Dynastic Conservatism and Poetic Violence
in Fin-de-Siècle Cracow: The Habsburg Matrix of
Polish Modernism

LARRY WOLFF

Ever since the publication in the American Historical Review in the summer of 1961, forty years ago, of Carl Schorske's pioneering article, "Politics and the Psyche in fin-de-siècle Vienna," there has been little doubt among historians that Viennese intellectual and artistic concerns were of fundamental significance for the cultural developments of the twentieth century in Europe. The public fascination with fin-de-siècle Vienna has even gone beyond the boundaries of academic scholarship, culminating in blockbuster museum exhibits such as "Vienna 1900" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1986 or, that same year, "Vienne: Naissance d'un Siècle" at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In a recent book of essays on Vienna and Budapest, published in 1998, the Hungarian historian Péter Hanák has noted "Vienna's extraordinary present-day popularity," observing that "Vienna's brilliance long obscured the virtues and merits of its neighbors" and making a case in the book for the parallel importance of Budapest. 1 Indeed, it appears remarkable that, over the course of a generation, the historiographical ascendancy of fin-de-siècle Vienna has not resulted in more purposeful efforts to place the urban culture of the capital in the context of a more broadly conceived fin-de-siècle Habsburg monarchy, whose multiple, multinational centers might include not only Vienna and Budapest but also Prague, Trieste, Zagreb, L'viv, and Cracow, among others. The case of Cracow provides a crucial piece of the Habsburg cultural puzzle, with artistic and intellectual developments that both converged and contrasted with those of the contemporary Viennese scene.	1
In Polish historiography and literary history, fin-de-siècle Cracow has been most often treated in the national context of Moda Polska, or Young Poland, linking Cracovian concerns with those in other specifically Polish centers, especially Warsaw within the Russian empire. 2 For instance, when in the midst of the Solidarity revolution, in June 1981, there took place in Cracow an academic conference on "Cracow at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century," the papers posed such national questions as "whether Cracow was the capital of Moda Polska," and "whether Cracow at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century was the Polish Rome." 3 Such questions are meaningful and important, looking to the common aspects of national culture in the partitioned lands of Poland but tending to obscure the Habsburg correspondences that also conditioned intellectual life in Cracow. The historical revaluation of fin-de-siècle Cracow should also consider the city in relation to contemporary Vienna and thus in the context of the fin-de-siècle Habsburg monarchy.	2
The designation Moda Polska, analogous in name to the literary circle of Jung-Wien in the Habsburg capital, suggests that fin-de-siècle Cracow, like Vienna, may be considered as a question of cultural generational conflict. Schorske has analyzed, almost psychoanalyzed, the Viennese complex, in which "the new culture-makers in the city of Freud thus repeatedly defined themselves in terms of a kind of collective oedipal revolt," rebelling "against the authority of the paternal culture that was their inheritance," against "the value system of classical liberalism-in-ascendancy." 4 The culture-makers in contemporary Cracow also formed, both chronologically and self-consciously, a generational cohort; they were swayed by the charismatic "Satanic" leadership of Stanisaw Przybyszewski, born in 1868, were attuned to the decadent and melancholy verses of Kazimierz Tetmajer, born in 1865, were amazed at the revolutionary dramatic conceptions of Stanisaw Wyspiaski, born in 1869, and were amused at the cabaret songs of the slightly younger Tadeusz eleski, nicknamed "Boy" and born in 1874. These writers themselves had a powerful conviction of their own generational achievement in fin-de-siècle Cracow, and later memorialized it with their own pens in Przybyszewski's Moi Wspóczeni (My Contemporaries) in 1930 and Boy's Znaszli ten kraj? (Do You Know the Land?) in 1931.	3
Yet the model of generational revolt against ascendant liberalism, which Schorske has proposed for the case of Vienna, should perhaps be revised in the case of Cracow to take into account the hegemonic conservatism of the city, where clerical and aristocratic values had prevailed during the second half of the nineteenth century. The intellectual revolt of the turn of the century in Cracow pitted itself not against the vulnerable paternal ideals of liberalism in retreat but rather against a conservative traditionalism that had not yet seriously encountered the social, economic, and ideological challenges of bourgeois liberalism. Boy, comparing it to Paris, conceived of fin-de-siècle Cracow as half a modern city, merely the "left bank" of the Vistula, with plenty of students and professors, disporting themselves in cafés and cabarets, but without the ballast of a "right bank" for modern commerce and capitalism. 5 The imbalance of bohemianism and business created the conditions for precocious cultural modernism without advanced economic modernity. Paris may have been, in Walter Benjamin's famous phrase, "the capital of the nineteenth century," its urban landscape provoking the modern poetic vision of Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, while Walt Whitman's New York, George Gissing's London, Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna, and Andrey Bely's St. Petersburg were likewise culturally compelling, whether by stupendous population, glittering consumption, gargantuan construction, or the monumental manifestations of far-flung imperial power. 6 Cracow, with 70,000 inhabitants in 1890 and 85,000 in 1900, was a modest city of increasing size, whose cultural rebels were well aware that artistic modernism, elsewhere, nourished itself on the unprecedented idiosyncracies of the true metropolis. 7	4
The modernist uprising of a younger generation against conservatism in Cracow, like the "revolt" against liberalism in Vienna, should not be interpreted as absolutely oppositional in nature, inasmuch as the generations were inevitably bound together in intimate relation. The oedipally rebellious sons deployed the paternal legacy and depended on the elder patronage of established institutions and an ambivalent public. The younger generation had no alternative but to seek the sympathy and support of the older generation, which, in conservative Cracow as in liberal Vienna, was already inclined to take an interest in literary and artistic developments. Schorske has argued that, in Vienna, art became for the bourgeoisie "an escape, a refuge from the unpleasant world of increasingly threatening political reality." 8 In Cracow, correspondingly, culture became in the nineteenth century the alternative or escape for a conservative Polish aristocracy that preferred to forgo the dangers of insurrectionary national politics; at the same time, culture could serve to disguise or defuse the political implications of a deeply impoverished peasant population in Galicia and intense national and religious tensions among Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians (or Ruthenians) in the province. Just as the preeminent organ of hegemonic liberal culture in Vienna was the daily Neue Freie Presse, so the prevailing voice of conservatism in Cracow was the newspaper Czas (Time). Boy remembered "the venerable daily Czas, the aristocratic, conservative, and clerical organ," with its pervasive influence on the public: "'Czas writes,' 'Czas says,' these were words that rang in my ears from my earliest childhood." In the 1890s, Czas continued to dominate a small field of daily rivals, such as the liberal Nowa Reforma (New Reform) and the nationalist, outspokenly anti-Semitic upstart Gos Narodu (Voice of the Nation). 9 With its populist impulse, Gos Narodu was particularly inclined to polemicize contemptuously against Czas.	5
