The Redl Affair had everything: sex, espionage, betrayal, a fall from greatness and a sensational climax in which Redl went to his death like a figure of high tragedy.
(New York Times)
The old Emperor’s response to the news about Redl’s suicide seems to have been deep shock, anger and frustration. He had known the Colonel personally. According to press reports the messenger, Adjutant General Artur Freiherr von Bolfras, almost collapsed after he had witnessed Franz Joseph’s reaction and exclaimed: ‘I have never before seen His Majesty like this!’1 Allegedly, the Emperor cried out in despair: ‘So this is the new era, and the creatures it bears!’2 Perhaps this was Redl’s most telling obituary. His demise preceded the destruction of the old order by only a year. Perhaps the aged lion had an intimation of the cold bitter wind that would be blowing through his empty palaces. He’d have counted himself lucky he didn’t live to see any of it.
Franz Ferdinand’s reaction was much worse. He was well known for his screaming tantrums. Now he was absolutely furious. The military had failed left, right and centre. The whole situation was horribly embarrassing, criticism resounding from all ends of the Empire. Redl was said to have been his protégé, and Franz Ferdinand felt personally attacked. And there was something else the Archduke could not come to terms with. While his Emperor had approved of the decision to allow the doomed man to end his own life and save the face of the ‘glorious army’, this was incompatible with the faith of the ultra-Catholic heir.
He needed a fall-guy to vent his spleen on. He briefly condemned Conrad von Hoetzendorf – the earlier honeymoon period was very definitely over – then moved on to Urbański. When he accused him of sloppiness in his and Giesl’s investigations in Prague, the Head of the Evidenzbureau tried to excuse his mistakes on the basis that his mental and physical health had been affected by the difficult circumstances. The Archduke lashed out at him. Quite obviously, he was no longer fit enough to do his job. His head was only spared thanks to support from the Chief of the General Staff himself, who found the best possible solution by granting his friend long-term personal leave.
Franz Ferdinand’s fury against his target did not abate. Apparently, he even threatened to kill him should he come into his sight.3 Throughout his life Urbański felt humiliated and treated unfairly. His rehabilitation was only feasible after the assassination.
Foreigners, especially diplomats, also felt the backlash from the affair. As was to be expected, Russians especially and in general were soon treated with suspicion. But other world powers did not escape either. In June 1913, the crisis touched the British Consulate in Sarajevo.4 Two of its staff, Ernest MacFarren and John Hope-Johnstone, were interviewed (though not arrested) by the police. It turned out one had kept a notebook containing entries about k.u.k troops in the area, as well as other possibly suspicious information. MacFarren claimed he had only written down what was there for everyone to see anyway. Hope-Johnstone introduced himself as a linguist who had established contacts to Serbian citizens and Albanian refugees for the sole purpose of his research on ‘Gipsy dialects’. An English bobby might have described both as ‘likely stories’.
Needless to say, the Foreign Office was none too happy. It gave strict instructions to the British Consul in Sarajevo, F G Freeman, to avoid any further actions that could cause a stir. Foreign Minister Edward Grey even pondered Freeman’s dismissal and the closure of the Consulate. The whole affair was especially embarrassing as MacFarren was also correspondent for the Daily Mail. The Austrian– Hungarian external office made it perfectly clear to Military Attaché Cuninghame that they would welcome a change ‘at the top of His Majesty’s Consulate in Sarajevo’.
In the same month Cuninghame himself came under criticism when Captain Forbes, the British Consul in Prague, found out that his colleague had quizzed his own employees, primarily those of Austrian–Hungarian descent, about the movement of Habsburg’s forces. Cuninghame gave a statement in which he denied any hostile motives. To improve bruised relations, he suggested permitting a higher number of k.u.k. officers to attend British manoeuvres, and ask for the same in return. This would make it easier to amass intelligence overtly. Both the War and Foreign Office approved of his idea.
Alfred Redl’s failures became for many a means to an end. For the political left he was the personification of everything that was ailing in the Empire, and especially among its elite. Why should they be allowed their own legal system that enabled them to avoid civil jurisdiction? Why should everybody have to bow to them in awe? Occasionally their criticism combined with that of many officers who were opposed to any system of constant mutual spying that contrasted so starkly with notions of chivalry.
The conservatives, including the church, saw him as the victim of a rotten liberal ideology. Danzers Armeezeitung stated that the monarchy had experienced a ‘moral Koeniggraetz’ and claimed: ‘We know officers who have refused to leave the house in other than civil clothing, and we know officers who are thinking about quitting. It is an unbearable thought to have been the comrade of a Redl.’5
The fact that Alfred Redl had been a high-ranking officer fuelled an ongoing debate that had originated in the eighteenth century. Should non-aristocrats be allowed to become officers at all? Back then the majority of gentry had regarded soldiering predominantly as a means of self-enrichment. The system had become corrupt and inefficient, and its overhaul was part of Empress Maria Theresa’s deep cutting reforms.6
She created a military system funded through taxation, commanded by professionals and with restricted opportunities for financial gain. She had initially hoped to be able to recruit her senior officers from the high ranks of the nobility. Not only did the state lack the necessary cash to finance their remuneration but the hereditary military elite were not enthusiastic about fighting for wages. Feudal service was traditionally unwaged but the lord would expect to be well rewarded from the spoils of victory. A regular salary cheque lacked the same allure.
