Congress to come: carpenters from Germany in their guild dress of top hats, black scarves, and gray bell-bottom trousers; French steel workers in blue aprons and metal caps; booted Italian miners waving lit lanterns.
The entire, enormous crowd came to a halt on the largest Prater meadow, just as the first drops fell. Thunder overrode the greetings of the intial speaker. Within a minute rain flooded down. Hail peppered the deluge. The throng fled into the Prater's inns, restaurants, and coffeehouses. Here labor's holiday continued in jam-packed solidarity but also in an unscheduled key. Had the weather held, the workers would have listened in orderly rows as orators outside exhorted them to valor and temperance and discipline for the ongoing struggle. Now, munching sausage, sitting on each other's laps or even on banners condemning liquor, they toasted their comradeship with bottles of Gumpoldskirchner. Of course at the Inn to the Brown Stag where Viktor Adler himself had taken refuge, one drank only coffee or orange soda. Still, Adler must have known that this May Day had come to an end more Viennese than planned.
Spring was taking a precarious turn for all three of Vienna's grand old men. The downpour spoiled Victor Adler's fete; it exacerbated his asthma for the next few days. Helpless stethoscopes surrounded Franz Joseph's bed. And the patriarch of psychosomatic medicine found his health in straits just as his Emperor's pneumonia reached a crisis. The coincidence may not have been coincidental.
During the winter of 1914 Freud had been suffering intermittently from colitis. In mid-April his symptoms persisted to a worrisome degree. He began to suspect a tumor of the colon.
Things were greening and sprouting in the Vienna Woods, but this spring the doctor lost his taste for mushroom hunts. He felt too tired for noontime walks around the Ring. What energy he had, he gave to his work and to the fisticuffs disguised as monographs within the International PsychoAnalytical Association.
Especially to the last. The association's politics, like those of the Balkans, had been steadily tensing. Until the end of 1913 Freud had hoped if not for peace, at least for a truce with his Swiss adversary, Carl Jung. In the course of the year Freud's allies had rallied around him in lectures and papers; they'd directed a scholarly scorn at the 'dogmas from Zurich' (particularly at Jung's de-sexualization of the libido into general psychic energy). Freud himself, however, had refrained from all personal sallies. As if to fortify his restraint he kept refining his 'Moses of Michelangelo,' that essay in praise of conciliation. Yet at the same time he took a certain partisan pleasure in the response to his recent Totem and Taboo. The psychoanalytic intellegentsia took note that Totem scintillated on the symbology of primitive man, the very field Jung claimed as his own.
In early 1914 Freud had begun to take a more decided role in the campaign. He used a paper begun during his Roman summer of 1913. Then, between trips to the Moses statue in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, he had blocked out 'On Narcissism: an Introduction.' Later, in Vienna, polishing the essay during the spring of 1914, he fashioned it into something of a stiletto: He included a very pointed though still civil revision of Jung's ideas on the subject.
Meanwhile the enemy was not sitting still. Jung was preparing to pluck once more at the prophet's beard through upcoming lectures in Scotland. Rumors to that effect filtered fast to Vienna. As if to confirm them, Jung publicly protested against Freud-inspired 'aspersions on my bona fides' and resigned as editor of the Psycho- Analytic Yearbook.
For Freud this was a signal to stop all appeasement. He had long repressed the militancy of his resentment. The speed with which it surfaced now can be gauged from two sentences from two different letters. 'I have no desire for separation,' he had written about Jung on June 1, 1913, '. perhaps my Totem paper will bring on the breach against my will.' On January 12, 1914, he wrote, working on another paper, '. I expect that this statement of mine will put an end to all compromises and bring about the desired rupture.'
General Conrad could not have expressed better his impatience with formal ties to a foe. After all, Belgrade still maintained diplomatic relations with Vienna, just as Jung was still President of Freud's International Psycho- Analytical Association. In contrast to the General, however, Freud wore the crown of his realm and could fire off ultimatums at will. 'This statement' that would cause 'the desired rupture' was a manuscript he had started just before New Year's when he also labored on 'Narcissism' and 'Moses of Michelangelo.' For Freud it was a season of astonishingly diverse industriousness that continued as the months grew warmer and his colitis worse. Yet regardless of other worries or chores, Freud kept working on this 'statement' designed to kill all 'compromises' with the Jungians. He wanted to publish it in the next issue of the Psycho-Analytic Yearbook from which Jung had just resigned.