According to Boy, who was writing songs at the turn of the century for the cabaret "Zielony Balonik" (The Green Balloon), the culture of fin-de-siècle Cracow flourished in the context of "a strange symbiosis between Czas and the Green Balloon, a discreet but very real symbiosis." 10 In Vienna, the Neue Freie Presse soon embraced Jung-Wien, applauding and even publishing the work of such writers as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler. In Cracow, the clerical, conservative Czas, though understandably apprehensive of Przybyszewski's self-proclaimed Satanism, published the poetry of Tetmajer and Wyspiaski and, finally, in 1901, after three days of hesitating silence, gave an enthusiastic review to the premiere of Wyspiaski's dramatic masterpiece, Wesele (The Wedding). The notion of "symbiosis," as formulated by Boy, suggests that Czas itself may provide an important perspective for evaluating fin-de-siècle Cracow, as the newspaper registered, reflected, revised, and reviewed the values of the younger generation within the city, as well as broader currents from elsewhere in the Habsburg monarchy and the rest of Europe. Retrospectively reading Czas, as Czas itself was once read by its Cracow public, and as the paper in turn interpretively "read" the city, the historian may seek to analyze the correspondences between the textual artifacts of urban journalism and the literary products of fin-de-siècle culture, at a time when city and culture alike were ambivalently located in nationally Polish and imperially Habsburg contexts. 11	6
The note of fin-de-siècle decadence was already sounded in 1894, in Tetmajer's poem "Koniec wieku XIX" (The End of the Nineteenth Century). The poet could not satisfy his spirit in prayers, in resignation, through faith in a future life, or even by indulgence in sensuous pleasures: "So what is there? What remains for us who know everything, for whom none of the old beliefs is enough? / What is your shield against the spear of evil, man of the end of the century?" 12 Such questions pointed toward the inebriated enthusiastic nihilism of Przybyszewski, who returned to Poland in 1898 after many years abroad, settled in Cracow, took up the editorship of the journal ycie (Life), and promptly revolutionized the cultural climate of the city. From the moment of his arrival, the younger generation found its rallying point in his outrageous and charismatic leadership. The year 1898 was also a watershed for Cracow conservatism. It was a year in which Czas anticipated the decorous and solemn celebration of two significant semi-centennials, the fiftieth anniversary jubilee of the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph and also the same anniversary of the newspaper's own journalistic existence, established in 1848. Yet both of those important conservative occasions were suddenly undercut and overshadowed by an unanticipated Habsburg disaster, the anarchist assassination of Empress Elisabeth in September 1898. This immediately became the occasion for Czas to reformulate and consolidate the ideological stance of conservatism, with almost apocalyptic fervor, looking toward the century's end. The assassination called forth an affirmation of dynastic loyalism in Cracow and gave sensational substance to a conservative vision of cosmic struggle against the ideological monsters of Satanism, revolution, and anarchy. At the same time, the perspective of conservatism was already inflected with elements of fin-de-siècle decadence, so that even a conservative organ like Czas could not fail to appreciate the tremendous dramatic impact of anarchist violence, to recognize the poetic aspects of the life and death of the empress. Transfixed by the anarchist act of violence, the city was distracted from other, more mundane, acts of violence that expressed the social, economic, national, and religious tensions of contemporary Galicia. The assassination of the empress and the character of its reception in the city demonstrated that an imperial Habsburg sensation could become an occasion for transformative municipal self-fashioning and, at the same time, revealed the artistic reverberations of violence within the culture of fin-de-siècle Cracow.	7
In a special edition of Czas on September 11, 1898, the editor, Micha Chyliski, reported to his readers the news, received from Vienna by telephone, of the assassination of Elisabeth (Elbieta in Polish) on September 10 by the shores of Lake Geneva. "The horrifying news about the tragic death of the empress," he noted, "calls forth from all circles of society the most painful impressions and deepest sympathy for the monarch hurt by such a heavy blow." Thus, from the very first announcement of the news in Cracow, the story of the assassination was invested with the dual significance of rallying sympathy and support to the Habsburg dynasty and forging a sort of sentimental solidarity among different "circles of society." On September 13, Czas elaborated on these themes:	8
The crime commited in Geneva shocks the whole world with aversion and repugnance, calls forth curses in the entire monarchy, and intensifies the feeling of filial loyalty and attachment, when for the lonely monarch the peoples under the Habsburg scepter remain his nearest family. Such feelings have taken hold deeply in every level of the population in our society and country. Some years ago there flashed for us for a moment the hope of greeting the enchanting empress, who everywhere spread grace and charm. A concurrence of contraries deprived us of the possibility of paying homage to her in our land, and this regret increases the mourning of our country. 13
The assassination immediately became an occasion for affirming the solidarity of "every level of the population in our society and country" and, at the same time, "the peoples under the Habsburg scepter." The references to "our country" could hardly have meant Poland, which did not exist in 1898, and whose partitioned lands were divided among three different dynasties, but rather referred to Galicia, the provincial entity of Habsburg Poland. Galicia was created at the time of the first partition of Poland in 1772, when Empress Maria Theresa needed a name to designate the Polish territory she had reluctantly acquired for the sake of preserving the balance of power. Cracow was first included in the province after the third partition of 1795, then adhered to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw under Napoleonic auspices, and, after the Congress of Vienna, it emerged as a nominally independent city state. The city was definitively reincorporated into Habsburg Galicia after 1846, a traumatic year in the history of the province that still cast a shadow at the end of the nineteenth century. In that year, a Polish national insurrection was launched in the free city of Cracow, with an appeal in the name of independence to the province of Galicia. Some Habsburg officials sponsored a counter-appeal to the peasantry of the province, urging loyalty to the emperor and