I don’t think I’ve ever read a book so slowly…

“Well Paul, that is what happens when you stop to locate every place in Googlemaps and cross-reference every person in Wikipedia.”

Yes, I know – but it was so captivating. Austria is now deep in my bucket-list and it has nothing to do with The Sound of Music.

After becoming absorbed in Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889 back in 2015 (reviewed here), 2019 commenced with more of Morton – this time, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913-1914.  The first book narrates the story leading up to Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide. This second book is focused on the months leading into an even more momentous event, the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Once again the author demonstrates this uncanny ability to weave the lives of other history-making people into his primary story. This time the opening pages introduce us to Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin, Josip Broz (to become Marshal Tito), Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler – all of whom are living in Vienna at the start of 1913. It overloads my imagination. Love it.

Another delight is the way, in both books, the chronology is linked to the seasons and to the church year. “Suddenly spring swept through the streets like a galloping pageant” (45). “The somberness of Lent, stubborn past its season, extended to the upper reaches” (42). “In Vienna spring belonged to culture more than to nature” (46). Ooh, how I wish I could write like that.

The story captures the last days of the Hapsburg court with Emperor Franz Josef – yes, the same guy with a glacier named after him in New Zealand – in not such great shape. “He had become dear only after he had become ancient. But he had been ancient for so long, he seemed to have been dear forever” (186). Vienna society was all about style, rather than substance – ‘an instinct for make believe’. “No elite in Europe had a more venerable pedigree. Supremacy came to its members as naturally and as casually as yawning” (28-29). Franz Josef’s nephew, Franz Ferdinand, is next in line. He is a dove among the military hawks who want to deal with Serbia, that “feisty little kingdom (that) had become a thorn in the Empire’s southeastern flank” (7). It is around this military tension that the plot builds.

In the bigger picture Franz Ferdinand is good mates with Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who himself is a cousin to both the Tsar of Russia and the King of England, the two of whom looked like identical twins – signing their letters to each other as Nicky and Willy. It is all so bizarre. They desperately tried to avoid World War 1 (324-326), but by that time the Generals had too much power and too much ambition.

I’ll leave you to enjoy the two books, but three things remain with me:

He is a colourful writer
Franz Josef’s wife was stabbed to death in broad daylight in Geneva, but before that and for 27 years in total, Franz Josef had a lady-friend, Frau Schratt. Describing their relationship is Morton at his best as a writer. She offered to be his mistress but he declined. I delighted in reading these paragraphs aloud to Barby:

“And so Franz Josef and Frau Schratt continued to be lovers in everything but raw fact. They never met between the sheets. Yet in Vienna or Ischl (where they holidayed) they practiced the entire range of stagecraft that surrounds the bed: all the ardent preambles of passion and the gallant postscripts, the avowals of desire, denials of indifference, impetuous confidences, embarrassed explanations, and the obligatory sulks and quarrels. These emotions they poured into countless letters. He addressed them to “My Dear Good Friend”, she, to “Your Imperial and Royal Majesty, my Most August Lord.”
They enacted their roles with a persuasiveness that appeared to obviate consummation. In Vienna, their play unfolded invisibly: behind the garden walls of Schonbrunn Palace or over the coffee tables in her breakfast room across the street. But in Ischl the octogenarian swain and his fifty-year-old inamorata produced their romance in the open, beneath the summer sun. They simulated to perfection the trappings of a liaison.
It was a way of love, a way of life, that came natural to Franz Josef, the weathered centrepiece of a patinaed court. Under his reign animation had petrified into decor. Decor – not dynamics – governed his affections as well as his politics. Both the Emperor’s empire and the Emperor’s affair were artifacts. Neither had much fleshly reality. Therefore both must draw their vigour, their tang, their long lives from etiquette and accoutrement. Both represented the triumph of form over substance. They were both masterpieces of survival through sheer style (85-86).“

Yes, I know what you are thinking. It is not just Googlemaps and Wikipedia that is needed. Where is that dictionary? But still the writing is as lavish as it is lovely.

It is a gripping story
Once the assassin, Gavrilo Princip (just 18 years of age!), enters the story and begins to build his team the story rollicks along. [NB: An earlier chapter (chapter 6, 63-76), on the fate of Alfred Redl, was even better.] Having stood, just 9 months ago, at the street corner in Sarajevo where the assassination happened, I was so easily drawn into the narration of this part of the story, riddled with mistakes as it was:

One of the mistakes – the guy on the running board is protecting the wrong side of the car!

