It was no ordinary homicide. Every newspaper roared out the news. Both slayer and slain bore front-page names. Schuhmeier had been a very prominent and vastly popular deputy of the Social Democratic Party. Paul Kunschak, his killer, turned out to be the brother of Leopold Kunschak, one of the most dynamic leaders of the opposing conservative party, the Christian Socialists.
Police interrogation established Paul Kunschak as a mumbling paranoiac convinced that Schuhmeier had been persecuting him personally. He had planned the killing without his brother's knowledge.
The significance of the tragedy lay less in its politics than in its timing. The shot in the Northwest Terminal rang out six days after Ash Wednesday, one week after the end of Fasching, Vienna's carnival. It brought home to a reluctant Vienna that the levity and therapy of Fasching make-believe were over. The Viennese could no longer play-act actuality away. They were stuck with the thing. It stung Paul Kunschak into murder. But it also aggravated many stabler citizens.
Among the victims of the process may have been Arnold Schonberg. Early in February the avant-garde composer had had his first success by the Danube with a performance of his Gurrelieder in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein. But that had been during Mardis Gras. A few weeks later, Schonberg found himself facing something of a lynch mob in the same Golden Hall. This time he conducted his Chamber Symphony as well as Anton von Webern's Orchestral Pieces Op. 6 and Alban Berg's "Songs with Orchestra after Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg." Berg and Webern were atonalistsmusical heretics. Peter Altenberg wrote novel fragments somehow powered by their very incompletion; he also wore sandals in snow storms. While in its carnival mood, the city tolerated such modernists as piquant harlequins. However, Schonberg's second Musikverein appearance took place in the depths of Lent. In more sober air, Schonberg and Company neither titillated nor amused.
"Nihilism!" the shouts went up. "Anarchists!" Catcalls multiplied. The concert stopped, but not the commotion. Program booklets became missiles. Hands became fists. Oscar Straus, the famous composer of the operetta Waltz Dream, punched the president of the avant-garde Society for Literature and Music. A physician who had witnessed the imbroglio testified that the effect of the music had been "for a certain segment of the public so nerve-racking and therefore so harmful to the nervous system that many present… showed obvious signs of severe neurosis.
During Lent the very sound or sight of otherness had become taxing. Yet Vienna teemed with "other" people. The police blotter of the University Precinct suddenly filled up with incidents of beer steins flung in student kellers, usually at "individuals of Hebrew descent" whom the flingers accused of "staring."
Some of the "others" offended by doing even less. On February 28 a Negro with a top hat strolled down the Prater- strasse. He was attacked by a man in a dinner jacket who shouted "Impostor!" before snatching the black's headgear, throwing it to the pavement, stamping on it.
At the subsequent court case, the Negro identified himself as Benson Harrington Adams, a professor of English from Baltimore, Maryland. The dinner jacket, a waiter, said that he "had just felt like having some fun before going to work." He was sentenced to making a one-sentence apology to the professor.
The point, of course, was that outside of carnival, a Negro in a top hat was not fun. Nor was excessively original music nor Hebrews in student kellers. They were "nerve-racking." The city, never a haven of tranquillity, had increasing trouble with its nerves. Its traditional trick had begun to fail. No longer could it so easily turn the stress of life into baroque caprice. Not that Vienna's talent was fading. No, the problem lay with life. Life had become too beset by reality. Fin de siecle Vienna had managed to cover the bleakness of workaday life with scrollwork and grace note. But by 1913 life seemed to tolerate less and less of anything but the rawly real.
Franz Schuhmeier's final journey signaled a change. The funeral of the murdered Socialist was the biggest in Vienna's history, bigger even than Karl Lueger's, all-time favorite among Viennese mayors, three years earlier.
Now over a quarter of a million men and women accompanied the coffin to the grave. Housemaids by the many hundreds swelled the procession. The law entitled them to only seven hours off every other Sunday; yet they gave up this Sunday to escort Schuhmeier on his way. Workers, shut in their factories eleven hours daily during the week, sacrificed their weekend rest as they trudged in the cortege. Slowly it moved along the Ottakringerstrasse; whole families streamed out of tenements to join the flow.
Ottakring constituted the largest workers' district. It was the district Schuhmeier had represented in Parliament and whose wretched statistics he had often shouted from the rostrum. Why? he had demanded. Why did only 5 percent of all people in Ottakring have a room of their own? Why were nearly half the houses in this borough-wide slum without running water? Why, more than a third of the staircases without gas light, let alone electricity? Why was the mortality rate of Ottakring more than twice as high as that of the upper class Inner City district? Why, in the name of the Twentieth Century?
And why, somebody else had to ask now, was Franz Schuhmeier dead? Why had he not even reached the age of fifty? Why must good men die too soon and by such senseless violence?
An old bafflement. Yet at the same time Franz Schuhmeier's funeral produced something new; something not seen before in the demeanor of mourning crowds. That Sunday they broke with Vienna's tradition of the "Schone Leiche"-the Beautiful Corpse. For generations, death by the Danube had been cultivated as a good show. A funeral aimed to be like a Singspiel, from the aria of the eulogy to the mobile stage of the hearse, to the chorusing of the wine-happy wake at the end. A funeral was often the only opera a proletarian could afford. While alive he displayed connoisseurship as spectator or as member of its supporting cast. When dead, he was its star.
The Schuhmeier burial broke with all that. There was no pomp festooned in sable; no black-ribboned horses, no opulence of wreaths, no black-clad band that trumpeted a majestic succession of dirges. Here there was a simple hearse and the oceanlike crowd tiding behind it under frayed caps and wrinkled babushkas, tiding and tiding, sometimes pushing prams, sometimes thumping along on crutches, tiding slowly, tiding in silence, tiding and tiding with the awesome, ominous, unrelenting rhythm of great waves.
In the late winter of 1913 Vienna woke up to discover that perhaps its poor were not what they used to be.
Nor were the rich-even the paradigmatic rich: the Austrian aristocrats. No elite in Europe had a more venerable pedigree. Supremacy came to its members as naturally and casually as yawning. They looked (as Consuelo Vanderbilt put it) "…like greyhounds, with their long lean bodies and small heads." They could impress even a starspangled bucko like Teddy Roosevelt. When asked what type of person had appealed to him the most in all his European travels he said unhesitatingly, "The Austrian gentleman." In 1913 the Austrian aristocrat could still ring superlatives from the most hard-eyed Americans by simply being himself.
There were some two thousand of him, grouped into eighty families. Not one had been founded by a hard-working, clever nineteenth-century tycoon whose son was only the second generation to sport a baronial escutcheon in his Ringstrasse palais. For Austria's "First Society " the Ringstrasse was parvenu; Baron was a title denoting a Jew. The princes and counts constituting major nobility usually had as their Vienna seats mansions of dusty rococo raised centuries ago on the cobbles of the Inner City.
A number of the founders of these clans-the Schwarzen- bergs, the Auerspergs, the Wilczeks, the Palffys, et al.-had been medieval bullies of the first water. Sometimes Habsburg had recruited their prowess by bettering their blazons with a lion rampant or two, sometimes by investing them with a fief that would make them zu as well as von.