A rather more pressing issue presented itself in the realisation these people were ‘amateurs’ and not necessarily interested in equipping themselves with the complicated specialist knowledge required to fight industrial wars. During Bismarck’s wars, artillery tripled in numbers and field engineering became infinitely more complex. The noble families remained reluctant to send their offspring to the newly formed Militaerakademien. Over time, this led to the acceptance of pupils from all classes of society to the academies. War was becoming a science for professionals rather than a sport for gentlemen.
In the High Middle Ages, the redoubtable mercenary knight Götz von Berlichingen, poet, swashbuckler and swordsman typified the gentleman warrior. He sold his sword to whoever was paying and lost a hand to the diabolical new science of gunnery. Undeterred, he acquired a workable prosthetic and carried on much as before in a career that spanned nearly half a century – legendary as ‘Götz of the Iron Hand’.7
Götz and Alfred wouldn’t have had much to talk about, even though both were motivated by cash. Working as a gentleman mercenary was an acceptable profession in the fifteenth century but being a commoner spy in the twentieth was not. The Austrian elite belonged to that chivalric tradition (pretty rough and ready in its own way). Their ideals harked back to this golden age of knighthood. Redl represented the cold wind of a new set of realities. No more glorious charges like Sobieski’s winged hussars sweeping down like the wrath of God upon the infidel and delivering Vienna. War was about technologies, supply and logistics, campaigns decided only by attrition. Gettysburg should have ended the American Civil War – it didn’t. There was a clear lesson there but nobody was really looking.
Redl represented the new face of war and espionage. Spying has always been part of the game but industrial wars merit industrial spying. Redl was a professional – disloyal, duplicitous and amoral but still a pro. Franz Joseph might shudder, Franz Ferdinand might rage, but this was the new reality. His way of life would outlast theirs.
Those who’d lost privileges in the process together with core reactionaries had still not fully accepted these changes. With Redl they saw a trump card. He was the evidence that ‘commoners’ could only bring ruin to the military. And they found their most prominent advocate in the Archduke, who now started to demand a higher percentage of aristocrats in the officer corps. Nobody could call Franz Ferdinand an innovator.
The Arbeiterzeitung reminded their opponents that even the noblest descent did not protect against serious deceit, the most prominent and dire example being General Baron von Eynatten. He’d been made responsible for feeding the army but really cared only for his own profits and let his men starve. The Baron’s defalcation became a major factor in losing the Lombardy campaign. The paper also pointed to the initial reasons for opening up the higher military career to all social classes: ‘The Austrian army would still be as aristocratic as it used to be, had the owners of those most noble names not decided to run away from the requirements the service demanded.’9
Numerous journalists brought the Empire’s ethnic conflicts into sharp focus. All of a sudden Redl had Polish blood. To the Hungarians it was clear that his background was Ruthenian. Then at last, and perhaps inevitably, Redl became a Jew, despite his Catholic background. It was claimed that his mother’s maiden name was Sternberg. Others modified this statement by asserting she was born in a place of the same name, so they declared him a ‘third generation Jew’. This wasn’t the end of it. The old spy continued to get dragged out of his coffin wherever an ideology needed a bogeyman. The Nazis would revive the myth of his Jewish background in 1938 and claim that Alfred changed his surname from ‘Redlich’ (also German for ‘honest’, ‘upright’) to ‘Redl’.
Had the Austrian Empire outlasted the war it had begun, Redl might have earned more widespread fame or notoriety but the whole system collapsed in 1918 and the old order just became old. The map of the world had changed dramatically. Of the great empires, Russia, Germany, Austria and Turkey were destroyed. Britain and France survived but scarred, ruined and depleted. French morale had not recovered by 1940. Some scholars like John Keegan became convinced Britain never fully recovered from the Somme.
Some of the old Buchan-esque ideas about spying as an affair for gentlemen lingered. Heydrich modelled the SD on the British Secret Service on the basis that they were both successful and ‘gentlemen’ – a caste he yearned to belong to. This lingered. It wasn’t until the debacle of the Cambridge Spies blew up in the faces of MI6 that a cold new reality dawned. John Le Carré who knows a thing or two about spies recalled a conversation with Philby’s former close friend and colleague Nicholas Elliott, over twenty years after the scandal:
But the limited truth, the digestible version: namely, in Elliott’s jargon, that somewhere back in the war years when it was understandable, Kim had gone a bit squidgy about our gallant Russian ally and given him a bit of this and that; and if he could just get it off his chest, whatever it was he’d given them, we’d all feel a lot better, and he could get on with doing what he did best, which was beating the Russian at his own game.10
Nobody was ever going to call Alfred Redl ‘squidgy’. But then he was never an insider like Philby, never really one of ‘us’. He was a pleb, an oik up from the provinces; useful, clever, even necessary, but still not quite a gentleman.
