And so the very word "Redl" spelled poison to the town. Alfred Redl's two surviving brothers, Oskar and Heinrich, received permission to change their names to Oskar and Heinrich Rhoden. Stefan Zweig, one of Austria's belletrists, ordinarily heedless of matters military or political, felt, after the first Redl bulletin, "a noose of terror tightening around my throat." There was no end to the toxicity of the affair. The Colonel had been among the Army's most up-to-date careerists, enlisting telegraph and wireless for the transmission of intelligence. Now this demon of forward-mindedness had crashed. It was as if in Vienna any attempt at modernity was doomed. "Redl" affected the city's dealings with the shape of things to come.
***
On June 9, 1913, an avatar of the twentieth century rose from the Black Forest into the air and flew toward the Austrian capital. Longer than the tower of St. Stephen's Cathedral, it darkened the heavens as the world's largest dirigible and, by far, the most gigantic aircraft. At a record speed of 101 kilometers per hour, it needed only eight and a half hours to traverse the distance from Baden-Baden to Vienna.
Vienna's progressive newspaper, the ArbeiterZeitung, called on the populace to hail the skyborne arrival of a great secular archangel "for that is how one prays in the twentieth century."
Indeed the Zeppelin appeared over Vienna in angelic perfection, without mishap or delay or even omission of protocol. Passing Schonbrunn Palace, it circled and dipped respectfully while the hoary Emperor on the terrace saluted, for the first time in his life, up instead of down. Many of his subjects, though, could not match his aplomb. Hundreds of children fled indoors from the gargantuan shadow overhead. Grown men flinched, women swooned. A few days later the Arbeiter Zeitung noted drily that at a mass celebration of the twentyfifth anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm's reign, twenty-six ladies had keeled over, prostrate with either heat or awe. "In Berlin, it seems, people faint out of reverence for the past; in Vienna, out of fear of the future."
The future had never been a great favorite along this bend of the Danube. Now it was less popular then ever. Even a futurist bauble like the cinema-and there were several dozen of them in Vienna now-developed warts. Those phantoms on the screen could burn very real flesh. The extreme flammability of film-a danger hitherto unnoticed-killed three people in a theater fire on June 18. At nearly the same time, a medical journal reported headaches in adult cinema addicts and, in children, a regression of speech patterns by limiting their vocabulary to the primitive phrases of the explanatory titles. When it was reported that an American film producer had come to town to explore the Redl story as a basis for a motion picture, it was like the closing of a viciously modern circle: turning the life of a corrupt young luminary into a corrupting new entertainment. At the center of the circle sat, like a spider, the future.
"Redl" became an emblem of decay; of the inevitability of degeneration in a monarchy so ancient. Would the Habsburgs, for centuries suzerains of the Holy Roman Empire, ever be able to develop their realm into a great modern power? Serbia, its adversary, was small, defiant, and pulsing with the young passion of nationalism. Until now it had yielded, however reluctantly and belatedly, before Austria's warnings against its Balkan presumptions. But it never yielded for long. Toward the end of June, Serbia inveigled Greece and Montenegro, its partners in last year's victory over Turkey, to join her in demanding a re-division of the Turkish spoils at the expense of the fourth partner, Bulgaria. Since Bulgaria was a Habsburg ally, Vienna protested to Belgrade. In vain. Belgrade politely acknowledged the protest and promptly ignored it. Serbia's troops and those of its cohorts-which Rumania had joined for good measure-massed along the Bulgarian borders. In Vienna, General Conrad once more managed to defeat the Crown Prince's cautions. The Chief of Staff obtained authorization for an Army Alert. Reservists were called up. The capital's railroad terminals teemed with mothers hugging their sons who looked like strangers in their sudden uniforms.
The weather turned queasy. It was still spring, but a breath of humid mid-summer came down on the city. Policemen sweated, in part thanks to Redl. To counteract the Redl malaise, the Police Commissioner devised an Austrian remedy. He decided to fortify the morale of his men with the glitter of their headgear. Instead of light summer caps, the constables must keep wearing the heavy but polished metal helmets of winter.
In their airless slums, the poor perspired, too. Suddenly there were more of them at the end of June: The Imperial and Royal Telephone Administration dismissed three hundred workers, thus adding to the record number of jobless in recent years. After all, mobilization cost money, and the government must cut expenses somewhere. The discharged three hundred demonstrated on the Ringstrasse, joined not only by fellow unemployed but by some of the more affluent Viennese who had been waiting for months to have their first telephones installed and now would have to wait still longer.
The jobs were not restored; the premature heat would not let up. But a number of the disadvantaged benefited from the experience of their counterparts in America. The Arbeiter Zeitung reported that indigents of a still more sweltering metropolis, namely New York, found a bit of relief by spending the night outdoors. They'd bed down in Battery Park, hoping for cool breezes from New York Bay. To keep lights from flashing into their eyes, they'd turn their backs to the Statue of Liberty, already blazing brightly with electric bulbs for the Fourth of July. And so many a Viennese pauper made himself a bed of rags or blankets on a sidewalk. Instead of zephyrs from New York, he had whiffs from the Vienna Woods-and no Statue of Liberty by which to be either disturbed or deceived.
***
For men of means it was a very different summer. Like others of their class elsewhere, they dealt with the city heat by leaving it. But in contrast to their peers outside Austria, their travels often took them not to the newly chic but to the fashionable old: the Alps' Salzkammergut, traditionally the hunting and pleasure grounds of Habsburg.
Here, in the heart of this lake district south of Salzburg, lay Bad Ischl, the summer mecca of Vienna's theater world. Here Franz Lehar, composer of The Merry Widow, sovereign of the operetta, maintained a baronial chalet by the banks of the River Traun. Here, in a villa close by, his predecessor Johann Strauss had summered. At the Patisserie Zauner, Lehar munched Mohr im Hemd and exchanged gossip almost as delicious with tenors, sopranos, directors, conductors, actors of note, tragedians, and comic talents, all of whom also did their rusticating here.
The theater represented the most glamorous of the arts. One would think that its luminaries would stake out a vacation terrain of their own toward which their public would then flock. But this was Austria. Vienna's show folk, rather than create a new modish arena of their own, congregated around a spectacle of Habsburg ancien regime, produced bucolicstyle, in Bad Ischl. In 1913 it was produced again.
A major figure in this scene was one of the stage world's own-Katharina Schratt, long a leading actress of the Court Theater. For twenty-seven years (before Franz Joseph had been widowed in 1898 and after) she had been the Emperor's lady. She still was. For twenty-seven summers the pair could be observed at Bad Ischl, his kepi bobbing alongside her flowered hat, his walking stick swinging close to her parasol, striding together between the snow-white lily beds and the bosky chestnut stands of the Spa Park.
By 1913 they looked like a pair bonded by a passion prac ticed through decades. What lay behind them instead was a quarter of a century of abstention. In 1888 Frau Schratt had offered to become her monarch's mistress. "Our relationship must be in the future what it has been in the past," the Emperor had replied (characteristically) by letter, referring to their chastity, "that is, if that relationship is to last, and it must last for it makes me so very happy."