Reunion in Rome

Seventy-five members of the high nobility of Imperial Austria went to Rome last week to act out in good earnest the situation which Playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood and his U. S. producers made much hay with as Reunion in Vienna. In Rome's Imperial Hotel, they bowed their heads and bent their knees in a chamber where, on a borrowed golden throne raised on a dais, sat Zita, last Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, mother of Otto, the 20-year-old pretender to the throne of Austria, Hungary or both.

The grim, black-pompadored woman was dressed in black. Over her head was a borrowed crown that Napoleon I had used when in Rome. First to genuflect came Duke Maximilian of Hohenberg, the assassination of whose father, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, set off a war in July 1914. The chances that they were paying homage to a future Dowager Empress were better last week than they had been in a long time.

Zita had been to see Italy's Benito Mussolini and King Victor Emanuel III to resume negotiations for the hand of the King's 18-year-old Daughter Maria, as Pretender Otto's bride. King Victor Emanuel would not want to waste his daughter on a "political adventurer" but a King-Emperor would be another thing. Zita told him last week that Britain and France were looking at Otto as at least a possible last resort to stop the spread of Nazism southward from Germany. What, King Victor Emanuel asked, of that potent little Nazi-stopper, Austria's Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss who emerged nearly intact last fortnight from a point-blank meeting with an assassin? Zita produced the strange new argument of Austrian Royalists: If Dollfuss were killed, there is no second Dollfuss to take his place. If her son, King-Emperor Otto, were killed, a replacement would be fixed by the law of succession.

Totally unready to die, Chancellor Dollfuss was last week busily stuffing up the chinks in his ''Patriotic Front" coalition against Naziism. Already head of the army, police and gendarmerie, he took over the headship of Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg's "White Fascist" Heimwehr. In payment he made Prince von Starhemberg deputy chairman of the Patriotic Front. Thus he prevented the hot-headed Prince from going off half-cocked and had the Heimwehr men to help him break any strikes the Socialists may call. He dissolved the Socialist singing society, the Saengerbund. He barred the Socialist newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung from newsstands for a month so that it must reach its readers by mail, a day late. He sanctioned by decree the internment of "undesirables" at their own expense (TIME, Oct. 2).

News of Germany's bolt from the Disarmament Conference exploded two ways in Austria. It touched off such headlines as "Hitler Declares War on Europe!" in the Socialist Press and it caused the Government to rush extra troops and string barbed wire along the Austro-German frontier. All the same, Chancellor Dollfuss could not forget that Austrians, no less than Germans, smart at their disarmament under the post-War treaties. Cautiously the Dollfuss Vienna Reichspost paid this grudging tribute to the Teuton political genius of Spellbinder Hitler: "The German Government's very effective appeal will awaken in the great majority of the German people a mighty echo. The pernicious regularity with which the victor nations continue to postpone fulfillment of their promise to disarm while at the same time insisting Germany remain defenseless was becoming unbearable."

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