CHAPTER EIGHT
frances had been urging John to go for analysis practically from the moment they met, but it wasn’t until January 1934—when asthma had him flat on his back, pale and gasping for breath—that he presented himself at Dr. Wilhelm Stekel’s consulting rooms in Vienna.
Tell me about the troubles that brought you here, Stekel always began. Where does the shoe pinch? The doctor was a man in his mid-sixties, with a twirled mustache and a gray beard trimmed to a sharp point.
John started with the asthma. Mustard brought it on. So did feathers and dander from cats and dogs, and fat blades of timothy weed. All of the usual remedies had been tried, none of which alleviated his illness. Just entering a room where there was a cat was enough to set off an attack.
But there were other problems, too. Problems with his wife. The return of the impotence that had afflicted him, off and on, for years. Dissatisfaction with his work. He’d squandered two years on a novel about the collapse of the Credit-Anstalt that now seemed, two hundred pages in, a dud.
Here is how we shall proceed, Stekel would say. First will come a trial period of a week. That was a step he always required. It allowed him time to assess the chances of a cure and, if necessary, to terminate an analysis that would be fruitless. In the meantime, Herr Gunther was to make a record of his dreams. Note them down in a dream journal within the first minutes of waking. The dream-book should always be brought to the analytical sitting. The patient must hold nothing back from the analyst. Remember what Goethe so wisely said: “I have never heard of a crime that I couldn’t have committed myself under certain circumstances.” Under no condition, Stekel insisted, was the patient to talk about the analysis with anyone when it was in progress. Afterward, he could tell whomever he liked.
—
carl jung, alfred adler, myself—we were all three Freud’s disciples. That was the way Stekel told the story. He was a young doctor from Czernowitz on the eastern fringes of the Habsburg territories. Shortly after settling in Vienna, he was analyzed by Freud. The famous Wednesday evening discussion circle? That had been Stekel’s idea. He’d proposed it to Freud in 1902. The conversation would be strictly informal; the men—Stekel and Adler and a few other disciples—would arrive at the Berggasse after the Freuds had finished their dinner. Enchanting evenings, Stekel said: none but a miner in the California Gold Rush could have known such a thrill of discovery, the talk of complexes and dreams and sex lives right there for the taking.
Before too long, though, he found himself at odds with Freud over matters of interpretation. They quarreled over autoeroticism (Stekel saw nothing wrong in it), about whether all neuroses (or as Stekel believed, only some) were caused by sexual repression, over who deserved credit for the idea of the death instinct. “Stekel is going his own way,” Freud had announced in 1912. The break hadn’t been his doing and he tried, over the years, to mend it. He certainly hadn’t set out to become Freud’s apostate. Without speaking against the great master, Stekel would only say that Freud wished to be the pope. He treated doubters as sinners and insisted on being quoted incessantly.
Painful as it was for him personally, perhaps it was better for psychoanalysis that he separated from Freud. Freed from Freud’s orthodoxies, Stekel had analyzed thousands of patients. He had developed a technique he called “active analysis,” a course of treatment of three to six months: three if the problem could be skimmed off the surface, six if he had to root out a deep-seated childhood conflict. With Freud, by contrast, you could sit for years with no improvement. Stekel didn’t take on a patient unless he thought that he could do him some good; it was his responsibility to improve marriages, not just cause divorces, especially if there were children involved.
Stekel’s books—among them, Frigidity in Women, Impotence of the Male, Auto-erotism: A Psychiatric Study of Onanism and Neurosis, The Language of Dreams, Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty—had been translated into twenty-six languages and his name was very well known in America. He’d lectured there and treated cases in New York and Chicago in 1921. Psychoanalysis, he had to instruct his American audiences, was a science, “not a kissing-game.”
Stekel’s method was to start the analysis with a series of questions: What was Herr Gunther’s favorite book? Was his parents’ marriage happy? What terms was he on with his sister? What was his sexual history? Tell me about your wife.
—
john filled up his green notebooks trying to understand his wife. Frances’s intelligence and capacity for deep thought, her low soft voice, the delight she took in moonlight and rocks polished smooth by the ocean. Her sweetness and dignity. The shocking things she said. At dinner, while eating salad, cool as could be: “Darling, please screw me tonight.”
He took down her sayings, snippets of their conversation. She flashed onto his page like a character he was trying out.
He to her, amid one of their divorce talks: “I wonder if I ever will write a good book!”
“If you don’t,” she replied, “I’ll come right back and re-marry you, as punishment.”
“Frances is certainly the most intelligent woman I have ever met. It took me 3 years to realize this.” He’d known her for nine years and had been married to her for seven and not once in that time had she uttered a trite thought. Her wit and her brightness still took him by surprise: he never knew what she’d do or think next. And when the facts didn’t bear out her theories? “So, I’m wrong!” she would declare. She made it sound like a victory.
