theme but in timing. For all carnival celebrations crest toward Lent; they all say 'carne vale' good-bye to the flesh-as penance for the death of the Lord. Freud's essay deduced from the anthropology of primitive man that the totem was an animal symbol of greatness slain, of the father-leader killed by his sons and followers. After his murder they donned a mask representing the sacred corpse. As their victim's worshippers, they banded together under his symbol in order to bear their guilt better in unison. They ate his flesh or assumed his face to partake of his power, to obtain his forgiveness.
Here was not only the dynamic of primeval myth. Here was the drama of the Eucharist and the plot of Easter, explored by a pen in the Berggasse, scratching on into the night. The ambivalence of carnival/Lent-so opulently celebrated in Viennapulsed around the once and future murder of the prince.
The brooder in the Berggasse was not the only man to stay aloof from the city's revels while being inwardly attuned to its darker currents. About nine tramway stops northeast of Freud's study, a twenty-three-year-old artist subsisted at Mel- demannstrasse 25. This was the address of the Mannerheim, in a desolate corner of the district of Brigittenau.
The municipal government had established this barrack to keep failures from becoming beggars. The Mannerheim' Home for Men'-gave shelter to the black-sheep baron who had drunk away his last remittance, the evicted peddler, the bit-actor too long between engagements, the free-lancer down on his luck, the day laborer always missing out on a steady job, the confused farm boy from the Alps, the flotsam from the Empire's Balkan fringes. They were men without anchor, without family, without sustaining women. All of them were lost in the merciless glitter of the metropolis. For three kronen a week[2] the Mannerheim gave them a last chance. That small sum provided a clean cubicle with a bed, a communal kitchen, a library with penny dreadfuls, a writing room for composing letters of application unlikely to be answered.
Six years earlier, in 1907, the young artist had arrived in Vienna to hunt, like thousands of other ambitious provincials, for the greatness that must be waiting for him somewhere in the great city. Since 1910 he had done his vain striving at the Mannerheim. Twice he had tried to pass the entrance examination at the Academy of Fine Arts. Twice he had been rejected. He had carried to every important architect's office in town his portfolio of architectural drawings; not even the lowliest assistant's job had been offered to him as a result. His watercolors-unusually conventional renderings of Biedermeier scenes-failed to draw the interest of any gallery. He painted watercolors of famous Vienna sights such as Parliament or City Hall. These, when hawked on street corners by a friend, did yield some occasional cash.
Actually he did not need to earn a penny. By 1913 his mother and his aunt had left him two fair-size legacies. He kept both secret. Nobody in the Mannerheim suspected him of an income that could have easily paid for quarters at a comfortable hotel.
But he felt more at ease with fellow losers. Here, among his Mannerheim peers, he enjoyed a special niche. He quite literally occupied it. At the end of a long oaken table near the window of the Writing Room was 'the Hitler Chair.' It had the best light for painting postcards. Nobody but Adolf dared sit there. Everybody honored his obsession with the chair, partly out of gratitude: If a Mannerheim tenant fell short of his week's rent, Hitler was amazingly fast in organizing a collection. Respect also played a role in obeying the man's wish: He was one of the very few in the house never to splurge or debauch. When the Court Opera played Siegfried he would indulge himself in a standing-room ticket. Once a week he might drop into a pastry shop for a chocolate square. But he always practiced sobriety.
And he was a worker. He would daub away with his brush even on carnival nights such as those in 1913 when the gas light outside gleamed on domino masks and decolletages. It didn't seem to bother him that he was excluded from a season so festive for the more fortunate.
Most of the others in the Mannerheim were restless. Even the cheapest ball glittered at them from an impossible distance. They could only afford to drop by a local pub, hoist a lager, ogle prostitutes, leer about sending them to a Serbian bordello. They'd return home for the 11 P.M. curfew, not ready to be shut into their cubicles. So they lingered in the Writing Room to jaw about politics or to reminisce about hot women. And then, without warning or preamble, it would happen.
Hitler would straighten up in his chair. He had been working all along, hunched over. Now the brush would drop from his hand. He would push the palette aside. He would rise to his feet.
He began to speak, to shout, to orate. With hissing consonants and hall-filling vowels he launched into a harangue on morality, racial purity, the German mission and Slav treachery, on Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons. His forelock would toss, his color-stained hands shred the air, his voice rise to an operatic pitch. Then, just as suddenly as he had started, he would stop. He would gather his things together with an imperious clatter, stalk off to his cubicle.
And the others would just stare after him. They had come to accept his fits along with his 'chair.' He was, after all, a good man otherwise. And he did give his Mannerheim audience a good show, producing so dramatically the gesticulations of a clown and the screeching of a demon. In January 1913, it was the Mannerheim's way of experiencing the Vienna carnival.
Chronologically the carnival of 1913 conformed with other years. It began shortly after New Year to end on Shrove Tuesday. This was the Merry Season as defined by the calendar. But carnival in the sense of opulent, ingenious, finely organized Viennese make-believe knew no such limit. In this city it had flourished continuously for over half a millennium.
Here the fairy tale of Habsburg splendor, with orb, scepter, and throne, with pomp of blazons and gonfalons, with the choreography of homage and precedence, of raised trumpets, white stallions, and bowed heads… here it had been enacted and re-enacted every day through endless generations.
The solemn, perpetual ball that was the Imperial court encompassed the entire town. London was other things be sides the King's residence. Even in Bourbon days, Paris had been much more than a royal encampment. But Vienna meant Habsburg. Habsburg meant Vienna. Vienna and Habsburg kept inventing each other into a crowned, turreted, sunset-hued fable that floated above ordinary earth. Compared to other urban centers in Europe, Vienna had little commerce, less industry, and hardly any of the workaday grayness of common sense. Fact-ridden pursuits could not leave much of an imprint on a city busy with the embroidery of Christendom's foremost escutcheon. Factory and counting house were dwarfed by the magnificent shadow of the Palace. Century after century the Viennese devoted themselves to the housing and feeding and staging of their suzerains' legend.
Of course that legend needed a legal character through which the Habsburgs could exercise their dominion. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century they were Holy Roman Emperors. They wore that dignity like a preternatural carnival mask-a mask whose illusion was obvious to all yet whose charisma no one could escape. This peculiarity has been a commonplace among historians: the Holy Roman Empire was hardly Roman. It was not holy (being a cauldron of profane ambitions). It was not an empire (being a mess of brawling princes beyond the emperor's control). The Habsburgs practical power issued from the patchwork of their own huge possessions. As executive instrument, the title of Holy Roman Emperor was vapor. As mask of Christ's paladin it wielded incalculable force.
Napoleon appreciated its resonance. In 1806 he forced the House of Austria to abandon it. Habsburg put the Viennese imagination to work. Other constitutional fictions were devised. By 1913 the latest of these had been in force for nearly fifty years. It was called the Empire of Austria-Hungary, and it was decked out in a legal framework as fanciful as any of its predecessors.
This creation combined quite marvelously the heraldic with the schizoid. Here was a monarchy ruled by one monarch whose subjects passed an official border as they traveled from Hungary, where Franz Joseph was King, to
