Colonel Redl

The Spycatcher, Caught

Author

Anne Cunningham
March 08, 2024

In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig mentioned the case of Colonel Redl, the Austro-Hungarian counterintelligence chief who turned out to be a spy, and was given the task of catching… himself. As I read the passage about him I had a strong memory of the last scene of the 1985 film very loosely based on the officer’s life, Colonel Redl. That scene was so well-done it remained almost perfectly intact in my head many years later.

Zweig had met Redl:

Personally I knew Colonel Redl, the central character in one of the most complex of espionage dramas, only slightly. He lived a street away from me in the same district in Vienna, and once, in the café where this comfortable-looking gentleman, who appreciated the pleasures of the senses, was smoking his cigar, I was introduced to him by my friend Public Prosecutor T. After that we greeted each other when we met. But it was only later that I discovered how much secrecy surrounds us in the midst of our daily lives, and how little we really know about those who are close to us.

Zweig describes the initial incident:

This colonel, who looked very much the usual capable Austrian officer, was in the confidence of the heir to the throne. It was his important responsibility to head the army’s secret service and thwart the activities of their opposing counterparts. It came out that during the crisis of the war in the Balkans in 1912, when Russia and Austria were mobilising to move against each other, the most important secret item in the hands of the Austrian army, the ‘marching plan’, had been sold to Russia. If war had come, this would have been nothing short of disastrous, for the Russians now knew in advance, move by move, every tactical manoeuvre for attack planned by the Austrian army. The panic set off among the General Staff of the army by this act of treachery was terrible. It was up to Colonel Redl, as the man in charge, to apprehend the traitor, who must be somewhere in the very highest places.

The Foreign Ministry, a bureaucratic rival to the Ministry of War, set up its own investigation, which is what ultimately led to the revelation of Redl’s role. If left up to him, it seems unlikely that the true culprit would have come to light! The Foreign Ministry ordered the police to open all “poste restante” correspondence throughout the empire, and in the course of this practice an envelope sent from a Russian border station was found containing several thousand-crown notes. The letter was labeled “Opera Ball” and the Viennese police kept watch to see who came to collect it.

Zweig recounted what followed:

For a moment it looked as if the tragedy was about to turn into Viennese farce. A gentleman turned up at midday, asking for the letter addressed to ‘Opera Ball’. The clerk at the counter instantly gave a concealed signal to alert the detective. But the detective had just gone out for a snack, and when he came back all that anyone could say for certain was that the unknown gentleman had taken a horse-drawn cab and driven off in no-one-knew-what direction. However, the second act of this Viennese comedy soon began. In the time of those fashionable, elegant cabs, each of them a carriage and and pair, the driver of the cab considered himself too good to clean his cab with his own hands. So at every cab rank there was a man whose job it was to feed the horses and wash the the carriage. This man, fortunately, had noticed the number of the cab that had just driven off. In a quarter-of-an-hour all police offices had been alerted and the cab had been found. Its driver described the gentleman who had taken the vehicle to the Café Kaiserhof, where I often met Colonel Redl, and moreover, by pure good luck, the pocketknife that the cabby’s unknown fare had used to open the envelope was found still in the cab. Detectives hurried straight off to the Café Kaiserhof. By then the gentleman described by the cabby had left, but the waiters explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he could only be their regular customer Colonel Redl, and he had just gone back to the Hotel Klomser.

The detective in charge of the case froze. The mystery was solved. Colonel Redl, the top espionage chief in the Austrian army, was also a spy in the pay of Russia. He had not only sold Austrian secrets and the army’s marching plan, it also instantly became clear why, over the last year, the Austrian agents he sent to Russia had been regularly arrested, tried and found guilty.

Detectives watched the Hotel Klomser, and when Redl emerged from it, one of them approached him and offered him his pocket knife. This was how he discovered that he had been caught. Two army officers followed him back into his room, one of them leaving a revolver. Redl shot himself with it. The army general staff was hoping the affair could be hushed up with his suicide, but so many people had been involved in his capture that the details leaked.

This week I rewatched Colonel Redl, which I first saw when I was fifteen. As I mentioned, reading Zweig’s description, I vividly recalled the last scene of the film, when Redl runs out of time. He is walked back to the last room he will ever enter, and takes up the revolver to end the affair himself, sparing himself the humiliation of a trial. Even though I knew it was coming this time, and recalled most of it, it still struck me as an amazing scene, Brandauer—a great actor at the height of his powers—giving it everything he has.