Why, then, in practical matters did she often seem so fragile, so undone? When it came to choosing a dessert from a restaurant menu, or a dress from a shop, she hung, paralyzed, unable to make a decision; it was maddening. In the kitchen, she was worse than incompetent. She could hardly scramble an egg. She was never on time and kept everyone waiting. “A tremendous paradox: F.’s absolutely sterling courage and strength in fundamentals, and her petty weakness in trivial things.” If her aura of helplessness didn’t quite square with her boldness in the Barnard Socialist Club, still less with her solo trip to the Soviet Union, it was, he knew, Frances’s frailty as well as her intelligence that attracted him.
“My diaries get nothing of F’s delicacy, grace, and occasional childishness, also her devotion to theory,” John acknowledged. He also left out the habits of hers that other people remembered: how she sometimes locked herself into a room at parties, sitting there silently for hours, refusing to come out. Or her willingness to “let go,” as Mickey Hahn admiringly put it, telling people exactly what she thought of them. She “was a B-I-T-C-H,” pronounced Edgar Mowrer’s wife, “one of those people who go for the jugular,” according to Rebecca’s son, Anthony.
John knew very well how much his work owed to Frances’s influence. She’d fed him ideas and she never stopped exhorting him to improve. Why wouldn’t he take a stronger stand in his writing? she continually demanded. “You’ve got to feel strongly & care yourself, or your readers won’t care,” she told him. Be fair to both sides, of course, but “care for one side.” They argued about it when he filed his dispatches from the Soviet Union in 1928 and they fought more in the early 1930s, in Vienna. The job of a reporter, he protested, was neutrality. His task was to observe and to analyze, not to offer moral judgment. It was one of his strengths as a journalist that he could, almost reflexively, see both sides.
It had been drummed into John, as it was into every other cub reporter, that objectivity was the reputable American newspaper’s life blood. Preserving the public’s trust required a scrupulous distinction between fact and opinion; accuracy—and decency, too—were gospel. Those were the principles that separated dignified papers such as the Chicago Daily News or the New York Times from the yellow press of the 1890s. But if impartiality and the embrace of facts had seemed straightforward enough propositions at the turn of the twentieth century, that was no longer the case by the 1920s and 1930s. The development of public relations as a profession, the success of propaganda during the First World War, the uneasy sense that irrationality as much as reason drove the human psyche, the competition from the tabloids: all combined to cast doubt on whether objectivity was possible—or even desirable.
Just as John and Frances debated the merits of taking a stand, American newspapers—in pursuit of the ideal of objectivity—were wrestling with the subjectivity inherent in reporting the news. The rise of the syndicated political columnist in the 1930s was a means of providing interpretation beyond the editorial pages; increasingly, as well, news stories were signed, previously the rule only for foreign correspondence. The belief that facts carried viewpoints, that they (at the very least) needed explanation, bolstered calls for the professionalization of journalism. Reporters, argued the journalist and theorist Walter Lippmann, required a scientific method: they couldn’t take their own disinterestedness for granted. Or was the right answer Henry Luce’s? According to the publisher of Time, founded in 1923, the strict division between news and opinion needed to be relinquished.
Foreign correspondents had long had a wider field of endeavor than their fellow reporters at home. They were permitted to be “editorial” since it was understood that affairs abroad required explanation. The trick, though, was to offer interpretation without advocacy. For most of the old-timers reporting from Europe, this hadn’t seemed a dilemma at all. With the exceptions of a few partisans, such as John Reed, whose reportage was avowedly political, most correspondents cultivated neutrality as though having no stake in the matter was the most superior position. Cynics and wise guys, they wandered from capital to capital, some dressed like dandies, others like tramps, turning wars and revolutions into inches of coolly detached newsprint. They were Americans and only there to see things, they said: that’s the job.
A decade earlier, John had a cowed respect for his elders among the foreign correspondents. But by 1934, it wasn’t enough to be a camera, not after what he’d seen of the fascists in Berlin. He cared too much about truth and decency and reason to treat the subject of Nazis evenhandedly. But if he abandoned the polestar of objectivity, how was he to explain what he was seeing in Austria? Put differently, what was behind the news? Frances’s exhortations were finally taking hold. The deeper he got pulled into events, the less sense they made to him. It was as if he’d set out to explain the forces of gravity using a ruler and a compass. After several months of analysis with Stekel, John began to think that perhaps he’d been operating with the wrong tools all along.
—
at the café louvre, all the talk was of secret negotiations. Dollfuss had an ironclad commitment from Mussolini to defend Austria’s borders against the Germans, it was said. But what had he given the Duce in return? Fodor had seen Dollfuss for a half-hour private conversation after he and John returned from Spital. The chancellor, Fodor reported to his editor, had lost his ebullience. He looked pale and seemed rattled. While Dollfuss pronounced himself committed to the anti-Nazi fight, he was also inclined, so thought Fodor, to take Hitler’s peacemaking overtures seriously.
When Dollfuss proclaimed the death of Parliament and concentrated more power in his own hands that fall, filling his cabinet not simply with old-fashioned reactionaries but outright fascists, Fodor called it the “greatest disappointment in my life.” Nevertheless, he continued to think the worst sorts of brutality could be avoided in Austria: “There is something terribly civilised in the Austrian nature which prevents them to be inhuman.” On his own or under Fodor’s tutelage, John had come to something of the same conclusion. Writing in Foreign Affairs, he marshaled the old Habsburg stereotypes: “The Austrian does not think that he is better than anyone else, he sometimes wonders if he is as good; his political nature is skeptical, lazy, and fatalistic; he thinks of the irredentism of Hungary or the chauvinism of Germany as simply ill-bred.”
