The Society of the Crossed Keys

THE WORLD OF SECURITY

IF I TRY TO FIND some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our Austrian Monarchy, then almost a thousand years old, seemed built to last, and the state itself was the ultimate guarantor of durability. The rights it gave its citizens were affirmed by our parliament, a freely elected assembly representing the people, and every duty was precisely defined. Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in the form of shiny gold coins, thus vouching for its own immutability. Everyone knew how much he owned and what his income was, what was allowed and what was not. Everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight. If you had wealth, you could work out precisely how much interest it would earn you every year, while civil servants and officers were reliably able to consult the calendar and see the year when they would be promoted and the year when they would retire. Every family had its own budget and knew how much could be spent on food and lodging, summer holidays and social functions, and of course you had to put a small sum aside for unforeseen contingencies such as illness and the doctor. If you owned a house you regarded it as a secure home for your children and grandchildren; property in town or country was passed on from generation to generation. While a baby was still in the cradle, you contributed the first small sums to its way through life, depositing them in a money box or savings account, a little reserve for the future. Everything in this wide domain was firmly established, immovably in its place, with the old Emperor at the top of the pyramid, and if he were to die the Austrians all knew (or thought they knew) that another emperor would take his place, and nothing in the well-calculated order of things would change. Anything radical or violent seemed impossible in such an age of reason.

This sense of security was an asset owned by millions, something desirable, an ideal of life held in common by all. Life was worth living only with such security, and wider and wider circles were eager to have their part in that valuable asset. At first only those who already owned property enjoyed advantages, but gradually the population at large came to aspire to them. The era of security was also the golden age of the insurance industry. You insured your house against fire and theft, your land against damage by storms and hail, your body against accidents and sickness; you bought annuities for your old age; you put insurance policies in your girl children’s cradles to provide their future dowries. Finally even the working classes organised themselves to demand a certain level of wages as the norm, as well as health insurance schemes. Servants saved for their old age, and paid ahead of time into policies for their own funerals. Only those who could look forward with confidence to the future enjoyed the present with an easy mind.

But for all the solidity and sobriety of people’s concept of life at the time, there was a dangerous and overweening pride in this touching belief that they could fence in their existence, leaving no gaps at all. In its liberal idealism, the nineteenth century was honestly convinced that it was on the direct and infallible road to the best of all possible worlds. The people of the time scornfully looked down on earlier epochs with their wars, famines and revolutions as periods when mankind had not yet come of age and was insufficiently enlightened. Now, however, it was a mere matter of decades before they finally saw an end to evil and violence, and in those days this faith in uninterrupted, inexorable ‘progress’ truly had the force of a religion. People believed in ‘progress’ more than in the Bible, and its gospel message seemed incontestably proven by the new miracles of science and technology that were revealed daily. In fact a general upward development became more and more evident, and at the end of that peaceful century it was swift and multifarious. Electric lights brightly lit the streets by night, replacing the dim lamps of the past; shops displayed their seductive new brilliance from the main streets of cities all the way to the suburbs; thanks to the telephone, people who were far apart could speak to each other; they were already racing along at new speeds in horseless carriages, and fulfilling the dream of Icarus by rising in the air. The comfort of upper-class dwellings now reached the homes of the middle classes; water no longer had to be drawn from wells or waterways; fires no longer had to be laboriously kindled in the hearth; hygiene was widespread, dirt was disappearing. People were becoming more attractive, stronger, healthier, and now that there were sporting activities to help them keep physically fit, cripples, goitres and mutilations were seen in the streets less and less frequently. Science, the archangel of progress, had worked all these miracles. Social welfare was also proceeding apace; from year to year more rights were granted to the individual, the judiciary laid down the law in a milder and more humane manner, even that ultimate problem, the poverty of the masses, no longer seemed insuperable. The right to vote was granted to circles flung wider and wider, and with it the opportunity for voters to defend their own interests legally. Sociologists and professors competed to make the lives of the proletariat healthier and even happier—no wonder that century basked in its own sense of achievement and regarded every decade, as it drew to a close, as the prelude to an even better one. People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches; our fathers were doggedly convinced of the infallibly binding power of tolerance and conciliation. They honestly thought that divergences between nations and religious faiths would gradually flow into a sense of common humanity, so that peace and security, the greatest of goods, would come to all mankind.

Today, now that the word ‘security’ has long been struck out of our vocabulary as a phantom, it is easy for us to smile at the optimistic delusion of that idealistically dazzled generation, which thought that the technical progress of mankind must inevitably result in an equally rapid moral rise. We who, in the new century, have learnt not to be surprised by any new outbreak of collective bestiality, and expect every new day to prove even worse than the day just past, are considerably more sceptical about prospects for the moral education of humanity. We have found that we have to agree with Freud, who saw our culture and civilisation as a thin veneer through which the destructive forces of the underworld could break at any moment. We have had to accustom ourselves slowly to living without firm ground beneath our feet, without laws, freedom or security. We long ago ceased believing in the religion of our fathers, their faith in the swift and enduring ascent of humanity. Having learnt our cruel lesson, we see their overhasty optimism as banal in the face of a catastrophe that, with a single blow, cancelled out a thousand years of human effort. But if it was only a delusion, it was a noble and wonderful delusion that our fathers served, more humane and fruitful than today’s slogans. And something in me, mysteriously and in spite of all I know and all my disappointments, cannot quite shake it off. What a man has taken into his bloodstream in childhood from the air of that time stays with him. And despite all that is dinned into my ears daily, all the humiliation and trials that I myself and countless of my companions in misfortune have experienced, I cannot quite deny the belief of my youth that in spite of everything, events will take a turn for the better. Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.

Now that a great storm has long since destroyed it, we know at last that our world of security was a castle in the air. Yet my parents lived in it as if it were a solid stone house. Not once did a storm or a cold draught invade their warm, comfortable existence. Of course they had special protection from cold winds; they were prosperous people who grew rich, then even very rich, and wealth comfortably draught-proofed your windows and walls in those times. Their way of life seems to me typical of the Jewish middle classes that had made significant contributions to Viennese culture, only to be exterminated root and branch by way of thanks, and I can say impersonally of their comfortable and quiet existence that, in that era of security, ten or twenty thousand Viennese families lived just as my parents did.

My father’s family came from Moravia. The Jewish communities there lived in small country towns and villages, on excellent terms with the peasants and the lower middle classes. They felt none of the sense of oppression suffered by the Jews of Galicia further to the east, nor did they share their impatience to forge ahead. Made strong and healthy by life in the country, they walked the fields in peace and security, just as the peasants of their native land did. Emancipated at an early date from orthodox religious observance, they were passionate supporters of the contemporary cult of ‘progress’, and in the political era of liberalism they provided parliament with its most respected deputies. When they moved from their places of origin to Vienna, they adapted with remarkable speed to a higher cultural sphere, and their personal rise was closely linked to the general economic upswing of the times. Here again, my family was entirely typical in its development. My paternal grandfather had sold manufactured goods. Then, in the second half of the century, came the industrial boom in Austria. Mechanical looms and spinning machines imported from Britain rationalised manufacturing, bringing a great reduction in costs by comparison with traditional handloom weaving, and Jewish businessmen, with their gift for commercial acumen and their international perspective, were the first in Austria to recognise the necessity of switching to industrial production and the rewards it would bring. Usually beginning with only a small capital sum, they founded swiftly erected factories, initially driven by water power, which gradually expanded to become the mighty Bohemian textiles industry that dominated all Austria and the Balkans. So while my grandfather, a middleman dealing in ready-made products, was a typical representative of the previous generation, my father moved firmly into the modern era at the age of thirty-three by founding a small weaving mill in northern Bohemia. Over the years, he slowly and carefully built it up into a business of considerable size.

