The Vienna Melody (66 page)

Henriette recognized the Chancellor quickly enough this time, as he passed by, to say, “Forgive me, Excellency, for not having recognized you earlier today.”

He answered, “Of course, Frau Alt. In any case, I knew who you were. Your son had pointed you out to me.”

“Hans is an admirer of yours,” Henriette said. Under other circumstances she would not have said that to this man who did not know how to live his life.

“I have a high regard for your son,” was Dr. Schuschnigg's rejoinder. Henriette had the impression that, like Hans, he too was struggling with shyness. He took his leave of the two ladies and left the lobby. Two men who had been standing behind him followed him out.

“To the Archbishop's residence!” one of them was heard to say.

“That's the life for you!” someone behind Henriette said with envy. She turned round and remarked in a loud tone to Martha Monica, “He makes the impression of a human being who knows what one should live for.”

“Yes,” said Martha Monica, without knowing what was in her mother's mind.

 

From the windows of the main hall of the Prince-Archbishop's palace, which the man just discussed was shortly to enter, one could see the baroque courtyard illuminated with the red glare of torches; a serenade was in progress there. Inside, round an oval table, sat six persons awaiting him. The Archbishop, the Governor of Salzburg, the president of the Festival, Peter Alt, chief of division in the Ministry of Education, Max Reinhardt, the director of the Festival plays, and the piano-maker Hans Alt. Peter had brought his cousin with him. The agenda of the day was: Promotion for the Salzburg Festival.

No one paid any attention to the agenda. The cries on the Cathedral Square were still resounding in all their ears. Some of them considered that it would be necessary to triple the police guard.

“It's incomprehensible to me how anyone can take a ridiculous person so seriously!” said Peter.

“You think so?” asked the Chancellor, and turned to the chief of division.

“Would Your Eminence and the Chancellor allow me to speak freely what has been in my mind a long time? I find it's absolutely wrong to waste our strength on taking Hitler seriously. May I state my reasons?”

The cardinal smiled in anticipation of a welcome diversion. “You may speak,” the Chancellor said.

“Our federated state,” Peter explained, “does not recognize its enemies. I don't say that Hitler isn't a mortal enemy. But he's a ridiculous enemy, and we should take advantage of that fact. If we strip the man of the mysticism that surrounds him—what remains? A ridiculous person. He looks ridiculous; his teeth are false; his martial gait is false; his martial speech is false. He chose a style of moustache without knowing it was that of a Jewish comedian, He shies away from every foreign word, and if he ever uses one he mispronounces it. He says ‘
status ko
,
'
and to this day is incapable of pronouncing the name of me very party he himself founded. His suits bag as though he had hired them from a secondhand dealer. When he receives diplomats he waits to see what they do and then imitates them. When he eats in society he looks to see how the others eat and copies them. All that is ridiculous or at least pitiful.

“At the same time he is an example of a person who knows precisely how ridiculous he is, and he is more surprised than the rest of the world at being taken seriously.

“When this man started out he was the most cowardly creature there was. Therefore he made no bones of doing in public the most cowardly thing a man can possibly do: during the Munich Putsch, when the police fired, he held children in front of himself in order not to be wounded. In the World War, in the course of those four years, all he achieved was the rank of corporal.

“This most ridiculous and cowardly of men, by being taken seriously, was encouraged to become significant and martial. Since he is a hysterical neurasthenic and gambler, this was possible. For both reasons he thrives on extremes and takes extreme risks. With the mentality of a beer-hall politician, he evolves his attitude towards the world not from knowledge but from private revenge. Because a Jew treated him ironically at an Academy examination he hates the Jews. Because Trotsky said of him, ‘No Bolshevik would trust him to shine his shoes,' he is against Bolshevism.

“This primitive man hit upon the primitive idea that immediately after a four-year war no one would be willing to make war again and would do anything rather than that. As a gambler he staked all or nothing on that idea, and he had the luck to break the bank; people took his bluff seriously. When he set fire to the Reichstag building in Berlin the world, instead of unanimously saying, ‘Hitler burned it,' talked about and printed ‘The Case of the Reichstag Fire'; when we accepted the vote he blackmailed in the Saar as a bona fide plebiscite, instead of blackmail, something happened which never before occurred in history: a zero, who knew that he was one, an Everyman—to quote our Festival play—or even a sub-Everyman, promoted himself to a billion. And the astronomical figures grew, the more seriously he was taken.

