ambassador withheld from his Foreign Minister news of the martial intentions of the Russian General Staff. But he did convey General Joffre's encouragement to his Russian colleagues 'to commence an offensive against East Prussia soonest.' The ambassador deliberately delayed Viviani's very different, moderating words to St. Petersburg until it was too late.
'Russian troops,' Poincare announced to the French cabinet on August 2, 'will be in Berlin by All Saints' Day.' Hurrah! The Zeitgeist vested in him the power withheld by the French constitution.
Who ruled in Britain? On July 29, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill wrote his wife that he would 'do my best for peace and nothing would induce me to wrongfully strike the first blow.' Yet the same letter confessed that 'war preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity.' Two days later he mobilized the fleet, against the explicit decision of the British cabinet. 'Winston,' said Prime Minister Asquith indulgently, 'has his war paint on.' 'The lamps are going out all over Europe,' said Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. 'We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' The shores darkened. Churchill's dreadnoughts fanned out across the North Sea. Hurrah!
***
Who ruled the world? In Habsburg's Prague, the insurance official Franz Kafka was just developing some notions on the subject. At another time he was to refer to himself ruefully as 'the nerve end of humanity.' Right now, on July 29, 1914, the day after Austria's declaration of War on Serbia, two days before Germany's ultimatum to Russia, the name 'Josef K' appears for the first time in Kafka's journal. That week he began to sketch out ideas for The Trial'[6]-the novel registering in a personal compass an evil erupting internationally: some incalculable force, insidious, inexorable, operating beyond all normal jurisdictions, closing in on its victims.
With what phrases did such power enter history? This was the time when ambassador after ambassador appeared before Foreign Minister after Foreign Minister to declare that he had the honor to inform His Excellency that his government, in order to protect the security and integrity of its realm, was forced to consider itself at war.
Honor? Security? Integrity? Excellency?
On August 9, 1914, while such words were still being intoned, Ludwig Wittgenstein began to ruminate systematically about the disjunction between language and truth. On that day he began the notebook that led to his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. The Tractatus, purging language of its routine shams, was born on the grandest proscenium of such shams, Imperial Habsburg. Flourish, not fact, held the realm together; flourish painted the mirage of dynastic communality between crown and people. Progress was corroding all things communal, but flourish painted over the corrosion. In the Empire of the flourish, Wittgenstein developed the philosophy that punctured, on the deepest modernist level, the theatrics of style. And here Kafka wrote the paradigmatic modernist novel, steeped in the angst underlying our daily charades.
Meanwhile great charades of state lit up the horizon. On August 4, the Kaiser stood on the balcony of his Berlin palace. He had not wept, like the Tsar, when the declaration of war had been published. But his face (in Grand Admiral von Tirpitz's description) 'looked ravaged and tragic.' The thousands who had come to hear him didn't notice. They only saw that their sovereign wore a spiked helmet under which his mouth shouted its mustachioed duty from the speech text handed him: 'We draw the sword with a clean conscience and clean hands… from now on I no longer know parties. I only know Germans!'
Hurrah!
The masses cheered. They cheered him and their own relief. Hurrah! Here in Berlin as well as in Paris, in London, in Vienna, in St. Petersburg, war had freed them from politics, from partisanship, from all apartness. Until now they had been mutually separated. Competition had driven them against each other. Or poverty had marooned them. Or they had been isolated in their cocoon of envy and alienation. Now it was all marvelously different. Now the worn-down unemployed, the trodden-under scullion, the unfulfilled genius, the bored coupon-clipper, the jaded boulevadier-they could all link arms and walk forward together in the same electrifying adventure, against the enemy. Now they were Germans together, Frenchmen together, Englishmen together, Russians together and-most astounding-ethnically motley Habsburg subjects together. The enemy made it possible for them to break through to one another. Now the same patriot warmth embosomed them all. 'Hurrah!' they all cried with one voice. 'Hurrah!'