Such caution in expanding the business, even when the economic situation looked enticingly favourable, was very much in the spirit of the times. It also exactly suited my father’s reserved and far from avaricious nature. He had taken the ‘safety first’ creed of his epoch as his own watchword; it was more important to him to own a sound business (the ideal of something sound and solid was also characteristic of the period), with the force of his own capital behind it, than to extend it to huge dimensions by taking out bank loans and mortgages. The one thing of which he was truly proud was that no one had ever in his life seen his name on a promissory note, and he had never failed to be in credit with his bank—which of course was the soundest bank of all, the Kreditanstalt founded by the Rothschilds. Any kind of transaction carrying the faintest suggestion of risk was anathema to him, and he never in all his years took part in any foreign business dealings. The fact that he still gradually became rich, and then even richer, was not the result of bold speculation or particularly farsighted operations, but of adapting to the general method of that cautious period, expending only a modest part of his income and consequently, from year to year, making an increasingly large contribution to the capital of the business. Like most of his generation, my father would have considered anyone who cheerfully spent half his annual income without thought for the future a dubious wastrel at the very least. Providing for the future was another recurrent idea in that age of security. Steadily setting profits aside meant rising prosperity. In addition, the state had no plans to take more than a few per cent of even the largest incomes in taxes, while state and industrial securities brought in good rates of interest, so that making money was quite a passive process for the well-to-do. And it was worth it; the savings of the thrifty were not stolen, as they are during times of inflation; no pressure was put on sound businesses, and even those who were particularly patient and refrained from any kind of speculation made good profits. Thanks to adapting to the general system of his time, in his fifties my father could be regarded as a very prosperous man by international standards. But the lifestyle of our family lagged well behind the increasingly rapid rise of its property. We did gradually acquire small comforts. We moved from a small apartment to a larger one, we hired a car for outings on spring afternoons, we travelled second class by train and booked a sleeper, but it was not until he was fifty that my father first allowed himself the luxury of taking my mother to Nice for a month in the winter. All things considered, he stuck to his basic attitude of enjoying wealth by knowing that he had it, rather than by making a great display of it. Even as a millionaire, my father never smoked any imported product but—like Emperor Franz Joseph with his cheap Virginia tobacco—the ordinary Trabuco cigars of the time, and when he played cards it was only for small stakes. He inflexibly maintained his restraint and his comfortable but discreet way of life. Although he was very much better educated than most of his colleagues, and culturally superior to them—he played the piano extremely well, wrote a good, clear hand, spoke French and English—he firmly declined any distinctions or honorary positions, and never in his life either aspired to or accepted any honour or dignity of the kind frequently offered to him in his position as a leading industrialist. His secret pride in never having asked anyone for anything, never having been obliged to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, meant more to him than any outward show.

There inevitably comes a moment in every man’s life when he sees his father reflected in himself. That preference for privacy, for an anonymous way of life, is beginning to develop in me more and more strongly as the years go by, though in fact it runs contrary to my profession, which is bound to make my name and person to some extent public. But out of the same secret pride as his, I have always declined any form of outward honour, never accepted any decoration or title, or the presidency of any association. I have never been a member of an academy, nor have I sat on the board of any company or on any jury panel. Attending a festive occasion is something of an ordeal for me, and the mere thought of asking someone a favour is enough—even if my request were to be made through a third party—to make my mouth dry up before uttering the first word. I know that such inhibitions are out of tune with the times, in a world where we can remain free only through cunning and evasion, and where, as Goethe wisely said, “in the general throng, many a fool receives decorations and titles.” But my father in me, with his secret pride, makes me hold back, and I cannot resist him. After all, it is my father I have to thank for what I feel is, perhaps, my one secure possession: my sense of inner freedom.

My mother, whose maiden name was Brettauer, was not of the same origin. Hers was an international family. She was born in Ancona in Italy, and Italian and German had both been the languages of her childhood. When she was discussing something with her mother, my grandmother or her sister, and they did not want the servants to know what they were saying, they would switch to Italian. From my earliest youth I was familiar with risotto, artichokes (still a rarity in Vienna at the time) and the other specialities of Mediterranean cookery, and whenever I visited Italy later I immediately felt at home. But my mother’s family was not by any means Italian, and saw itself as more cosmopolitan than anything else. The Brettauers, who had originally owned a bank, came from Hohenems, a small town on the Swiss border, and spread all over the world at an early date on the model of the great Jewish banking families, although of course on a much smaller scale. Some went to St Gallen, others to Vienna and Paris. My grandfather went to Italy, an uncle to New York, and these international contacts gave the family more sophistication, a wider outlook, and a certain arrogance. There were no small tradesmen in the family, no brokers, they were all bankers, company directors, professors, lawyers and medical doctors; everyone spoke several languages, and I remember how naturally the conversation around my aunt’s table in Paris moved from one language to another. It was a family that thought well of itself, and when a girl from one of its poorer branches reached marriageable age, everyone contributed to providing her with a good dowry so that she need not marry ‘beneath herself’. As a leading industrialist, my father was respected, but my mother, although theirs was the happiest of marriages, would never have allowed his relations to consider themselves the equals of hers. It was impossible to root out the pride of their descent from a ‘good family’ from the Brettauers, and in later years, if one of them wanted to show me particular goodwill, he would condescend to say, “You’re more of a Brettauer really”, as if stating approvingly that I took after the right side of my family.

This kind of distinction, claimed for themselves by many Jewish families, sometimes amused and sometimes annoyed my brother and me, even as children. We were always hearing that certain persons were ‘refined’, while others were less so. Enquiries were made about any new friends of ours—were they from a ‘good family’?—and every ramification of their origins in respect of both family and fortune was investigated. This constant classification, which was in fact the main subject of all family and social conversations, seemed to us at the time ridiculous and snobbish, since after all, the only difference between one Jewish family and another was whether it had left the ghetto fifty or a hundred years ago. Only much later did I realise that this idea of the ‘good family’, which seemed to us boys the farcical parody of an artificial pseudo-aristocracy, expresses one of the most mysterious but deeply felt tendencies in the Jewish nature. It is generally assumed that getting rich is a Jew’s true and typical aim in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting rich, to a Jew, is only an interim stage, a means to his real end, by no means his aim in itself. The true desire of a Jew, his inbuilt ideal, is to rise to a higher social plane by becoming an intellectual. Even among Orthodox Eastern Jews, in whom the failings as well as the virtues of the Jewish people as a whole are more strongly marked, this supreme desire to be an intellectual finds graphic expression going beyond merely material considerations—the devout Biblical scholar has far higher status within the community than a rich man. Even the most prosperous Jew would rather marry his daughter to an indigent intellectual than a merchant. This high regard for intellectuals runs through all classes of Jewish society, and the poorest pedlar who carries his pack through wind and weather will try to give at least one son the chance of studying at university, however great the sacrifices he must make, and will consider it an honour to the entire family that one of them is clearly regarded as an intellectual: a professor, a scholar, a musician. It is as if such a man’s achievements ennobled them all. Unconsciously, something in a Jew seeks to escape the morally dubious, mean, petty and pernicious associations of trade clinging to all that is merely business, and rise to the purer sphere of the intellect where money is not a consideration, as if, like a Wagnerian character, he were trying to break the curse of gold laid on himself and his entire race. Among Jews, then, the urge to make a fortune is nearly always exhausted within two or at most three generations of a family, and even the mightiest dynasts find that their sons are unwilling to take over the family banks and factories, the prosperous businesses built up and expanded by the previous generation. It is no coincidence that Lord Rothschild became an ornithologist, one of the Warburgs an art historian, one of the Cassirer family was a philosopher, one of the Sassoons a poet; they were all obeying the same unconscious urge to liberate themselves from the mere cold earning of money that has restricted Jewish life, and perhaps this flight to the intellectual sphere even expresses a secret longing to exchange their Jewish identity for one that is universally human. So a ‘good’ family means more than a mere claim to social status; it also denotes a Jewish way of life that, by adjusting to another and perhaps more universal culture, has freed itself or is freeing itself from all the drawbacks and constraints and pettiness forced upon it by the ghetto. Admittedly, it is one of the eternal paradoxes of the Jewish destiny that this flight into intellectual realms has now, because of the disproportionately large number of Jews in the intellectual professions, become as fatal as their earlier restriction to the material sphere.[1]

In hardly any other European city was the urge towards culture as passionate as in Vienna. For the very reason that for centuries Austria and its monarchy had been neither politically ambitious nor particularly successful in its military ventures, native pride had focused most strongly on distinction in artistic achievement. The most important and valuable provinces of the old Habsburg empire that once ruled Europe—German and Italian, Flemish and Walloon—had seceded long ago, but the capital city was still intact in its old glory as the sanctuary of the court, the guardian of a millennial tradition. The Romans had laid the foundation stones of that city as a castrum, a far-flung outpost to protect Latin civilisation from the barbarians, and over a thousand years later the Ottoman attack on the West was repelled outside the walls of Vienna. The Nibelungs had come here, the immortal Pleiades of music shone down on the world from this city, Gluck, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Johann Strauss, all the currents of European culture had merged in this place. At court and among the nobility and the common people alike, German elements were linked with Slavonic, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, French and Flemish. It was the peculiar genius of Vienna, the city of music, to resolve all these contrasts harmoniously in something new and unique, specifically Austrian and Viennese. Open-minded and particularly receptive, the city attracted the most disparate of forces, relaxed their tensions, eased and placated them. It was pleasant to live here, in this atmosphere of intellectual tolerance, and unconsciously every citizen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world.