“I have heard this man speak in Munich. He gives the impression of a clown. But instead of giving him the only answer he deserves—to laugh him loudly out of court and prick the bubble of his inflatedness, thereby reducing it to the nonentity it is—we systematically enlarge it and call out the police to combat it. I ask the indulgence of you gentlemen if I have trespassed on your patience.”

“It was very interesting,” remarked the Chancellor, who was sitting where he could look across to the Berchtesgaden mountains. “I regret only that I can't agree with you. In the first place, I wouldn't call a man a coward who was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. Besides, even if it is a clown who sets fire to the world, I don't think that laughter is the right reaction. Scorn is wrong in any case. As for Hitler, he may be setting the world on fire, or at least may want to do so, but he is less of a clown than I am. All of us here—for we are, after all, Austrians—honor religion, education, culture. Yet the lack of it, in my estimation, is not a cause for ridicule but at most for pity. And our own Metternich has told us that a person who thinks himself a Napoleon, without being one, can be more dangerous than Napoleon. Megalomania, whatever its derivation, should be dealt with by strait jackets and insane asylums. As long as madmen are unconfined we must protect ourselves against them as best we may.”

Whereupon they went back to the agenda. Various participants, including Hans, made proposals which were accepted: a competition for symphonic compositions, followed by the world premiere of the prize-winning work at the next festival, in the summer of 1938; guest performances of the Paris Opera and the New York Metropolitan Opera in exchange for the Salzburg production of Mozart's
Così Fan Tutte.

When the Chancellor left the archbishop's palace Hans walked down the stairs with him.

“
I was so pleased to meet your mother,” the Chancellor said.

“She's a wonderful woman,” said the son. “I'm beginning to see that she's been underestimated in our family.”

The other man nodded. “That's Austrian. Your cousin is right in one respect. We do the opposite from the Nazis. We make a business of underestimating ourselves. But perhaps we're obliged to do it when we are at home here and see constantly before our eyes the standards of real greatness.” He looked up to the Untersberg rising in the moonlight like a silver block out of the dark green surface of the night.

They fell into a conversation which continued as they walked along the Salzach quay. “You too are a widower?” said the Chancellor, and stood still. The two men following him also stopped.

Hans nodded.

“We understand each other,” said the Chancellor, and walked on. “I should like to have a talk with you, unofficially and without the shadow I cast.” As he said it he looked back at the two men behind him. “You're a good Austrian, Herr Alt.”

“That is perhaps all I am, Herr Bundeskanzler,” was Hans's answer.

“That is not a small thing. But I know how little it is appreciated. I shall look forward to seeing you again!”

 

In the night Hans was awakened in his hotel room by the conversation of a couple who, returning late and being under the influence of alcohol, did not care whether others slept. Apparently they had been at the Festival play that afternoon and were attempting to imitate the disturbing shouts. They seemed to have found them extraordinarily comic, for they could scarcely go on, they were laughing so. They kept mixing up their cues and argued (in a Prussian dialect) as to whether the “Heil Hider” came after “Thy kingdom come” or not until after “Thy will be done.”

As he could not go to sleep again, Hans did what he had done so often before when he was trying to get at the meaning of things. He stood at the open window and let the night air cool his brow. Over there, beyond the Staats-Bridge, was Mozart's birthplace. One could see the house and the golden letters which proclaimed it. Beyond the frontier half an hour away, lived Hitler. One could see the constant searchlight coming from his house as it pierced the sky …

 

Thanks for your friendly letter [Hans wrote later that same night on a postcard of Mozart's birthplace]. Our exhibition has been a great success. The pianists whom I, or rather you, invited all came. Salzburg is now crammed with enthusiastic foreigners horn all over the world. For next summer they are going to construct a new Festival building in the park of Schloss Mirabell. One sees what an attraction Austria can have when it remembers Mozart. Cordial greetings and good wishes.