The 'statement' was a 'polemic' as Freud himself more closely defined it. Its title: 'On the History of Psycho-Analysis.' Despite the neutral tag, it articulated (in the words of the editor of Freud's Standard Edition) 'the fundamental postulates and hypotheses of psycho-analysis to show that the theories of… Jung were totally incompatible with them.'
***
Advance word of the Freud offensive reached Jung in the early months of 1914. Soon afterward the Freud- controlled Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psycho-Analyse loosed a barrage of hostile comment at Jung-influenced monographs. The strategy took. On April 20 Jung completed the breach. He resigned from the Presidency of the International Psycho-Analytical Association.
'I am tired of leniency and kindness.' Freud made that confession in a letter of May 17, three months after finishing the Moses essay in which he had embraced leniency and kindness. How well tuned he was to the world's mood in 1914. How quickly his Apollo had changed to Dionysus. And how mortal he remained, just like the world's other Dionysians. In midMay his intestinal symptoms, ever worsening, forced him to comply with his physician's demand. He submitted to a detailed examination by a specialist on cancer of the colon.
On may 12, 1914, two men in civilian clothes, yet attended by orderlies, had tea in the sitting room of a hotel suite in Carlsbad. One of them had obviously come to the spa for a purpose other than a cure. At sixty-two General Conrad was trim and fit, still a terrier primed to pounce. The tic of his left eye punctuated his energy, the crispness and speed of his motions. His handsome face, topped by the mane of gold and gray, glowed with a tan earned on horseback during spring maneuvers.
His German counterpart slumped in an armchair as though he were much more than only four years older. General Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of Staff of the Kaiser's armed forces, needed the healing waters badly. Ungainly, flabby, bald, he was not at all well in stomach or kidney. Nor fortunate with certain wrinkles in his disposition. To offset these he read Nietzsche as the Muse of Power and he often talked about Thomas Carlyle's books showing that history was made by heroes. Still, he couldn't help proclivities odd for the principal warrior of the Junkers. He was a cello-playing Christian Scientist with a penchant for esoteric cults. At night, when nobody was watching, he translated Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande from the French. He suggested a frayed, bruised poet, possibly androgynous, definitely overweight.
The Kaiser called Moltke 'der traurige Julius' (sad Julius). High-echelon wags in Berlin claimed that he was not sad, just hurting with bruises from his falls from the saddle. As a source of many a grin, the horsemanship of the Chief of Staff contributed to the lighter side of official life in Berlin. One of his celebrated tumbles had been in front of the equestrian statue of his uncle, the Helmuth von Moltke, the great Field Marshal von Moltke, victor over Napoleon III in the war of 1870.
The comparison afflicted the lesser von Moltke all his life. So did the conflict between his duty, which must be remorseless, and his intelligence, which was considerable. 'The next war,' he had told the Kaiser a few years earlier, 'will be a national war. It will not be settled by one decisive battle but will be a long wearisome struggle with an enemy who will not be overcome until his whole national force is broken… a war which will utterly exhaust our own people even if we are victorious.' Yet here he sat, in May 1914, discussing the next war. It was von Moltke's job to map out the catastrophe of victory.
Of course General Conrad suffered from none of his colleague's pangs or qualms. He had journeyed to Carlsbad ostensibly to underline in person what he had written Berlin in several memoranda; namely that Serbia's provocations in Albania and elsewhere could no longer go unanswered. Bel grade, he told the German Chief of Staff, was presuming too much on the patience of Conrad's imperial masters (an allusion to Crown Prince Ferdinand's pacifism and the caution of Franz Joseph, now so sick). A day of reckoning was at hand. It would put the German- Austrian alliance to a test. Conrad said he wanted to make sure that he and his Berlin confrere agreed on all the mechanics of the partnership.
Conrad, in other words, was fishing for reassurance. If Russia and France rushed to Serbia's aid, could