This art of adaptation, of gentle and musical transitions, was evident even in the outward appearance of the city. Growing slowly over the centuries, developing organically from its centre, with its two million inhabitants Vienna had a large enough population to offer all the luxury and diversity of a metropolis, and yet it was not so vast that it was cut off from nature, like London or New York. The buildings on the edge of the city were reflected in the mighty waters of the Danube and looked out over the wide plain, merged with gardens and fields or climbed the last gently undulating green and wooded foothills of the Alps. You hardly noticed where nature ended and the city began, they made way for one another without resistance or contradiction. At the centre, in turn, you felt that the city had grown like a tree, forming ring after ring, and instead of the old ramparts of the fortifications, the Ringstrasse enclosed the innermost, precious core with its grand houses. In that core, the old palaces of the court and the nobility spoke the language of history in stone; here Beethoven had played for the Lichnowskys; there Haydn had stayed with the Esterházys; the premiere of his Creation was given in the old university; the Hofburg saw generations of emperors, Napoleon took up residence at Schönbrunn Palace; the united rulers of Christendom met in St Stephen’s Cathedral to give thanks for their salvation from the Turks, the university saw countless luminaries of scholarship and science in its walls. Among these buildings the new architecture rose, proud and magnificent, with shining avenues and glittering emporiums. But old Vienna had as little to do with the new city as dressed stone has to do with nature. It was wonderful to live in this city, which hospitably welcomed strangers and gave of itself freely; it was natural to enjoy life in its light atmosphere, full of elation and merriment like the air of Paris. Vienna, as everyone knew, was an epicurean city—however, what does culture mean but taking the raw material of life and enticing from it its finest, most delicate and subtle aspects by means of art and love? The people of Vienna were gourmets who appreciated good food and good wine, fresh and astringent beer, lavish desserts and tortes, but they also demanded subtler pleasures. To make music, dance, produce plays, converse well, behave pleasingly and show good taste were arts much cultivated here. Neither military, political nor commercial matters held first place in the lives of individuals or society as a whole; when the average Viennese citizen looked at his morning paper, his eye generally went first not to parliamentary debates or foreign affairs but to the theatrical repertory, which assumed an importance in public life hardly comprehensible in other cities. For to the Viennese and indeed the Austrians the imperial theatre, the Burgtheater, was more than just a stage on which actors performed dramatic works; it was a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, a bright mirror in which society could study itself, the one true cartigiano of good taste. In an actor at the imperial theatre, spectators saw an example of the way to dress, enter a room, make conversation, were shown which words a man of taste might use and which should be avoided. The stage was not just a place of entertainment but a spoken, three-dimensional manual of good conduct and correct pronunciation, and an aura of esteem, rather like a saint’s halo, surrounded all who had even the faintest connection with the court theatre. The Prime Minister, the richest magnate, could walk through the streets of Vienna and no one would turn to stare, but every salesgirl and every cab driver would recognise an actor at the court theatre or an operatic diva. When we boys had seen one of them pass by (we all collected their pictures and autographs) we proudly told each other, and this almost religious personality cult even extended to their entourages; Adolf von Sonnenthal’s barber, Josef Kainz’s cab driver were regarded with awe and secretly envied. Young dandies were proud to have their clothes made by the tailors patronised by those actors. A notable anniversary in a famous actor’s career, or a great actor’s funeral, was an event overshadowing all the political news. It was every Viennese dramatist’s dream to be performed at the Burgtheater, a distinction that meant a kind of ennoblement for life and brought with it a series of benefits such as free theatre tickets for life and invitations to all official occasions, because you had been a guest in an imperial house. I still remember the solemn manner of my own reception. The director of the Burgtheater had asked me to visit his office in the morning, where he informed me—after first offering his congratulations—that the theatre had accepted my play. When I got home that evening, I found his visiting card in my apartment. Although I was only a young man of twenty-six, he had formally returned my call; my mere acceptance as an author writing for the imperial stage had made me a gentleman whom the director of that institution must treat as on a par with himself. And what went on at the theatre indirectly affected every individual, even someone who had no direct connection with it whatsoever. I remember, for instance, a day in my earliest youth when our cook burst into the sitting room with tears in her eyes: she had just heard that Charlotte Wolter, the star actress of the Burgtheater, had died. The grotesque aspect of her extravagant grief, of course, lay in the fact that our old, semi-literate cook had never once been to that distinguished theatre herself, and had never seen Charlotte Wolter either on stage or in real life, but in Vienna a great Austrian actress was so much part of the common property of the entire city that even those entirely unconnected with her felt her death was a catastrophe. Every loss, the death of a popular singer or artist, inevitably became an occasion for national mourning. When the old Burgtheater where the premiere of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro had been given was to be demolished, Viennese high society gathered there in a mood of solemn emotion, and no sooner had the curtain fallen than everyone raced on stage to take home at least a splinter from the boards that had been trodden by their favourite artists as a relic. Even decades later, these plain wooden splinters were kept in precious caskets in many bourgeois households, just as splinters of the Holy Cross are preserved in churches.

In my own day, we acted no more rationally when the so-called Bösendorfer Saal was torn down. In itself that little concert hall, which was reserved exclusively for chamber music, was a modest building, not suggesting any great artistic distinction. It had been Prince Liechtenstein’s riding school, and was adapted for musical purposes only by the addition of interior boarding, without any ostentation. But it had the resonance of an old violin, and it was a sacred place to music-lovers because Chopin and Brahms, Liszt and Rubinstein had given recitals there, and many of the famous quartets had first performed in this hall. And now it was to make way for a new purpose-built concert hall; such a thing was beyond the understanding of those of us who had spent many memorable hours there. When the last bars of Beethoven died away, played better than ever by the Rosé Quartet, none of the audience left their seats. We shouted and applauded, some of the women were sobbing with emotion, no one was willing to admit that this was goodbye. The lights in the hall were extinguished to clear us out of the place. Still none of the four or five hundred people present left their seats. We stayed for half-an-hour, an hour, as if our presence could save the sacred hall by force. And as students, how we campaigned, with petitions and demonstrations and articles, to keep the house where Beethoven died from demolition! Whenever one of these historic Viennese buildings went, it was as if a part of our souls were being torn from our bodies.

This fanatical love of art, in particular the art of the theatre, was common to all classes of society in Vienna. Its hundreds of years of tradition had made the city itself a place with a clearly ordered and also—as I once wrote myself—a wonderfully orchestrated structure. The imperial house still set the tone, while the imperial palace represented not only the spatial centre of the city but also the supranational nature of the monarchy. Around that palace lay the grand residences of the Austrian, Polish, Czech and Hungarian nobility, forming what might be called a second rampart. Then came the houses of the members of ‘good society’—the minor nobility, higher civil servants, captains of industry and the ‘old families’. Below them came the lower middle class and the proletariat. All these social classes lived in their own circles and even in their own districts of the city: at the centre the great noblemen in their palaces, the diplomats in District Three, businessmen and industrialists near the Ringstrasse, the lower middle class in the inner districts, Districts Two to Nine, the proletariat on the periphery. However, they all came into contact with each other at the theatre and for major festivities such as the Floral Parade, when three hundred thousand spectators enthusiastically greeted the ‘upper ten thousand’ in their beautifully decorated carriages. Everything in Vienna that expressed itself in colour or music became an occasion for festivities: religious spectacles like the Corpus Christi procession, the military parades, performances by the outdoor musicians of the Burgmusik, even funerals attracted enthusiastic audiences, and it was the ambition of every true Viennese to end up as ‘a handsome corpse’ with a fine funeral procession and many companions escorting him on his last journey. A genuine Viennese turned even his death into a fine show for others to enjoy. The entire city was united in this sensitivity to everything colourful, musical and festive, in this delight in theatrical spectacle as a playful reflection of life, whether on the stage or in real space and time.

It was not difficult to make fun of the theatrical mania of the Viennese, whose delight in tracking down the tiniest details of the lives of their favourites sometimes became grotesque, and our Austrian political indolence and economic backwardness, by comparison with the determined German Reich next door, may indeed be partly ascribed to our overrating of sensuous pleasure. But in cultural terms the very high value placed on the arts created something unique—a great veneration for all artistic achievement, leading over the centuries to unequalled expertise, and finally, thanks in its own turn to that expertise, to outstandingly high standards in all cultural fields. An artist always feels most at ease and at the same time most inspired in a place where he is valued, even overvalued. Art always reaches its zenith where it is important in the life of an entire nation. And just as Renaissance Florence and Rome attracted painters and trained them to achieve greatness, because every one of them felt bound to keep outdoing others and himself, competing in front of the citizens as a whole, so musicians and actors knew how important they were in Vienna. At the Opera House, in the Burgtheater, nothing was overlooked, every wrong note was instantly detected, every incorrect entry or abridged passage deplored, and this keen surveillance was exercised not only by professional critics at premieres, but day after day by the alert ear of the public at large, honed as it was by constant comparison. While the attitude in politics, the administration and morality was easygoing, and one made allowances for a slipshod piece of work and showed leniency for an offence, no quarter was given in artistic matters. Here the honour of the city was at stake. Every singer, every actor, every musician must constantly give of his best, or his career was finished. It was wonderful to be a darling of the public in Vienna, but it was not easy to maintain that position. No lowering of standards was forgiven. And this awareness of being under constant and pitiless observation forced every artist in Vienna to do his best, bringing the art of the city as a whole to a very high level. All of us who lived there in our youth have brought a stern and implacable standard of artistic performance into our lives from those years. Those who saw discipline exercised down to the smallest detail at the Opera House under Gustav Mahler, and vitality combined with meticulous accuracy taken as the norm in music played by the Philharmonic, are rarely entirely satisfied with theatrical or musical performances today. But we also learnt to criticise our own artistic performance; the example before us was, and still is, a high level of achievement inculcated into rising artists in few other cities in the world. This understanding of the right rhythm and momentum went deep into the people themselves, for even the most unassuming citizen sitting over his Heurige,[2] demanded good music from the wind band just as he expected good value from the landlord. Similarly, people knew exactly which military band played with most verve in the Prater, whether it was the German Masters or the Hungarians. Anyone who lived in Vienna absorbed a sense of rhythm as if it were in the air. And just as that musicality expressed itself in writers in the particular attention we paid to writing particularly well-turned prose, in others the sense of delicacy was expressed in social attitudes and daily life. In what was known as ‘high society’, a Viennese with no appreciation of art or pleasure in form was unimaginable, but even among the lower classes the lives of the poorest showed a certain feeling for beauty drawn from the surrounding landscape and genial human attitudes. You were not truly Viennese without a love for culture, a bent for both enjoying and assessing the prodigality of life as something sacred.

