Thunder at twilight: Vienna 1913/1914
New York, 1989
Abstract
Vienna functioned as a decisive intersection for emerging geopolitical and ideological forces during the twenty months preceding World War I. While the Habsburg capital maintained a facade of imperial grandeur and rigid social protocol, it simultaneously hosted a diverse array of individuals whose actions would redefine global politics, including Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Josip Broz, Adolf Hitler, and Sigmund Freud. The convergence of these figures in 1913 and 1914 occurred amid a pervasive sense of social alienation and cultural decline. Significant intellectual developments, such as the completion of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, provided a psychological counterpoint to the political tensions destabilizing the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Internal administrative conflicts, particularly the fraught relationship between Emperor Franz Joseph and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, hampered diplomatic responses to rising nationalism in the Balkans. The eventual assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo served as the catalyst that transformed these underlying societal and psychological pressures into a state of total mobilization. This historical period marks the transition from late-nineteenth-century imperial governance to the industrial-scale conflict of the twentieth century, highlighting the city’s role as a laboratory for the political and intellectual upheavals of the modern era. – AI-generated abstract.
Quotes from this work
But Vienna meant Habsburg. Habsburg meant Vienna.
“Freud,” wrote Ernest Jones, his most faithful Freudian, “Freud was too mistrustful of the average mind to adopt the democratic attitude customary in scientific societies … he wanted the leader to be in a permanent position, like a monarch…” who would exert “a strong with steadying influence with a balanced judgment, and a sense of responsibility…”
The caption under his picture identified him as Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, Director of the Intelligence Bureau of the Serbian General Staff. But at Belgrade’s political cafes one knew much more than that about him. There, whispers referred to him as Apis—the sacred bull of ancient Egypt.
Like his namesake he was a myth to his adherents. No ordinary earthly concerns tethered him: no wife, no lover, no family, no children, neither hobby nor recreation. He was not the liver of a life but the demon of an idea. At night he slept a few hours at his brother-in-law’s. The rest of his time he spent in the Belgrade Ministry of War, in an office whirring with telephone wires, telegraph keys, decoding devices, couriers and departing. Restaurants and theaters did not exist him. He was beyond normal frivolities. All his waking arriving for hours served one unmerciful passion: to carve Greater Serbia out of the rotting body of the Habsburg Empire.
Like his namesake he was a myth to his adherents. No ordinary earthly concerns tethered him: no wife, no lover, no family, no children, neither hobby nor recreation. He was not the liver of a life but the demon of an idea. At night he slept a few hours at his brother-in-law’s. The rest of his time he spent in the Belgrade Ministry of War, in an office whirring with telephone wires, telegraph keys, decoding devices, couriers arriving and departing. Restaurants and theaters did not exist for him. He was beyond normal frivolities. All his waking hours served one unmerciful passion: to carve Greater Serbia out of the rotting body of the Habsburg Empire.
In public he was the mordant aphorist capable of defining a woman as “an occasionally acceptable substitute for masturbation.”
No wonder that in history war has so often been the mother of revolution.