ultimate garden. Therefore it was the ultimate antithesis to what Kraus hated most: Vienna's artificiality, especially the kind perfected by the Viennese press with its deliciously concocted slanders, the bribed bias of its reportage, the slick charm of its feuilletonists. Through sheer organic honesty of stalk and leaf and petal, the garden rebuked all such ink-stained turpitude.
Shortly after visiting Konopiste, Kraus fired off a philippic culminating in the declaration
that the preservation of the wall of a manor park, where between a five-hundred-year-old poplar and a bluebell flowering today, all the miracles of creation are salvaged from the wreck of the world-that such a thing is more important in the name of the spirit than the pursuit of intellectual infamy which takes God's breath away!
These words in Die Fackel, vibrating on the rim of 'the wreck of the world,' were the last Kraus wrote before the shots of Sarajevo.
After Sarajevo (while Berchtold was hatching the nonultimatum super-ultimatum), Die Fackel of July 10, 1914, ran a eulogy of the late Crown Prince that was also a hymn to nature's naturalness as well as the indictment of a culture. 'In this era so deplorable for humanity,' wrote Kraus, which in our Austrian laboratory of the apocalypse is expressed by the grimace of gemutlich sickliness-in such an era the Archduke had the measure of a man. Only now, as Vienna mimics mourning, do we realize… how much he disdained that indispensable affability used by the powerful to promote their careers… He was no greeter. He had no winning ways to charm the people past their grievances. He did show character through his radical championship of the commonplace against a fake modernity.
He proved himself by his taste. At his estate he opened to the people a floral landscape intelligible on the most popular level, a park with few rarefied pretensions… He was not part of the fancy dynamics of Austrian decay… he wanted to rouse our era from its sickness so that it would not sleep past its own death. Now it sleeps past his.
Even as Kraus wrote that passage, Europe drowsed on toward a great death. In fact, some of his admirers had a hand in both the drowsing and the dying. Many bright young diplomats read him with awe. This included the group under Count von Berchtold laboring on the composition of the missive Berchtold was to unveil exquisitely, explosively, during the second act of his scenario-the nonultimatum superultimatum to be served on Serbia.
'We were all devotees of Karl Kraus,' one of the group would later reminisce in a memoir. 'We all devoured, fascinated, every issue of Die Fackel. From Kraus we had learned to believe in the magic of the word as the womb of thought… We were the last generation [of Habsburg Foreign Office officials], and our highest aim was to crystallize language into utter perfection. For four weeks we worked on the phrasing of the ultimatum as if we were polishing a jewel.'
To Kraus, had he known of it, such adulation would have been abomination. For him 'the magic of the word' lay in quarrying the truth, not in tricking it out. Die Fackel aimed to expose, as he once put it, the 'difference between an urn and a chamber pot.' In July of 1914 his fans on the Ballhausplatz manipulated the word in order to blur just this distinction. They were festooning the chamber-pot crassness of an ultimatum with the adornments of an urn, to be passed on a silver server from Excellency to Excellency.
Meanwhile excellencies all over Europe continued in the roles assigned to them by Count von Berchtold's Act I. The weather continued as the Count's obedient stagehand. A slumbrous tropical sun made the continent a lotus land. Belgrade announced that the Serbian King would shortly travel to a spa abroad. In London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, took a languid view of international relations; speaking at a banquet, he said that while some clouds always hovered on the horizon, there were fewer this year than last, and that His Majesty's Government would help to dissipate even those… In Vienna itself, a skeptical journal like the Socialist ArbeiterZeitung relaxed its suspicions of the government. 'The quiet and slow pace of events,' it wrote, 'suggests that no drastic action will be taken against Serbia.'
Just past the midpoint of July, rumors skittered along the Ringstrasse. What was happening behind those drawn blinds at the Ballhausplatz? The stock market registered a sudden, though not major decline.
But Count von Berchtold knew how to restore the blandness required by his scenario. On July 18, he visited British Ambassador Sir Maurice de Bunsen at the ambassador's summer residence Schloss Stixstein. The Foreign Minister 'was unusually chatty and agreeable,' Sir Maurice would later report, '… not a word was let drop that a crisis impended.'