resistance to the insurrectionary Polish szlachta, the gentry; the unexpectedly ferocious response was a peasant uprising against the gentry, culminating in the massacre of more than a thousand people in the region around the town of Tarnów. The lesson that the gentry learned was that the Polish peasants were not susceptible to the insurrectionary cause of Polish nationalism and actually preferred to cast their lot with the Habsburg dynasty; many nobles in Galicia came to the conclusion that they should do likewise. After 1866, when the Habsburgs were defeated by Otto von Bismarck at Königgrätz, and were vulnerable to national pressure from within the monarchy, the nobles of Galicia strategically affirmed their attachment to the Habsburgs, and the provincial assembly in L'viv adopted a declaration of eloquent loyalty to Franz Joseph: "Przy Tobie, Najjaniejszy Panie, stoimy i sta chcemy," "We stand with you, Your Majesty, and wish to stand with you." Galicia emerged from the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 with autonomous privileges of its own, self-government by the diet or Sejm at L'viv, and important concessions to the Polish language in administration and education. 14
L'viv was the provincial capital, but Cracow, with Jagiellonian University, became the intellectual and ideological center of triumphant conservatism in Galicia, articulated for the public in the pages of Czas. The gentry of Poland, at the time of the partitions, were among the most relatively numerous nobilities in Europe, counting perhaps 8 percent of the population; in little nineteenth-century Cracow, they played an unusually influential urban role, enhanced by the Habsburg penchant for curial election structures on municipal, provincial, and imperial levels. The importance of the gentry in Cracow was increasingly supplemented by that of the university professors, who could often be characterized by noble descent or, more vaguely, by noble values. There was a well-known anecdote about a beggar who solicited a coin from a gentleman, addressing him as "count" (panie hrabio); when he denied being a count, the beggar immediately altered the salutation to "professor" (panie profesorze). 15 The powerfully influential figure of Count Stanisaw Tarnowski combined both qualities as professor of literature at the university, president of the Cracow Academy, and one of the creators of Cracow's conservative "Staczyk" ideology, named for a sixteenth-century court jester.	9
Conservatism achieved political power in Cracow after 1867, just when liberalism arrived at its moment of supremacy in Vienna; by the final decade of the century, those hegemonies were threatened by the same social and ideological rumblings of modern mass politics. Precisely because of Galicia's autonomy and relatively relaxed Habsburg circumstances, Polish political movements found more opportunities for development than in Russian or Prussian Poland; in 1892, a social democratic party was established in Galicia, in 1893 a peasant party. In 1893, the Cracow municipal council chose the bookseller Józef Friedlein as its president over Count Antoni Wodzicki; Friedlein introduced electric streetcars to the city. In 1893, Gos Narodu first appeared in Cracow, encouraging anti-Semitism and even commercial boycott against the Jews who made up 30 percent of the city's population, and in 1895 Roman Dmowski began to publish in Galicia the journal Przegld Wszechpolski (All-Polish Observer), mobilizing middle-class integral nationalist sentiment. 16 In 1894, the appointment of Mykhailo Hrushevsky as a history professor in L'viv consolidated the increasing importance of Ukrainian national identity in eastern Galicia. In 1897, the extended Habsburg franchise brought Ignacy Daszyski, the Galician socialist leader, into the Viennese Reichsrat, shattering the conservative consensus of the "Polish Club," while the elections in eastern Galicia witnessed new levels of tension between Poles and Ukrainians. Whereas in 1846 it was the dynastically loyal peasants who murdered the nationally discontented nobles, in 1898, when Elisabeth was assassinated, it was the loyal conservative nobles who sought to rally the dynastic sentiments of the increasingly discontented lower levels of society. In Czas, the declaration of "filial loyalty and attachment" to Franz Joseph in 1898 echoed the famous formula of 1866—"we stand with you"—putting a newly urgent emphasis on the inclusiveness of the first-person plural.	10
As the newspaper could not conceal, Elisabeth had never managed to make a visit to Cracow, and "the hope of greeting the charming empress," of "paying homage to her in our land," was never to be fulfilled. Elisabeth had not been without passionate attachments to particular peoples of the monarchy, most notably the Hungarians, but the ardor for her, articulated in Cracow after the assassination, was apparently platonic in character, a matter of purely ideological devotion, unassisted by any memories of personal contact in the imperial flesh. Now, in the aftermath of martyrdom, the empress was everywhere in Cracow: "On account of the death of Her Majesty our city has gone into mourning clothes. From the churches, from every municipal and official building, as well as from public institutions there wave the flags of mourning." Shops and businesses were closed in her honor, and theater performances were canceled. Mourning for the empress was supposed to include the entire city, affecting all its public activities, just as it was meant to embrace every social stratum. While schools organized special services to promote mourning among the young, there were placards around the city announcing a Mass to be sponsored by Catholic workers' societies. The bishop of Cracow, Jan Puzyna, issued a statement deploring the assassination as "the sad fruit of estrangement from God and the Church, which unfortunately we see in our times," and offering the emperor that sympathy which "with deep suffering strikes the hearts of all his subjects." Not only the head of the urban ecclesiastical hierarchy but also the leaders of its intellectual institutions became spokesmen for municipal condolences, with Wadysaw Knapiski, the rector of Jagiellonian University, and Tarnowski, the president of the Cracow Academy, sending telegrams of sympathy for the emperor to Vienna and promptly receiving in return official telegrams of gracious acknowledgment. "His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty thanks you kindly for the expressions of sympathy," read the telegram to Tarnowski, and the whole city read it in the newspaper along with him. 17 Czas sought to represent in its pages the universality of municipal mourning, which embraced the clergy, the professors, the students, and the workers. Gos Narodu offered its readers a somewhat more divisive view of their city, describing public announcements posted Sunday morning after the assassination on Saturday, with groups of "poorer people" already gathered to read the news at six, "going to church or the morning markets," while intellectuals, officers, and middle-class people were not seen reading the posters until seven. Nevertheless, Gos Narodu conceded that "the whole city was in a true fever." 18	11
Figure 1 : This picture of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth dates from shortly before the "catastrophe of Geneva," that is, the assassination of Elisabeth in September 1898. From A. de Burgh, Elisabeth: Kaiserin von Oesterreich und Königin von Ungarn (Vienna, 1901). Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.
