A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889 by Frederic Morton

Author:Frederic Morton [Morton, Frederic]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781626813953
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

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* See Chapter 7

Chapter 17

A difficult duty, of the Crown Prince is to keep silent, when the lowest subject of the state is free to talk. It is his duty to remain in the shadow even when he feels the necessity to step candidly and powerfully into the light of public opinion. This difficult duty had been a severe burden to the Crown Prince because so often he was convinced that what happened…was not beneficial to the fatherland.

On December 1, all Vienna could read these lines on the front page of the Wiener Tagblatt. Censorship had let them through for a simple reason. They referred to a foreign controversy. The words quoted were from a lawyer beyond the border, defending the publisher of the diaries of the German Crown Prince Friedrich; the Friedrich who had died in March after barely three months on the throne. Wilhelm, the new Kaiser, disliked his predecessor’s liberalism and had interdicted publication of the diaries. His act had become an international cause célèbre. Moritz Szeps’s Wiener Tagblatt was merely reporting on a hot issue abroad—good journalistic practice. It was a liberal paper and quite naturally quoted an argument stressing the historical importance of the diaries of a liberal prince. That was all.

Yet many readers sensed that wasn’t all, at all. Moritz Szeps was too good a friend of the Austrian Crown Prince. Citing dead Friedrich’s defender meant writing, between the lines, an eloquent essay on behalf of Rudolf.

Szeps still saw the Crown Prince regularly. He knew that Rudolf’s life did not get easier as the year wore on to its end. When Rudolf traveled with Franz Joseph to his grandfather’s funeral in Munich, his cough returned—an old complaint. But there was a complaint yet older and worse, which afflicted him whenever he had to accompany the monarch to a pomp of state. He felt he was being moved about like an overdressed archaic puppet. The Emperor pulled strings taut for the pettiest motions. “His Majesty has ordered,” Rudolf wrote his First Court Chamberlain, Count Bombelles, “that neither you nor I should attend the Bavarian regimental anniversary [because of mourning], but that a courteous regret note should be sent now, and that later, on the anniversary day itself, a congratulatory cable should be dispatched.”

On his return to Vienna, Rudolf had to playact his way through the usual ceremonial chores. Sometimes, rarely, he disconcerted courtiers with a flash of his real face, as he had with Countess Festetics on All Souls’ Day. Mostly he concealed himself and his resentment beneath his official graciousness. He had to go on miming a role he loathed, and the court calendar scheduled him for many performances that fall.

He had to inspect the model for City Hall Park together with a host of newspaper reporters. He had to smile the Crown Princely smile though he hated the very idea of the park. Its execution would cost over a million gulden. It would dress up still more an already overembellished Ringstrasse neighborhood.

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