Tag: Vienna

On an Unusual Pacifist

Conrad Haas should not have been a pacifist. Given his position in the Austrian Army’s artillery corps, Haas spent most of his adult life figuring out how to best use gun and cannon fire to kill large numbers of troops. And, during the time that Haas lived, artillery killed more soldiers than any other type of weapon did.

Haas was born in Vienna and raised in a middle-class family. He studied artillery in college, and became an army officer in charge of munitions for the entire Austrian Army soon. When it came to artillery, Haas was somewhat of a savant. He not only could calculate distance and elevation of the weapons to fire accurately, but he also knew how to best conserve fire and make it effective when it counted most in battle. Such skill soon made him known throughout Europe, and he was invited to Romania to teach in an army artillery school there.

Now, you’d think that a person who knew about how to effectively cause death and destruction through artillery wouldn’t have many qualms about his job, but Haas did. In fact, he began to see that his job was that of a sort of artillery grim reaper, a person who sowed disaster and mayhem. And that made him become a pacifist while he was still in the employ of the military.

He began to tinker with the artillery and the calculations needed to shoot projectiles long distances. And this led him to try to see another possible application for artillery than that of death. What Haas came up with was revolutionary for his time. In addition, he began writing treatises about disbanding and disarming the military. “Mankind should pursue peace and not war,” he wrote. “The day will come when the powder will stay dry, the leaders will keep their money, and the young men will not die.” You can imagine that these types of writings made him some powerful enemies.

And those enemies would have done something about this artillery officer cum peacenik if what Haas proposed to do with artillery didn’t interest them so. You see, it was Conrad Haas who first came up with idea of launching not an artillery projectile, but, rather, a rocket into space. His concept was a three-stage rocket made up of a combination of solid and liquid fuels that would help the rocket break the earth’s gravity and cause the projectile to soar into the upper atmosphere.

He also came up with what is called a delta-shaped fin (the types we see on rockets today) and even a cone-shaped exhaust that would focus the power more directly and in a less diffused manner. And we can imagine that armies certainly liked the military capabilities that Haas’s ideas brought. So, his pacifism was ignored.

Of course, when Haas thought of all this, the practical application for such technology was years away.

After all, it was the 1550s.

On an Eldest Son

Karl’s dad died when he was seven and his little brother and only sibling was an infant. His memories of his birth father, understandably, are muddled and mixed. He was raised throughout the remainder of his youth by his doting mother (who used to be a professional singer as a younger woman) and his step-father and went to school in Prague. The step-father, a man named George, had little to do with him; he didn’t adopt Karl and was happy to send him off to school.

Karl apprenticed to a trading company in Italy. It didn’t suit him Following in his mother’s footsteps (and her deepest wishes), Karl then pursued music as a career when he found the business world too difficult to break into. He took music lessons with some of the most important Italian teachers in Milan, thinking that the occupation of his mother was also possible for him. Besides, it would please her greatly. He soon proved to be a gifted pianist, but he also knew that the music business was so fickle and insecure as a career.

Then, when the opportunity for a position with the Austrian government came along–and with it the promise of steady income, unlike the musician trade–Karl took it. He became an accountant for the government’s department in Milan and a translator for government officials who were stationed there. And so, the oldest son of the family became a life-long civil servant in Italy.

Karl soon realized that he made the correct choice of career in eschewing music for the security of public administration. The job allowed him to enjoy some of the finer things in life as he became an indispensable member of the Austrian delegation in Milan. He hobnobbed with Italian royalty, rubbed shoulders with musicians (with whom he could converse knowledgeably) and artists, and gained a reputation for being a hard worker who took his position seriously.

Karl eventually purchased a sizeable house in a village north of Milan in the foothills of the Alps not too far from Lake Lugano and Lake Como where he enjoyed his life before dying at age 74. Upon his death, he bequeathed the house to the village. As a life-long bachelor, Karl had no other heirs who would make a claim on the property. The grateful village erected a plaque on the house to Karl’s memory in honor of his gratitude.

Karl’s younger brother also never married. However, that little brother did decide to follow his mother’s example and pursue music. You see, music was in his blood because both of these boys also had a musical father. And it makes sense that the younger brother would pursue music as a career because he bore the same name as their father, the father that neither of them remembered well:

Wolfgang Mozart, Junior.