For Jews, adaptation to the human or national environment in which they lived was not only a measure taken for their own protection, but also a deeply felt private need. Their desire for a homeland, for peace, repose and security, a place where they would not be strangers, impelled them to form a passionate attachment to the culture around them. And nowhere else, except for Spain in the fifteenth century, were such bonds more happily and productively forged than in Austria. Here the Jews who had been settled in the imperial city for over two hundred years met people who took life lightly and were naturally easygoing, while under that apparently light-hearted surface they shared the deep Jewish instinct for intellectual and aesthetic values. And the two came together all the more easily in Vienna, where they found a personal task waiting for them, because over the last century Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy. In the eighteenth century Maria Theresia had had her daughters taught the pleasures of music, Joseph II had discussed Mozart’s operas with him as a connoisseur, Leopold II was a composer himself, but the later emperors Franz II and Ferdinand had no kind of interest in art, and Emperor Franz Joseph, who in his eighty years of life never read or even picked up a book other than the Army List, even felt a decided antipathy to music. Similarly, the great noblemen had abandoned their former position as patrons; gone were the glorious days when the Esterházys gave house-room to Haydn, when the Lobkowitzes and Kinskys and Waldsteins competed for the first performance of a work by Beethoven to be given in their palaces, when Countess Thun went on her knees to that great daemonic figure asking him not to withdraw Fidelio from the Opera. Even Wagner, Brahms, Johann Strauss and Hugo Wolf no longer received the slightest support from them; the citizens of Vienna had to step into the breach to keep up the old high standard of the Philharmonic concerts and enable painters and sculptors to make a living, and it was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance. They had always loved the city, taking it to their hearts when they settled there, but it was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese. In fact they exerted little influence otherwise in public life; the lustre of the imperial house left all private wealth in the shade, high positions in the leadership of the state were in hereditary hands, diplomacy was reserved for the aristocracy, the army and the higher reaches of the civil service for the old-established families, and the Jews did not even try to look so high as to force their way into those privileged circles. They tactfully respected such traditional privileges as something to be taken for granted. I remember, for instance, that my father never in his life ate at Sacher’s, not for reasons of economy—the price difference between Sacher and the other great hotels was ridiculously small—but out of a natural instinct for preserving a distance. He would have felt it embarrassing or unseemly to sit at the table next to one occupied by, say, Prince Schwarzenberg or Prince Lobkowitz. It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights, because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone in the city, and the part played by the Jewish bourgeoisie in Viennese culture, through the aid and patronage it offered, was immeasurable. They were the real public, they filled seats at the theatre and in concert halls, they bought books and pictures, visited exhibitions, championed and encouraged new trends everywhere with minds that were more flexible, less weighed down by tradition. They had built up virtually all the great art collections of the nineteenth century, they had made almost all the artistic experiments of the time possible. Without the constant interest of the Jewish bourgeoisie as stimulation, at a time when the court was indolent and the aristocracy and the Christian millionaires preferred to spend money on racing stables and hunts rather than encouraging art, Vienna would have lagged as far behind Berlin artistically as Austria did behind the German Reich in politics. Anyone wishing to introduce a novelty to Vienna, anyone from outside seeking understanding and an audience there, had to rely on the Jewish bourgeoisie. When a single attempt was made in the anti-Semitic period[3] to found a so-called National Theatre, there were no playwrights or actors or audiences available; after a few months the ‘National Theatre’ failed miserably, and that example first made it clear that nine-tenths of what the world of the nineteenth century celebrated as Viennese culture was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna.

For in recent years the Viennese Jews—like those of Spain before their similarly tragic downfall—had been artistically creative, not in any specifically Jewish style but, with miraculous empathy, giving especially intense expression to all that was Austrian and Viennese. As composers, Goldmark, Gustav Mahler and Schönberg were figures of international stature; Oscar Straus, Leo Fall and Kálmán brought the traditional waltz and operetta to new heights; Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Beer-Hofmann and Peter Altenberg gave Viennese literature new status in Europe, a rank that it had never before reached even at the time of Grillparzer and Stifter. Sonnenthal and Max Reinhardt revived the international reputation of Vienna as a city of the theatre; Freud and the great scientific experts attracted attention to the famous and ancient university—everywhere, as scholars, virtuoso musicians, painters, directors, architects, journalists, they claimed high and sometimes the highest positions in the intellectual life of Vienna. Through their passionate love of the city and their adaptability they had become entirely assimilated, and were happy to serve the reputation of Austria; they felt that the assertion of their Austrian identity was their vocation. In fact, it must be said in all honesty that a good part, if not the greater part, of all that is admired today in Europe and America as the expression of a newly revived Austrian culture in music, literature, the theatre, the art trade, was the work of the Jews of Vienna, whose intellectual drive, dating back for thousands of years, brought them to a peak of achievement. Here intellectual energy that had lost its sense of direction through the centuries found a tradition that was already a little weary, nurtured it, revived and refined it, and with tireless activity injected new strength into it. Only the following decades would show what a crime it was when an attempt was made to force Vienna—a place combining the most heterogeneous elements in its atmosphere and culture, reaching out intellectually beyond national borders—into the new mould of a nationalist and thus a provincial city. For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Anyone who lived and worked there felt free of narrow-minded prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.

We lived well, we lived with light hearts and minds at ease in old Vienna, and the Germans to the north looked down with some annoyance and scorn at us, their neighbours on the Danube who, instead of being capable and efficient like them and observing strict principles of order, indulged themselves, ate well, enjoyed parties and the theatre, and made excellent music on those occasions. Instead of cultivating German efficiency, which finally embittered and destroyed the lives of all other peoples, instead of the greedy will of Germany to rise supreme and forge a way forward, we Viennese loved to chat at our ease; we liked pleasant social gatherings, and in a kindly and perhaps lax spirit of concord we let all have their share without grudging it. ‘Live and let live’ was famous as a Viennese principle, a principle that still seems to me more humane than any categorical imperative, and it reigned supreme in all social circles. Poor and rich, Czechs and Germans, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together in spite of the occasional needling remark, and even political and social movements did not have that terrible spitefulness that eventually made its way into the bloodstream of the time as a poisonous residue of the First World War. In the old Austria you fought chivalrously; you might complain in the newspapers and parliament, but then the deputies, after delivering their Ciceronian tirades, would sit happily together over coffee or a beer, talking on familiar terms. Even when Lueger, leader of the anti-Semitic party,[4] became mayor of the city, nothing changed in private social relationships, and I personally must confess that I never felt the slightest coldness or scorn for me as a Jew either in school, at the university, or in literature. Hatred between country and country, nation and nation, the occupants of one table and those of another, did not yet leap to the eye daily from the newspaper, it did not divide human beings from other human beings, nations from other nations. The herd instinct of the mob was not yet as offensively powerful in public life as it is today; freedom in what you did or did not do in private life was something taken for granted—which is hardly imaginable now—and toleration was not, as it is today, deplored as weakness and debility, but was praised as an ethical force.