The case remained a hot topic over the next two decades. It is not difficult to understand that the story with its explosive personal, social and political dimensions was and still is irresistible to a wide spectrum of creative artists; the fascination of the tragic and unexplained has kept several generations of them busy. The lack of any final, proven truth, the legions of rumours, half-truths and lies made it easy for them to invent their own fictional variants. And the same writers and filmmakers who kept the spy’s memory alive often found themselves under fire from all sides.
Egon Erwin Kisch, whose representations of the case have managed to dominate general awareness until today, still drew hostility even in the 1960s and got disparaged for being a ‘Jew and a Socialist’.11 ‘Harmless’ movies such as Oberst Redl (1925), or Der Fall des Generalstabs – Oberst Redl (1931) were closely scrutinised and received a continuous stream of criticism from military circles who objected to seeing the former Emperor and the dynasty dragged through the dirt.
When Franz Antel announced a new film project in the 1950s, monarchists, amongst them former k.u.k. officers of venerable age, launched a storm of protest.12 This came as a bit of a surprise. The filmmaker, who has produced a number of glorious films during his long career which have become classics both on Austrian and German screens, had previously received plenty of praise from the same crowd, for productions such as the Emperor Waltz and the Emperor’s Ball. Now they saw Austria’s dignity and reputation under threat and tried to embargo the whole production. They even managed to find an ally in the Education Ministry who voted against the film’s export to Germany (which would have spelt its financial ruin), for ‘moral and patriotic’ reasons, especially as he believed the film ‘hinted at Redl’s unfortunate disposition’.
After assuring themselves that Spionage would not feature ‘anti-Austrian‘ sentiments the authorities gave Antel the green light. The film has recently (2015) become available again on DVD. It is principally enjoyable because of an excellent cast. For an ‘espionage thriller’ it lacks excitement; historically, it mainly follows Kisch’s fictional account with an added femme fatale. The ‘mysterious woman’ became an integral part of novels and films alike. This is hardly surprising, not least because Redl’s homosexuality remained an area most artists did not dare to touch.
When John Osborne broke the unwritten rule and made the Colonel’s homosexuality the subject of his play A Patriot for Me in 1965, it was not officially allowed on stage at the Royal Court Theatre. Apparently it was ‘too sexually transgressive’ (whatever that means). The only way it could be shown at all was to declare the theatre a ‘private club’ for the duration of the performances.13
Amongst the countless takes on the subject amongst writers, Robert Asprey’s semi-fictional A Panther’s Feast (1959) is one we need to mention, not just because unlike most others it is available in English. Asprey, himself an ex-US intelligence officer based in Austria after 1945, became obsessed with the case and started his own research. He delved into archives as well as interviewing witnesses, whose trustworthiness might have been compromised by the fact that they got paid for delivering information. From a historian’s perspective it is rather disappointing that he turned his research into a quasi-novel of questionable qualities.
The 1980s brought a new perspective with Péter Dobai’s novel Roman ueber die Donaumonarchie. His Redl was also a corrupt character, but one who had become the victim of a dysfunctional society. Dobai co-wrote the screenplay for Istvan Szabó’s awardwinning film Colonel Redl from 1985, with the charismatic Klaus Maria Brandauer in the title role and Armin Mueller-Stahl as the Archduke. Again, Redl’s homosexuality is only hinted at, although his longings and inner conflicts are illustrated beautifully. He is a sympathetic character, an outsider who doesn’t fit in anywhere.
When one ‘googles’ the name Alfred Redl these days, the old stereotypes still dominate search results. We find the reckless spy, the ‘homosexual who wrecked an empire’. Hopefully this book will manage to further de-demonise our man and show him as what he was: not your ordinary human being, not innocent, but not evil either.
For quite a while after Redl’s death in 1913 the Evidenzbureau kept his alter ego Nizetas alive, hoping to catch another spy or two. Redl was never allowed to rest in peace. ‘Patriots’ started to vandalise his grave in June the same year. In 1944 his mortal remains were moved further down as the space was needed for a new arrival.
This hasn’t prevented him from staying on the loose since. Regardless of how many jigsaw pieces we manage to add to the picture, ultimately his persona will remain a mystery. Alfred Redl’s compelling story is far from dead. In some ways he is a metaphor for the modern world, ambitious but without a place, craving recognition in a system from which he is effectively disbarred.