With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Frederick Morton: The Armageddon Waltz

[Frederic Morton is the author of “Thunder of Twilight: Vienna 1913-1914.”]

IN the depth of winter of 1913, at the height of pre-Lenten carnival, the Vienna Bankers Club gave a Bankruptcy Ball at the opulent Blumensaal hall. Some ladies appeared as balance sheets, displaying voluptuous debits curving from slender credits. Others came as inflated collateral: faux enhancements amplified the bust or upholstered the posterior. As for the gentlemen, thin ones were costumed as deposits, fat ones as withdrawals. Sooner or later everybody repaired to the debtor’s prison — the restaurant of the Blumensaal.

Here mortgage certificates made pretty doilies for Sachertortes. Ornamented with the bailiff’s seal, eviction and foreclosure notices were colorful centerpieces, each topped by a bowl of whipped cream. If you wrote your waiter an I.O.U., he would pour you a flute of Champagne. Dancing and merriment continued until 5 a.m., when, suddenly, the orchestra leader stopped his men in the middle of the “Emperor Waltz.” He announced that since the musicians hadn’t been paid, there would be no more music, good morning, good luck, goodbye....

The very week of the Bankruptcy Ball, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, successor to the throne, met with Emperor Franz Josef to urge disengagement from Albania. This, he pleaded, would help facilitate a rational dialogue with Albania’s neighbor — militant, Austria-hating Serbia. The hater-in-chief there was Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic, the head of Serbian military intelligence, who was organizing a secret terrorist squad to be loosed against the Habsburg realm.

At the same time, Vienna was incubating in its own streets some of the century’s prime virtuosos of violence. One of them was active close to the imperial palace, Schloss Schönbrunn, where the emperor had received his heir. An elegant building on Schönbrunner Schlossstrasse housed young Josef Stalin, dispatched by Lenin to explore the empire’s explosive nationalities situation. It was during Stalin’s weeks in Vienna that he initiated his lethal feud with young Leon Trotsky, who, a few streetcar stops away, was publishing the original Pravda. All this while on the other side of town young Adolf Hitler was seething obscurely, painting postcards for a living....

“Austria,” said Karl Kraus, who was Habsburg Austria’s H. L. Mencken, “is the laboratory for the apocalypse.” What would he say about America today?
Read entire article at NYT