(Change of scene.)
Scene 42
Optimist and Grumbler in conversation.
OPTIMIST Believe me, the young Emperor really looks like a man who has groomed himself thoroughly for his role as ruler.
GRUMBLER I can easily believe that. After all, when he was Crown Prince he had the walls of his study lined with military cartoons from Die Muskete.
OPTIMIST You wouldn’t believe how serious he’s become.
GRUMBLER No wonder — he’s stopped attending operettas since the run of Walzertraum ended.
OPTIMIST Yes, but look, seeing Walzertraum 50 times—
GRUMBLER —would make anyone feel in low spirits, that’s true.
OPTIMIST Much else about him has changed, too. His youthful enthusiasm—
GRUMBLER —for the Parrot cabaret—
OPTIMIST —the good times whooping it up in barracks at Brandeis in Bohemia.
GRUMBLER —the cinema in Bad Reichenau—
OPTIMIST He doesn’t go there now anymore either.
GRUMBLER After his hundredth visit he’s supposed to have said it was getting to be a bore.
OPTIMIST No, believe me, you underestimate his intellectual qualities.
GRUMBLER I’m convinced his face gives an exaggerated impression of them. Recently, someone who knows him assured me that he’s quick on the uptake. That’s the highest praise monarchists can adduce for the object of their veneration, whenever they want to convince a sceptic. But for a ruler, the prerequisite is actually that he should be quicker on the uptake than his subjects.
OPTIMIST Doesn’t the fact that he wants peace speak highly in his favour?
GRUMBLER That, too, is hardly a quality that raises him above most of his subjects. I, for instance, am even keener on peace; moreover, I’ve never told lies in order to obstruct it when I could have brought it about by telling the truth. And the likes of us never even had the opportunity to renounce a throne if we didn’t want to wage a war or continue fighting one.
OPTIMIST That’s the only thing he can be reproached for: he’s fickle and thinks whoever talked to him last is in the right.
GRUMBLER The diversity of his views is astonishing. For he looks such a simple soul.
OPTIMIST But all in all, you’ve got to admit, the way he’s turned out is surprising. He was always promising, and all his promise has been fulfilled.
GRUMBLER True, but not his promises.
OPTIMIST His fickleness — saying one thing one day and something else the next—
GRUMBLER —apparently comes from the Saxon branch of the Habsburgs, and that quirk in their lower lip.
OPTIMIST But all in all, he’s surely a good-natured fellow? You can say what you like—
GRUMBLER That’s just it, you can’t say what you like.
OPTIMIST What is it you can’t say?
GRUMBLER That I don’t want to be ruled by an operetta star — to have a matinee idol like Marischka or Fritz Werner perched on the throne. That it’s far more gruesome having to feel respect for a dashing young man about town than for a bewhiskered old freak of an Emperor. That I find it intolerable to be ruled by a cartoon character who might have been created by Schönpflug. By someone who can smile and smile and be — not a villain but a jaw-dropping cretin. Someone frozen in the stance of continuously greeting others.
OPTIMIST And he does the jokey caption for each picture as well. The other day at a court banquet he’s supposed to have cracked this one: “What’s the opposite of Apponyi? — A horse!”
GRUMBLER I can just hear the braying laughter of those who can send us to our deaths. No, it’s no good. I refuse to take part in the winter campaign.
OPTIMIST But look, you can’t seriously blame him for his humour. He’s simply inherited the proverbial affability of the Habsburgs — Franz Ferdinand being the only exception — and even Harden, surely a principal witness, held out high hopes for him. That was the time after the assassination in Sarajevo when he appeared smiling to greet the crowds, arm in arm with Franz Joseph, the greater figure—
GRUMBLER —the greeter figure! A monarch whose cheerfulness gave the lie to the official bulletin which reported that he lunched alone to signal his profound grief at Franz Ferdinand’s death. The predecessor and the successor to the assassinated Heir to the Throne took their leave, greeting the honourable public as they went. The successor promptly justified the hopes placed in him with a historic utterance along the lines of: “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!”
OPTIMIST Don’t overlook the symbolic significance inherent in such utterances.
GRUMBLER How could I? With his utterance “Let the ancient bastions fall” in 1888, Franz Joseph made a first breach in the ramparts of old Vienna.
OPTIMIST And Crown Prince Rudolf famously expressed the hope that “a sea of light” would stream forth—
GRUMBLER —at the opening of the Electricity Exhibition in 1883. But if Goethe on his deathbed had not called out “More light”, as the legend goes, but merely “Open the other shutter and let more light in”, it would still be more enlightening than all the maxims of the Habsburgs, though such endorsements were indeed valued at a right royal rate imposed on the exhibiting firms, while their mind-numbing impact was the last straw for peoples afflicted by the deeds of the Habsburgs. Nevertheless, Archduke Rudolf — in the intimate company of his coachmen Bratfisch and Mistviecherl, a shining light to later generations of revellers — slaked his thirst for culture through his journalist friends Szeps and Frischauer. For all that, these Habsburgs and Hasbeens have pathetically failed to blaze a trail for progress; under their lamentable aegis the arts and sciences had no option but to bloom. One would be hard-pressed, I’d say, to imagine more than one or two of them with a book in their hands, even one of the primers by Leo Smolle about the military virtues of the double-headed eagle. Their mark of intellectual nobility was “to be quick on the uptake” of what they were slow to understand. But of all Franz Joseph’s utterances, the most authentic seems to me to be one he made when contemplating an aquarium at a cooking exhibition: “Aha, goldfish, their swimming looks so natural!” The keenest intellects among the Habsburgs, and also the most reliable, are probably the homosexual ones. But if, like Ludwig Salvator, you are credited with human impulses, you will certainly be lying buried on Majorca, not in the Capuchin Crypt. The others — those who were able to fulfil their historic destiny and increase the power of their House through marriage, and those who, on the contrary, diminished Austria’s happiness through wars — they would not have enjoyed their Indian summer if their peoples had had more sense. Otherwise the unremitting misfortune of being ruled by individuals, about whom the best that could be said was that you couldn’t offend them, would have long been unendurable; and the dire situation that in the twentieth century there were not only archdukes, but also compulsive adulterers dignified by royal titles, would have been eradicated before the war was lost.
The brain fog generated by these characters will be fully felt in all its destructive force only after its dispersal, which now seems imminent. God’s patience must be running out, after listening for so long to appeals by a submissive population to “preserve and protect” the Habsburgs, in the words of the national anthem. I hope to celebrate the next Imperial anniversary without the festive bowing and scraping of the arse-lickers who have made their way to the spas for this great day; and also without the resounding cries “All present and correct!” of those disreputable journalists who, in the midst of a world war, still dared ignore the suffering of our blood-soaked front to puff up these cliques of devotees in the rear, and drown out the curses of millions of mothers with the cheers of loyal lackeys. Anachronistic Austria, deferential to every Imperial Highness, will only come to its senses when it finally recognizes the trail of destruction left by those majestically striding past; when it decides to create republics rather than guards of honour, and firmly and incisively slams the door of the imperial carriage shut in the face of all the Salvators and Annunziatas.