To the Italian ambassador, who seemed a bit unnerved by Austria's impassivity after Sarajevo, the Foreign Minister said that the situation was not grave-'it just needs to be cleared up.' And the French ambassador, who did not find much clarification in that statement, was assured by Berchtold that Vienna's note to Belgrade would be 'reasonable.'
The French ambassador duly relayed this news to his government. Paris, not overly alarmed in the first place, let its attention wander. Just then a magnificent scandal was engulfing France. On July 20, a judge's gavel at the Court de Seine started a trial mesmerizing the Gallic imagination. Mme. Henriette Caillaux, wife of the Finance Minister (widely touted to be the next Prime Minister), had pumped six bullets into the body of France's most powerful journalist, the editor in chief of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmette. That had been back in March. But now, in mid-July, fireworks between prosecutor and defense counsel lit up the erotic glamor behind this charismatic homicide. Much of the trial revolved around the love letters Caillaux had written Henriette during the extramarital affair that preceded their wedding-letters whose imminent publication in Le Figaro had driven Mme. Caillaux to murder.
The shots at Sarajevo faded rapidly as those from the Figaro office resounded once more in newspaper columns. This was the stuff of prime gossip, made even tangier by a courtroom duel. It enlivened millions of French vacations. Certainly it piqued President Poincare on his summer cruise. About to land in St. Petersburg, he asked to be apprised of every moist detail by cable.
Britain also had an absorbing domestic concern-apart from holiday-making, of course. The Irish Home Rule Bill was roiling tempers very badly. On July 20-on the morning the Caillaux judges assembled in scarlet robes at the Seine Tribunal-His Britannic Majesty summoned the contending parties to Buckingham Palace, taking a very rare step beyond his constitutional role as a reigning, not a ruling, monarch. And King George did manage to postpone the crisis-until a superior urgency submerged it. But who would have expected such an urgency? Where would it come from? The Henley Regatta?
British King and Paris murderess were spear-carriers for Count von Berchtold's stagecraft. They both diverted attention as he readied the surprise climax. Vienna itself remained quiet, basking its way through July. It did generate some official news-though of a literally festive character. The City Fathers were planning the First International Vienna Music Festival, scheduled for June 1915. Newspapers reported a spirited debate on the subject in the Municipal Council. Among the main points discussed were (1) should the program consist of concerts only? and (2) if operas were included, would this be aping Salzburg, whose own first large-scale festival was slotted for August of this year and which would feature the great Felix Weingartner conducting Lotte Lehmann in Don Giovanni?
Vienna, then, looked preoccupied with matters either esthetic or bucolic and at all events harmless. As late as July 20, the Russian ambassador saw no reason for not leaving town on a two-week holiday. He left. From St. Petersburg came an even more conclusive signal of detente. On July 21, the Tsar and his guest, French President Poincare, exchanged toasts that dwelled on the international picture: The Serb-Austrian problem wasn't even mentioned.
But forty-eight hours earlier, while Europe sunned and napped, Count von Berchtold had tiptoed toward the last scene of his first act. On the afternoon of July 19, a number of taxis and private automobiles drew up before his Palais overlooking the Strudlhof Steps. The cars arrived at intervals, avoiding a dramatic convergence. It was Sunday. The scene seemed to point to some weekend social gathering. A passerby, had he cared to notice, would not have spotted a single official limousine.
Yet this was an official occasion, as crucial as it was covert: a cabinet meeting of the Joint Ministers of the AustroHungarian Empire. Berchtold had summoned them to review the text of the note to the Serbian government. On the morning of that day the 'jewel' had finally been polished to perfection.
Next morning, on Monday July 20, a courier left the Ballhausplatz for the Emperor's villa at Bad Ischl. He made this trip routinely, every weekday, carrying state papers. On the twentieth he carried 'the jewel' for Franz Joseph's inspection. On Tuesday the twenty-first, a brief, laconic item in the official Wiener Zeitung reported that Foreign Minister Count von Berchtold had gone to Bad Ischl 'to discuss current business with His Majesty.' And that