Boy described fin-de-siècle Cracow as a city obsessed with "ceremonies," including funerals, for "all solemnities played a disproportionately large role in the life of Cracow"; at Easter, "in all the salons people remarked on how beautiful Bishop Dunajewski appeared with the miter on his silver hair," appraising him as if he were an actor. 19 On the morning of Friday, September 16, 1898, Bishop Puzyna, the successor to the silver-haired Albin Dunajewski, presided over a memorial service for the murdered empress, who was represented by an empty coffin on a catafalque in Cracow's great Church of the Virgin Mary, the Koció Mariacki. All the city's clergy, officials, and military officers were present, while "the rest of the church was filled with so much of the public that many people, not being able to get in, remained before the church doors." For the duration of the service, the city's gas lanterns were burning, and the lampposts themselves were hung with black mourning crepe, by order of Friedlein, the president of the municipal council. For those same hours, the council also ordered the closing of shops and businesses, those of Jews as well as Christians. The service, concluding with the singing of the "Salve Regina," was followed by an assembly at the Spiski palace to send off the Cracow delegation, which was now about to set out to attend the empress's true funeral the next day in Vienna. Czas meticulously enumerated all the institutions and organizations that were represented there, from the academy and the university to the Jewish Council and the Uniate Church of the Ukrainians, all sending their sympathy to Vienna with the delegation. "All levels [wszystkie warstwy] and professions of our society were represented," the newspaper proudly proclaimed, returning to the theme of municipal solidarity, "namely officials, intelligentsia, the Cracow middle class, workers, and village people." 20 The liberal Nowa Reforma placed further emphasis on the participation of Cracow's Jews in the public mourning, noting that there would be special services "for the peace of the soul of the empress" in the synagogues on Saturday. 21 Nowa Reforma, at this time, was publishing serially Wadysaw Reymont's naturalist novel Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land) about the troubled coexistence of Poles, Germans, and Jews in the industrial city of ód in Russian Poland. Liberalism, like conservatism, could find comfort in municipal unity, whether conceived as traditional harmony or modern ecumenicism. Gos Narodu said nothing about mourning among the Jews of Cracow.	12
The year 1898 was the centennial of the birth of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's most celebrated Romantic poet, and Cracow's love of the ceremonial found some satisfaction in the formalities that surrounded the unveiling of the statue of Mickiewicz in the Rynek, the central market square. In 1890, there had been even more elaborate ceremonies of a funereal nature when Mickiewicz, who died in Constantinople in 1855 and was buried in France, was finally reinterred in Wawel Cathedral in Cracow. In June 1900, as the century turned, Wyspiaski published his rhapsody, "Kazimierz Wielki," on the burial of Casimir the Great, which first took place in Cracow when the king died in 1370 and then was ritually reenacted five hundred years later in 1869. In his funeral dirge for Casimir, Wyspiaski evoked the same spirit of municipal harmony in Cracow that had been emphasized two years before in the mourning over Elisabeth.	13
Figure 2 : The Sukiennice, the Renaissance Cloth Hall, stands at the center of Cracow's main square, the Rynek. Illustration by Wodzimierz Tetmajer from Limanowski's Galicya, 1892. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library.
And they go gloomy from all of the churches with tokens and wreaths, which flowering, fragrant, were counted in thousands. And peasants in long coats and lords who are dressed in scarlet clothing and cloaks. 22	14
Czas had described just such an occasion of mournful solidarity in Cracow in September 1898, and in June 1900 the newspaper published Wyspiaski's funereal rhapsody.
Przybyszewski's Totenmesse, his morbidly decadent Mass for the dead, was originally published in German in Berlin in 1893, but a part of it appeared in Polish, as Msza aobna, in Cracow in 1900; Czas did not publish it but rather a journal called Modo (Youth). It was Czas, however, that in 1897 had published in installments Tetmajer's novel, Anio mierci (The Angel of Death), and the newspaper thus "violently rejuvenated itself," according to Boy. 23 In 1899, Tetmajer's fin-de-siècle volume Melancholia included a rhapsodic apostrophe to death, "Do mierci": "O death! white and silent death: we are alone together, the two of us, like a pair of lovers—why not bring your mouth close to my mouth?" 24 The fascination with death, which was also artistically important in fin-de-siècle Vienna, whether in Hofmannsthal's poetry or Gustav Klimt's painting, made imperial murder and municipal mourning into an occasion for the convergence of cultural concerns between literary generations.	15
Wyspiaski, at the same time that he composed his rhapsody, designed a stained-glass window for Wawel Cathedral, showing Casimir as a skeletal cadaver wearing the regalia of royalty. In Wyspiaski's funeral dirge, the mourners responded to the ringing of church bells:	16
And the bells ring to them from all of the churches and sounded, and fluttered with sashes in front, banners, pennants funereal. 25
On Saturday, September 17, 1898, at four o'clock, just as the funeral of Elisabeth was beginning in Vienna, a signal from Wawel Cathedral set all the church bells of Cracow ringing. Again, the gas lanterns were lit and were draped with sashes of black crepe. Czas, receiving reports by telephone from Vienna, could inform the public of Cracow about the arrival of the train from Geneva with the corpse of the empress and about the mourning crowds and processions in the Habsburg capital. Cracow had already completed its own funeral service with an empty coffin, but Czas made the Viennese rites into the occasion for further reflection on the significance of the assassination:
All the peoples were preparing for the jubilee gathering of homage to the monarch; the solemn ceremony was supposed to crown fifty years of government, conducted in the name of justice. All these feelings, which grew and strengthened through a series of long years, were supposed to explode in one single exaltation, to thunder at the throne in one precious and harmonious outcry . . . Instead of triumphal fanfares the mourning bells have sounded . . . A tragic fate compels these peoples to put on black crepe, and to replace the jubilee manifestation with the power of sympathy in sadness. 26
Whereas the Cracow rites had been represented as a demonstration of municipal solidarity among different levels of society, the Vienna funeral was interpreted in terms of "harmonious" multinational solidarity among the peoples of the Habsburg monarchy.