For I was not born into a century of passion. It was a well-ordered world with a clear social structure and easy transitions between the parts of that structure, a world without haste. The rhythm of the new speed had not yet transferred itself from machinery, the motor car, the telephone and the aeroplane to humanity. Time and age were judged by different criteria. People lived a more leisurely life, and when I try to picture the figures of the adults who played a large part in my childhood it strikes me how many of them grew stout before their time. My father, my uncle, my teacher, the salesmen in shops, the musicians in the Philharmonic at their music desks were all portly, ‘dignified’ men at the age of forty. They walked slowly, they spoke in measured tones, and in conversation they stroked their well-groomed beards, which were often already grey. But grey hair was only another mark of dignity, and a ‘man of mature years’ deliberately avoided the gestures and high sprits of youth as something unseemly. Even in my earliest childhood, when my father was not yet forty, I cannot remember ever seeing him run up or down a staircase, or indeed do anything in visible haste. Haste was not only regarded as bad form, it was in fact superfluous, since in that stable bourgeois world with its countless little safeguards nothing sudden ever happened. Those disasters that did take place on the periphery of our world did not penetrate the well-lined walls of our secure life. The Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, even the Balkan Wars did not make any deep impression on my parents’ lives. They skimmed all the war reporting in the paper as indifferently as they looked at the sports headlines. And what, indeed, did anything that happened outside Austria have to do with them, what change did it bring to their lives? In the serene epoch of their Austria, there was no upheaval in the state, no abrupt destruction of their values. Once, when securities fell by four or five points on the stock exchange, it was called a ‘crash’ and discussed with furrowed brow as a catastrophe. People complained of high taxes more out of habit that from any real conviction, and by comparison with those of the post-war period the taxes then were only a kind of little tip you gave the state. The most precise stipulations were laid down in wills for ways to protect grandsons and great-grandsons from any loss of property, as if some kind of invisible IOU guaranteed safety from the eternal powers, and meanwhile people lived comfortably and tended their small worries like obedient domestic pets who were not really to be feared. When an old newspaper from those days happens to fall into my hands, and I read the excitable reports of some small local council election, when I try to remember the plays at the Burgtheater with their tiny problems, or think of the disproportionate agitation of our youthful debates on fundamentally unimportant matters, I cannot help smiling. How Lilliputian all those anxieties were, how serene that time! The generation of my parents and grandparents was better off, they lived their lives from one end to the other quietly in a straight, clear line. All the same, I do not know whether I envy them. For they drowsed their lives away remote from all true bitterness, from the malice and force of destiny; they knew nothing about all those crises and problems that oppress the heart but at the same time greatly enlarge it. How little they knew, stumbling along in security and prosperity and comfort, that life can also mean excess and tension, constant surprise, can be turned upside down; how little they guessed in their touching liberal optimism that every new day dawning outside the window could shatter human lives. Even in their darkest nights they never dreamt how dangerous human beings can be, or then again how much power they can have to survive dangers and surmount trials. We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.

EROS MATUTINUS

DURING THOSE EIGHT YEARS at grammar school, one very personal fact affected us all—starting as children of ten, we gradually became sexually mature young people of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Nature began to assert its rights. These days, the awakening of puberty seems to be an entirely private matter, to be dealt with for themselves by all young people as they grow up, and it does not at first glance appear at all suitable for public discussion. For our generation, however, the crisis of puberty reached beyond its own real sphere. At the same time, it brought an awakening in another sense—it taught us to look more critically, for the first time, at the world of the society in which we had grown up and its conventions. Children and even adolescents are generally inclined to conform respectfully to the laws of their environment at first. But they submit to the conventions enjoined upon them only as long as they see everyone else genuinely observing them. A single instance of mendacity in teachers or parents will inevitably make the young turn a distrustful and thus a sharper eye on their surroundings as a whole. And it did not take us long to discover that all those authorities whom we had so far trusted—school, the family, public morality—were remarkably insincere on one point—the subject of sexuality. Worse than that, they wanted us, too, to dissimulate and cover up anything we did in that respect.

The fact is that thirty or forty years ago, thinking on such subjects was not what it is in the world of today. Perhaps there has never been such a total transformation in any area of public life within a single human generation as here, in the relationship between the sexes, and it was brought about by a whole series of factors—the emancipation of women, Freudian psychoanalysis, cultivation of physical fitness through sport, the way in which the young have claimed independence. If we try to pin down the difference between the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century, which was essentially Victorian, and the more liberal uninhibited attitudes of the present, we come closest, perhaps, to the heart of the matter by saying that in the nineteenth century the question of sexuality was anxiously avoided because of a sense of inner insecurity. Previous eras which were still openly religious, in particular the strict puritanical period, had an easier time of it. Imbued by a genuine conviction that the demands of the flesh were the Devil’s work, and physical desire was sinful and licentious, the authorities of the Middle Ages tackled the problem with a stern ban on most sexual activity, and enforced their harsh morality, especially in Calvinist Geneva, by exacting cruel punishments. Our own century, however, a tolerant epoch that long ago stopped believing in the Devil and hardly believed in God any more, could not quite summon up the courage for such outright condemnation, but viewed sexuality as an anarchic and therefore disruptive force, something that could not be fitted into its ethical system and must not move into the light of day, because any form of extramarital free love offended bourgeois ‘decency’. A curious compromise was found to resolve this dilemma. While not actually forbidding a young man to engage in sexual activity, morality confined itself to insisting that he must deal with that embarrassing business by hushing it up. Perhaps sexuality could not be eradicated from the polite world, but at least it should not be visible. By tacit agreement, therefore, the whole difficult complex of problems was not to be mentioned in public, at school, or at home, and everything that could remind anyone of its existence was to be suppressed.

We, who have known since Freud that those who try to suppress natural instincts from the conscious mind are not eradicating them but only, and dangerously, shifting them into the unconscious, find it easy to smile at the ignorance of that naive policy of keeping mum. But the entire nineteenth century suffered from the delusion that all conflicts could be resolved by reason, and the more you hid your natural instincts the more you tempered your anarchic forces, so that if young people were not enlightened about the existence of their own sexuality they would forget it. In this deluded belief that you could moderate something by ignoring it, all the authorities agreed on a joint boycott imposed by means of hermetic silence. The churches offering pastoral care, schools, salons and the law courts, books and newspapers, fashion and custom all on principle avoided any mention of the matter, and to its discredit even science, which should have taken on the task of confronting all problems directly, also agreed to consider that what was natural was dirty, naturalia sunt turpia.[1] Science capitulated on the pretext that it was beneath its dignity to study such indecent subjects. Wherever you look in the books of the period—philosophical, legal, even medical—you find that by common consent every mention of the subject is anxiously avoided. When experts on criminal law met at conferences to discuss the introduction of humane practices to prisons and the moral damage done to inmates by life in jail, they scurried timidly past the real central problem. Although in many cases neurologists were perfectly well acquainted with the causes of a number of hysterical disorders, they were equally unwilling to tackle the subject, and we read in Freud how even his revered teacher Charcot admitted to him privately that he knew the real cause of these cases but could never say so publicly. Least of all might any writer of belles-lettres venture to give an honest account of such subjects, because that branch of literature was concerned only with the aesthetically beautiful. While in earlier centuries authors did not shrink from presenting an honest and all-inclusive picture of the culture of their time, so that in Defoe, the Abbé Prévost, Fielding and Rétif de la Bretonne we can still read unvarnished descriptions of the true state of affairs, the nineteenth century saw fit only to show the ‘sensitive’ and sublime, nothing embarrassing but true. Consequently you will find scarcely a fleeting mention in the literature of that era of all the perils and dark confusions of young city-dwellers of the time. Even when a writer boldly mentioned prostitution, he felt he should refine the subject, presenting a perfumed heroine as the Lady of the Camellias.[2] So we are faced with the strange fact that if young people today, wanting to know how their counterparts of the last couple of generations made their way through life, open the novels of even the great writers of that time, the works of Dickens and Thackeray, Gottfried Keller and Bjørnson,[3] they will find—except in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who as Russians stood outside the pseudo-idealism of Europe—accounts of nothing but sublimated, toned-down love affairs because the pressures of the time inhibited that whole generation in its freedom of expression. And nothing more clearly illustrates the almost hysterical over-sensitivity of our forebears’ moral sense and the atmosphere in which they lived, unimaginable today, than the fact that even this literary restraint was not enough. Can anyone now understand how such a down-to-earth novel as Madame Bovary could be banned by a French court on the grounds of indecency? Or how Zola’s novels, in my own youth, could be considered pornographic, or so well-balanced a writer of neoclassical epic works as Thomas Hardy could arouse indignation in England and America? Reserved as they were on the subject, these books had given away too much of the truth.