Whether the Austrian populace was energetic or listless hardly mattered at all to the story John wanted to tell. His focus was Dollfuss. John’s aim was to explain how Dollfuss had become the bulwark against Nazism, and here, what counted was the man’s personality. He wasn’t a blusterer, like Hitler or Mussolini. He wasn’t clever, like Metternich. Rather, the source of Dollfuss’s authority, as John saw it, was an earnestness that, together with his religiosity, gave him “a curious innocence”: the sort displayed by “old, wise priests.” Dollfuss’s foes—the Socialists as well as the Nazis—continually underestimated him, even as he succeeded in turning their errors to his own advantage. His political allies, meanwhile, behaved like “hypnotized sheep” around him.
Unlikely as it would seem, Dollfuss had become the “political darling of Western Europe,” John observed. Though he didn’t say so, the little chancellor was also a favorite of the foreign press corps, John included, as much for his personality as his stance against Hitler. In high political circles, his modesty made him a curiosity. He was known to laugh at the jokes traded about him. Have you heard of the latest attempt on the life of Dollfuss, Knick chortled from Berlin: “Detectives found a mousetrap in his room!” John’s articles about Dollfuss were evenhanded. To the publisher of the Chicago Daily News, though, John expressed himself more frankly: “He is pursuing a courageous and intelligent course and I hope he wins through.”
For the spies in Vienna’s Central Telegraph & Telephone Office, the reporters’ fondness for Dollfuss presented an opportunity. On the whole, the spies took a dim view of the “Anglo Saxon” foreign correspondents, the Gunthers included: “Mr. John GUNTHER, an American, whose wife is half-Russian and who during his long stay in Moscow as a correspondent has acquired an undisguised sympathy for Soviet Russia.” They condemned the whole Louvre bunch as naïve and inclined to sensationalist reporting, puffing up any rumor of coups or revolutions, and unremittingly hostile to the Heimwehr. But precisely because the correspondents respected Dollfuss, the spies thought that it might be possible to bring them around to a more sympathetic point of view.
It would be a fool’s errand to try to predict the course of events in Austria, John acknowledged in Foreign Affairs. By the time that the reader opened the magazine—his piece appeared in the January 1934 issue—the little chancellor could be in hiding or in prison. And despite all of Dollfuss’s talk of class harmony and a new era in industrial relations, Austrian fascism might well prove as much a “swindle” of the working class as Hitler’s or Mussolini’s regime. “One thing is certain. The Dollfuss system will not mean a terror,” John declared.
—
the next month, on a February morning a few weeks after John started his analysis, the streetcars that glided along their street came to a halt. The electricity in the apartment cut out, too.
Outside, the tram drivers and conductors were standing around the idled streetcars. They’d become wary as the reporter approached them, go silent and stare, but a greeting of Comrade! would soon get them talking. Had the Nazis possibly managed to sabotage the central power station? Or was it a general strike?
If it was a strike, the tram workers hadn’t been told about it. The electricity had just gone out suddenly, they said. There were rumors, though, that Nazis had been shooting their comrades in Linz. They’d heard that Dollfuss had called out the government troops. And if Austrian soldiers or the Heimwehr fired on workers, there’d be civil war. They wouldn’t be taken like cattle.
On the radio, the day before, the head of Vienna’s Heimwehr, Major Fey, had addressed his troops. “The time has come to exterminate the Reds, once and for all!” he declared. Emil Fey had a widow’s peak oiled black like Mussolini’s and a jutting chin like the toe of a boot. But his smooth white dress gloves: that part was all Austrian, as homegrown as schnitzel. “Tomorrow,” Fey proclaimed, equal parts menace and pomposity, “we are going to clean up Austria.”
Maybe little Dollfuss will keep his head, John said hopefully.
There were preparations the Gunthers knew to make in situations such as these. The nanny would run over to fetch Johnny from kindergarten, and then Frances would talk her into staying for the rest of the afternoon. She filled the two bathtubs so that they’d have a supply of drinking water and laid in a store of candles, matches, and flour. In the meantime, John went to fetch the car.
They picked up Fodor first. In the city center where he lived, right around the corner from the Stock Exchange, the streets were quiet. There was a heavy stillness that set the heart racing. The Heimwehr men patrolling the streets had rifles slung across their chests. A bad sign: the government had opened the munitions depots to Fey’s men. The Ringstrasse was already barricaded with tanks and tangles of barbed wire, troops pulling machine guns into place to guard the arterial roads. On the walls of buildings were posters proclaiming martial law.