“The chauffeur had just begun to work the wheel for the U-turn. Count Harrach stood on the running board, on the river side of the quay. There was nothing between Franz Ferdinand von Hapsburg and Gavrilo Princip except five feet of translucent summer air. For this one moment the pale blue eyes of the son of a postman looked into the pale blue eyes of a lord descended from thirteen European dynasties. The next second the son of the postman realised he could not throw the bomb he was already gripping inside his coat: the Archduke was too close and the crowd too dense around him for hauling out his arm. Therefore he pulled out his Browning. He turned his head away (later he would say he had been confounded by the sight of the Duchess, a woman) and, perhaps to compensate for this lapse, pressed the trigger twice. 
And then all was really over. After the two bangs Princip saw the car pull away fast, the Archduke still sitting upright, unaffected, unscathed, even after this final effort. 
Princip put the pistol to his own head, but someone wrested it from his hand. He reached for the cyanide capsule, managed to get it between his teeth, bit it open, already felt a taste of bitter almonds, but a policeman’s stick came down on his head and knocked the thing out of his mouth. From everywhere arms reached for him, gripped him and punished him, yet nothing punished him him more in this nightmare tumult than the fact that he was still alive and so was the Archduke (262-263).“

There is a reflective conclusion
“The sun shone. The days passed. The jolt of Sarajevo subsided” (285). Everybody relaxed, as it appeared that Vienna was not going to exact revenge.  Nothing could be further from the truth. A “non-ultimatum super ultimatum” from Vienna to Belgrade was soon on the table. After the lull of a month, things became frantic and frenetic, as Europe awoke to an unfolding nightmare and cables criss-crossed the continent:

“All cables invoked the sacredness of peace. All countries involved kept thrusting bayonets into the hands of their young men. Power had drained from the thrones and chancelleries into the offices of the Chiefs of Staff. Clumsily, diplomats tried to bluff their counterparts into peace. Efficiently, each Chief of Staff activated his mobilizing apparatus. Inevitably, the mobilization accelerated each other. 
Now the subordination of Chiefs of Staff to heads of state was only nominal. Now the Chiefs drew their true prerogative from an unofficial but tremendous power. Overnight this power had become visible. It was surging through the streets all over the continent (316).“

In the closing pages, the author makes a case for what went wrong. Quite unusual for a historical novel. “(People) had lost their sense of origin and of final purpose” (318). He places the blame with ‘progress unmoored from God.’ About the assassin, he writes:

“As a zadruga, that is as a tight-knit farm based Bosnian clan, the Princips had raised their own corn, milled their own flour, baked their own loaves, and worshipped a God close enough to their roof to be their very own protector. 
Progress had broken all this apart. Princip’s father could no longer create bread from his earth. He could no longer live his livelihood. He must earn it with the estranged, endless trudgings of a postman. His son Gavrilo, more educated than his father, more sensitive, more starved for the wholeness that is holiness and more resentful of the ruins all about him, had to seek another garden. He sought something that would satisfy his disorientation and his anger; something which, as readings of Nietzsche (“the patron saint of the summer of 1914” – 333) suggested, would restore the valor of the vital principle that his race had lost…
Progress had shattered numberless zadrugas by hundreds of other ethnic names … The Stalins, Mussolinis, Hitlers, Princips were the monsters of progress. Progress had abused and bruised them, but they could turn the sting outward and avenge the injury (319).“

Incredibly, “Like men longing for a thunderstorm to relieve them of the summer’s sultriness, so the generation of 1914 believed in the relief that war might bring” (322). How wrong could they be? War as a ‘thunderstorm to clear the air’? Goodness deary me. “The leaders didn’t instigate the Great War – their subjects demanded it” (339). Nicky and Willy tried to stop things, with a flurry of telegrams. “The spotlight, after shifting from the futility of Excellencies to the helplessness of Majesties, now came to rest on the supremacy of generals (327).” And yes, yet again, I read a book where Winston Churchill doesn’t emerge smelling like roses!

The author adds an Afterword to a special 2014 commemorative edition of the book (339-345). He asserts that the world of 1914 “vibrated on a great brink” (339) and that in the century since “the precipice has become our habit” (339). The author’s little sermon rises to a crescendo with these final words, after which I have written, “!! The Global Church!!”

“No wonder we sense that the precipice is ubiquitous and perennial, encircling each of us individually. A related precariousness marks our entire culture. More than ever, the “free market” turns neighbours into rivals and neighbourhoods into covert battlegrounds. Here, often under a veneer of cocktail party manners, consumerist gladiators contend in chronic one-upmanship, each desperate to escape the pit of loserdom by pushing down the others…
Can we, finally, one hundred years after those fatal shots in Sarajevo, learn from the anthropologists and live socially, as a social species should? Can we narrow the chasm not just between nations, but between the citizen and citizen within each nation? This, I grant, is a much harder thing to accomplish in life than to advocate on paper. But it is easier than domesticating the abyss (344).”

But why turn merely to the anthropologist when the global church, at is best, demonstrates what progress moored to God can look like, helping us step back from the brink, the precipice and the abyss?

nice chatting

Paul

PS: Thanks, Mark, for alerting me to these books!