assisted by his children. The Churchill family was building sand castles that featured deep moats to trap the tide.
At almost the same time the British Prime Minister Sir Herbert Asquith sent his daughter off to Holland 'so that the girl can have some fun.' Sir Herbert himself did not stray too far from No. 10 Downing Street. After all, he had to tend to something of a crisis. More fuss was afoot about the Irish Home Rule Bill.
The sunny, stable high over Europe was of double benefit to Vienna. Politically, it painted just the right trompe l'oeil backdrop for Count von Berchtold's stage. But the fine summer also met the personal needs of the Viennese. Perhaps more than other cities, theirs had been an incubator of the treacheries of the human soul. Perhaps more than others, it cultivated the therapy of the meadow.
After many rainless weeks, a nocturnal downpour on July 9 washed away the dust. At dawn the west wind scented the streets with the pine of Alpine pastures. (It was the day Berchtold's team began to draft in secret the nonultimatum super-ultimatum.) By noon the sun had re-burnished the foliage of the Vienna Woods. And since only a few streetcar stops separated the Viennese from their Woods, the weather drew them outdoors in unprecedented numbers. They might stoop the work day away in dank factories or behind cramped desks. But on Sunday the lagoons of the Danube splashed with swimmers. At night, the vineyard inns sounded with more song than ever. 'Wien… Wien…' they sang, turned toward the heart of the city, namely its past. They still sang about its dreamy courtyards, its gothic alleys, its Biedermeier gardens-all dear and cozy and going, going, gone. Who would suspect that, hidden away at the Ballhausplatz, Count von Berchtold was preparing a giant grenade? In July 1914, Vienna presented itself as a spectacle of nature and nostalgia-the very opposite of imminence and war.
Nature and nostalgia. Their twin lure was felt by many during just those weeks. On July 12, Sigmund and Martha Freud left Vienna for Carlsbad. They arrived there at almost the same time as the Chief of the German General Staff, General von Moltke. The Freuds, though, lived just outside the spa. They took rooms at the Villa Fasolt on the Schlossberg, a hummock among wooded knolls. This landscape resembled the environs of Fribor, a small Moravian town where Freud had lived during his first four years. In Fribor, by the foothills of the Carpathians, he had been'… the happy child who received his first indelible impressions from this air… from this soil.' Even as an adult'. I never felt really comfortable in the city. I believe now that I was never free from a longing for the beautiful woods near our home.'
During this summer Freud began to develop thoughts for a paper (never published) called 'Philogenetic Fantasy,' about mankind's infancy-a pre-Ice Age, pre-Angst, pre-Jung Eden with food and space aplenty, succeeded by much rawer and more crowded times in which paranoia became a survival instinct.
In contrast to Freud, Leon Trotsky could not afford an expensive resort. He spent July of 1914 in his sparse apartment near the flowering edge of the Vienna Woods. Longingly, no doubt. His autobiography shows that for all his sophistication, Trotsky retained the yearnings of a country boy born in the Southern Ukraine'. a kingdom of wheat and sheep… The village would flare up in my consciousness and draw me on like a lost paradise. In my years as commander of the Red Army… I was greatly pleased to see each new [rural] fence constructed of freshly cut pine boards. Lenin, who knew this passion of mine, often twitted me about it.'
Yet this same summer saw Lenin sharing this same passion. His headquarters at Cracow near the Austro- Russian border had been chosen for reasons beyond revolutionary expediency. 'Illyich likes Cracow so much,' his wife would write, 'because it reminded him of Russia.' But Lenin, born in a Volga backwater many miles from the nearest railroad, liked better yet a nook in his Habsburg exile that was smaller and greener than Cracow.
'Autumn is magnificent in the Tatra range,' he'd written his sister Maria in April 1914. 'If we have a fine autumn we shall probably live in the country.' The summer of 1914 was too seductive. Lenin didn't wait for fall. In July he and his wife Krupskaya moved to Poronin in the Tatras. Krupskaya suffered from a goiter and couldn't walk far from their cottage. But Lenin took off with knapsack, walking stick, and notebook 'clambering up the steeps like a mountain goat.' Sometimes he stopped to make notes on the contentious Socialist Con gress scheduled in Vienna for the following month. But for most of July (while the Ballhausplatz hatched the nonultimatum super-ultimatum) Lenin hiked the glorious days away.
Lenin was an occasional visitor in Vienna. Hitler, like Trotsky, had lived there for years. Unlike Trotsky he'd never been drawn to the city's green precincts. He had painted, brooded, ranted, on pavement only; in fact he'd meticulously kept away from the Vienna Woods as if their fragrance might compromise his bitterness. But in this balmy summer he seemed to be haunted by leaf and tree. In July Hitler meandered through Munich's sub-Alpine outskirts, those pointing toward Salzburg and his native Upper Austria. He sketched river shores and villas, often with a garden motif.
That summer the idea of the garden, of nature and nostalgia, also haunted another demon. A virtuous demon, this one, obsessed with morality as others are obsessed with hate. Karl Kraus was the most merciless critic in Austria of Austria. About three times a month he published Die Fackel (The Torch), a magazine of inexhaustible indignation and surgical brilliance. At first it had printed polemics from a variety of writers. But by 1914 no other Jeremiah even approached Kraus's eloquence; by then every syllable in Die Fackel hissed from his pen. His wit seared Vienna's operetta Machiavellis, its hand-kissing nastiness, its whipped-cream ethics. Die Fackel lit up the ways in which the city debased manners and debauched language.
But the summer of 1914 proved that Kraus, Austria's scourge, shared certain sympathies with the late Austrian Crown Prince. Of course both were dedicated haters-the Archduke forever frowning and the torch-hurling Jew. But there was another affinity. Both men were drawn to nature and nostalgia, the dual hallmark of the season. Both loved the garden because it sustained virtue that had withered elsewhere. For the Archduke, the garden- particularly his great garden in Bohemia-was a haven of divine grace; it sheltered him and his Sophie against the godless and malevolent artifice of Vienna's court. For Kraus, the garden was a sanctuary from civilization, which had 'betrayed God to the machine.'
The Crown Prince loved the garden lavishly, naively, as evidenced by the vast rose beds of Konopiste. Kraus loved the garden mystically. Show him a border of violets, and his acid genius would pulse in an orphic vein. To Kraus, nature occasioned a transfiguring nostalgia. Nature and nostalgia were part of a trinity whose third member was the Maker Himself.
Not long before the summer of 1914, Karl Kraus wrote 'The Dying Man,' a poem that spies a beacon glimmering from the garden of Creation. It glimmers on through the Fall to guide the fallen toward Redemption; a Redemption whose flowers are the same as those of Genesis.
In the poem God, the Gardener, addresses man, the moribund:
But the garden did more than furnish Kraus with apocalyptic metaphor. During July of 1914, he experienced the garden as a very personal, real, blooming, and twittering haven. In the park of Janowitz, the Bohemian estate of his mistress, Baroness Sidonie von Nadherny, he could lean back under chestnut boughs. He could breathe deeply and release himself from his angers. In public he was the mordant aphorist capable of defining a woman as 'an occasionally acceptable substitute for masturbation.' In private, among Janowitz's groves, he kissed his baroness's slim fingers as they intertwined with his own. In Janowitz Park he relished his rare moments of repose and affection.
Less than fifteen miles away from Janowitz lay Franz Ferdinand's Konopiste. On June 15, when the archducal gardens had opened to the public, Kraus and his baroness had been among the dazzled visitors. This was the
