The Redl Scandal was a politically dangerous one for newspaper owners in Vienna. Speculation on ‘regular’ criminals was just part of selling papers, but Redl was a high-ranking military official with murky protection at the Foreign Office and by extension the Imperial Court. Speculation about Redl’s suicide was something very few editors could afford to do.
There were a few ‘protected’ liberal papers which did print unsubstantiated information regarding Redl’s motivation and last few hours, for instance the Foreign Office’s Fremdenblatt or Neue Freie Presse, the leading Liberal Jewish publication. But just because one of these tony outlets printed salacious information about the former oberst did not mean that other editors gave the information credence, nor that they reproduced the stories on their own pages.
This post is about a remarkable instance where salacious information about Redl was not only printed, but widely believed by Vienna’s liberal and non-liberal editors. On May 30th or earlier Weiner Allgemeine Zeitung published that Redl paid an “expensive Viennese cabaret singer (female)” for a relationship. (WAZ has not yet been digitized for this period, but Arbeiter Zeitung reprinted the WAZ scoop on May 31st and attributed it to the liberal paper.) WAZ’s information was widely rebroadcast by Vienna’s best-connected editors.
WAZ’s long-time editor and creative force Felix Salten was not just a journalist, he was father to Vienna’s tiny cabaret scene. The only newspaper outlet which might have been as well connected in the ‘small stage’ world was Die Zeit, which by 1913 had come under the influence of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
At the time of Redl’s death there were two cabarets in Vienna: the Simplissimus and the far more influential Cabaret Fledermaus.
The Fledermaus Cabaret was a seedy affair which served up heavily sexualized content for rich people with little artisitc education. Fledermaus leading ladies were fond of accusing each other of prostitution. Interestingly, the Fledermaus was dissolved just a few weeks after Redl’s death, which suggests the outfit’s connection to the intelligence head may indeed have been intimate. Certainly Austro-Hungarian intelligence had a long history of partnering with sex-trade networks in politically unstable parts of the empire; urban police forces (an important branch of the intelligence apparatus) had overseen local theater industries since the time of Joseph II.
It’s not hard to trace who the Fledermaus’s leading ladies were at this time— there were three: Mela Mars, Thea Degen and Lucie König. Fledermaus’s most famous female star and refugee from Die Elf Scharfrichter of Munich, Marya Delvard, was long in the tooth by the time of Redl’s death and had had vicious fights with the other cabaret staff.
The reality of the fin-de-siècle theater world is that all of these women would have sold sex in addition to their stage careers. Looking at the Bohemia advertisement above, it’s most likely that Lucie König was the “cabaret diva” whom Redl paid for sex, according to WAZ.
And finally the Diva of the Hour, Lucie König. These images are from my private collection and celebrate her 18-month period as a leading light of the Fledermaus stage. Most of these postcards have expensive embellishments reflecting the mysterious influx of capital which the Fledermaus enjoyed after its original sponsor Fritz Waerndorfer went broke in 1909 and Franz Ferdinand bought into Vienna’s avant gard scene…
Lucie König was considered a “blonde and rosy” offering at the theater. It was not uncommon for bordellos to keep an ethnic assortment of women to cater to a variety of tastes. Franz Kafka had this to say of her in his Diaries of 1910-1913, in which he extensively documents Jewish theater in Prague:
Cabaret Lucerna. Lucie König showing photgraphs with old hair-styles. Threadbare face. Sometimes, with her turned-up nose, with her arm held aloft and a turn of all her fingers, she succeeds in something. A milksop face.
The Cabaret Lucerna was a Prague outfit where König also performed. In an empire wherein pimps had extraordinary imperial protection, Prague’s sex industry was exceptionally well connected to the intelligence apparatus. Prague’s leading bordello was even owned by a former police officer. (Hapsburg police operated as a political police force, tasked with monitoring and undermining domestic political dissent, particularly nationalism.) When prostitution scandals did erupt, the press often identified Jewish police officers as leading collaborators.
Given that Col. Redl sat at the pinnacle of Hapsburg military intelligence in the rebellious region of Bohemia, and given the military’s encouragement of sex-trade patronage among its career officers, WAZ’s allegation rings true today and certainly did for many of Vienna’s respected contemporary broadsheets.
Col. Alfred Redl 