The battles, apparently, were being fought in the Socialist housing projects, the Sandleiten, the Karl Marx-Hof, the Goethehof, and the other gigantic buildings on the outskirts of the city. Even from miles away, they heard the awful whistle and crash of mortar fire, the cold crack of the howitzers. But Dollfuss wouldn’t order government troops to fire on Austrian workers, would he? Such a thing was unimaginable, the reporters told each other. Thousands of children and women lived in those buildings. Zigzagging through the city, avoiding the cordoned-off streets, the Gunthers and Fodor reached the Sandleitenhof by early afternoon.
John drove the Ford right up to the Sandleiten’s allotment gardens. The ground was a hard crust, the buildings drawn up like fortresses behind hastily barred gates. In front of the arched entryways, garbage cans had been pulled into a line, a makeshift barricade. The police, wearing steel helmets, carbines at their sides, were dragging the cans away.
From the second-story windows of the Sandleiten, a flash of a rifle, and the crackle of a sniper’s fire sent the police scuttling. The Socialists had orders not to fire first—that Frances and John had heard. But how long could the people inside hold on? How many weapons did they have? And what had happened to the Schutzbund, the Socialist militia?
The police had machine guns, the infantry had artillery. They’d bring in armored tanks to crash through the street barricades.
“John, drive on!” Frances cried out, determined to get as close as they could.
—
frances had seen fey up close at the Anglo-American Press Association meeting when he’d come to deliver the usual speech about the Bolshevik menace stalking the Austrian homeland. A bullet-headed clod, she decided, an implementer of other people’s orders.
Prince von Starhemberg, the chief commander of the Heimwehr, was another matter. Cary Grant without the chin dimple, he was elegant and loose-limbed with a hedonist’s mouth. He was the possessor of thirteen ancestral castles and the namesake of the von Starhemberg who’d fought back the Turks from Vienna’s gates in 1683. It was said he was in hock up to his eyeballs to Jewish moneylenders. Von Starhemberg had the aristocrat’s supercilious sense that social peace would reign in Austria only if the workers could be liberated from their “Jewish-Marxist betrayers.” He was fond of saying that no one, absolutely no one, had more respect for Austria’s workers than he did.
Sometimes von Starhemberg threw himself into politics, energetically marshaling the Heimwehr, intriguing against his rivals. But he also liked the company of actresses and women skiing champions, late evenings in the nightclubs. On a hot Vienna summer day, you could find him, stripped to his shorts, bathing on the Lido.
What sort of game was von Starhemberg playing, though? the correspondents wondered. For a few years he’d delivered tirades of the Nazi sort, not purple-faced like Hitler’s, but with the well-bred cadences that wouldn’t be out of order at his mother’s dining table. “In ‘the people’ I do not include those foreign, flat-footed parasites from the East who exploit us,” he’d declared. The time for compromise was finished; he was a man of action. “We know that the strength of our movement is not in parliament but in our militant formation.” The future of Austria, he once said, was with Germany.
But more recently, von Starhemberg seemed to have acquired a different view. Ever since Dollfuss had allowed him a freer hand (at Mussolini’s behest, claimed the sages of the Café Louvre), he’d bestirred himself to declarations about Austria’s sovereignty. To Frances, he seemed a nasty opportunist in a charmer’s body. He reminded her—strangely—of her stepfather. She took every chance she could to watch von Starhemberg in action.
“From my experience in fascist countries,” Frances wrote a few months later, “I have come to one conclusion. Rules of democratic fair play should be reserved for democrats. Decencies of liberalism should be reserved for liberals. But the only way to treat a fascist is to treat him the way he intends to treat you—first. That means hitting him below the belt before he has a chance to hit you below the belt.”
She knew her editor at the News Chronicle, a good London liberal, would object to those sentiments. He didn’t know yet that laissez-faire liberalism was done for, as dead as horse-drawn carriages and hoopskirts. It was time to out-fascist the fascists. “At least, when you knock a fascist out, you will send him to a hospital or observation ward—but when he knocks you out, he sends you to a concentration camp or a crematorium.”
The Socialists she and John knew—men like Oskar Pollak, the editor of Vienna’s leading socialist paper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung—were good and decent. As an intellectual matter, they understood that you couldn’t play a game of chess with an adversary whose sole purpose was to smash the board and scatter the pieces. But in their decency, Frances thought, they were making a fatal mistake. They still saw a future for Red Vienna stretching out in front of them.
She wouldn’t deny for a minute that their ambitions were glorious. The Sandleiten’s butter-colored façades, the arched entryways and windows with twelve big panes of glass: sun and light and air for the masses. Grassy courtyards for children to run and play. A kindergarten outfitted with miniature washstands and towels, a whole orchestra of musical instruments for the children. The gymnasium and swimming pool onsite. The communal laundry room. The workers’ library, fifteen thousand volumes strong.
That was what it meant to have a fair government, Frances said. But all of that had to be defended and she didn’t see a Lenin or even a Trotsky among Red Vienna’s leaders.
—
now, the big glass panes of the workers’ paradise shook from the concussion of machine-gun fire. John edged the Ford up to the Sandleiten with Frances urging him on—keep going, just a little farther! Much to Fodor’s relief, and probably John’s, too, the police forbade them to drive on.