The most inveterate outsiders joined this surge. In Munich, Adolf Hitler had been living without a friend, without a lover, without even the bleak commonalty of Vienna's Mannher- heim. 'The war,' he says in Mein Kampf, 'liberated me from the painful feelings of my youth… I fell down on my knees and thanked heaven with an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune to be alive at that time.' Hurrah!
Dr. Sigmund Freud, outcast from his city's medical establishment, grim practitioner of the Viennese affectation of despising Vienna-this same Freud now said, 'for the first time in thirty years I feel myself to be an Austrian'; that England (hitherto his favorite country) was 'a hypocrite' for supporting 'Serbia's impudence'; that 'all my libido goes to AustriaHungary.' Now the war with Jung fell away. Freud hurried from Carlsbad back to Vienna, where his sons Martin and Ernst joined the colors 'for the noble cause' to which the over-age Freud himself made a contribution: He refused to give male patients of conscription age Certificates of Nervous Disability; he would not help them evade service to their country. Hurrah!
Ludwig Wittgenstein was medically exempt from war service, having undergone a double hernia operation in July. He should have been immune to the war spirit since he was a recluse, a maverick, a deviant from norms sexual, semantic, or financial (he had just given away most of the vast fortune left him by his industrialist father). On August 9, he started his notebook exploring the deceptions of language. On August 7, he showed that he was at one with the deceived crowd. He enlisted. Hurrah!
Years earlier Arnold Schonberg had gone abroad because the Austrian capital grated on him as much as his music grated on it. In the summer of 1914, he returned and joined Vienna's own regiment, the Deutschmeister. The atonal heretic began to compose military marches for Austria's glory. Hurrah!
Oskar Kokoschka made the same fast transition from enfant terrible to waver of flag. Before Savajevo he had spoken of 'the personal misery of living in Vienna, utterly alone, without a friend,' and sought opportunities as distant as possible from the Danube, '. perhaps a commission for a fresco in America.' After Sarajevo he sold his most valuable painting, The Tempest (showing him with Alma Mahler), to a Hamburg pharmacist. With the proceeds he bought a horse and a cavalry uniform-a light blue tunic with white facings, bright red breeches, and a brass helmet. Now he could volunteer for the 15th Imperial Dragoons who prized war so much that they shaved before each battle. Now Kokoschka's fellow rebel, the architect Adolf Loos, could print a photograph of the helmeted painter as a postcard publicizing Kokoschka's hurrah!
What about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke? Born in Habsburg Bohemia, he was an itinerant solitary, a free- floating mystic who considered Austria and Germany countries to which he was attached 'only by language.' In the summer of 1914, he reattached himself with a vengeance. He rhapsodized along with the throngs in German and Austrian streets. His Five Cantos / August 1914 celebrate the War God:
… the Lord of Battle has suddenly seized us Hurling the torch: and over a heart filled with homeland His reddened sky, where He reigns in His rage, is now screaming.
Hurrah!
'To be torn out of a dull capitalistic peace was good for many Germans,' said Hermann Hesse. 'I esteem the moral values of war on the whole rather highly.' For Thomas Mann, war was 'a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers.' Hurrah!
It was a clamorous, resonant, exultant summer, this summer of 'progress unmoored from God.' It was a summer catapulting men from their separate vacations into a much higher, gallant, and collective holiday. 'We saw war,' Freud would write some months later 'as an opportunity for demonstrating the progress of mankind in communal feeling… a chivalrous crusade.'
'What is progress in my sense?' asked Nietzsche, 'I, too, speak of a 'return to nature,' although it is not really a going back but a progress forward-an ascent up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness, where great tasks are something one plays with… Napoleon was a piece of 'return to nature.' '
Nietzsche had written this twenty-five years earlier, but he was the patron saint of the summer of 1914. That summer millions began to ascend not to Kraus's garden of pristine repose but to Nietzsche's jungled Napoleonic