Yours,

HANS ALT

 

As he was addressing it he realized he did not know Fraulein Hübner's first name. He had to look it up in her letter. Mitzi.

Then he read, until it grew light, in Hofmannsthal's posthumous writings. One passage moved him almost to tears:

 

Every one sees himself in the figure of Everyman. The foreigners, who come to see the old play revived, the English, the French, the Americans, the Germans. Perhaps they do not believe their hour has struck, but they sense that it will strike and they see themselves in a mirror. Only we Austrians do not see ourselves. Why is that so? Is it because we are so pious we have no further reason for remorse? Or are we still like that old ditty singer of the time of the plague, good old Augustine, the most Austrian of all figures and the incarnation of divine cheerfulness, who staggered drunkenly into a pestilential grave, slept off his stupor there, and awoke next day unharmed, to continue uninterrupted his song from the depths of the plague-infested tomb? Or are we more akin to that neglected, poor stonecutter in Anzengruber's play to whom nothing could ever happen and who is just as much of an Austrian character? Happy the people to whom the omens do not speak …

 

Hans was in the small group of people waiting for the Austrian Chancellor early in the morning of February 14 at the West Station in Vienna. The man who stepped from the train was not the same who had driven away two nights before. He held his hand out to those standing there as though he did not see them, greeted the guard of honor drawn up before the station with a listless “Long live Austria,” and drove with his two escorts to his apartment in a small building, formerly the head clerk's residence at Belvedere Castle. It was Sunday. Although he regularly went to mass every morning at seven, he missed it today. Nor did that seem to concern him.

All this time he had been holding a leather briefcase tightly under his arm. Now he laid it on his desk, opened it, and said in his even voice, reminiscent of Monsignor Seipel's speech, but underneath which there was a feeling of intense excitement, “Before I go to the president to make my report I should like to reconstruct the notes I made on my return journey, of hay conversation of yesterday at Obersalzberg. Will you be good enough, Guido, to take it down? And you, Hans, will see that it is put in final form. I don't care to take anyone else into my confidence.”

The leader of the Fatherland Front, Guido Zernatto, prepared to take dictation. Hans nodded his agreement. For many months he had been a constant evening guest in this long, narrow, red-and-white room, as soon as the man who lived there had his day's work behind him and was free to talk. These conversations had usually begun with music and nearly always ended with Austria. The two men had come to have the deepest confidence in one another. The Chancellor was glad to be able to talk frankly with someone who possessed a mind of his own but who had neither an official position nor ambition and therefore was completely above suspicion when he used him to get information or convey it. Hans, on the other hand, found that this man whom he visited in the late evenings was one of the most sincere men he knew. He had never met anyone who loved Austria more passionately and selflessly.

“On February the ninth the German Minister von Papen called on me,” he began his dictation, not looking at anything except his papers, and smoking cigarettes at intervals. “I must state in the beginning that on February the fourth the Supreme German Army Command was changed and the Generals Fritsch and Blomberg, who had given their pledge to our Chief of General Staff Jansa to respect Austrian independence, were removed. On February the sixth von Papen saw Hitler in Berlin, of which fact I was aware. When Papen called on me on the ninth he declared that he had splendid news for me, which would, by a single stroke of the pen, remove all the outstanding difficulties between Austria and Germany. The Chancellor of the German Reich had invited me to visit him at the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden.

“When I inquired as to the nature of the stroke of a pen Papen explained that the stroke of a pen was merely a metaphor and not to be taken literally. As far as Hitler was concerned, his sole intention was to have a friendly talk with me. He himself knew no further particulars, but he had been entrusted to deliver to me the invitation of a friend. I replied that I was well satisfied to hear of this sudden change of attitude but that, as he would easily understand, I desired to be acquainted with the subjects that would come under discussion during our conversation; up to the present the attitude of the German Chancellor towards Austria and myself had in any case not aroused an impression of friendship. Von Papen countered with the question of whether I insisted on being informed in advance of the subject of negotiation, which in his private opinion could not be anything but a treaty of friendship with Austria. I said that I did, and he promised to obtain further information.