In Vienna, the delegates laid on the imperial coffin a flowery wreath with a sash, inscribed "from the city council of Cracow to our ever lamented empress and queen." Czas sought a "psychological truth" in the experience of common suffering, the emotional reinforcement of a "pact of attachment" between Franz Joseph and his subjects: "Millions of these hearts beat in time with the heart of the aching monarch. May this sympathy become balsam . . . The treasury of dynastic feelings, gathered through fifty years of fatherly rule, are multiplied more by the days of mourning than could be done by the most brilliant intoxication of jubilee celebrations. Often the bonds formed by tears are stronger than those joined by joy." 27 Aching hearts, flowing tears, and healing balsam became the emotional imagery of an "intoxication" of mourning, now pronounced truly preferable to mere rejoicing. While the crisis of liberalism in Vienna was preparing for the intellectual revolution of psychoanalysis, nervous conservatism in Cracow responded to "the most hidden secrets of the heart" and invoked the principle of "psychological truth" in order to discover a deeper sentimental affirmation of dynastic loyalty and imperial solidarity. Fin-de-siècle Cracow offered a richly enhanced sentimental vocabulary to a conservative vision of the social contract, or "pact of attachment," based on millions of hearts all beating in time, while mourning bells "ring to them/from all of the churches," ringing in contrapuntal rhythm.	17
Precisely a month after the assassination, in October, the balsam of suffering and sympathy was still at work in Cracow, with a commemorative Mass for the soul of the empress at the Church of the Bernardines before a "numerous public." Later in October, when students and professors began the academic year at Jagiellonian University, there was a special service for Elisabeth at the Church of St. Anne, conducted by theology professor and church historian Wadysaw Chotkowski. At the same time, Gos Narodu published a piece of amateur poetry, "At the Coffin of the Empress Elisabeth"; the poem began at the Viennese funeral ("Mourning covers the walls of Vienna . . .") and concluded by comparing her coffin to the metaphorical tomb of partitioned Poland. While Czas looked for imperial solidarity in Polish mourning, the poem in Gos Narodu suggested a more explicitly national dimension: "So today for that heart which has been bloodied, / Let a Polish tear fall among so many tears of sympathy." 28 A copy of the poem was sent to Vienna; eventually, the emperor himself, through the Cracow police department, sent thanks to the author, a high school teacher, "for this manifestation of loyalty," and Franz Joseph requested translated copies for Elisabeth's daughters, the archduchesses Gisela and Marie Valerie. 29	18
In contrast, however, to this poetic loyalty, in late October there took place in Cracow behind closed doors the trial of a postman named Gimpel Goldberg. He was charged with lèse majesté, suspended from his job, convicted for "praising a criminal act after the death of Her Majesty," and condemned to fourteen days' imprisonment. The provocation for this official action was his alleged remark that the assassin "deserved a medal." 30 The judicial record identified the postman as a native of Cracow, the father of ten children, and a sufferer from chronic headaches. He had also been heard to remark that postal employees deserved higher salaries. As late as the following February, the police in Cracow and L'viv were still investigating the possibility that Goldberg, through the postal service, had made other subversive contacts in Galicia. 31 The secrecy of his October trial suppressed the details of this one dissonant note in the harmony of Cracow's municipal solidarity, the city's unified exaltation of mourning inspired by the assassination of the empress. One presumably Jewish postman had failed to conform to the seemingly mandatory mourning, and he was promptly suspended, charged, condemned, and imprisoned. This single reported instance of dissidence, provoking in response such purposeful suppression, underlined the urgency of the conservative vision of universal sympathy and solidarity.	19
When Bishop Puzyna addressed the Cracow delegates to the Viennese funeral, before the gathered representatives of every level of society, he declared that it was "not only the task of chaplains, but of everyone, to work for the healing of the evil which has sunk such deep roots, and found its expression in anarchy." 32 The assassin, Luigi Luccheni, was, in fact, an Italian anarchist, but the bishop, in the spirit of Cracow conservatism, perorated against anarchy as a general manifestation of universal evil rather than a specific political perspective and workers' movement in nineteenth-century Europe. From the first reports of the assassination, Czas interpreted it in terms of a cosmic struggle between Satanic and Christian principles, with nothing less than civilization itself at stake. The bereaved emperor was quoted as wondering "who could make such an assault on her, she who only did good and no evil to anyone?" Czas rhetorically responded: "In the mysteries of human psychology there is no reply to this question. One must seek for it in the pervasive, demonic currents in modern humanity." The advent of demonic force into modern history was dated to the French Revolution:	20
Figure 3 : One of the last pictures of Empress Elisabeth before her assassination. From A. de Burgh, Elisabeth, 1901. Courtesy of the Harvard College Library. The Empress Elbieta fell by the dagger of an assassin, like Marie Antoinette one hundred years before on the guillotine. The same furious and infernal tendencies that took possession of the Convention here wielded the murderer's instrument of death . . . In the array of regicides from antiquity to our own times, these two female forms are today surrounded by a common halo as victims of an idea, by which revolutionary madness endeavors to exterminate. 33
Appreciating the assassination of the empress as a crime of ideology, Czas framed its response in the fin-de-siècle language of religiously inflected conservatism, invoking the opposition between hell and the halo. The reference to Marie Antoinette seemed to allude to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which already in 1790 cherished the French queen as the victim of revolutionary madness. In 1898, Cracow conservatism recognized the devil behind the ideological dagger.
The stabbing of Empress Elisabeth demonstrated that revolutionary evil had developed even more insidiously during the century since the execution of Marie Antoinette:	21
Contemporary anarchism outdoes French terrorism; equally monstrous, but much more vile, it lurks treacherously, and from concealment hurls the missile of death among crowds of people . . . What is the source, where the limits, of these insanities? How to heal the soul of humanity from similar infections, how to secure society and every higher authority from extinction? By turning one's mind where today the heavily afflicted monarch turns his mind—toward heaven! The earth is a battlefield between infernal and celestial powers—peoples and thrones stand between Satanic inspirations and the grace of God. In order to put out these underground fires in human souls, it is necessary to draw rays from on high into the social-civilizational structure, to return the current of civilization to the Christian creche. 34
In this Manichaean conception of a human universe polarized between Satanic and celestial forces, Czas could offer only the conventional conservative remedy of Christian principles. The framing of the problem, however, was more notably modern, moving from the "mysteries of human psychology" to the "underground fires in human souls," in search of the concealed ideological culprit that put society and civilization at risk of extinction.
Andrzej Walicki has analyzed the importance of Hegelian dialectical philosophy for Polish Romantic Messianism, especially in the case of August Cieszkowski, the author of Ojcze Nasz (Our Father), of which the final volumes only appeared posthumously in 1899 and 1903. Wiktor Weintraub, as well as Walicki, has considered the importance of prophecy and catastrophism in Polish Romanticism, especially in the Paris lectures of Mickiewicz. Finally, Jerzy Jedlicki has indicated the significance of apocalyptic catastrophism, concerning economy and society, for the evolution of Polish conservatism in the nineteenth century. 35 Czas's emphases on cosmic dualism and catastrophic prophecy were consistent with some of the intellectual principles of Polish Romanticism, removed from its revolutionary political impulses and reconceived as Christian conservatism.	22
Having identified "anarchism" as the fundamental ideological infection hidden within the human soul, Czas considered the political menace of the anarchist movement and seized on the assassination as an occasion for international mobilization. "Just as in our monarchy, so in the entire civilized world," the newspaper recorded, "one shriek of horror and condemnation has gone up on account of the monstrous crime in Geneva." A published list of anarchist attacks in the 1890s mentioned the attempts on the life of the Italian king Umberto in 1893 and 1897 (before the successful assault of 1900) and the assassination of the French president Sadi Carnot in 1894; the published condolences to Franz Joseph from international leaders in 1898 included telegrams from Pope Leo XIII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria, and President William McKinley (himself later assassinated by a Polish-American anarchist in Buffalo in 1901). Czas viewed anarchism as both more and less than a purely political danger to crowned heads and elected leaders:	23
It is not possible to consider the anarchists as a political party and to evaluate their activity by the standards applied to political offenders. They are only either common criminals who cover their transgressions with the pretenses of some theory, or they are madmen seized by the mania for murder. In both cases they ought to be excluded from general laws, for humanity must defend itself equally from criminals and from the insane if it wants to exist and develop further. 36
Czas thus proposed a sociological and psychological conception of anarchism, alternatively framed as a matter of crime or insanity. The very existence of humanity—of "the entire civilized world"—was at stake, and Czas emphasized the seriousness of the menace by returning to the medical metaphor of infection.