But we grew up in this unhealthily musty air, drenched with sultry perfumes. The dishonest and psychologically unrealistic morality of covering up sexuality and keeping it quiet weighed down on us in our youth, and as, thanks to the solidarity maintained in this policy of hushing things up, there were no proper accounts available in literature and cultural history, it may not be easy for my readers to reconstruct what had actually happened, incredible as it might seem. However, there is one good point of reference; we need only look at fashion, because the fashions of a period, visibly expressing its tastes, betray its morality. It can be no coincidence that as I write now, in 1940, the entire audience in every town and village all over Europe or America bursts into wholehearted merriment when society men and women of 1900 appear on the cinema screen in the costumes of the time. The most naive of us today will smile at those strange figures of the past, seeing them as caricatures, idiots decked out in unnatural, uncomfortable, unhygienic and impractical clothing. Even we, who saw our mothers, aunts and girlfriends wearing those absurd gowns and thought them equally ridiculous when we were boys, feel it is like a strange dream for a whole generation to have submitted to such stupid costumes without protest. The men’s fashions of the time—high, stiff collars, one of them known as the ‘patricide’, so stiff that they ruled out any ease of movement, the black frock coats with their flowing tails, top hats resembling chimney pipes, also provoke laughter. But most ridiculous of all is a lady of the past in her dress, difficult to put on and hard to wear, every detail of it doing violence to nature. Her body is cut in two at a wasp-waist obtained by a whalebone corset, her skirts billow out in an enormous bell, her throat is enclosed right up to the chin, her feet covered to the toes, her hair piled up into countless little curls and rolls and braids, worn under a majestically swaying monster of a hat, her hands carefully gloved even in the hottest summer—this creature, long ago consigned to history, gives the impression of pitiable helplessness, despite the perfume wafting around her, the jewellery weighing her down and all the costly lace, frills and trimmings. You see at first glance that once inside such garments and invulnerable as a knight in his armour, a woman was no longer free, could not move fast and gracefully, but every movement, every gesture and indeed her whole bearing in such a costume was bound to be artificial and literally unnatural. Merely dressing to look like a lady—never mind all the etiquette of high society—just putting on such gowns and taking them off was a complicated procedure, and impossible without someone else’s help. First there were countless little hooks and eyes to be done up behind a lady’s back from waist to neck, a maid had to exert all her strength to tight-lace her mistress’s corset, her long hair—and let me remind the young that thirty years ago all European women, with the exception of a handful of Russian women students, had hair that fell to their waists when they unpinned it—had to be curled, set, brushed and combed and piled up by a hairdresser called in daily and using a large quantity of hairpins, combs and slides, curling tongs and hair curlers, all this before she could put on her petticoats, camisoles, little bodices and jackets like a set of onion skins, turning and adjusting until the last remnant of her own female form had entirely disappeared. But there was a secret sense in this nonsense. A woman’s real figure was to be so entirely concealed by all this manipulation that even at the wedding breakfast her bridegroom had not the faintest idea whether his future companion for life was straight or crooked, plump or thin, had short legs or long legs. That ‘moral’ age thought it perfectly permissible to add artificial reinforcements to the hair, the bosom and other parts of the body, for the purposes of deception and to conform to the general ideal of female beauty. The more a woman was expected to look like a lady, the less of her natural shape might be shown; in reality the guiding principle behind this fashion was only to obey the general moral tendency of the time, which was chiefly concerned with concealment and covering up.

But that wise morality quite forgot that when you bar the door to the Devil, he usually forces his way in down the chimney or through a back entrance. What strikes our uninhibited gaze today about those costumes, garments so desperately trying to cover every inch of bare skin and hide the natural figure, is not their moral propriety but its opposite, the way that those fashions, provocative to the point of embarrassment, emphasised the polarity of the sexes. While the modern young man and young woman, both of them tall and slim, both beardless and short-haired, conform to each other in easy comradeship even in their outward appearance, in that earlier epoch the sexes distanced themselves from each other as far as possible. The men sported long beards, or at least twirled the ends of a mighty moustache, a clearly recognisable sign of their masculinity, while a woman’s breasts, essentially feminine sexual attributes, were made ostentatiously visible by her corset. The extreme emphasis on difference between the so-called stronger sex and the weaker sex was also evident in the attitudes expected of them—a man was supposed to be forthright, chivalrous and aggressive, a woman shy, timid and defensive. They were not equals but hunters and prey. This unnatural tension separating them in their outward behaviour was bound to heighten the inner tension between the two poles, the factor of eroticism, and so thanks to its technique—which knew nothing of psychology, of concealing sexuality and hushing it up—the society of the time achieved exactly the opposite. In its constant prudish anxiety, it was always sniffing out immorality in all aspects of life—literature, art and fashion—with a view to preventing any stimulation, with the result that it was in fact forced to keep dwelling on the immoral. As it was always studying what might be unsuitable, it found itself constantly on the alert; to the world of that time, ‘decency’ always appeared to be in deadly danger from every gesture, every word. Perhaps we can understand how it still seemed criminal, at that time, for a woman to wear any form of trousers for games or sports. But how can we explain the hysterical prudery that made it improper for a lady even to utter the word ‘trousers’? If she mentioned such a sensually dangerous object as a man’s trousers at all, she had to resort to the coy euphemism of ‘his unmentionables’. It would have been absolutely out of the question for a couple of young people, from the same social class but of different sexes, to go out together by themselves—or rather, everyone’s first thought at the mere idea would have been that ‘something might happen’. Such an encounter was permissible only if some supervising person, a mother or a governess, accompanied every step that the young people took. Even in the hottest summer, it would have been considered scandalous for young girls to play tennis in ankle-length skirts or even with bare arms, and it was terribly improper for a well-brought-up woman to cross one foot over the other in public, because she might reveal a glimpse of her ankles under the hem of her dress. The natural elements of sunlight, water and air were not permitted to touch a woman’s bare skin. At the seaside, women made their laborious way through the water in heavy bathing costumes, covered from neck to ankles. Young girls in boarding schools and convents even had to take baths in long white garments, forgetting that they had bodies at all. It is no legend or exaggeration to say that when women died in old age, their bodies had sometimes never been seen, not even their shoulders or their knees, by anyone except the midwife, their husbands, and the woman who came to lay out the corpse. Today, forty years on, all that seems like a fairy tale or humorous exaggeration. But this fear of the physical and natural really did permeate society, from the upper classes down, with the force of a true neurosis. It is hard to imagine today that at the turn of the century, when the first women rode bicycles or actually ventured to sit astride a horse instead of riding side-saddle, people would throw stones at those bold hussies. Or that, when I was still at school, the Viennese newspapers filled columns with discussions of the shocking innovation proposed at the Opera for the ballerinas to dance without wearing tights. Or that it was an unparalleled sensation when Isadora Duncan, although her style of dancing was extremely classical, was the first to dance barefoot instead of wearing the usual silk shoes under her tunic—which fortunately was long and full. And now think of young people growing up in such an age of watchfulness, and imagine how ridiculous these fears of the constant threat to decency must have appeared to them as soon as they realised that the cloak of morality mysteriously draped over these things was in fact very threadbare, torn and full of holes. After all, there was no getting around the fact that out of fifty grammar school boys, one would come upon his teacher lurking in a dark alley some day, or you heard in the family circle of someone who appeared particularly respectable in front of us, but had various little falls from grace to his account. The fact was that nothing increased and heightened our curiosity so much as this clumsy technique of concealment, and as it was undesirable for natural inclinations to run their course freely and openly, curiosity in a big city created its underground and usually not very salubrious outlets. In all classes of society, this suppression of sexuality led to the stealthy overstimulation of young people, and it was expressed in a childish, inexpert way. There was hardly a fence or a remote shed that was not scrawled with indecent words and graffiti, hardly a swimming pool where the wooden partition marking off the ladies’ pool was not full of so-called knotholes through which a peeping Tom might look. Whole industries flourished in secret—industries that have now disappeared because morals and manners are more natural—in particular the trade in nude photographs offered for sale under the counter in bars to adolescent boys. Or the pornographic literature sous le manteau—since serious literature was bound to be idealistic and cautious—which consisted of books of the very worst sort, printed on poor-quality paper, badly written, and yet sure to sell well, like the ‘titillating’ magazines of a kind no longer available today, or not in such a repulsive and lecherous form. As well as the court theatre, which paid homage to the ideals of the time with its noble sentiments and snow-white purity, there were theatres and cabarets with programmes entirely comprising the smuttiest of dirty jokes. What was suppressed found outlets everywhere, found ways around obstacles, ways out of difficulties. So ultimately the generation that was prudishly denied any sexual enlightenment, any form of easy social encounter with the opposite sex, was a thousand times more erotically obsessed than young people today, who have so much more freedom in love. Forbidden fruit excites a craving, only what is forbidden stimulates desire, and the less the eyes saw and the ears heard the more minds dreamt. The less air, light and sun was allowed to fall on the body, the more heated did the senses become. To sum up, the social pressure put on us as young people, instead of improving our morals, merely made us embittered and distrustful of those in authority. From the first day of our sexual awakening we instinctively felt that this dishonest morality, with its silence and concealment, wanted to take from us something that was rightfully ours in our youth, and was sacrificing our desire for honesty to a convention that had long ago ceased to have any real meaning.

