harvested from contemplative reason.
Now, in the spring of 1914, Ilic's friend Princip acted out the Dionysian principle of his favorite Nietzsche poem:
Everything that I have becomes coal.
Flame am I, surely…
Dionysian bullets were singing through a man-shaped tree stump in a Belgrade Park. In Munich, Adolf Hitler- another young temperance fanatic-was burning to lead a Dionysian master race. (Hitler's last birthday gift to Mussolini in 1943: The Collected Works of Nietzsche.) In Vienna during the Great War, Viktor Adler's son Friedrich- named after Friedrich Nietzsche-would commit a Dionysian crime; he would shoot and kill the Austrian Prime Minister von Stdrgkh at the restaurant Meissl & Schadn. Adler Senior, however, as befits an elderly asthmatic revolutionary of middle-class origins, had fallen back on Nietzsche's more sedate Apollonian aspects. By 1914, he no longer saw the superman as the hero of some magically wild folk poem but as a rational social being, no longer as the superb Teuton but as the emancipated proletarian. To help the worker liberate his brethren, the Party must give him an education.
The new proletarian didn't need to storm the Bastille. But he had to master a syllabus. Only by unshackling his mind could the worker free himself of injustice. 'The revolution of consciousness,' Adler had written, 'must progress along with the revolution in economics.'
By 1914, Viktor Adler had been spearheading that revolution for twenty-five years. Since he had led it in Vienna, he'd had to lead it against Vienna. He had to fight the genius loci that let the poor waltz through their poverty. He had to take on the elan with which the city painted carnival across squalor; fight the handkissing done in rags; fight the wine songs sung by starvelings; fight the heraldic fairy tales framing lives of grime.
'One thing is needful,' Nietzsche had said, 'namely, giving style to one's character.' Victor Adler made the worker acquire character by cultivating a new style. Instead of whining sentimental ditties about Alt-Wien, Socialist choirs rehearsed songs about union organizers. Instead of all that tavern reminiscing about Empress Elizabeth, the people rediscovered the revolution of 1848 through slide shows at the Party's Adult Education Centers. Instead of dissipating their leisure with alcohol or gambling or prostitutes, they joined the Party's Gymnasts' or Alpinists' or Bikers' clubs. The Party organized and sanitized the workers' lives, and thus vitalized their resistance against exploitation.
Through all that, Austro-Marxism had produced 'the world's most educated proletarians.' Furthermore it elected a plurality envied by its competitors. At the Austrian Parliament dissolved in 1914, the Socialists commanded 84 out of 504 members. This stood out as an impressive number in a legislature that was a crazy quilt of many little ideological patches.
Yet the nature of the Party's strength also produced its insulation. It was a quasi-Nietzschean elite operating in a most un-Nietzschean ambiance. To become strong, it had purged its members of their Austrian indulgences. Adler had fashioned a political masterpiece against the Viennese grain; therefore its strength stood isolated. Other parties might have connected with it in terms of common strategy, if not program. But in character the Socialists were too alien for coalitions or even negotiations. Austro-Marxism lacked the leverage of brother movements in other countries.
In 1914 even more than in previous years, Viktor Adler knew that his Party must not be a weak link of the international workers' alliance. Shadows had begun to jut across Europe's borders. Governments of major powers speechified louder than ever about national interests, patriotic valor, and automated battleships. France heard German sabers rattling. Germany protested its encirclement by England, France, and Russia. Russia denounced Austria's pushiness in the Balkans. And Austria countered sharply; statements from Count von Berchtold's Foreign Ministry on the Ballhausplatz, editorials in the Ballhausplatz-inspired press, all used an especially martial tone to prove that Habsburg was not crippled by the illness of the Emperor.
Yet at the same time the masses had grown more sensitive to the menace of war. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg had just been tried for inciting troops to mutiny: If Germans were asked to murder Frenchmen-she had said in publicGermans would refuse. A court had sent her to jail for a year, but the sentence did not dim the pacifism of German Socialists or the popularity of their party. In the Berlin parliament their plurality topped their comrades' in Vienna. No less than 35 percent of all Reichstag deputies wore the red ribbon in their lapels. In France, the people would go to the polls on May 10; all signs pointed to a Socialist triumph bound to reduce the three-year conscription. In Russia the Tsar must face strikes spreading to armament factories.
