The Proud Tower (61 page)

A doctor like Chekhov, Schnitzler was marked by the same melancholy underlying a tone of irony and mockery. Except in his tragedy of
Professor Bernhardi
, the Jewish doctor who was assimilated but never enough, Schnitzler’s heroes were philanderers, seekers for meaning in love and art and life, but always, as became Vienna, a little listlessly. They were charming, good-natured, clever and sophisticated; voices of the wit, inconstancy, politeness and unscrupulousness of the Viennese soul—and of its lassitude. The hero of
Der Weg ins Freie
(The Road to the Open), six months after returning from a “melancholy and rather boring” tour of Sicily with his mistress before a final parting, reminds himself that since then he has done no real work, not even written down “the plaintive adagio which he had heard in the waves breaking on the beach on a windy morning in Palermo.” He is obsessed by a feeling of the “dreamlike and purposeless character of existence.” Discussing a heated debate in the Landtag he replies to a question, “Heated? Well, yes, what we call heated in Austria. People were outwardly offensive and inwardly indifferent.”

Hofmannsthal after his first meeting with Strauss sent him a verse play for a ballet which he had written on discovering “Dionysian beauty” in the wordless gesture of the dance. Not so dedicated to pure art as not to value an association with Strauss, he hoped the Master would set his libretto to music. Strauss, however, was at the moment too busy with
Feuersnot
and other projects. Pursuing the Dionysian trail, Hofmannsthal began to make notes on Greek themes, on the relation of the supernatural to the bestial, on “phallic exuberance” and the “pathology and criminal psychology” of the tragedies then enjoying revival on the stage. Here he found, not the marble purity of the conventional classical Greece known to the Nineteenth Century, but Nietzsche’s vision of a demonic Greece in whose sins and hates and forbidden bloodstained passions was the birth of tragedy, the earliest statement of man’s compulsive drive toward ruin. The central tragedy, which Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides all had dramatized, was the chain of guilt in the house of Atreus from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the murder of Agamemnon to the revenge of Electra and Orestes in their ultimate act of matricide. Hofmannsthal followed, but his
Elektra
turned out to be closer to Poe than Euripides, a nightmare of Gothic horror rather than a drama of man’s fate.

His stage directions describe a palace courtyard at sunset where “patches of red light glimmering through the fig tree fall like bloodstains on the ground and walls.” His characters surpass Salome in extravagant utterances of torment and desire, in ghastly longing for the double slaying of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, in recollections of Agamemnon’s gaping wounds, in sexual images of hatred appearing as a bridegroom, “hollow-eyed, breathing a viperous breath,” whom Electra takes into her bed that it might teach her “all that is done between man and wife.” Crazed with mutual hate, mother and daughter circle each other like mad dogs. Electra is a maniacal fury, feeding the vulture of revenge on her body, groveling in the dust of Agamemnon’s grave at sundown, the hour when she “howls for her father” and sniffs among the dogs for the buried corpse. Clytemnestra is almost putrescent, with “a sallow bloated face” and heavy eyelids which she can only keep open by a “terrible effort.” Dressed in purple, covered in jewels and talismans, she leans on an ivory cane, her train carried by “a yellow figure with the face of an Egyptian and the posture of a serpent.” Sick with terror, evil dreams and an old lust, she is obsessed by the need to spill blood and drives herds of animals to the sacrifice in the hope that if the right blood flows she will be relieved of the nameless horror of her nightmares. It is no word, no pain that chokes her; it is nothing, yet so terrifying that her soul “hungers to hang itself and every nerve cries for death.”

Can one decay alive like a rotten corpse?
Can one fall apart if one is not even ill?
Fall apart wide awake like a dress eaten by moths?

She seems an allegory of Europe and the play a climax of the
Schwarzseher
, an apocalyptic vision of disaster. When, desperate for surcease from her dreams, Clytemnestra demands to know from Electra who must bleed and die that she may sleep at last, Electra cries in exaltation, “What must bleed? Your own throat!… and the shadows and torches shall envelop you in their black and scarlet net.”

