Let me begin with a remarkable document: the report of the extraordinary session of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna held on July 1, 1914. It must be one of the shortest and most colorless reports in that august institution's history.

I doubt whether anyone could still find out what was actually said. As it stands, this statement is a classic instance of reserve. One does not need to go to the first scenes of Karl Kraus's Die letzten Tage der Menschheit to know that at the time such reserve was a rarity. On first reading “Serbien muß sterbien” (Serbia must bite the dust) and all the other jingoist slogans, I admired the author's ingenuity without realizing that it was stark realism, as some contemporary posters and descriptions setting them in their historical context make abundantly clear. Nor was the world of learning always proceeding sine ira et studio (without wrath and heat) in those trying years.