We're All Viennese Now

On a Royal Suicide Pact and Ages of Anxiety

Crown Prince Rudolf and Mary Vetsera

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This week’s essay is free to read. Then after the jump, my thoughts on Keir Starmer’s immigration strategy, plus a rattle bag of delights.

On the morning of January 30, 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his mistress Mary Vetsera were found dead in the prince’s bedroom at the Imperial Hunting Lodge at Mayerling, in the woods outside Vienna. Rudolf was 30, Mary was 17. Rudolf had shot Mary in the head, before turning the gun on himself. Lovers for just a short while, the two had made a suicide pact. Mary left letters of farewell to her family: “Please forgive me for what I’ve done. I could not resist love…I am happier in death than life.”

The news rocked Europe, where Rudolf was famous and admired. He was seen as more modern, dynamic and far-seeing than his rather stiff father, the Habsburg ruler, Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Rudolf’s early death made a tear in the fabric of history. Since Rudolf had no son, the new heir presumptive became Franz Joseph’s nephew, Franz Ferdinand. Franz Joseph was still emperor on 28 June, 1914, when that plan bit the dust too.

I’ve been reading Frederic Morton's 1979 book, A Nervous Splendour, which sets the Mayerling incident in the context of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Certain cities, during certain periods, exert disproportionate influence on world culture: Paris in the 1920s; New York in the 1970s; Dubai in the 2020s (joke. I think). Vienna around the turn of the century might just outdo them all.

In that city, at that time, psychology was reinvented by Freud, classical music by, in turn, Mahler and Schoenberg; visual arts by Klimt and Schiele; architecture by Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos; economics by von Mises; literature by Schnitzler and Zweig; Jewish identity by Herzl. Hayek (economics), Popper, and Wittgenstein (both philosophy) were Viennese too, even if they did their revolutionary work elsewhere. I won’t go on, though I could. Vienna played a central role in the invention of modernism, and modernity itself.

Morton focuses on a short period at the beginning of this phase: the turn of 1888 into 1889. Apart from Rudolf and Vetsera, his cast of characters includes the 32-year-old Sigmund Freud, established, barely, as a neurologist, and just starting to grope towards the ideas that became psychoanalysis (his breakthrough album, The Interpretation of Dreams, was a decade away); Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner, the former near the beginning of his career, the latter near the end of it, both unsatisfied with their status; Gustav Klimt, an artist discovering his own radicalism, and Theodore Herzl, a peacocking young journalist and playwright beginning to hunger for seriousness.

All of them are in some way frustrated and anxious, which was typical: Vienna was, famously, a nervous city. It was full of hysterics, of both sexes (it took Freud to point out that the condition was not specific to women), intense over-thinkers, overstrung status-seekers, apocalyptic doomers. Its feverish creativity emerged from claustrophobic diversity: in coffee houses enclosed by the Ringstrasse - the grand boulevard encircling Vienna’s inner city - chemists and psychiatrists and composers mingled with novelists and artists and physicists, caffeine fuelling their edgy conversations.

This was a city of extreme, bipolar pleasures. The Viennese were fuelled by cocaine, champagne, sex and dancing; stupefied by morphine, pastries, cakes and cigars. Culturally, there was an emphasis on ephemerality, on taking hits of hedonism while being cynically aware of the meaninglessness of it all. Many young people, overwhelmed by a feeling of futility, contemplated the ultimate revolt against this existence; suicide rates were high, particularly among the upper classes. As Frank Tallis, in his book on Freud, Mortal Secrets, puts it, “death was often viewed as a welcome escape from a carousel of sexual compulsion, disillusion and sour comedy”.

Suicide was aestheticised and competitive. A tightrope walker hung himself from a rope tied to the window handle of his tenement. He left a note: “The rope was my life and the rope is my death.” An elegant young woman aboard the express train to Budapest entered the toilet with her suitcase, changed into a bridal gown, opened the car door, leaped out. She was found dead by the rails, white lace stained with blood. In 1888, a courting couple, beautiful and rich, picnicked on capon and champagne outside the gate of a cemetery, before the young man shot his girlfriend and then himself. Educated Viennese were consumed by German romanticism, which, from Goethe to Wagner, tied love and death together. Killing yourself for love, either its absence or its presence, was fashionable.

