4
Exile in Europe
My country calls me—my duty calls me—I must leave you and go
back to my first love—my country.
—subhas chandra bose to Emilie Schenkl from Badgastein,
Austria, March 1936
Vienna, once the dazzling center of the sprawling, multiethnic Austro-
Hungarian Empire, was greatly diminished at the end of World War I:
it had become the cap ital of a small, landlocked, agrarian nation- state.
In the afterglow of fin- de- siècle Vienna, the finest expressions of sober
bourgeois high culture met and struggled with the youthful avant-
garde. The death of the city’s two most brilliant painters, Gustav Klimt
and Egon Schiele, in 1918 symbolized the passing of an era. Vienna re-
mained the home of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and
it was gripped by a neurosis attending the transition from empire to
nation—a trauma masterfully depicted by the novelist Robert Musil.^1 It
was to this beautiful and angst- ridden city on the Danube that Subhas
Chandra Bose came in March 1933, as a po lit i cal exile seeking a cure
from the illness that had beset him in colonial prisons and hoping to
promote his country’s freedom struggle in Europe.
On March 11, Bose was admitted to Fürth Sanatorium and under-
went thorough X- ray and clinical examinations.^2 He had suf fered a se-
rious attack of bronchial pneumonia in Mandalay Jail and doctors
suspected that he might even have contracted tuberculosis from a fel-
low prisoner. More recently, severe abdominal pains had indicated the