However, the morality of this society, which on the one hand tacitly assumed the existence of sexuality running its natural course, but on the other would not publicly acknowledge it at any price, was in fact doubly mendacious. For while it turned a blind eye to young men and even, winking the other eye, encouraged them to ‘sow their wild oats’, as the jargon of the time jocularly put it, society closed both eyes in alarm and pretended to be blind when faced with women. Even convention had to admit tacitly that a man felt and must be allowed to feel certain urges. But to admit honestly that a woman was also subject to them, that for its eternal purposes creation required the feminine as well as the masculine principle, would have offended against the whole concept of women as sacred beings. Before Freud, it was an accepted axiom that a woman had no physical desires until they were aroused in her by a man, although of course that was officially permitted only in marriage. However, as the air of Vienna in particular was full of dangerously infectious eroticism even in that age of morality, a girl of good family had to live in an entirely sterilised atmosphere from her birth to the day when she went to the bridal altar. Young girls were not left alone for a moment, for their own protection. Girls had governesses whose duty it was to make sure that they did not—God forbid!—take a step outside the front door of their homes unescorted; they were taken to school, to their dancing classes and music lessons, and then collected again. Every book they read was checked, and above all young girls were kept constantly occupied in case they indulged in any dangerous ideas. They had to practise the piano, do some singing and drawing; they had to learn foreign languages and the history of art and literature; they were educated, indeed over-educated. But while the idea was to make them as educated and socially well brought up as possible, at the same time great care was taken to leave them ignorant of all natural things, in a way unimaginable to us today. A young girl of good family was not allowed to have any idea of how the male body was formed, she must not know how children came into the world, for since she was an angel she was not just to remain physically untouched, she must also enter marriage entirely ‘pure’ in mind. For a girl to be well brought up at the time was equivalent to leaving her ignorant of life, and that ignorance sometimes remained with women of those days all their lives. I am still amused by the grotesque story of an aunt of mine, who on her wedding night suddenly appeared back in her parents’ apartment at one in the morning frantically ringing the bell and protesting that she never wanted to set eyes on the horrible man whom she had married again, he was a madman and a monster! In all seriousness, he had tried to take her clothes off. It was only with difficulty, she said, that she had been able to save herself from his obviously deranged demands.

I cannot deny that, on the other hand, this ignorance lent young girls of the time a mysterious charm. Unfledged as they were, they guessed that besides and beyond their own world there was another of which they knew nothing, were not allowed to know anything, and that made them curious, full of longing, effusive, attractively confused. If you greeted them in the street they would blush—do any young girls still blush? Alone with each other they would giggle and whisper and laugh all the time, as if they were slightly tipsy. Full of expectation of the unknown that was never disclosed to them, they entertained romantic dreams of life, but at the same time were ashamed to think of anyone finding out how much their bodies physically craved a kind of affection of which they had no very clear notion. A sort of slight confusion always animated their conduct. They walked differently from the girls of today, whose bodies are made fit through sport, who mingle with young men easily and without embarrassment, as their equals. Even a thousand paces away in our time, you could tell the difference between a young girl and a woman who had had a physical relationship with a man simply by the way she walked and held herself. Young girls were more girlish than the girls of today, less like women, resembling the exotically tender hothouse plants that are raised in the artificially overheated atmosphere of a glasshouse, away from any breath of inclement wind; the artificially bred product of a certain kind of rearing and culture.

But that was how the society of the time liked its young girls—innocent and ignorant, well brought up and knowing nothing, curious and bashful, uncertain and impractical, destined by an education remote from real life to be formed and guided in marriage by a husband, without any will of their own. Custom and decency seemed to protect them as the emblem of its most secret ideal, the epitome of demure feminine conduct, virginal and unworldly. But what a tragedy if one of these young girls had wasted her time, and at twenty-five or thirty was still unmarried! Convention mercilessly decreed that an unmarried woman of thirty must remain in a state of inexperience and naivety, feeling no desires—it was a state not at all suitable for her at her present age—preserving herself intact for the sake of the family and ‘decency’. The tender image of girlhood then usually turned into a sharp and cruel caricature. An unmarried woman of her age had been ‘left on the shelf’, and a woman left on the shelf became an old maid. The humorous journals, with their shallow mockery, made fun of old maids all the time. If you open old issues of the Fliegende Blätter or another specimen of the humorous press of the time, it is horrifying to see, in every edition, the most unfeeling jokes cracked at the expense of aging unmarried women whose nervous systems were so badly disturbed that they could not hide what, after all, was their natural longing for love. Instead of acknowledging the tragedy of these sacrificial lives which, for the sake of the family and its good name, had to deny the demands of nature and their longing for love and motherhood, people mocked them with a lack of understanding that repels us today. But society is always most cruel to those who betray its secrets, showing where its dishonesty commits a crime against nature.

If bourgeois convention of the time desperately tried to maintain the fiction that a woman of the ‘best circles’ had no sexuality and must not have any until she was married—for anything else would make her an immoral creature, an outcast from her family—then it was still obliged to admit that such instincts really were present in a young man. And as experience had shown that young men who had reached sexual maturity could not be prevented from putting their sexuality into practice, society limited itself to the modest hope that they could take their unworthy pleasures extramurally, outside the sanctified precincts of good manners. Just as cities conceal an underground sewage system into which all the filth of the cesspits is diverted under their neatly swept streets, full of beautiful shops selling luxury goods, beneath their elegant promenades, the entire sexual life of young men was supposed to be conducted out of sight, below the moral surface of society. The dangers to which a young man would expose himself did not matter, or the spheres into which he ventured, and his mentors at school and at home sedulously refrained from explaining anything about that to him. Now and then, in the last years of that moral society’s existence, an occasional father with ‘enlightened ideas’, as it was put at the time, put some thought to the matter and, as soon as the boy began to show signs of growing a beard, tried to help him in a responsible way. He would summon the family doctor; who sometimes asked the young man into a private room, ceremoniously cleaning his glasses before embarking on a lecture about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, and urging the young man, who by this time had usually informed himself about them already, to indulge in moderation and remember to take certain precautions. Other fathers employed a still stranger method; they hired a pretty maidservant for their domestic staff, and it was this girl’s job to give the young man practical instruction. Such fathers thought it better for a son to get this troublesome business over and done with under their own roof. This method also, to all appearances, preserved decorum and in addition excluded the danger that the young man might fall into the hands of some ‘artful and designing person’. One method of enlightenment, however, remained firmly banned in all forms and by all those in authority—the open and honest one.

What opportunities were open to a young man of the bourgeois world? In all other classes of society, including the so-called lower classes, the problem was not a problem at all. In the country, a farm labourer of seventeen would be sleeping with a maidservant, and if there were consequences of the relationship it was not so very important. In most of our Alpine villages the numbers of illegitimate children far exceeded those born in wedlock. In the urban proletariat, again, a young working man would ‘live in sin’ with a woman of his class when he could not afford to get married yet. Among the Orthodox Jews of Galicia, a young man of seventeen who had only just reached sexual maturity was given a bride, and he could be a grandfather by the time he was forty. Only in our bourgeois society was the real solution to the problem, early marriage, frowned upon, because no paterfamilias would have entrusted his daughter to a young man of twenty-two or twenty. Someone so young was not thought mature enough. Here again we can detect dishonesty, for the bourgeois calendar was by no means synchronised with the rhythms of nature. While nature brings a young man to sexual maturity at sixteen or seventeen, in the society of that time he was of marriageable status only when he had a ‘position in society’, and that was unlikely to be before he was twenty-five or twenty-six. So there was an artificial interval of six, eight or ten years between real sexual maturity and society’s idea of it, and in that interval the young man had to fend for himself in his private affairs or ‘adventures’.

Not that he was given too many opportunities for them at that time. Only a very few and especially rich young men could afford the luxury of keeping a mistress, meaning renting an apartment for her and providing for her keep. Similarly, a few particularly lucky young men matched a literary ideal of the time in the matter of extramarital love—for extramarital love was the only kind that could be described in novels—and entered into a relationship with a married woman. The rest managed as best they could with shop girls and waitresses, affairs that provided little real satisfaction. Before the emancipation of women, only girls from the very poorest proletarian background had few enough scruples and sufficient liberty to engage in such fleeting relationships when there was no serious prospect of marriage. Poorly dressed, tired out after working at a poorly paid job for twelve hours a day, neglectful of personal hygiene (a bathroom was the privilege of rich families in those days), and reared in a very narrow social class, these poor girls were so far below the intellectual level of their lovers that the young men themselves usually shrank from being seen with them in public. It was true that convention had found a way of dealing with this awkward fact in the institution of chambres séparées, as they were known, where you could eat supper with a girl in the evening unobserved, and everything else was done in the small hotels in dark side streets that had been set up exclusively for this trade. But all these encounters were bound to be fleeting and without any real attraction; they were purely sexual rather than erotic, because they were always conducted hastily and surreptitiously, like something forbidden. At best, there was the possibility of a relationship with one of those hybrid beings who were half inside society, half outside it—actresses, dancers, women artists, the only ‘emancipated’ women of the day. In general, however, the basis of eroticism outside marriage at that time was prostitution, which in a way represented the dark vaulted cellar above which rose the magnificent structure of bourgeois society, with its immaculately dazzling façade.

