High Treason and Low Comedy. Robert T. O’Keeffe
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Habsburg political and military affairs; or the note on how the army’s ‘marriage bond’ worked). There are only a few footnotes to the Toni Gallows play, supplying supplementary information. In both plays I use asterisks to flag brief notes shown at the bottom of a page―these allow for continuous reading of the text while supplying information to make immediate sense of what is flagged (e.g., the name or reputation of a person or locale).
My formatting of the plays follows the appearance of the pages in the 1926 text of Hetzjagd durch die Zeit, which allows the reader to see the running headers that encapsulate material on the page, a common practice of the era―Kisch’s headers use a telling phrase from the dialogue or summarize the page’s contents; these are shown in italics, centered on the pages as they appeared in 1926. Kisch puts stage directions and background and mood descriptions in parentheses; I replicate these. The characters’ names and their accompanying dialogue hew to the present-day formatting convention in English. My only apology to the reader is that I cannot supply the full context―sights, sounds and smells―of a Weimar-era cabaret theater, a place of sensory overload, where customers buzzed and hooted while partaking of alcohol, sausages, and a pile of cabbage and potatoes. Now, on to the plays.
Chapter 3. The Pursuit
THE PURSUITA TRAGICOMEDY OF THE IMPERIAL AND ROYAL1 GENERAL STAFF IN FIVE ACTS
Archduke Viktor Salvator, Inspector-General of the Troops2
Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the General Staff of the Austro-Hungarian Army3
Major General Anton Höfer, Conrad’s Deputy Chief4
Colonel Alfred Redl, General Staff Chief of the 8th Army Corps stationed in Prague5
Colonel Peter Umanitzky, Chief of the Intelligence Bureau of the General Staff6
Wenzel Worlitschek,7 Major-Auditor*
Stefan Hromadka, Lieutenant in the 7th Ulan (Cavalry) Regiment8
Franzi Mittringer, Hromadka’s fiancé9
Baroness Daubek10
Rigo, Leader of a gypsy band11
Strebinger and Steidl, Detectives of the Viennese Police Force12
The head porter of the Hotel Klomser
Franz, a bellhop at the Hotel Klomser
The events involving the above take place in Vienna on the evening of May 24, 1913.
* Rank and title of a lawyer serving as an officer in the army’s Judge-Advocates Corps.
So then, who’s going to provide for your wife
ACT I
IN COLONEL REDL’S HOTEL ROOM
Redl, Hromadka, Franzi enters later
REDL (he sits down on the sofa and throws his arm over Hromadka’s shoulder): Tell me that you’re not serious about this, I’m begging you, please tell me you’re not serious. For God’s sake, Stefan, you can’t be serious, can you? Don’t you realize everything that I’ve done for you ...
HROMADKA: Of course I realize it. And I’m certainly very grateful for everything ...
REDL: No, you really don’t understand what I’ve done for you. How far out on a limb I’ve gone for you, Stefan, dangerously far out, and now you want to leave me. Tell me that you don’t mean it, tell me that you don’t really want to leave me.
HROMADKA: I don’t want to leave you. I just want to get married.
REDL: Married? You call that not leaving me! With marriage it’s all over between you and me. You’re a young man, a good-looking lad too — everybody likes you, the whole world is there for you to grab. And now you want to give all that up, you want to put yourself in chains — and on top of it all, on account of a woman! On account of a woman! So then, who’s going to provide for your wife? What, you’ll hang around in bars, take business trips, stay in hotels, is that it? And all the time there are hundreds of wenches out there, far better than just one. And just what are you going to talk about with your wife? I’ll lend you a book, it’s called On The Congenital Feeble-Mindedness of Women.13
Something important has been pending for months
HROMADKA: But what if I really love her?
REDL: Hold on, you don’t love her. You only let yourself get grabbed by her, you just let her nurse you along, and you let it happen because ... well, you were available because I haven’t been around for you for so many months. It’s been far too long since I’ve been in Vienna. I’ve been afraid to come here because— because I thought that you’d been unfaithful to me. I didn’t come, even though there’s something very important waiting for me here—something big has been pending for months—and yet I still didn’t come ...
HROMADKA: Your appointment as Bureau Chief?
REDL: No, not that, not yet, anyway. Something else.
HROMADKA: What, something bad, some kind of unpleasantness?
REDL: Not unpleasant for you. But if you leave me, well then, there goes all my good luck, that’s unpleasant. Look, Stefan, take a trip with me—we’ll go to Switzerland, then Italy, and your thinking will change for the better. Blow off this whole idea of a woman!
HROMADKA: She loves me too.
REDL: And I don’t love you? Aren’t you the greatest good fortune in my life? Have I ever given you a reason to complain? It’s not that I’m selfish, all I want is for you to love me. But this woman, what kind of person is she? Does she have enough money to cover the marriage-bond?14 God only knows what kind of worthless slut she is anyway.
The faults of women
HROMADKA (resolutely): Excuse me, you can’t insult her like that. If you had just asked me first, then I would have spared her these insults. My fiancé is the daughter of an official, and her mother is a teacher at a technical school here in Vienna. If she stays in school, then we don’t need the money for the army’s marriage-bond — that’s an imperial ordinance. In any event I hope that she’ll give up her place there ...
REDL: ... because you think that I’ll come up with the money for the bond!
HROMADKA: Yes, I had hoped for that, though Franzi has forbidden me to accept such an arrangement. But now, since you’ve been running her down ...
REDL: Franzi knows about me?
HROMADKA: She knows about you, but only that we’re friends.
REDL: Does she know that I’m in Vienna?
HROMADKA: I mentioned to her that I was going to see you.
REDL: And what else does she know?
HROMADKA: Nothing.
REDL. Oh yes, “nothing”, as you put it! Just put something like that in a woman’s head, you fool! She’s definitely thinking about her part in all this—women have a nose for things that are none of their business. But in that they’re mistaken. Look, Stefan, let women be women, but stay true to our friendship. Men don’t ever
Promises
let other men down—stick with me, Stefan! Listen up, within a year I’ll be a General—I’m already the most talked-about General Staff man in the whole monarchy. I’m bound to become Chief of the Intelligence Bureau, maybe even Chief of the General Staff or Minister of War, and you, (here Redl sits closer to Hromadka and hugs him around the shoulder) you’ll move on up along with me, you’ll make extraordinary advances, and, if you want to, you’ll get into the War College.15 I’ll go to the Kladrub stable16 and buy you a gray stallion with gold-braided riding blankets, I’ll get you the best fur shako with beaver trim, the works, isn’t that what you want? (there’s a knock on the door,