When they returned home that night, the streets were pitch-black. It was impossible to see the blockades. John ran the car into barbed wire, reversing directions, again and again. On the radio, there were all manner of lies: a criminal strike at the central electric power plant had started the trouble; the Bolshevik leaders, having provoked a revolution, had fled before a shot was fired, their trunks stuffed with stolen party funds. Let there be no doubt about it: the government would chase the “hyenas to the devil.”
But this was no socialist revolution, it was clear to John and Frances. It was a right-wing coup. The government’s troops and the Heimwehr had joined forces to crush the Socialists. At the Rathaus, seat of Red Vienna, Heimwehr fighters ran their green and white banner up the flagpole.
This was a government making war on its own people. This was a massacre. How could anyone possibly sleep? The rifle fire all night, the thud of shells, the bitter cold. Even from miles away, their windows were rattling in the frames. My God, there are children in those buildings, people would say all night long to each other, as if saying so could restore decency.
John left just after daybreak for the Goethehof. Waving his press pass, he’d gotten through a few hours after the bombardment. If you could only have seen the kindergarten, he reported. Little desks buried under collapsed beams. A child’s rectangular, metal paint-box smashed up. Shards of blackboards. This was the vengeance meted out against people who dared to defend their homes. “Of course even the Heimwehr admits the Bolshevik foe fought bravely—especially the women and children,” he wrote Bill Shirer.
John now knew why there had been no concerted defense of Vienna by the Socialist Schutzbund. Like the Heimwehr, the Schutzbund had storehouses of weapons—in pits buried deep in the courtyards of the Sandleiten, or bricked up in secret locations within the walls of the Karl Marx-Hof. They’d made contingency plans: the commander of the Schutzbund, his subordinate, and the next layer of underlings all knew where the guns were. But they hadn’t counted on the efficiency of Dollfuss and Fey, who’d rounded up the Schutzbund leaders and their deputies, shooting some of them, arresting the others.
All Monday and Tuesday night, then, through Red Vienna’s model housing blocks, Socialist men and women had searched for their cache of weapons, scratching in the dirt of the courtyards with their bare hands while Dollfuss’s army blasted the buildings to rubble. They’d chipped away at the interior walls with picks where someone had heard that the munitions stores might be. As for the guns that might have made for a fair fight, the trunks of bullets and grenades intended for the defense of Vienna’s socialist experiment: they were never found.
It was quick work for Dollfuss’s troops to clean up Vienna. The entire thing lasted just four days, the Socialist dead numbered more than fifteen hundred, the wounded four times as many. Every hospital in the city was full. In the sewers of Vienna, injured Schutzbund men hid in the shadows, waiting for comrades who could smuggle them out, in darkness, wearing fresh, unbloodied suits. Inside one housing project, home to five hundred families, there were long red streaks where the bodies had been dragged down the halls, Fodor reported.
The Socialist Party is dissolved! proclaimed the radio. The trade unions are disbanded! The Bolshevik ringleaders will be hanged!
The trouble with the Austrian Socialists wasn’t their radicalism, Frances declared. It was that they weren’t Bolshevik enough. Why hadn’t they nationalized Austria’s largest industrial concerns, seized their assets back in 1918, when they’d had the chance? How could they not have seen that it was no time to obey the rules? During the fighting, the Socialist leaders took pride in the fact that there was no looting. It was rumored that one Schutzbund battalion surrendered to the Heimwehr because they didn’t want to tread on the grass! Say what you like about Lenin and Trotsky, she told John: they wouldn’t have made that mistake.
After the showdown in Austria was over, the correspondents spoke even more carefully at the Louvre and agreed that there was no telling, now, what might happen.
The police swooped down on newsstands and swept away the foreign newspapers. Austrian officials lodged bitter protests with the American chargé d’affaires in Vienna about the reporters’ dispatches. Papers that carried “atrocity stories,” Dollfuss’s government threatened, would be banned in Austria. The correspondents consoled themselves that New York and Peoria and Richmond would hear about the massacre of the Socialists. On one evening in late February, some twenty thousand people gathered at Madison Square Garden to demonstrate against the Austrian government’s actions.
Of course prisoners hadn’t been beaten up, Dollfuss protested to the American and British reporters who assembled at the Anglo-American Press Association. “You know how gentle we are in Austria.” He’d come for a parley with the correspondents, to correct misapprehensions. Now was the time to heal the wounds from the fighting, he said. The Socialists who had fought the government were not bad men, they were simply misled. “These men defended themselves so bravely that I am sure it is worth doing everything to try to win their full confidence and their help in building up a new Austria.”
Prince von Starhemberg saw the reporters, too. His message was different from Dollfuss’s in tone as well as content. He called the Social Democrats “Austro-Bolshevists,” the Heimwehr’s fighting words. “I have always deliberately fostered Fascism and fought democracy, and I believe that the democratic system is dying throughout the world. It cannot last much longer,” said von Starhemberg. “We feel there is a Fascist wave.” The Austrian government and the Nazis shared much in common, he continued. They were both enemies of democracy. But the Nazis’ campaign against the churches he rejected as “crazy,” and insisted: “We do not accept the exaggerated racial program of the Nazis.”
