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In 1907, a socialist journalist aided by an embittered bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry exposed an aristocratic homosexual circle, led by ‘the Harpist’ (Eulenburg) and his lover ‘Sweetie’, General Kuno ‘Tutu’ von Moltke. As Princess Eulenburg understood, ‘They are striking at my husband, but their target is the kaiser.’ Willy ordered his friends to sue for libel. In October 1907, Moltke launched the first of seven court cases that unveiled a secret realm of saucy nicknames, fabulous costumes, secret power and sexual assignations with a cast of grandees, waiters and fishermen. Advised by the chief of his Military Cabinet, General Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, a harsh critic of Phili’s camarilla, the kaiser dismissed Moltke and dropped Phili, who had introduced him to ‘gentlemen of dishonourable reputation’. Phili collapsed and was then arrested. Another journalist alleged that Chancellor ‘the Eel’ von Bülow, though married, was a secret homosexual, nicknamed Concettina in their coterie, and had appointed his young lover to the Privy Council.

Willy had a nervous collapse. While recovering with friends in England, he gave a provocative interview which would almost destroy him. At home his anachronistic hatred for the elected politicians, unions and press, indeed for much of the modern world, combined with the louche Phili scandal, undermined his supremacy – just as tensions rose in the Balkans.

Germany’s ally, Austria, struggling to control its restless Slavs, was challenged by Serbia under its pro-Russian king Peter Karad¯ord¯evic´,^* guided by a nationalist public and a secret coterie of powerful irredentists who dreamed of a greater Serbia carved out of Habsburg territory. Willy’s friend Franz Ferdinand regarded Serbia as an existential threat, but now Tsar Nicholas started to back the Serbs.

If there was an answer to this conundrum it was to be found in Vienna, where after fifty years on the throne the antique emperor, Franz Josef, still went about his usual routine. He ‘still stands upright’, wrote his daughter Valerie, ‘a simple and just man’, after so many tragedies and defeats.

In September 1898, Empress Sisi was getting off a ferry in Geneva when a passer-by brushed against her. She fell but got up again and walked 100 yards chatting. ‘What did that man want?’ she asked a courtier. ‘Perhaps he wanted to take my watch?’ Then she suddenly gasped, ‘Oh no, what’s happened to me now?’ and collapsed. An anarchist had stabbed her in the heart with an iron file. ‘How can you kill a woman who’s never hurt anyone?’ asked Franz Josef. ‘You don’t know how much I loved this woman.’

As this bowed, grey, bewhiskered monarch grieved, Franz Ferdinand sought a solution while all around their booted, braided and epauletted Habsburg court – the dullest in Europe – seethed Vienna, the most exciting city, a laboratory for the ideas of race, revolution and art that made the twentieth century.

VIENNA: FRANZI, FREUD, KLIMT, HITLER AND OTHER ARTISTS

The feeling that the empire was ending gave the city a nervy, feverish, almost sexual charge, expressed by writers, doctors and artists, many of them Jewish.

A Galician Jewish doctor, Sigmund Freud, son of a wool merchant, was both typical and exceptional. Adored by his mother, highly educated and multilingual, Freud first studied the effects of cocaine, almost losing himself to coke addiction before he settled for cigar smoking. In 1886, now married to a rabbi’s granddaughter and father of a family, he set up a private practice specializing in nervous disorders, treating a patient suffering from mysterious ailments, ‘Anna O’ (actually a wealthy Jewish feminist named Bertha Pappenheim), by encouraging her to discuss sexually charged incidents from her childhood that eased her neurotic symptoms, a process he called ‘psychoanalysis’ which ultimately changed the consciousness of the twentieth century. His Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, argued that a subconscious coexisted with the conscious. He followed that up with the idea that character, governed by the libido and the death drive, was formed by psychosexual experiences in childhood. In particular, he identified the Oedipus complex of paternal hatred and maternal attraction, along with castration anxiety for boys, penis envy for girls.