Hitler would straighten up in his chair. He had been working all along, hunched over. Now the brush would drop from his hand. He would push the palette aside. He would rise to his feet.
He began to speak, to shout, to orate. With hissing consonants and hall-filling vowels he launched into a harangue on morality, racial purity, the German mission and Slav treachery, on Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons. His forelock would toss, his color-stained hands shred the air, his voice rise to an operatic pitch. Then, just as suddenly as he had started, he would stop. He would gather his things together with an imperious clatter, stalk off to his cubicle.
And the others would just stare after him. They had come to accept his fits along with his "chair." He was, after all, a good man otherwise. And he did give his Mannerheim audience a good show, producing so dramatically the gesticulations of a clown and the screeching of a demon. In January 1913, it was the Mannerheim's way of experiencing the Vienna carnival.
Chronologically the carnival of 1913 conformed with other years. It began shortly after New Year to end on Shrove Tuesday. This was the Merry Season as defined by the calendar. But carnival in the sense of opulent, ingenious, finely organized Viennese make-believe knew no such limit. In this city it had flourished continuously for over half a millennium.
Here the fairy tale of Habsburg splendor, with orb, scepter, and throne, with pomp of blazons and gonfalons, with the choreography of homage and precedence, of raised trumpets, white stallions, and bowed heads… here it had been enacted and re-enacted every day through endless generations.
The solemn, perpetual ball that was the Imperial court encompassed the entire town. London was other things be sides the King's residence. Even in Bourbon days, Paris had been much more than a royal encampment. But Vienna meant Habsburg. Habsburg meant Vienna. Vienna and Habsburg kept inventing each other into a crowned, turreted, sunset-hued fable that floated above ordinary earth. Compared to other urban centers in Europe, Vienna had little commerce, less industry, and hardly any of the workaday grayness of common sense. Fact-ridden pursuits could not leave much of an imprint on a city busy with the embroidery of Christendom's foremost escutcheon. Factory and counting house were dwarfed by the magnificent shadow of the Palace. Century after century the Viennese devoted themselves to the housing and feeding and staging of their suzerains' legend.
Of course that legend needed a legal character through which the Habsburgs could exercise their dominion. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century they were Holy Roman Emperors. They wore that dignity like a preternatural carnival mask-a mask whose illusion was obvious to all yet whose charisma no one could escape. This peculiarity has been a commonplace among historians: the Holy Roman Empire was hardly Roman. It was not holy (being a cauldron of profane ambitions). It was not an empire (being a mess of brawling princes beyond the emperor's control). The Habsburgs practical power issued from the patchwork of their own huge possessions. As executive instrument, the title of Holy Roman Emperor was vapor. As mask of Christ's paladin it wielded incalculable force.
Napoleon appreciated its resonance. In 1806 he forced the House of Austria to abandon it. Habsburg put the Viennese imagination to work. Other constitutional fictions were devised. By 1913 the latest of these had been in force for nearly fifty years. It was called the Empire of Austria-Hungary, and it was decked out in a legal framework as fanciful as any of its predecessors.
This creation combined quite marvelously the heraldic with the schizoid. Here was a monarchy ruled by one monarch whose subjects passed an official border as they traveled from Hungary, where Franz Joseph was King, to Austria, where his title became Emperor. The realm had two Prime Ministers who were really less premiers than governors of their respective imperial or royal sub-realms. On the other rather dizzying hand, there was only one Foreign Minister; in a number of ways his power and prestige exceeded that of the Prime Ministers because he formed the chief link between the monarch and the twin cabinets. A further incongruity distinguished him above all other panjandrums. In addition to the conduct of Exterior Affairs he was also charged with "participating in family celebrations of His Majesty's household," as if these duties were complementary.
Constitutional wonders did not end there. The two premiers shared between them one common Minister of Finance and one common Minister of War who commanded the common armed forces. The two men headed these departments as Imperial Excellencies in Vienna, as Royal Excellencies in Budapest. To endow Hungary with the dignity of being a separate country, all other, less essential, ministries were separately headed and staffed; so were the judiciaries and the civil services on both sides of the Austro-Hungarian hyphen.
As for the legislatures, their doubleness came with an extra dollop of paradox. In Budapest, the Parliament of the Kingdom of Hungary convened. But in Vienna there was no such thing as an Austrian Parliament. Officially speaking, there was no such thing as "Austria." Yes, Habsburg was known as the House of Austria. Yes, the world knew Franz Joseph as the Austrian Emperor. Yet nowhere in the constitution of his empire did an entity named "Austria" appear. "Austria" seemed to be a grandiose ghost whose radiance must not be bounded by definition. The non-Hungarian portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not called Austria. The constitution referred to it obliquely and indirectly as "the lands and provinces represented in the Imperial Council."
The Imperial Council was the Parliament sitting in Vienna. And the Parliament in Vienna was at least in part another feat of illusion. It was not very parliamentary. Electoral districting and balloting procedures gave Austria's German-speaking citizens proportionally more representation than Slav voters. What's more, one stroke of the Imperial pen could dissolve the Imperial Council at any time. Until the next elections (whose date the Emperor determined), the Emperor could rule and legislate by decree. Usually he refrained. The option always loomed. The Vienna parliament was a masterpiece of that famous Austrian speciality, latent absolutism.
In physical terms, too, it was an interesting deception. On a Ringstrasse rampant with architectural heroics, Parliament looked like a temple of calm. Its granite ramps, huge but gently angled, led up to the serenity of a colonnade. It was guarded by the monumental poise of a statue of Pallas Athene. The facade breathed neoclassic serenity.
Inside seethed a witches' sabbath of nationalisms. Here the ethnic groups of the Empire's non-Hungarian part went at each other through their representatives. Six million Czechs attacked ten million Germans for under-financing Czech schools in Bohemia and Moravia. Five million Galician Poles banged desks to demand greater administrative independence. Three and a half million Ukrainians stamped feet for a Russian-language university to counteract the Poles' cultural domination. Deputies from the South Slav area contributed to the multinational brawl. Through their representatives' throats, over a million Slovenes and three-quarters of a million Serbo-Croats shouted their grievances. German-speaking deputies split bitterly into Socialist and Conservative movements, the latter divided still further into the anti-Semitic Christian Socialist and pan-German parties. Such schisms inspired similar front lines within other ethnic factions. Occasionally all groups joined to excoriate Hungarian politics as practiced by the sister parliament in Budapest.
It was less a legislature than a cacophony. But since it was a Viennese cacophony it shrilled and jangled with a certain flair. Polemics were delivered through clenched teeth. Yet the vitriol came with whipped-cream rhetoric: "If Your Ministerial Excellency would finally condescend to reason!" Friction ran red hot without becoming altogether raw. Instead of exploding the Empire, nationalist fury spent itself in theater. Representatives bristled so histrionically against each other that often they had little energy left to use against the Emperor's Double Eagle under whose wings they were allowed to stage their confrontation.