And yet the Nazis, the reporters suspected, would be the beneficiaries of the events of February 1934. By destroying Red Vienna, Dollfuss had weakened the forces of resistance to a Nazi takeover. What the correspondents had witnessed was the first onslaught on the postwar European order. This was “mass murdering mass,” wrote Rebecca West, one segment of the population turned assassins, the other victims. And from now on, the “embryos”—Rebecca’s name for men like Mussolini, Dollfuss, and Hitler—would be in charge. Because “adults cannot be happily governed by embryos,” as she later put it, “existence must decline from what ease and dignity it had attained to a hitherto unknown level of pain and humiliation.”
—
after the fighting was done, there was no longer any doubt in John’s mind about the need to take sides. No one who walked through that kindergarten in the bombed-out Karl Marx-Hof could have felt any differently. “Fifteen years of work which no unprejudiced eye could look at without exhilaration have been ruined in a forty-eight-hour nightmare,” John concluded in the Daily News. “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the socialist workers are the defenders in this war and the government the attacker.”
That took some gumption, Bill Shirer applauded from Paris. It was with trepidation, Shirer admitted, that he’d gone down to the Daily News’s bureau to read John’s dispatches. He’d been worried that John had been getting entirely too fond of Dollfuss, that he’d feel the need to maintain impartiality in the conflict: “But you were grand, just as I knew you would be when a final showdown came.”
Writing the truth was well enough but what was John supposed to do? For centuries, people had campaigned for more liberty, petitioning their leaders for equality and peace. And now? Here they were, the people themselves, putting that all in reverse, clamoring for fascism. John knew how the hero of his Credit-Anstalt novel, an able American newspaperman, an affable type but no deep thinker, would react. He’d join the Socialist Schutzbund and learn how to fire a machine gun so that he could defend Red Vienna.
John wasn’t going to do that.
Dr. Stekel had an answer to John’s uncertainty. Herr Gunther’s authority complex had been shattered. There was nothing unusual about that. It had happened to millions of young people amid the First World War. What right had their elders to lord it over them? The breakdown of the family, the church, the institutions of government had prepared fertile soil for the rise of the dictators. Hitler, Mussolini, Dollfuss—they were all neurotics of course. But they’d also become father substitutes for the masses.
But why, John wondered, would people who distrust authority choose to subsume themselves in a strongman? Why—of all things—did they view Hitler as God?
“People like to be afraid,” said Stekel. They tell themselves that they are defiant, that they are independent. They poke their fingers in the eyes of the Jews. They roar in a crowd. The ectoplasm of the dictator envelops them. They believe they are now part of the leadership. “Obedience and defiance finally merge and the leader becomes the new savior.”
—
stekel seemed almost absentminded as he probed, a mesmerist operating by intuition. Sometimes they sat together in the consulting rooms, but Stekel also liked to stroll in the Vienna woods with his patients. When he worked loose an interpretation, he’d stop on the path and then speak.
John related a dream he had—about a cat. “I am awakened (in my dream) by the mewing of a cat. The sound is faint, as if coming from a great distance. I shudder, and think: ‘The cat is a herald of death.’ Then I really awake and am appeased by finding that it is no more than a silly dream. But my heart goes on thumping for a long time.”
Did John know Edgar Allan Poe’s wonderful story, “The Black Cat”? Stekel asked.
He’d read quite a lot of Poe as a boy. But funny, no, he hadn’t read that story.
Ah, that’s a surprise, replied the analyst. Let me tell you, then, about “The Black Cat.” In Poe’s story, a man murders his wife. To hide the body, he removes the bricks from the wall where there had once been a chimney, props up the corpse against the inner wall, and sets about plastering so that no disturbance to the wall is visible.
Four days later, the police appear at his door. Where is his wife? She’s off on a visit out of town, he replies. He bids them to search the premises, conducting them through the house himself. Hands crossed over his chest, he leads the police into the cellar. Two times, three times, four, they investigate it. Just as the officers are on the verge of leaving, the man—swept away by bravado—taps with his cane on the exact place where he’d immured his wife. Solidly built, these walls! he exclaims.
Just then, from behind the walls, comes the mewling of a cat. The detectives set about tearing down the wall, and out falls the body of his wife, and standing on her head, the black cat!
The day after Stekel told him the plot of “The Black Cat,” John rummaged in the reading journals he’d kept since adolescence. Aha! He had read “The Black Cat,” after all, when he was fourteen. Not only that, he’d made notes on Poe’s story, observing that its theme was remorse.
At his next sitting, John bubbled with his discovery. He had an excellent memory and never forgot a thing that he read. He remembered the plot of books he didn’t even care about, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Kenilworth. Whatever could it mean that he’d forgotten “The Black Cat”?
Let me interpret it for you, said Stekel. The asthma is plainly connected to a murderous impulse about your wife. The cat is an association to your homicidal thoughts. Between the negative and positive emotions runs a current of electricity: desire is paired with disgust, love with hatred, a will to power with a will to submission. We do not always have to dig deep into the unconscious, as the orthodox Freudians claim. Some people’s central conflicts lie there, right on the surface.
