southward to Merano, in the semitropical foothills of the Dolomites, making a detour around Vienna, of course.
'Schani, trag den Garten ausse!'
It was a command often heard after winter's end in Vienna. Headwaiters shouted it at busboys: 'Johnny, carry the garden outside!' All over town Johnnys carried onto the sidewalk foliage made of green-lacquered cloth leaves, then added tables and chairs to complete 'the garden terrace.' Spring had come to Vienna's restaurants as it did to the rest of this most theatrical of all cities: It came in the form of a stage set.
By April most props were in place. Only the mood music seemed still a bit wrong. Perhaps the weather had something to do with it. Not that the temperatures remained wintry; usually the sun drove away the night's chill. But there had been no rain for weeks, and the drought had delayed budding. Only restaurant gardens displayed some leafy green. It was fake and dusty. Dust, sooty, grainy proletarian dust, drifted from the proletarian districts in the West where the sanitation department did not trouble to send many brooms. Uncouth dust mottled the breasts of goddesses whose marmoreal charms supported balconies of the Imperial Palace. But dust could not stop Vienna from play-acting like Vienna. The city kept furbishing the decor and the costumes of Maytime.
Tailors cut and stitched deep into the night. Now was the moment for the city's fashionables to start fittings for their summer wardrobe, which this year featured slimmer singlebreasted suits. Fiacre drivers used their lunch hour to wield the paint brush; time to refresh the gray-black design of their carriages. On the gothic elegance of the menu card of Demel's, the ultimate patisserie, a herald of the warmer season appeared-iced coffee with a tiara of whipped cream.
Still, the trees in the Vienna Woods were less than verdant; so, underneath the busyness, was the feeling in town. Even on the day of the Resurrection, a sense of Ash Wednesday weighed on the roofs. Over the Easter weekend, Sunday, March 23 and Monday, March 24, twenty-three people tried to kill themselves, a majority of them in that unswept slum to the West; seventeen of these drank concentrated lye. It was the cheapest poison and therefore the most cost-effective means of suicide. Over six thousand crammed nightly into the municipal Wdrmestuben. These were 'warming rooms' where the capital's homeless could sleep sitting up on wooden benches.
The somberness of Lent, stubborn past its season, extended to the upper reaches. True, the rich could afford to ease their spirit at chic new entertainments like the cinema. A film of Dante's Inferno was the dernier cri in the genre. You could see it at the Graben Kino, a theater with seats of plush and walls of silk and an orchestra of two pianos and three violins to make musical the shadows on the screen. No wonder that the jeunesse doree elected the Graben Kino as a favorite courtship rendez-vous. Perhaps it was no wonder, too, that in the early spring of 1913 one went a-Maying to the Inferno.
Dust thickened as the rains held off. Fires increased. Cinders sprinkled the time of rejuvenation. A touch of hell at the edge of heaven: that seemed to be the motto of the weather, of politics, and of the social scene as exemplified by the dinner party of Herr Hermann von Passavant, Consul General of the German Reich in Vienna.
On Monday, March 31, his table saw a cross-section of the powerful: Baron Conrad, the Chief of Staff; Hermann von Reininghaus, the beer magnate of the Habsburg Empire, with his lush, dusky-eyed wife; Baron Leo von Chlumetzky, influential publisher of the Oesterreichische Rundschau; and Joseph Redlich, a key member of Parliament as well as a political scientist and assiduous journal keeper who often recorded in detail his experiences as intellectual-in-residence of the Vienna establishment.
Delicious was the Tafelspitz that evening; delicate, the juxtaposition of personalities. Everyone in the know (and everyone here was) knew of the capital's foremost triangle: Herr von Reininghaus, Frau von Reininghaus, and the Chief of Staff. The last two were seated next to each other.
Alas, the piquancy could not be fully savored. Just as the General looked deeply into his neighbor's eyes, history interrupted him with a knock at the door. It was his adjutant with a bulletin concerning the latest Serb aggression. During the last few weeks the Serbs and their Montenegrin henchmen had reopened hostilities with Turkey, driving the Sultan's troops south on Albanian territory until they reached a critical zone, the town of Scutari, near the coast. Vienna had stated publicly that extension of Serb control into Scutari would jeopardize Austria's security and undermine all hope of Balkan stability. The news which had just reached the General indicated that Scutari might fall at any moment.
