Page - 141 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The First Shot 141 one’s feelings and construct clear enemy stereotypes. Cries of ‘Dole Srbia !’ (Down with Serbia !) were heard in Zagreb (Agram) : ‘Long live the King, long live the Monarch, long live Serbia, down with Vienna !’ was chanted in Belgrade.331 ‘Down with […] !’, ‘Death to […]’ and similar formulations were now part of the vocabulary of the people in the streets and in the newspapers. Later, and until very recently, the words that were said and written in summer and autumn 1914 were severely criticised and branded as a terrible derailment of the human spirit. Hans Weigel wrote of the ‘disgrace of the spirit of Germany and Austria’332 and in doing so completely overlooked the fact that the intellectual outcry of 1914 was not a phenomenon that remained limited to these countries. We must go much deeper to find the explanation here. Attempts have been made to bring into play the human fascination with death and to make use of Sigmund Freud in order to explain this. Maybe even that is too simple or, rather, too complicated, or just wrong. It seems, instead, possible to procure a satisfying explanation using Viktor Frankl and the third Vienna School of Psychiatry. The people in question were searching for the meaning of life and for many of them this was a desperate struggle. It was a question of an awakening, a radical reorientation, liberation from deadly boredom and sterile materialism.333 Therefore, hardly anyone wanted to be left out and multitudes of intellectuals volunteered to serve as soldiers or at least  – like Stefan Zweig  – to contribute on the home front. Trakl, Wittgenstein, the degraded doctor Arthur Schnitzler, artists, thinkers, scientists and scholars, lawyers, the rich, ge- niuses and fools  – they were all thrilled and wanted to be involved when the world of yesterday was carried to its grave. The First Shot With the report on the skirmish near Temes-Kubin, the prerequisite for unleashing the war had been provided. However, since no hostilities had actually taken place that could be classified as the beginning of an actual war of weapons, there had to be something else. The fact that it was ultimately the Imperial and Royal Navy that actually began the war and fired the first shells on to Serbian territory, bombarding the interior of Serbia with warships, is one of the many curiosities of the outbreak of the war. As early as 9 July the first secret order was issued by the Naval Section of the Im- perial and Royal War Ministry to Port Admiral Pola. It concerned the Danube Flo- tilla, which was part of the Navy. The Port Admiral was instructed, in the event that a strengthening of the Danube Flotilla should be ordered, ‘to deploy’ the necessary complementary crews ‘in the quickest  – not the cheapest  – way possible’.334 The fact that in the Habsburg Monarchy a ministerial instruction was sent to give no thought