Free Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes Page B

of the darkness gatheringover the rest of Europe. Here a synthetic sun shone on glittering synthetic beaches full of synthetically happy people. I said to myself, “I don’t care. This will be the last fling before I leave Europe forever. In one, two, or five years there will be a war, after which the Europe I know will be no more. Excepting, of course, Paris—Paris will never, must never, perish. Paris sees only civilizations roll over and past her; she will forever remain the art city. But Europe, the Europe of my youth, it is finished for a long time. Here, then, the last orgies before the flood!”
    Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship on 30 January 1933 turned the tide. “He decides the handwriting’s on the wall,” Antheil recalled the moment in the third person, “two months later he’s back in America to stay.”
    So an ocean separated George Antheil from Hedy Kiesler Mandl just as she, in Vienna, began to test the locks on her golden prison.

[ FOUR ]
Between Times
    In the late 1920s, after he had revitalized his family’s armaments business, Fritz Mandl began investing in Austrian right-wing politics. To advance his social status as well as his business interests, he cultivated in particular Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, an heir to the defunct Austro-Hungarian throne who was a member of the Austrian parliament and a leader of the nationalist paramilitary Heimatschutz (Homeland Security) movement. Starhemberg, a year older than Mandl, had stood with Adolf Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923; the putsch’s failure put Hitler in prison and sent the disaffected prince back to Austria. By the end of the decade he had exhausted his family’s wealth. Thereafter Mandl supported him to buy his influence.
    Mandl and Starhemberg converted the Heimatschutz movement into a private militia, the Heimwehr (HomeGuard), which Mandlarmed with surplus weapons shipped to Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik from Italy ostensibly to be reconditioned for the Hungarian army—as many as 100,000 Mannlicher rifles and two hundred Schwarzlose machine guns. A Vienna newspaper broke the story of the illicit diversion and the weapons were confiscated, but the Hirtenberger arms scandal helped inflame relations between the Left and the Right at a time when the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had suspended parliament, invoked emergency rule, and outlawed the Socialist Party. “The Heimwehr and its principals, Starhemberg and Mandl,” a historian writes, “earned the undying hatred of the Austrian and international Left for their bloody role in the suppression of Vienna’s Socialists in February 1934.” Ostensibly (and cynically) searching for clandestine Socialist weapons caches, the Heimwehr provoked the Socialists into defending themselves in a series of bloody clashes centered on Vienna that resulted in more than a thousand casualties, including several hundred deaths.
    After that brief civil war, Nazi sympathizers in Austria increased their agitation for a merger of Austria with Germany. Dollfuss turned to Mussolini for support. “Austria may be assured she can count on Italy at all times,” the Italian dictator responded in a speech on 18 March. “Italy will spare no effort to assist her.” Dollfuss pushed through a new, dictatorial Austrian constitution styled on the Italian Fascist model, which took effect at the beginning of May. As a reward for the backing of Starhemberg’s Heimwehr , Dollfuss appointedthe young prince as his vice-chancellor, and when Austrian Nazis assassinated Dollfuss in an attempted putsch on 25 July 1934, Starhemberg briefly became Austrian head of state. Mussolini rewarded Mandl the following year, and indirectly funded the Heimwehr , by assigning the lucrative munitions contract for his Ethiopian campaign to Hirtenberger.
    “Mandl also sold arms to Bolivia during the Chaco War,” the historian writes—a brutal war fought from 1932 to 1935 between Bolivia and