Socialist advances elsewhere would soon stare AustroMarxism in the face. It was in Vienna that the leaders of Europe's proletariats were to convene for the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Socialist International. Their meeting was scheduled to begin on August 23 at the Grosser Musikvereinssaal, with Viktor Adler as host.
The prospect charged Adler's agenda in the spring of 1914. It was time to overcome the insulation of his Party; to show comrades abroad and at home that Austrian Socialism could contribute crucially to the International's chorus: 'More Bread, Fewer Guns, No War!'
For such a purpose, May Day of 1914 would be an exhilarating reveille. Most of Viktor Adler's politics appealed to the intellect. But May Day spoke to the body's sensuousness. Therefore it was only appropriate that Viktor Adler had invented the May Day March in the apartment later occupied by Sigmund Freud at Berggasse 19: May Day stoked the Socialist libido. The great march ritualized and rhapsodized ideals presented by the Party much more soberly during the rest of the year. In brief, May Day's Apollonian orderliness had always carried Dionysian voltage. No wonder that the sight of the march had overwhelmed Hitler at twenty-three, or that its memory in Hitler's brain would later set brown-shirted ecstatics goose-stepping behind the swastika. No wonder May Day had electrified Gustav Mahler, Viktor Adler's cohort in their Nietzschean salad days. As Socialist leader, Viktor Adler defined May Day as a 'waking call.' As mature composer, Mahler intended to title his Third Symphony The Gay Science (in tribute to Nietzsche's book of the same name) and began its first movement with a 'Weckruf' (waking call) to rouse the dormant Nietzschean life force. No wonder that Richard Strauss was to remark that whenever he conducted Mahler's Third he would always imagine, during the First Movement, 'uncountable battalions of workers marching to the May Day celebration in Vienna's Prater.' No wonder that Mahler at the end of his career, by then the aging apolitical Director of the Vienna Opera, had suddenly recaptured the ardor of his youth on a May First. Leaving an opera rehearsal, he had run into the workers' procession by accident, joined it on impulse, stuck with it to the very end, and came home at night 'vibrant with brotherliness.'
That had been in 1905. Now it was 1914. Mahler was dead. Viktor Adler was old, suffering from cardiac edema. Yet he remained as determined a workers' leader as ever. This year of all years, the May Day march needed juice, resolve, will. Yet just this year the march faced unusual jeopardy. At any moment the Emperor might die. His successor Franz Ferdinand might cancel all celebrations. True, so far Franz Joseph had survived a fever that would have killed most other octogenarians. Yet his very lingering posed a problem for May First. In many an Austrian Socialist there lurked a covert monarchist. Would there be a reluctance to join the Red festival while the father of the country fought for breath?
***
At most of the twenty-five May Days so far, the sky had been clear and comradely in Vienna. This year weather forecasters were wary. Still, May 1, 1914, dawned with a plenitude of sun. What's more, the Emperor's pneumonia did not dampen class consciousness. Workers poured out of the slums. By the hundreds they gathered as craft groups at many different assembly points: tailors, bakers, mechanics, glove-makers. By the thousands the groups merged on the Ringstrasse, adding multitudes as they went. By the tens of thousands they crossed the Danube Canal bridges. As a host of hundreds of thousands they converged on the Prater. There in the park they were the First Movement of Mahler's Third become flesh, ready for the crescendo.
At that point it was just past noon. Above a moving sea of heads the heavens had turned from blue to gray. But clouds had become irrelevant. There was such brightness surging through the streets: band after band intoning the 'Internationale' or playing workers' songs; banners calling for an eighthour day; banners demanding apartments with plumbing; banners condemning alcohol as the capitalists' confederate; banners exhorting the government to recall Parliament, to spend less money on guns, to ease conscription, to keep peace.
Arms locked, the marchers chanted their grievances and sang out their hopes. And this May Viktor Adler had added a new touch-'Red Cavalry,' made up of battalions of bicyclists. Their legs pistoning in unison, their bike wheels festooned with red carnations, they held trumpets to their mouths and made the town echo with fanfares that galvanized onlookers into cheers. Topping it all were delegations from abroad as heralds of the International's
