Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

One day, then, a post office received a letter from the Russian border station at Podvolokzyska to a poste-restante address code-named ‘Opera Ball’. On being opened, it proved to contain no letter, but six or eight new Austrian thousand-crown notes. This suspicious find was reported at once to the chief of police, who issued instructions for a detective to be stationed at the post-office counter to arrest the person who came to claim the suspect letter on the spot.

For a moment it looked as if the tragedy was about to turn into Viennese farce. A gentleman turned up at midday, asking for the letter addressed to ‘Opera Ball’. The clerk at the counter instantly gave a concealed signal to alert the detective. But the detective had just gone out for a snack, and when he came back all that anyone could say for certain was that the unknown gentleman had taken a horse-drawn cab and driven off in no-one-knew-what direction. However, the second act of this Viennese comedy soon began. In the time of those fashionable, elegant cabs, each of them a carriage and pair, the driver of the cab considered himself far too good to clean his cab with his own hands. So at every cab rank there was a man whose job it was to feed the horses and wash the carriage. This man, fortunately, had noticed the number of the cab that had just driven off. In quarter-of-an-hour all police offices had been alerted and the cab had been found. Its driver described the gentleman who had taken the vehicle to the Café Kaiserhof, where I often met Colonel Redl, and moreover, by pure good luck, the pocketknife that the cabby’s unknown fare had used to open the envelope was found still in the cab. Detectives hurried straight off to the Café Kaiserhof. By then the gentleman described by the cabby had left, but the waiters explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he could only be their regular customer Colonel Redl, and he had just gone back to the Hotel Klomser.

The detective in charge of the case froze. The mystery was solved. Colonel Redl, the top espionage chief in the Austrian army, was also a spy in the pay of Russia. He had not only sold Austrian secrets and the army’s marching plan, it also instantly became clear why, over the last year, the Austrian agents he sent to Russia had been regularly arrested, tried and found guilty. Frantic telephone conversations began, finally reaching Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of General Staff of the Austrian army. An eyewitness of this scene told me that on hearing the first few words he turned white as a sheet. Phone calls to the Hofburg palace ensued, discussion following discussion. What should be done next? The police had now made sure that Colonel Redl could not get away. When he was leaving the Hotel Klomser, and was giving the hotel porter some instructions, a detective unobtrusively approached him, offered him the pocketknife and asked, in civil tones, “Did you happen to leave this pocketknife in your cab, Colonel?” At that moment Redl knew that the game was up. Wherever he turned, he saw the familiar faces of secret policemen keeping watch on him, and when he returned to the hotel, two officers followed him up to his room and put a revolver down in front of him, for by now a decision had been reached in the Hofburg—the end of an affair showing the Austrian army in such an ignominious light would be best hushed up. The two officers stayed on duty outside Redl’s room in the Hotel Klomser until two in the morning. Only then did they hear the sound of the revolver being fired inside the room.

Next day a brief obituary of the highly regarded officer Colonel Redl, who had died suddenly, appeared in the evening papers. But too many people had been involved in tracking him down for the secret to be kept. Gradually, moreover, details that explained a great deal in psychological terms came to light. Unknown to any of his superiors or colleagues, Colonel Redl’s proclivities had been homosexual, and for years he had been a victim of blackmailers who finally drove him to this desperate means of extricating himself from their toils. A shudder of horror passed through the entire army. Everyone knew that if war came, this one man could have cost the country the lives of hundreds of thousands, bringing the monarchy to the brink of the abyss. Only then did we Austrians realise how very close we had been to world war already during the past year.

That was the first time I felt terror take me by the throat. Next day I happened to meet Bertha von Suttner, the generous and magnificent Cassandra of our times. An aristocrat from one of the first families in the land, in her early youth she had seen the horrors of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 come close to their hereditary castle in Bohemia. With the passion of a Florence Nightingale, she saw only one task in life for herself—preventing a second war, preventing war in general. She wrote a novel entitled Die Waffen nieder —Lay Down Your Arms—which was an international success; she organised countless pacifist meetings, and the great triumph of her life was that she aroused the conscience of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. He was induced to make up for the damage his invention had done by setting up the Nobel Peace Prize to foster international understanding. She came towards me in a state of great agitation. “People don’t realise what’s going on,” she cried out loud in the street, although she usually spoke in quiet, kindly and composed tones. War was so close, and they were hiding everything from us and keeping it secret as usual. “Why don’t you young people do something? It’s more your business than anyone’s! Resist, close ranks! Don’t keep leaving everything to a few old women like us. No one listens to us!”

I told her that I was going to Paris, and perhaps we could try to draw up a joint manifesto there.

“Why ‘perhaps’?” she urged me. “Things look worse than ever, the wheels have begun turning.” Uneasy as I was myself, I had difficulty in calming her down.

But it was in France that a second, personal episode was to remind me how prophetically the old lady, who was not taken very seriously in Vienna, had foreseen the future. It was a very small incident, but it made a powerful impression on me. In the spring of 1914 I had left Paris, with a woman friend, to spend a few days in Touraine, where we were going to see the grave of Leonardo da Vinci. We had walked along the banks of the Loire in mild, sunny weather, and were pleasantly weary by evening. So we decided to go to the cinema in the rather sleepy town of Tours, where I had already paid my respects to the house in which Balzac was born.

It was a small suburban cinema, not at all like our modern picture palaces made of chromium and shining glass. Only a hall perfunctorily adapted for the purpose, and full of labourers, soldiers, market women, a crowd of ordinary people enjoying a gossip and blowing clouds of Scaferlati and Caporal tobacco smoke into the air, in defiance of a No Smoking sign. First on the screen came a newsreel—‘News From All Over the World’. A boat race in England; the people talked and laughed. Then a French military parade, and again the audience took little notice. But the third item was entitled: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Visits Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna’. Suddenly I saw on the screen the familiar platform of the Westbahnhof in Vienna, an ugly railway station building, along with a few policemen waiting for the train to come in. Then a signal was given, and old Emperor Franz Joseph walked past the guard of honour to welcome his guest. As the old Emperor appeared on the screen, stooping slightly and not entirely steady on his feet as he passed the line of men, the audience in Tours smiled kindly at the old gentleman with his white side whiskers. Then there was a picture of the train coming in, the first, the second and the third carriages. The door of the saloon car was opened, and out stepped Wilhelm II, the ends of his moustache bristling, wearing the uniform of an Austrian general.