Completely incomprehensible therefore is the conduct of those states that tolerate not only individual anarchists but even their unions and associations. No government anywhere suffers the official existence of clubs of thieves or brigands, and yet anarchist associations have for their purpose the destruction of property and life. Anarchism is certainly a grievous social disease, and truly for that reason it should be destroyed by all means; if however international understanding suffices to check plague, cholera, smallpox, and other harmful diseases, why should it not suffice to wipe out the pestilence of anarchism. 37
From the conservative perspective of cosmic dualism, the anarchist menace appeared as a Satanic principle transmitted along the social vectors of catastrophic infection.
The balance between didactic journalism and apocalyptic prophecy became increasingly unstable as Czas, a week after the funeral, published an informative historical account called "The Origin and Development of Anarchism," while, at the same time, on the front page, meditating about the imminent end of the nineteenth century:	24
The nearer the end of the century, the more threatening the clouds that veil the future. In whatever direction we look, everywhere is unrest and discord . . . The force of racial, social, even confessional hatred is increasing in the world. It is as if, following the angel of faith, the good spirits have flown from the earth—the angel of hope and the angel of love, the spirit of freedom, the spirit of law, and the spirit of progress. Instead monsters and reptiles are crawling out from every side. 38
Citing anarchism in general and the murder of the empress in particular, Czas thus explicitly linked the assassination to the fin-de-siècle spiritual crisis, as conceived from the perspective of Cracow conservatism. In the apocalyptic encounter between angels and spirits, on the one hand, and monsters and reptiles, on the other, the assassination of Elisabeth was a historical manifestation of Manichaean conflict, an indication of that which lay concealed within the hearts of men and hidden behind the clouds that veiled the future of humanity. In 1894, Tetmajer had asked, "What is your shield against the spear of evil, man of the end of the century?" In 1898, after the murder of the empress, Czas recognized the dagger of the anarchist assassin as the instrument of a monstrous evil hovering over the century's end. Tetmajer's man of the end of the century "hung his head silently" at the end of the poem, but Cracow conservatism did not hesitate to identify the only operative shield as "the finger of God and the hand of Providence." Czas declared that "our century is not thoroughly perverted," and, in spite of "moments of eclipse, of decline, of discord, of danger," there was nevertheless reason to believe in the ultimate triumph of redemptive Christianity. Thus the rival generations of fin-de-siècle Cracow, from the perspectives of decadent poetry and of conservative piety, acknowledged the same spiritual crisis.
Gos Narodu, by contrast, was more specific in identifying the lurking menace behind the violence of anarchism and in naming the monsters who stalked the turn of the century. Within days of the assassination in September, that newspaper looked into the "infernal band" of Italian anarchists and discerned in all their evil work the "red thread" of "Jewish activity and Masonic work." In February 1899, Gos Narodu began a series of articles entitled "At the Turn of the Century," with a vision of redemption "in the whole world and especially in Galicia" through the struggle for "liberation from moral and material oppression by the Jews." 39 Schorske has demonstrated the importance of anti-Semitic mass politics in Vienna, which was demagogically challenging the earlier prevalence of muncipal liberalism, as in the Christian Socialism of Karl Lueger, who became mayor of Vienna in 1897. Gos Narodu in Cracow attempted to articulate just such a challenge to municipal conservatism, reporting on Lueger himself in September 1898 when the mayor made his own Viennese statement on the assassination of the empress. 40 Lueger was once famously supposed to have summed up his tactical anti-Semitism with the comment, "Wer Jude ist bestimme ich," "I decide who is a Jew." In this same arbitrary spirit, Gos Narodu did not hesitate to attribute even the assassination of the empress to the machinations of the Jews, editorializing in a spirit of demagogic brazenness that trampled on the elaborately articulated conservative principles of Czas.	25
In November 1898, when Czas celebrated its own jubilee, after fifty years of publishing, the last half of the nineteenth century was still summed up in a spirit of apocalyptic concern, "the always denser darkness of intensifying hatreds and endeavors of destruction." Czas reaffirmed its faith in conservative principles and claimed that Polish society, at least, had proven itself largely immune to the dark endeavor of anarchism during the last fifty years. In 1899, however, the newspaper reviewed the work of the historian Bronisaw oziski, reconsidered the massacre of the nobles in Galicia in 1846, and recognized that tragedy under the name of anarchy. 41 Indeed, the principle of anarchy, once satisfactorily defined as a Satanic force that manifested itself in criminality or insanity, offered a convenient alternative to specifying the dynamics of class conflict. In retrospect, the revulsion against murderous anarchism in 1846 could be celebrated as the founding force of nineteenth-century Cracow conservatism. In 1900, as the century turned, Czas reviewed the work of the Polish philosophy professor Henryk Struve and evaluated the concept of "anarchism of the spirit" (anarchizm ducha). Struve had traced the history of philosophical anarchism from Baudelaire through Nietzsche and, finally, to the epicenter of fin-de-siècle literary anarchism, Cracow itself, where Moda Polska was in the intellectual thrall of the notoriously Satanic Stanisaw Przybyszewski. 42	26
Struve remarked on Przybyszewski's "naked erotomania" as evidence of his anarchism, but Czas hesitated to accept the verdict, noting Struve's "too imprecise characterization of the manifestations of contemporary art, which must be misunderstood and warped if it is to be forcibly drawn into the pattern of 'anarchism of the spirit.'" 43 Czas was unwilling to dismiss modernist literature, including Przybyszewski, as a mere manifestation of anarchism. Gos Narodu, in fact, even censured Czas for being too sympathetic to Moda Polska and labeled the literary movement as a pestilential "bacteria culture." In October 1898, a month after the assassination, Gos Narodu found Moda Polska to be fully infected with the French spirit of "Vive l'anarchie." Although Tetmajer was sincerely admired by Gos Narodu, and even Przybyszewski grudgingly regarded as "at least a person of unusual and original talent," the whole movement had to be condemned for its "socialist-Jewish retinue." 44 The outrage of others underlined the more sympathetic engagement of Czas with its relatively favorable view of Moda Polska.	27