In the film, it is Redl’s old friend from cadet school, the Baron Kubinyi, who hands him the revolver. Kubinyi tries to console Redl, but is rebuffed, and then the baron collapses in the hall after rushing from the room. I assume these details were invented. This time around I noticed that the film states explicitly, at the beginning, that it is not based on historical documents. It is more of an exploration of what it might have been like to rise to great heights while hiding your homosexuality in the Austro-Hungarian army.

As Zweig put it:

Unknown to any of his superiors or colleagues, Redl’s proclivities had been homosexual, and for years he had been a victim of blackmailers who finally drove him to this desperate means of extricating himself from their toils. A shudder of horror passed through the entire army. This one man could have cost the country the lives of hundreds of thousands, bringing the monarchy to the brink of the abyss.

The screenplay for the highly fictionalized version of Redl’s life was written by the Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó, who also directed. It was partly based on John Osborne’s play about Redl, A Patriot for Me. To me, it seemed to have an English feel, borrowing some of the tropes from English boarding school novels. The most obvious being that the repressed homosexual feelings for the boarding school friend get displaced onto the friend’s sister, in this case the Baron Kubinyi’s sister, Katalin. There are many such triangles in English literature, but the one that springs to mind is Nick Jenkins’ relationship with his friend Peter Templer’s sister in A Dance to the Music of Time.

A twist on the original trope here is that Katalin knows that Redl really loves her brother. It is part of what makes them so close, and what gives her the unwitting power to destroy him. For in the film version, it is Katalin who introduces Redl to the man with whom he has an affair, who turns out to be an intelligence agent.

There are a series of scenes from a school holiday the two boys took at Kubinyi’s grand country house. The poorer student, who would never bring his friend back to his own unimpressive house, marvels at the splendor of his friend’s upbringing and surroundings. Young Redl doesn’t understand how the fancy samovar works, and ends up getting tea all over the floor. This intense, emotional, class-based longing also feels like something out of an English story—for instance, Brideshead Revisited. Though it makes sense that it might chime with others’ experiences in different places.

Come to think of it, Brideshead is another story where the protagonist’s homosexual feelings for his friend get displaced onto and normalized in a relationship with his sister. And it occurs to me that the structure of Colonel Redl parallels the play Another Country, about the English spy Guy Burgess. Another Country delves into Burgess’s schooldays and his first loves, to explore why he became a traitor to England.

Redl is not merely hiding his secret love for his friend. He’s also hiding the fact that he’s Jewish. The irony is that this poor Jewish boy from the provinces starts out as one of the soldiers most loyal to the emperor, because he has been plucked from obscurity and given a chance to rise in the ranks alongside the nobility like his friend the baron. He owes everything to the monarchy. Unlike Kubinyi and other officers, Redl does not spend his time whoring, carousing, and drinking so much that he regularly falls of his horse. He is aware of how much he has been given and how much he has to lose. His secrets act as a check on his impulses.

Redl works incredibly hard and does advance, but his friend Kubinyi makes many more mistakes and still ends up on the general staff, in an even more advantageous position. In the fictional version, it is Kubinyi who is the traitor, and Redl the convenient scapegoat. The archduke and other top officers conspire to throw suspicion on Redl. This is where the exploration of the secret history lost me, though, because it is clear from Zweig’s account that it was hugely embarrassing to the army and the monarchy that such a critical figure as Redl became a traitor. It makes no sense that they would try to pin it on him. Nor do the farcical aspects of his capture suggest a clever plan by a sinister cabal. It is clear both that he did it and why.

The film was most successful at conveying Redl’s contradictions, through Brandauer’s wonderfully subtle performance. You feel his envy and longing as well as his temptations and the grace he tries to extend to other people’s foibles, aware as he is of his own. It is only when he is being squeezed by his superiors or by the general impossibility of his position that he lashes out. It is a very convincing portrait of a sensitive personality slowly poisoned by the secrets he keeps.

I already felt a connection to Zweig’s personal account of the Vienna he knew, but the mention of Redl brought back some of my earlier engagement with that history.