—
the twenty-fifth of july, 1934, was a warm, fine day. The analysis with Stekel had finished a few weeks before, and it was damn near a miracle, John wrote in his diary. “I am strong: more self-reliant: no more asthma: tremendously more potent sexually: free of most of my old inhibitions, puritanism, evasions, cowardices.” Frances had started analysis with Stekel’s wife; her treatment was still in process but she was better, too, he was certain. No more of her monsoons and she was making a success of her job as the Vienna correspondent of the London News Chronicle, circulation 1.3 million daily.
The telephone rang just as he was walking out the door. He’d put in a good morning’s work and was off to have a swim. It was 1:07 p.m. On the line was one of his tipsters: “Have you heard the radio? The Vienna radio has just given this announcement: ‘The government of Dr. Dollfuss has resigned.’ ”
Was it true or just the churning of the Austrian rumor mill? John put in a call to the Paris office of the Daily News, alerting them to a story. Then, in turn, he called Fodor, who promised to hurry over to the Chancellery; the switchboard of the Chancellery (no answer—curious); and finally a local Austrian wire service, which announced a Nazi coup in the making. He phoned in the story to Paris at 1:19, his hat pushed back on his head. He ran to get the Ford.
Before he could get down the block, though, a policeman pulled him over. Drive me to headquarters, he commanded John. There’s been a general alarm raised, about what the officer didn’t know. By one-thirty, when John arrived at the Chancellery, Fodor was already there. Outside was a row of Heimwehr men in apple-green uniforms standing in the shade cast by the building’s wall. The gates to the Chancellery were locked up tight, the blinds drawn.
At least Dollfuss is safe inside, John and Fodor reassured each other. When another armored car rolled by, they tailed behind it, all the way to the headquarters of the Austrian broadcasting company, the Ravag. There, on a normally bustling city street, were police trucks, bristling with rifles and bayonets, and a mêlée, the pfffttt of machine guns, and blasts of hand grenades. They’d arrived just in time. Shortly before one p.m., a pack of Nazis, fourteen strong, had shot their way into the building in a bid to command the radio.
The conspirators had killed the guard on duty, rushed into the studio, and taken the radio announcer hostage. With a gun stuck up under his ribs, he’d read the Nazi message about the resignation of Dollfuss’s government. Were it not for a quick-witted girl telephone operator, who called the police, and an official at the radio station, who cut the wires between the headquarters and the provincial stations, the Nazis would be in charge of the airwaves. Before long, the police arrived and stormed the building, shelling it with gas and capturing the plotters. For the rest of the day, through a telephone line from Linz piped into the radio transmitter at Bamberg, radio audiences across Austria would listen to waltzes.
“Well, it seems to be all over,” John said at three forty-five to another correspondent on the scene, as the dead and wounded were carried out of the Ravag on stretchers. But, he continued, isn’t it strange that the government would have locked themselves in the Chancellery in a crisis?
A handful of reporters had stuck around the Chancellery, loitering on the Ballhausplatz, waiting for the government to make a statement about the coup attempt. But the only word they had from inside the building was that a new police chief was coming from Berlin. What on earth did that mean? Was that Major Fey at the window? And who was inside?
At two-thirty, a Heimwehr officer, fearing for Fey’s safety, had pounded on the Chancellery door: “We give you twenty minutes and then we blow up the building.” From inside came a voice: “Go away or we shoot.” At three fifty-seven, Fey appeared on the balcony, summoning two policemen to meet him at the back door of the Chancellery. Without their weapons, he added.
Ten minutes later, one of the officers left the Chancellery and ran to the telephone in the Imperial Palace just across the square. He spoke so loudly that the reporters could hear him. “I’ve been inside, I’ve spoken with Fey,” the policeman panted down the line. “Dollfuss is apparently badly wounded. He has resigned.”
By the time John tried to return to the Chancellery, at four p.m., the police had blocked off access to the surrounding streets and were turning away everyone, reporters included. Why wouldn’t they permit him to proceed to the Chancellery? John asked an officer. “The building is occupied,” the man barked at him. “By Nazis, Nazis disguised as army and police.”
—
shortly before one p.m., 150 or so Nazi plotters, taking advantage of the changing of the Chancellery guard, had swung their trucks (the sides of which were lettered milk and meat) into the courtyard of the building. They were members of a secret SS regiment in Austria; most were former Austrian Army men, officers and privates, who’d been dismissed because of their Nazi sympathies. Some of the conspirators were active duty police officers; the police force was riddled with Nazis.
Once inside, they locked the gates of the Chancellery and poured out of the trucks, armed with rifles. Dividing into groups, the rebels herded civil servants and government officials into the courtyard. They’d be shot, the hostages were warned, if they made a move.
Upstairs, in the state rooms, the cabinet was meeting. Dollfuss received the alarm just before the trucks pulled into the courtyard. Why it took so long for the warning to reach him, no one could explain. Was it a conspiracy or just Schlamperei, Austria’s notorious inefficiency? The police had been tipped off nearly an hour earlier. Quickly dismissing the cabinet, Dollfuss insisted that the ministers leave the building immediately and return to their offices. At that point, he withdrew to his private study. Hurry! said his secretary. They’re in the courtyard now.
