We are still only on February 16, 1938. Several
hours before the ultimatum expired, Miklas, cloistered in his presidential
palace, also gave in. They pardoned Dollfuss’s killers, Seyss-Inquart was named
Minister of the Interior, and the SA paraded down the streets of Linz waving
huge banners. On paper, Austria was dead; it had come under German supervision.
But as we’ve seen, none of this has the density of nightmares or the
grandiosity of terror; only the vicious clamminess of schemes and deception. No
violent highs; no horrible, inhuman words: nothing more than blunt threats, and
crude, repetitious propaganda.
And yet, a few days later, Schuschnigg suddenly got his back up. This forced
agreement had stuck in his craw. In a final outburst, he declared in Parliament
that Austria would remain independent and would go thus far and no further. The
situation escalated. Members of the Nazi Party took to the streets and wreaked
havoc. The police didn’t lift a finger, since the Nazi Seyss-Inquart was
already Minister of Interior.
There’s nothing worse than resentful
masses, militias with their arm bands and faux-military insignias, young people
caught up in false dilemmas, squandering their passions in awful causes. At the
moment, the little Austrian dictator, played his final card. Still, he must of
known that, in any game, there comes a tipping point, after which it’s
hopeless. All you an do is watch your opponent lay down hand after winning hand
and take every trick: queens, kings, all the cards you couldn’t play in time
and that you desperately held back, trying not to forfeit them. For Schuschnigg
is nothing. He contributes nothing, is friend to nothing, is the hope of
nothing. He’s got nothing but flaws: aristocratic arrogance and reactionary
political views. A man who, eight years earlier, established a paramilitary
group of young Catholics No shaft of light will break out on the specter’s face
and encourage him to carry out his final duty. His mouth will utter no lapidary
words, no morsel of grace, no splutter of enlightenment. His face will not be
bathed in tears. Schuschnigg is just a gambler, a paltry schemer. He even seems
to have believed in the sincerity of his German neighbor, the integrity of the
accords, even though they’d been extorted from him. It’s a bit late in the day
for alarm! He calls upon the goddesses he scorned, demands ridiculous commitments
for an independence that is already dead – but he who dances on freedom’s grave
shouldn’t expect it to come rushing to his aid. He has not wanted to look truth
in the eye, and now here it is, up close, horrid, and inevitable. And it spits
the doleful secret of his compromises right in his face.
And so, in a drowning man’s last gasp, he tried to drum up support from the
trade unions and Social Democrats, even though they’d been banned for the past
four years. Realizing the danger, the socialists nonetheless agreed to back
him. Schuschnigg immediately ordered a plebiscite on his country’s independence.
Hitler was livid.
On Friday, March 11, at five in the morning, Schuschnigg’s valet woke him for
the longest day of his life. He lowered his feet from the bed. The parquet
floor was cold. He put on his slippers. They told him of massive movements of
German troops. The border at Salzburg was closed and railway service between
Germany and Austria had been suspended. There was a snake in the grass. The burden
of living was unbearable. He suddenly felt terribly, horribly old. But he’d
have plenty of time to think about that, as he would spend seven years in prison
under the Third Reich. He’d have seven years to ponder whether it had been the
right thing to do back then, organizing his little paramilitary Catholic
groups; seven years to decide what is truly Catholic and what isn’t, to
separate the light from the ash. Even
with privileges incarceration is an ordeal. And so, once liberated by the Allies,
he would finally live a pacific life.- as if it were possible for each of us to
have two lives, as if the game of death could wipe our thoughts clean, as if in
the darkness of those seven years he had called out to God, ‘Who am I?’ and God
had answered, ‘Somebody else.’ - the former chancellor would settle in the United
States and become a model American, a model Catholic, a model professor at a very
Catholic Saint Louis University. We can almost imagine him sitting around in his
dressing gown, chatting about the Gutenberg galaxy with Marshal McLuhan!
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