Nevertheless, Czas itself had made the explicit equation between Satanism and anarchism in September 1898, and Przybyszewski, whose literary reputation included both of those dubiously distinctive labels, was inevitably controversial for the conservative point of view. Przybyszewski returned to Poland in September 1898, after years of literary celebrity in Germany and Scandinavia; now he settled in Cracow to take up the editorship of ycie and preside over the modernism of Moda Polska. His literary Satanism had been acknowledged as recently as the previous year, in 1897, when he published in Germany the essay Die Synagoge des Satan and the novel Satans Kinder, both written in German; Polish versions were published as soon as Przybyszewski returned to Poland in 1899, with the essay appearing in Cracow in ycie and the novel in L'viv. The Synagogue of Satan offered a somewhat fanciful historical account of Satanism since ancient times, with an enthusiastic salute to Satan's original role as the "god of instinct and fleshly pleasure." In Totenmesse (1893), Przybyszewski had demonstrated his appreciation of the sexual principle, anticipating the psychoanalytic revolution with the scandalously unbiblical pronouncement, "In the beginning there was sex." Boy, remembering Przybyszewski's Cracow disciples with their bohemian morals and alcoholic excesses, celebrated them as "Satan's children" with the master himself as the "good-hearted" Satan. 45
The novel Satan's Children, however, was not in the least good-hearted. Its central Satanic figure was an anarchist, who went by the Byronic name of Gordon, and masterminded a gratuitous act of anarchistic arson. Gordon affirms that "we are all the children of Satan, all of us who are driven by despair," and that "life is the kingdom of Satan: hell." Asked, "Why do you wish to destroy?" Gordon replies, "Because I hate." 46 He has no qualms about committing any crime, including murder. Thus Przybyszewski, in 1897, had already made precisely the same equation between anarchism and Satanism that Czas articulated in response to the assassination of the empress in 1898. Czas, like Przybyszewski, saw the earth as "a battlefield between infernal and celestial powers," life as a contest "between Satanic inspirations and the grace of God," even though Przybyszewski was capable of artistic sympathy with some aspects of Satanism. Czas also discerned the "underground fires in human souls," but Przybyszewski recognized that they burned with the psychological intensity of human instincts. Cracow conservatism and fin-de-siècle decadence were closely related in their terms of analysis, addressing the Satanic character of anarchism.	28
In July 1899, Czas published a review essay on works by Przybyszewski that had recently appeared in Polish, including Satan's Children. The reviewer was the Messianic philosopher Wincenty Lutosawski, who did not particularly admire Przybyszewski's style—"the lack of any artistic elaboration"—or his anarchist characters: "The people whom he presents to us as the children of Satan are, in truth, poor sick victims of the more serious forms of neurosis, leading to hysteria." Lutosawski further noted the recurrence of the "favorite theme of the author, the violent force of sexual lust," but complained of "monotony" and implausibility. He allowed himself to wonder whether Przybyszewski, in spite of his literary success in "depraved Berlin," would ever manage "to dazzle virtuous Cracow." 47 Przybyszewski lived in Berlin between 1889 and 1894, and he continued to publish there in German after moving on to Norway and then Cracow; Lutosawski's moral comparison between Berlin and Cracow, a true metropolis and a small city, suggested the difficulty of cultivating urban modernism without modern urbanism.	29
"All this Satanism exists nowhere and never existed, except in the dreams induced by drunkenness," affirmed Lutosawski. 48 Yet, in spite of such sensible skepticism, Czas itself was more or less in agreement with Przybyszewski in accepting the existence of Satanism and even its correspondence to anarchism. The morbid ravings, the infectious somnolence, the neurotic intoxications of fin-de-siècle decadence also found some echo in the principles of Cracow conservatism. Although Lutosawski might insist that such Satanism never existed, when Czas reviewed the concept of "anarchism of the spirit" in 1900, with attention to Przybyszewski, the newspaper also published in an adjoining column a report from Switzerland on assassin Luigi Luccheni in prison. A professor of psychiatry in Switzerland had just published an article declaring Luccheni to be mentally ill: "The gloomy anger of Luccheni and his morbid madness are the symptoms of insanity." 49 In Cracow, Luccheni had become a symptomatic point of reference in the crisis of conservatism at the turn of the century.	30
Luccheni murdered the empress on the afternoon of September 10, 1898, and, in the early age of telephone communication, the news was rapidly disseminated, reaching Cracow by telephone from Vienna around six in the evening. Details of the tragedy arrived by telegraph an hour later. That evening, at the Teatr Miejski, the municipal theater, the company was performing a comedy by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou, and, in the middle of the second act, the play was interrupted by an announcement from the stage, to the full house, that the empress had been assassinated. From the very beginning, therefore, the reception of the news of the assassination was conditioned by a theatrical context. The Cracow public was further informed, in the next day's newspaper, about the announcement of the news to another theater audience in Vienna, where the Burgtheater was sold out for the tragedy of Faust. The performance was about to begin:	31
All at once there was unrest in the whole hall, groups formed, and some began to press in a crowd toward the exit. At the stroke of seven the curtain rose and the artist Robert, already in costume as Faust, announced that the performance was canceled by the highest order. This occurred similarly in the opera and in all the private theaters. The public, exiting from the theaters, filled the streets, and awaited details of the terrible crime. 50
In Cracow, as in Vienna, such audiences went out into the streets to wait for special editions from the newspapers; eventually, they would also read about themselves, about the interrupted performances in which the imperial tragedy supplanted the staged drama of Faust and Mephistopheles. The intensity of theatrical and literary culture in Vienna has been noted by Stefan Zweig in his memoirs, by Hermann Broch in his essay on Hofmannsthal, and by Schorske in his historical studies; theater and literature in Cracow were considerably more limited by the comparatively smaller public but were disproportionately important precisely on that account. Afterwards, looking back, Boy remarked, "in defiance of all the material and physical inadequacies of the city, artistic life developed more fully than ever before" in the 1890s, and, "where real life was so terribly impoverished," modern drama, for instance the plays of Henrik Ibsen, could become "the sole realities." 51 The assassination of Elisabeth, from the moment it was announced in the theater, became a public sensation in which the theatrical, artistic, and poetic values of fin-de-siècle Cracow pervasively influenced and transmuted the representation of journalistic reality.
