The Little Book by Selden Edwards

Author:Selden Edwards [Edwards, Selden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780452295513
Amazon: 0452295513
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2009-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

30

The Illusion of Flight

In 1897, during Wheeler Burden’s time there, Vienna sat at the center of the vast and richly diverse Hapsburg empire that had once controlled half of Europe and now included a collection of important satellite cities, Prague, Cracow, Sarajevo, and Budapest among them. Twenty years later, by the end of World War I, the empire would be dissolved, the ruling family exiled, and the great imperial city reduced to a small insignificant position governing little more than itself. During the time of Wheeler’s visit, Vienna was a city in turmoil, although few people living within the confined perspective of the time—listening to operetta music, eating Sacher torte mitt schlagg, waltzing till exhaustion—wanted to notice it or admit it. The pro-Germans wanted alliance with Germany; the Slavs and Hungarians wanted independence, their own separate states and their own language; the working classes wanted better public services and housing; the artists wanted freedom from the old order; the sons in general wanted out from under the oppressive thumbs of their fathers. Just below the surface of the gaiety of the city there was such a powerful turmoil, in fact, that to an astute and pessimistic critic of the Café Central crowd or a historian with the benefit of hindsight who searched for the kernel by peeling away the layers nearly a century later, the whole culture appeared a whirling mass, headed for apocalypse. And if there was any one unifying and precipitating event that symbolized and perhaps played a major role in causing the unraveling, it was the tragedy at Mayerling nine years before.

At the time of Wheeler’s visit, the tragedy surrounding Crown Prince Rudolf was still on everyone’s mind, and still cloaked in mystery. The royal family’s efforts at covering up the facts had been successful, or one would say later, had been as successful as anything the royal family had tried to do. Within weeks of the awful tragedy, German newspapers, freed from the yoke of imperial censorship, were beginning to uncover the details, real and imagined. But even nine years after the fateful night in the imperial hunting lodge, fact and romance blended together into a version that the national psyche could accept and endure. The suicide of the heir to the throne seemed to be a metonymy, a part that represented the whole, an event that symbolized what lay deep in the great heart of Vienna and the empire itself: intrigue, enigma, and doom.

The Haze would tell the whole story, filling in all the details. The tragedy at Mayerling, after all, was a central part of his gospel, the gospel according to the Haze. The crown prince was despondent for a number of reasons. He had contracted a painful, and then incurable, case of venereal disease, the same disease that had driven his mother’s cousin Ludwig of Bavaria to lunacy and suicide only a few years before. He hated the thought of Germany, and perhaps all of Europe, being dominated by his crude bully cousin Wilhelm II.

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