The Vienna psycho-analytical society was not the only group holding a spring fete. Much bigger and therefore more widely controversial was the workers' procession on May 1.
It played no part in the life of a nonpolitical man like Sigmund Freud-except as an impediment to his high-speed walks along the Ringstrasse after lunch. Yet this Socialist rite had been charted, of all places, at Berggasse 19, under the very roof where Freud had conceived psychoanalysis.
A quarter of a century earlier, Dr. Viktor Adler had lived here in the house then owned by his father. Viktor was no relation of Alfred Adler. But like Alfred, Viktor was a trained psychiatrist. Like Alfred, young Viktor developed Socialist sympathies. And with Viktor Adler, these sympathies became his life's engulfing mission. Very soon he abandoned medicine for politics to lead the new Social Democratic Party. In 1889, in the apartment soon to be Freud's, he initiated and choreographed what the world came to know as the May Day Parade.
And in 1913 the parade gave, as always, gorgeous hints of its Viennese lineage. May 1, the international proletarian festival, was a descendant of the society corso in the Prater. Every May 1 the Austrian aristocracy in full panoply of escutcheoned carriages, liveried drivers, passengers in princely capes and floral hats used to promenade through the Prater, followed by caparisoned parvenus.
Sic transit primavera. Since 1890 Viktor Adler had the working class celebrate spring with equal pride and comparable showmanship. On May 1 of 1913 the parade was particularly splendid. Every category of labor-from foundry stoker to papermill hand to shoemaker to tanner-assembled at a different inn or coffeehouse early in the morning. At 10 A.M. sharp they sallied forth, phalanx by phalanx, each group in the garb of its craft, be it apron or overalls or smock. But red carnations shone in all their buttonholes; they all wore black armbands to commemorate the recent murder of their deputy Schuhmeier; all their arms were linked into comradely chains. Chanting against war, chanting for livable wages, chanting for bearable housing, the groups merged on the Ringstrasse where the chants united into a hundred-thousand-throated boom. The weather chimed in with sunshine, crisp air, and just enough breeze to make the banners come alive. Chanting, marching, waving their banners in the same cadence, the mass moved toward the meeting ground in the Prater.
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By 1913, May Day had become familiar. But it still exhilarated the proletarian soul. It still terrified the prosperous. In "better districts" like Hietzing or Doebling, maids were instructed to hoard food in advance of the critical weekend. Stefan Zweig recalls that well-to-do parents like his had the doors locked so that their children might not stray into the streets "on this day of terror which might see Vienna in flames."
The spectacle also shook up at least one man who was not a member of the upper classes, twenty-four-year-old Adolf Hitler.
In Mein Kampf he reports his awe
at the endless rows of Viennese workers marching four abreast in this demonstration. I stood almost two hours with bated breath observing this immense human snake as it rolled by. In fearful depression I finally left the place and wandered homeward.
But why so fearfully depressed? Because these workers rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the "capitalists"; the Fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie to exploit the working class; the authority of the law as a means to repress the proletariat; school as an institution for breeding slave material, but also for the training of slavedrivers; religion as a means to stupefy the people intended for exploitation; morality as a sign of stupid, sheeplike patience… There was absolutely nothing that was not dragged through the mire of horrible depths.
Spring is the visceral season, felt deep down. The man appalled by these "horrible depths" was puritan, celibate, and volcanic at once. Eventually he would forge an empire out of the ambivalence. Meanwhile he abhorred the elemental mire. Yet he also watched it "for almost two hours with bated breath." The money he'd inherited could have bought him shelter more elevated than the Mannerheim. Yet he lingered for years amidst its primitivities. He rejected the new elemental artists-Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka-who had begun to excite Vienna with their expressionist eruptions; they were so different from the dainty banality of Hitler's own paintings; their "fleshly" work, he would sneer later in Mein Kampf, might as well have been "the smears of a tribe of Negroes." Yet his contempt for "fleshliness" was also engrossment: He accompanied a friend to the Spittelberggasse where prostitutes drew on black stockings in lit windows. Hitler never touched them-just lashed out at "the iniquity"-and came back to look and lash out again.
A similar revulsion-obsession made him shiver, at length, at the proletariat thrusting up from below. Since he could not deal with the primal physically or esthetically, he went at it politically-sniffed it, imagined it, fantasized it, developed a mania to tap it, manipulate it, tame it, control it. "At this time," he says in Mein Kampf of his Vienna years, "I formed a view of life which became the granite foundation of my actions."
His horror of May Day on the Ringstrasse became a permanent inspiration. The elemental obedience of so many thousands to their Socialist chiefs leads him to conclusions prophetically detailed in Mein Kampf:
The masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doc trine tolerating none other besides itself… They are unaware of their shameless spiritual terrorization or the hideous abuse of human freedom, for they absolutely fail to suspect the inner insanity of the whole doctrine. All they see is the ruthless force and brutality of its calculated manifestation, to which they always submit in the end… If Social Democracy is opposed by a doctrine of greater truth but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer.
The italics are Hitler's. An unitalicized sentence two pages later begins and ends with the word summarizing the central lesson he drew from May Day: "Terror in the workshop, in the factory, in the assembly hall, and on occasion in mass demonstrations, will always be accompanied by success as long as it is not met by an equally great force of terror."
But terror did not enforce the workers' May Day. It was a voluntary procession and, in the radiant weather, joyous. To Hitler, the sight was apocalyptic.
The apocalypse is the cataclysm through which death convulses into birth. Some day Hitler would summon apocalyptic emotions before a global audience. Meanwhile May of 1913 marked for him, on a modest scale, an end that introduced a beginning. This was the month in which he left Vienna for Germany, ". that country for which my heart had been secretly yearning since the days of my youth." And though he still lived in the Mannerheim during those final weeks, he spent most of his time at the other end of the city, in the streets and cafes close to the West Terminaclass="underline" his original port of arrival whose precinct had been the haunts of his early years in Vienna from 1907 to 1909. He seemed to be revisiting the ambitions that had driven him to the city in the first place. They had been dashed; yet they were still fermenting, as fierce as ever. Now he would fulfill them in a worthier land. On Saturday, May 24, 1913, he rose for the last time from his seat in the Writing Room of the Mannerheim. He went to pack the few belongings that cluttered his cubicle. Then he took the streetcar to the West Terminal to board a Third Class compartment on the train to Munich.
May 1913 promised Hitler hope and change. It also brought him safety. His passport recorded his birth date: April 20, 1889. At twenty-four he had just passed the age of conscription, having failed to register for service since 1909. The man who turned into the century's most thunderous war lord no longer needed to fear that some border guard would hold him as a draft evader.