The crown prince’s staff noticed how closely he read press accounts of these grisly events. In company, Rudolf was affable and charming, but privately he brooded. The son and heir of a relatively young emperor, he was all prestige and no purpose, a condition familiar to Kendall Roy and Prince Harry. Politically speaking, he was a liberal who wanted to modernise the monarchy and the country, but found his efforts in that direction smothered by Franz Josef and deadening tradition. On turning thirty, he wrote to a friend, “We live in a slow, rotten time…this eternal living-in-preparation, this permanent waiting for great times of reform, weakens one’s best powers…”

Morton, a Viennese Jew whose family emigrated to America in 1940 (his life story is amazing) had a compelling theory of why fin-de-siècle Vienna had this anxious, almost manic-depressive temperament. He thought it stemmed from an unusual decision taken five hundred years before, by the founder of the Habsburg dynasty. Rudolf I made Vienna his capital, even though it lay on the Eastern rim of his territories, which made it vulnerable to attack by the Turks. The result was a city organised around military defence and royal pageantry, with little room for civilian labours to flourish:

”[Vienna] never went through normal urban development by way of a gradual unfettering of the middle class. The sword of the knight and the flourish of the courtier marked its streets, not the common sense of the tradesman. There was little physical or psychological room inside these ramparts for bourgeois growth…In other, comparable Western capitals burgherdom thrived along with practicality, efficiency, industry. Not in Vienna. The principal manufacture of the city was the grandeur of its monarchs.”

Come the late nineteenth century, Vienna was still run by soldiers and courtiers. The Crown dispensed political power to a small, intensely competitive population of aristocrats. Vienna’s intellectually inclined inhabitants had the sense of living in a city of brittle illusions, increasingly detached from the rest of rapidly industrialising Europe. Without the energy and common sense of a commercial class, Vienna felt like a gold-leafed yacht drifting aimlessly out to sea as storm clouds gathered on the horizon. Some passengers chose to throw themselves overboard.

It’s not hard to spot parallels with our own time: an era of elite overproduction, in which young, highly educated people have their paths to success and achievement blocked off by older generations. We haven’t, thank God, cultivated an art of suicide, but we do have high levels of anxiety and mental disorders, particularly among the middle classes. Apocalyptic phantoms - climate change, AI - stalk the future; our young people share with the Viennese a sense of dancing on the edge of a volcano. Vienna’s pre-industrial anxiety is mirrored by our post-industrial version: for all the hardship that came with manufacturing, there was something grounding about it - at least that’s how it seems to those of us who make a living from Powerpoint slides and podcasts. For Vienna’s ephemeral pleasures, we have TikTok, fast food, and opioids.

Morton also identified a political reason for Vienna’s malaise (which, lest we forget, was enormously generative), and Crown Prince Rudolf’s depression. Liberalism, as championed by Rudolf and others, “had begun to go palpably wrong”. The liberal dream of equality and abundance generated by democracy and technology - of “progress” - had only created “new forms of inner and outer want; new envy, new doubt, and an entirely new furious bewilderment.” Instead of happiness and security, nervousness and anger.

As the son of the Emperor, Rudolf experienced his generation’s crisis with peculiar intensity. Morton believed the crown prince’s story to have enduring resonance: “Under today’s system the young often appear to be a generation of Rudolfs: free and glamorous in theory, crushingly impotent in action…overprivileged and hapless at once; free to sound the depths of sophisticated frustration.”

Of course, this was written, and is read, with the knowledge that Vienna’s doomers were right: the apocalypse really was coming, twice over (A Nervous Splendour ends with the birth in northern Austria, in 1889, of a future Viennese called Adolf). But the fact that Morton’s description was at least somewhat applicable in 1889 and in 1979 - not to mention 1947 - and still today, should remind us that we moderns live in a permanent age of anxiety; one which is sometimes justified, sometimes not. There’s something calming about that.

Still, the past is a weird country. Morton gives a gripping account of the days and hours leading up to Mayerling. Rudolf, who had a distant relationship with his wife, had been dwelling on the prospect of a suicide pact with a lover even before he knew Vetsera, a young noblewoman who had been besotted by him from afar. He had suggested the idea to another mistress, who laughed it off. Mary, who shared his intensity and was completely in his thrall, agreed to it with enthusiasm. It’s almost impossible for us to imagine, but they really seem to have gone to their deaths joyfully. The day before, Rudolf entertained a hunting party of aristocratic friends at the lodge, while Mary hid in his bedroom. He was by all accounts full of bonhomie.

When the guests had gone and only a few loyal servants remained, Mary emerged for dinner. After dinner the couple invited Bratfisch, Rudolf’s driver, to entertain them with folk songs, which he did, singing and whistling for them until the early hours. Finally, Rudolf and Mary retired to the bedroom, hand in hand. There they wrote farewell letters to loved ones. (“Bratfisch whistled wonderfully,” said Mary’s postscript to her sister.) At 6.30am, Rudolf sauntered into his butler’s bedroom in his dressing gown to request he be called for breakfast in an hour’s time. Then he left, whistling one of Bratfisch’s tunes, and that was the last time anyone saw either him or Mary alive.

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After the jump: my thoughts on Keir Starmer’s new political strategy, plus a rattle bag of goodies, including what I’m reading and what I’m listening to.