Up the main staircase ran a group of plotters. His secretary wanted Dollfuss to hide upstairs in the Chancellery, in a warren of archive rooms. Maybe there he could lock a door and they wouldn’t find him. But the conspirators caught Dollfuss in a room just off the staircase. He turned, one hand on the high golden door handle, and half-raised his arms. The ex-sergeant Otto Planetta, thrown out of the Austrian Army two years earlier because of his Nazi activities, was barely two feet away. Without a word, Planetta shot the little chancellor in the shoulder. Then he fired again, from eight inches, and hit Dollfuss in the throat. “How his head cracked the floor!” Dollfuss’s secretary later told the reporters.
“Stand up,” commanded Planetta.
“I cannot,” Dollfuss whispered.
The Nazis picked him up, depositing him on the Louis XIV divan. The pink-and-gold tapestry was soon soaked through with blood and there Dollfuss lay for another hour and a half. The plotters refused to fetch a doctor. At two-thirty, they allowed Fey to see Dollfuss.
“I wanted only peace,” Dollfuss murmured to Fey. “May God forgive the others. Love to my wife and children.”
Get him a doctor, Fey pleaded. At least allow him to see a priest. This, too, was refused. That Dollfuss died in agony, wrote John, was something that no one who saw that shrunken body and that crumpled face could possibly doubt.
That evening, at six p.m., the phone lines across Austria went dead. Later the same night, the border between Germany and Austria swung shut. With the help of loyal Heimwehr units, the Austrian government regained control in Vienna; the police rounded up the plotters. Mussolini rushed Italian troops to the Brenner Pass, the border between Austria and Italy, a shot across Hitler’s bow: the Duce wouldn’t stand for a Nazi invasion of Austria. To report the story of Dollfuss’s assassination without kowtowing to the Austrian censors, John and Frances would have to drive to Bratislava, just across the Czech frontier.
—
after it was all over, John closeted himself away in the tiny servant’s room in the apartment that he used as an office, trying to make some larger sense of what had happened. Harper’s wanted a piece from him. Every night, once the day’s work was done, he went back to work in his office. Writing out his own eyewitness account was easy enough, but the meaning of the story kept frustrating him. It took him a dozen tries before he was satisfied with his lead.
One way of reporting the Dollfuss murder was simply as a failed Putsch: a coup attempt that missed the mark badly. That was the way that John told the story in the immediate aftermath. What the Nazi conspirators hadn’t anticipated was that Anton Rintelen, the former governor of Styria, who was to have taken over as chancellor after Dollfuss was shot, had been apprehended the afternoon of the coup outside the Hotel Imperial. The plotters inside the Chancellery folded once it became clear that Rintelen wasn’t coming.
As a shriveled corpse—as a martyr to Austrian independence—Dollfuss was stronger dead than he was alive, wrote John in the Daily News the day after the assassination. The brutality of the attack had backfired. Shocked by the violence, Austrians were rallying to their government. As hundreds of thousands of mourners lined up outside the Rathaus to file past Dollfuss’s coffin, it seemed to John that the assassination marked the “death spasm for the Hitler movement” in Austria.
The other way to interpret Dollfuss’s assassination—the way that John began to tell it in his long article for Harper’s—was as an act of Hitler’s personal vengeance and of international gangsterism. “It is the story of an organized conspiracy to murder,” John wrote in Harper’s, outlining the evidence he’d gathered about the millions of marks the Germans had spent on propaganda in Austria, the Nazi preparations to smuggle the Putschists over the border to safety in Germany, the pre-written German press releases heralding the change of leadership.
Viewed in that light, the Dollfuss assassination in July 1934 wasn’t, in fact, a failure, but a roaring triumph. For the first time, Hitlerism was mushrooming beyond Germany’s borders. For the moment, John wrote, Austria was still safe. Dollfuss’s murder had bought the country “temporary security,” but how long would that last?
The news agencies had beaten John on the first day’s stories because he couldn’t get a phone line in time. But in the weeks to come, he made up for it with a series of front-pagers—honest to God circulation-boosters, “amazingly fine” articles, praised his editor. He’d outdone all the other correspondents; he was making “distinct contributions to American thought.” From Switzerland, where he was in hiding, his Arbeiter-Zeitung banned after February, Oskar Pollak applauded John’s efforts. Even Rebecca West took note. She’d never thought much of John’s reporting before. But his stuff on the Dollfuss assassination? That was quite good.
John would later say that Stekel had given him eyes to see and wings to fly. He now knew what was so important about the trip to Spital and the details of Hitler’s childhood. He understood why the hatred between Stalin and Trotsky or Hitler and Dollfuss mattered so much, why dictators were rising everywhere, and why, of all things, people seemed to prefer it that way. You couldn’t explain what was happening just by reporting about economics (he’d never been interested in that, anyway) or the weaknesses of political parties or the failings of the international system. There was something deeper, something more personal at work. “These monsters,” he wrote, “were making our lives.”