The play was produced by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1903, the year after
Salome.
Hofmannsthal was alert to its possibilities. To serve as a libretto for an opera by Strauss was then considered “to reach the summit of contemporary fame,” and he repeatedly urged
Elektra
on Strauss as his next project. Though attracted, Strauss hesitated because of its similarity to
Salome
and cast about for some other theme of human nature driven to dreadful extremes. “Something like a really wild Cesare Borgia or Savonarola would be just what I am yearning for,” he wrote to Hofmannsthal in March, 1906. Following a visit to The Hague, where he was haunted by Rembrandt’s “Saul and David,” he suggested a “raving Saul” as a possible subject. Ten days later he suddenly proposed, “How about a subject from the French Revolution for a change?” Hofmannsthal, with his drama already written, kept returning to
Elektra
and, although the marks of Wilde on it were obvious, he insisted that it was really very different. Eager for collaboration, he was persuasive and Strauss succumbed. Meanwhile, with one foot in the dominant camp, he composed five highly colored military marches for the Kaiser which won him the Order of the Crown, Third Class.

While Strauss was at work on
Elektra
a major scandal revealing rottenness in high places became public. The Eulenburg affair concerned homosexuals in the immediate circle of the Kaiser, but it was less their habits than the layers disclosed of malice, intrigue and private vendetta which shed a lurid glow on Germany. Three years earlier Fritz Krupp, head of the firm, on being accused by the Socialist paper
Vorwärts
of homosexual acts with waiters and valets, committed suicide. This time the central figure was Prince Philipp Eulenburg, former Ambassador to Vienna from 1894 to 1902, a suave and cultivated aristocrat who was the Kaiser’s oldest and closest friend, sang songs to him beautifully at the piano, and gave him intelligent advice. As the only courtier to exercise on the whole a beneficent influence on the sovereign, he was naturally the object of the jealousy of Bülow and Holstein, who suspected the Kaiser of intention to make him Chancellor. Initiator of the scandal was Maximilian Harden, the feared and fearless editor of the weekly
Die Zukunft
, of which it was said that everything rotten and everything good in Germany appeared in its pages. Cause and motive had to do with Germany’s diplomatic defeat at the Algeciras Conference which set off waves of recrimination among ministers, culminating in the removal of the spidery Holstein. He blamed Eulenburg, although in fact his removal had been secretly engineered by Bülow. Rabid for revenge, Holstein, who for years had kept secret police files on the private habits of his associates, now joined forces with Harden to ruin Eulenburg, whose influence on the Kaiser, Harden believed, was pacific and therefore malign. With Holstein’s files at his disposal, Harden opened a campaign of innuendo naming three elderly Counts, all A.D.C.’s of the Kaiser, as homosexuals and gradually closing in on the friendship of Eulenburg with Count Kuno Moltke, nicknamed Tutu, “the most delicate of generals,” commander of a cavalry brigade and City Commandant of Berlin. The Kaiser ditched his friends instantly and forced Moltke to sue Harden for libel, which was just what Harden wanted in order to ruin Eulenburg. Through four trials lasting over a period of two years, from October, 1907, to July, 1909, evidence of perversion, blackmail and personal venom was spread before a bewildered public. Witnesses including thieves, pimps and morons told of “disgusting orgies” in the Garde du Corps regiment and testified to abnormal acts of Eulenburg and Moltke twenty years in the past. A celebrated specialist in pathological conditions discoursed on medical details, Moltke’s divorced and vindictive wife was called to testify, charges of subornation and perjury were added, Chancellor Büllow was himself accused of perversion by a half-crazed crusader for the legal rights of homosexuals and forced to sue, the verdict of the first trial in favor of Harden was reversed by a second trial and re-reversed in a third at which Eulenburg, now ill, disgraced and under arrest, was brought to court in a hospital bed. The public felt uneasily that justice was being tampered with, readers of
Die Zukunjt
were given an impression of perversion everywhere and the prestige of Kaiser and court sank. At the same time in Vienna the Emperor’s brother, Archduke Ludwig-Viktor, known as Luzi-Wuzi, became involved in a scandal with a masseur.