The General's facial tic had accelerated. His irritation dominated what was left of dinner. He should get up right now, he said, and walk to the telephone and call the Military Chancellery at the Imperial Palace and request permission through the Duty Officer to bring the Adriatic fleet into action. Before dawn he could dispatch a battleship and two cruisers with marines ready to land. They would make short work of Belgrade's provocations in that area. It would be the logical thing to do. But there was no point calling the Palace. Lately he was not allowed to apply logic when it came to Serbia. Never! Not once. Each time he tried, the Palace said No, pressured by the Crown Prince. It was always the bugbear of Russian intervention. Why, just recently His Majesty had said that war with Russia would be the end of His monarchy. Actually it would be the end of the Tsar. Conrad himself, with his own hands, had placed on the Emperor's desk intelligence that proved the illogic of any Russia-panic. This intelligence came from a source so high he could name its identity only to the Emperor (it was Count Sergius Witte, former Prime Minister at St. Petersburg), and the information proved that thirty million non-Russians would revolt against the Tsar-including Finland and Poland. The time to strike Serbia was now, before Russia could get organized. But that was out of the questionjust because it would be the logical thing!
An excellent chocolate mousse could not mellow the General's frustration. Nor did mocha end it. The dinner party was eventful, though not as personally piquant as one had hoped. Before the night was out, however, Frau von Reininghaus took our diarist, Herr Redlich, aside. It was so valorous of the General, she breathed in Redlich's ear, to press for action, since the General had three sons of military age; in fact, he had confided to her his premonition that his eldest, Herbert, would fall before the enemy….
As April ended, rain came to Vienna at last. Then the sun broke through, and the flowers burst forth. Suddenly spring swept through the streets like a galloping pageant. Suddenly the Vienna Woods interlaced so closely with the pavement that cobbles became fragrant. In the West and the South where the vineyards touched the sidewalks, they touched them with the pearly blossoms of the grapevine. The hills looming so closely above the roofs-those 'house mountains' beloved of the Viennese like Kahlenberg, Cobenzl, Leo- poldsberg-turned into waves of vivid hue: crocuses, cyclamens, primroses, daisies, lilacs, all blessed with the songs of blackbird and thrush. Along the banks of the Danube cherry orchards flamed into color.
In the city itself blossoms swamped bricks. Violet vendors surrounded the Opera and scented the piazzas. In parks like the Stadtpark and Volksgarten peacocks jaunted under festive trees. White roses garlanded the fiacres that brought children to their First Communion: the girls like buds unfolding in their snowy lace, the boys with white carnations glowing from their buttonholes.
Elsewhere in Europe spring happened to other cities as well. But here it burgeoned as a gala that was intimately Viennese. It affected someone so no-nonsense as Trotsky's wife. 'From our windows we could see the mountains,' she wrote. 'One could get into the open country through a backgate without going to the street… In April the scent of violets filled our rooms from the open windows…'
In Vienna spring belonged to culture more than to nature. Here spring merged its green arts into the town's architecture, whose seasons bloomed from romanesque to rococo, sprouted as gargoyles, fountains, statues. With its vernal rose windows, its tendrilled friezes, its sculpted bowers and garden amorettos, the Maytime city conjured the poetry of the West. Now it exuberated in the same vein with leaf and petal. Vienna experienced spring as yet another urban fancy, opulent and stylish, moving through its dream of history.
Here, against this time and this place, against this backdrop, Leon Trotsky wrote some somber lines. In an essay for Kievan Thought he shuddered at the barrenness of his country's past. It seemed so tundra-dreary compared to the occidental succulence surrounding him in Vienna. 'We are poor,' he said of Russia, 'with the accumulated poverty of over a thousand years… The Russian peoples were as oppressed by nobility or by the church as the peoples of the West. But that complex and rounded-off way of life, which on the basis of feudal rule grew up in Europe-that gothic lacework of feudalism-has not grown on our soil… A thousand years we have lived in a humble log cabin and stuffed its crevices with moss. Did it become us to dream of vaulting arcs and gothic spires?… How miserable was our gentry! Where were its castles? Where were its tournaments? Its crusades, its shield bearers, its minstrels and pages?… Its fetes and processions?… Its chivalrous love?'
Asking such questions in Vienna amid the prodigalities of an elegant tradition, Trotsky laments that its