Schorske has stressed the influence of aesthetic culture on journalism in fin-de-siècle Vienna, with particular attention to the feuilleton, a newspaper essay in which the writer "tended to transform objective analysis of the world into subjective cultivation of personal feelings." 52 Czas reacted to the assassination with an anonymously authored front-page obituary feuilleton, published in installments over the course of three days. This meditation on the life and death of the empress began by imagining her own grief at the suicide of her son Crown Prince Rudolf at Mayerling ten years before. "Seeking peace in solitude, in the beauty of nature and art," the empress was represented in print as a focus for the impressions and emotions of the Habsburg public:	32
It was impossible to imagine that she could awaken fanatical hatred, she who, her whole life, brought enchantment with beauty and grace. For that reason amazement seizes the mind, suggesting an image of bestial crime on Lake Geneva. There have been regicides whose bloody deeds had something of monstrous greatness, compelling the fantasy of poets [przykuwajc fantazy poetów]; but this murderer, whose dagger cut off the days of the Empress Elbieta, strikes one only with aversion, with abomination, like the shock of nerves at the brutal sight of the figures of common criminals in a peep show at the fair. 53
The strategy of the feuilleton involved the overwhelming of the susceptible mind by suggestive images and impressions, the manipulative appeal to sensitive nerves. Yet, even as the obituary affirmed that the only possible emotional response was aversion and abomination, it was impossible altogether to suppress the deeply decadent idea that assassination could compel "the fantasy of poets." Indeed, it was part of the self-conscious aesthetic scheme of decadent poetry to play perversely on the nerves. The form of the feuilleton, by its subjective nature, was inclined toward such poetic impulses, but the obituary determinedly resisted the Satanic values of Przybyszewski, for whom anarchist reptiles might well have assumed some sort of "monstrous greatness." In his "Confiteor" manifesto, published in ycie on New Year's Day 1899, Przybyszewski would affirm the absolute value of art for art's sake, including even art that represented "the greatest crimes" (najwiksze zbrodnie). 54 The obituary feuilleton in Czas already conceded that murder could stimulate the aesthetic nerves of fin-de-siècle sensibility.
The obituary also affirmed a set of more conservative aesthetic values, discovered in the character of Elisabeth herself. She was saluted for "her sensitivity to everything artistic," including the island of Corfu, the statues of ancient Greece, and the poetry of Heinrich Heine, but especially for her appreciation of nature: "the mysterious pulse of the life of the ocean waves, of forests, and of mountain peaks." 55 Yet a modern artistic movement already existed in Cracow, where the artists' association Sztuka was established in 1897, the same year as the Viennese Sezession; as in the parallel literary movements of Jung-Wien and Moda Polska, the aesthetic concerns of a younger generation also involved contacts and connections between Cracow and Vienna. 56 Cracow conservatism was not untroubled by the inklings of aesthetic ambivalence in 1898, and finally, after a week of municipal mourning, Czas became less resistant to the sentimental temptations of fin-de-siècle decadence. The story that had been first reported from the stage of the theater was now fully integrated into the dramatic repertory: "The tragic death of the Empress Elbieta on foreign territory, by the hand of a foreigner, is among the series of dramas that have played continuously in our century on the steps of thrones—but exceptional in its historical significance, we would dare to say [mielibymy powiedzie], it has a strange poetry and beauty [ma dziwn poezy i pikno]; it also arouses exceptional suffering and terror." 57 The almost Aristotelian aspects of the tragedy were articulated in the fin-de-siècle formulas of morbid modern aestheticism. After first refusing to acknowledge any appeal to the fantasy of poets, Czas now fully conceded that the death of the empress, as the tragically inevitable conclusion of her drama, was artistically admirable, suffused with "strange poetry and beauty." The convergence between the older generation of dynastic conservatism and the younger generation of decadent modernism was consummated in a daring ideological concession to the poetry of violence.	33
On the 1st of March 1899, Arthur Schnitzler's one-act play Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo) was first performed in Vienna at the Burgtheater, and before the end of that month it was reviewed in Czas, keeping Cracow up to date on the important dramatic phenomena of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Schnitzler's play was all about the theatricality of violence, about the ways in which violence, even murder, could produce a poetic titillation in the fantasy of susceptible spectators. The play was set in a Paris cabaret, the Green Cockatoo, in which decadent aristocrats went to watch actors playing the parts of violent criminals. The date of the action was July 14, 1789, and the people of Paris were storming the Bastille offstage, so that revolutionary violence became confused with theatrical violence inside the club. "Reality enters into the play," a character commented, "the play into reality." Czas found the message familiar: "variations on a theme of thought that is not new: life is a combination of dream and reality, of falsehood and truth." Boy would later see this as the hallmark of fin-de-siècle Cracow: "Nowhere else as in Cracow did people live so much in the imagination and so little in reality." 58 Schnitzler's drama proposed a perspective on reality that was perfectly conducive to the literary atmosphere of Cracow and a vision of violence consistent with the dramatic appreciation of the assassination six months before. In Vienna, the daughters of Elisabeth, the Habsburg archduchesses, found Schnitzler's play subversively offensive and encouraged its removal from the repertory.	34
Just as Schorske has suggested that art provided Viennese liberals with an "escape" from the unpleasantness of politics, so in Der grüne Kakadu the aristocratic escape into theatrical fantasy was overtaken and overwhelmed by revolutionary reality outside the Green Cockatoo. 59 The Cracow conservatives who lavished such an exaltation of attentions on the assassination of the empress in 1898, and came to find a certain "strange poetry and beauty" in her death, were also seeking refuge from a more threatening and less poetic reality. It is true that the growing organization of socialist, populist, and nationalist movements in Galicia was distasteful and alarming to Cracow conservatives, and an apocalyptic intimation of anarchistic Satanism served as a sort of distraction from more mundane political menaces. At the same time, however, there were other manifestations of violence in Galicia, which could be neither apocalyptically philosophized nor aesthetically poeticized, still less comprehended and confronted. The articles in Czas during the first week of September addressed the violent events that would be promptly displaced in the press by the assassination of the empress on September 10. On September 5, the trial began in Cracow of forty-four people accused of criminal violence against Jews in various villages of the region, a judicial reckoning with the serious anti-Semitic riots of 1898 in Galicia. Czas told the unsavory story of a village mob, earlier in the year, armed with axes and cudgels, smashing windows and breaking into Jewish taverns in order to destroy the premises, drink the vodka, and steal whatever could be carried away. On September 9, four more defendants were accused in court of public violence and putting people at risk of bodily injury, for breaking the windows of Jewish establishments in nearby Wieliczka. At the same time, Czas was following a murder trial in Sanok, east of Cracow, where a peasant was charged with stabbing to death his wife and her uncle, who happened to be