In England the three trials of Oscar Wilde had blazed and been put out within two months; the establishment turned its back on him and destroyed him. In Germany the establishment itself was on trial. In the midst of it, in October, 1908, came the tremendous gaffe of Kaiser Wilhelm’s interview on foreign affairs in the
Daily Telegraph
, in which his more than usually indiscreet opinions, carelessly allowed to pass by Billow, aroused the fury and hilarity of nations and questions as to his sanity at home. Some even demanded his abdication. Billow, maneuvering neatly as he thought, virtually apologized in the Reichstag for his sovereign who never forgave him. Hurt and indignant, the Kaiser retired to the estate of his friend Prince Fürstenberg, where, in the course of an evening’s festivities, Count Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the Military Cabinet, appeared in a pink ballet skirt and rose wreath and “danced beautifully,” affording everybody much entertainment. On finishing he dropped dead of heart failure. Rigor mortis having set in by the time the doctors came, the General’s body could only with the greatest difficulty be divested of its ballet costume and restored to the propriety of military uniform. It had not been a happy year for the Kaiser, although six months later he at least had the satisfaction of forcing the resignation of Bülow.

Damage to the image of the ruling caste caused its members to swagger more than ever. As the Kaiser’s prestige slipped, the trend of the extreme militants grew in favor of the Crown Prince, a strutting creature whose flatterers told him he resembled Frederick the Great, as indeed, facially, he did. In the eternal duel of reigning monarch and eldest son, Wilhelm II and “little Willy” felt required to outdo each other in bombast. “I stand in shining armor” and similar pronouncements of the Kaiser were of this period. The nation’s mood of conscious power could absorb unlimited bombast. Germans knew themselves to be the strongest military power on earth, the most efficient merchants, the busiest bankers, penetrating every continent, financing the Turks, flinging out a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad, gaining the trade of Latin America, challenging the sea power of Great Britain, and in the realm of intellect systematically organizing, under the concept
Wissenschaft
, every branch of human knowledge. They were deserving and capable of mastery of the world. Rule by the best must be fulfilled. By this time Nietzsche, as Brandes wrote in 1909, held “undisputed sway” over the minds of his countrymen. What they lacked and hungered for was the world’s acknowledgment of their mastery. So long as it was denied, frustration grew and with it the desire to compel acknowledgment by the sword. Talk of war became a commonplace. When the Kaiser’s troublesome Rhodes scholars got drunk they threatened Oxford colleagues “with invasion and castigation at the hands of the German Army.” In 1912 General Bernhardi, the leading military theorist of his day, proclaimed the coming necessity in a book of indisputable authority and conviction whose title was
Germany and the Next War.

The other Germany, the Germany of intellect and sentiment, the liberal Germany which lost in 1848 and never tried again, had withdrawn from the arena, content to despise militarism and materialism and sulk in a tent of superior spiritual values. Its representatives were a caste of professors, clergy, doctors and lawyers who regarded themselves as the
Geistaristokratie
(aristocracy of the mind) superior to the vulgar rich, the vulgar nobility and the vulgar masses. Unconcerned with social problems, unengaged in politics, they were satisfied with an indoor liberalism which fought no battles and expressed itself in abstract opposition to the regime, in contempt for the Kaiser and in the anti-militarist cartoons of
Simplicissimus.
They were personified by a professor of philosophy, Georg Simmel, whose lectures in a room overlooking Unter den Linden coincided with the hour of the changing of the guard. At the first sound of the military band Professor Simmel would abruptly stop talking and stand motionless in “an attitude of arrogant disgust and stoical suffering until the barbaric noise had faded away.” Only then would he resume his lecture.

At the centenary celebration of the University of Berlin in 1910, the two Germanys met when the academic community found itself invaded by their fierce-moustachioed monarch in the golden cuirass and golden-eagled helmet of the Garde du Corps, with retinue in gorgeous uniform, heralded by the terrific blasts of a trombone choir. Satisfied that the Kaiser “looked even worse than his caricatures,” the audience consoled itself with the thought that such an intrusion could not trouble their halls again for another hundred years.

Strauss completed the score of
Elektra
in September, 1908, with his publishers taking it from him page by page. Anticipating the prospect of another
succès de scandale
, they paid $27,000 for it, almost double the $15,000 paid for
Salome
, making Strauss’s income from music in 1908 $60,000. The German public’s appetite for sensation had become a habit and four cities competed for the honor of the premiere. Grateful to Schuch, Strauss gave it to Dresden, which in honor of the occasion scheduled a Strauss festival to include
Salome, Feuersnot, Sinfonia Domestica
and two performances of
Elektra
—five evenings of Strauss in succession.