The present generation has little idea of the vast extent of prostitution in Europe before the world wars. While today prostitutes are seen in big cities as seldom as horses in the streets, at the time the pavements were so crowded with women of easy virtue that it was harder to avoid them than to find them. In addition there were all the ‘closed houses’ or brothels, the night-spots, cabarets and dance halls with their female dancers and singers, the bars with their hostesses. Feminine wares were openly offered for sale at such places, in every price range and at every time of day, and it really cost a man as little time and trouble to hire a woman for quarter-of-an-hour, an hour, or a night as to buy a packet of cigarettes or a newspaper. Nothing seems to me better evidence of the greater and more natural honesty of life and love today than the fact that these days it is possible, and almost taken for granted, for young men to do without this once indispensable institution, and prostitution has been partly eliminated, but not by the efforts of the police or the law. Decreasing demand for this tragic product of pseudo-morality has reduced it to a small remnant.

The official attitude of the state and its morality to these murky affairs was never really comfortable. From the moral standpoint, no one dared to acknowledge a woman’s right to sell herself openly; but when hygiene entered the equation it was impossible to do without prostitution, since it provided a channel for the problem of extramarital sexuality. So the authorities resorted to ambiguity by drawing a distinction between unofficial prostitution, which the state opposed as immoral and dangerous, and licensed prostitution, for which a woman needed a kind of certificate and which was taxed by the state. A girl who had made up her mind to become a prostitute got a special licence from the police, and a booklet of her own certifying her profession. By placing herself under police control and dutifully turning up for a medical examination twice a week, she had gained business rights to hire out her body at whatever price she thought appropriate. Her calling was recognised as a profession along with other professions, but all the same—and here came the snag of morality—it was not fully recognised. If a prostitute had, for instance, sold her wares, meaning her body, to a man who then refused to pay the agreed price, she could not bring charges against him. At that point her demand had suddenly become an immoral one, and the authorities provided no protection—ob turpem causam was the reason given by the law, because it was a dirty trade.

Such details showed up the contradictions in a system that on the one hand gave these women a place in a trade permitted by the state, but on the other considered them personally outcasts beyond the common law. However, the real dishonesty lay in the fact that these restrictions applied only to the poorer classes. A Viennese ballerina who could be bought by any man at any time of day for two hundred crowns, just as a street girl could be bought for two crowns, did not, of course, need a licence; the great demi-mondaines even featured in newspaper reports of the prominent spectators present at horse-racing events—trotting races, or the Derby—because they themselves belonged to ‘society’. In the same way, some of the most distinguished procuresses, women who supplied the court, the aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie with luxury goods, were outside the law, which otherwise imposed severe prison sentences for procuring. Strict discipline, merciless supervision and social ostracism applied only to the army of thousands upon thousands of prostitutes whose bodies and humiliated souls were recruited to defend an ancient and long-since-eroded concept of morality against free, natural forms of love.

This monstrous army of prostitutes was divided into different kinds, just as the real army was divided into cavalry, artillery, infantry and siege artillery. In prostitution, the closest equivalent to the siege artillery was the group that adopted certain streets of the city as their own quarter. These were usually areas where, during the Middle Ages, the gallows, a leper house or a graveyard used to stand, places frequented by outlaws, hangmen and other social outcasts. The better class of citizens had preferred to avoid such parts of the city for centuries, and the authorities allowed a few alleys there to be used as a market for love. Two hundred or five hundred women would sit next door to one another, side by side, on display at the windows of their single-storey apartments, as twentieth-century prostitutes still do in Yoshiwara in Japan or the Cairo fish market. They were cheap goods working in shifts, a day shift and a night shift.

Itinerant prostitutes corresponded to the cavalry or infantry; these were the countless girls for sale trying to pick up customers in the street. Street-walkers of this kind were said in Vienna to be auf den Strich,[4] because the police had divided up the street with invisible lines, leaving the girls their own patches in which to advertise. Dressed in a tawdry elegance which they had gone to great pains to purchase, they paraded around the streets day and night, until well into the hours of dawn, even in freezing and wet weather, constantly forcing their weary and badly painted faces into an enticing smile for every passer-by. All the big cities today look to me more beautiful and humane places now that these crowds of hungry, unhappy women no longer populate the streets, offering pleasure for sale without any expectation of pleasure themselves, and in their endless wanderings from place to place, all finally going the same inevitable way—to the hospital.

But even these throngs of women were not enough to satisfy the constant demand. Some men preferred to indulge themselves more discreetly and in greater comfort than by picking up these sad, fluttering nocturnal birds of paradise in the street. They wanted a more agreeable kind of lovemaking in the light and warmth, with music and dancing and a pretence of luxury. For these clients there were the ‘closed houses’, the brothels. The girls gathered there in a so-called salon furnished with fake luxury, some of them in ladylike outfits, some already unequivocally clad in negligees. A pianist provided musical entertainment, there was drinking and dancing and light conversation before the couples discreetly withdrew to bedrooms. In many of the more elegant houses, brothels that had a certain international fame (to be found particularly in Paris and Milan), a naive mind could imagine that he had been invited to a private house with some rather high-spirited society ladies. In addition, the girls in these houses were better off than the street-walkers. They did not have to walk through the dirt of alleyways in wind and rain; they sat in a warm room, had good clothes, plenty to eat and in particular plenty to drink. In reality, however, they were prisoners of their madams, who forced them to buy the clothes they wore at extortionate prices, and played such arithmetical tricks with the expense of their board and lodging that even a girl who worked with great industry and stamina was always in debt to the madam in some way, and could never leave the house of her own free will.

It would be intriguing, and good documentary evidence of the culture of that time, to write the secret history of many of these houses, for they held the most remarkable secrets, which of course were well known to the otherwise stern authorities. There were secret doors, and special staircases up which members of the very highest society—even, it was rumoured, gentlemen from the court—could visit these places, unseen by other mortals. There were rooms lined with mirrors, and others offering secret views of the rooms next door, where couples engaged in sex unaware that they were being watched. There were all kinds of strange costumes for the girls to wear, from nuns’ habits to ballerinas’ tutus, kept in drawers and chests ready for men with special fetishes. And this was the same city, the same society, the same morality that expressed horror if young girls rode bicycles, and called it a violation of the dignity of science for Freud, in his clear, calm and cogent manner, to state certain truths that they did not like to acknowledge. The same world that so emotionally defended the purity of woman tolerated this horrifying trade in female bodies, organised it and even profited by it.

So we must not be misled by the sentimental novels and novellas of that period; it was not a good time for the young when girls were placed in airtight compartments under the control of their families, sealed off from life, their physical and intellectual development stunted, and when young men in turn were forced into secrecy and underhand behaviour, all in support of a morality that at heart no one believed in or obeyed. Straightforward, honest relationships, exactly what ought to have been bringing happiness and delight to these young people by the laws of nature, were granted to only very few. And any man of that generation trying to be honest in recollecting his very first encounters with women will find few episodes on which he can really look back with unclouded pleasure. For apart from the social constraints always urging young men to be cautious and preserve secrecy, there was another element at the time to cast a shadow on their minds, even at the most intimate moments—the fear of infection. Here again the young men of the time were at a particular disadvantage compared to those of today, for it must not be forgotten that forty years ago sexual diseases were a hundred times more prevalent than they are now, and above all a hundred times more dangerous and terrible in their effects, because clinical practice did not yet know how to deal with them. There was still no scientific possibility of curing them as quickly and radically as today, when they are little more than a passing episode. While thanks to the treatment developed by Paul Ehrlich,[5] weeks may now pass at the teaching hospitals of small and medium-sized universities without a professor’s being able to show his students a new case of syphilis, statistics of that time showed that in the army, and in big cities, at least one or two in every ten young men had already contracted an infection. Young people at the time were constantly warned of the danger; walking through the streets of Vienna, you could read a plate on every sixth or seventh building proclaiming that a ‘specialist in skin and venereal diseases’ practised there, and to the fear of infection was added horror at the repellent, degrading nature of treatment at the time. Again, today’s world knows nothing of that. The entire body of a man infected with syphilis was subjected to weeks and weeks of treatment by rubbing with quicksilver, which made the teeth fall out and caused other kinds of damage to the patient’s health. The unfortunate victim of a bad attack felt not only mentally but also physically soiled, and even after such a terrible cure he could never for the rest of his life be sure that the malicious virus might not wake from its dormancy at any moment, paralysing him from the spinal marrow outwards and softening the brain inside his skull. No wonder that at the time many young men diagnosed with the disease immediately reached for a revolver, finding it intolerable to feel hopelessly suspect to themselves and their close family. Then there were the other anxieties resulting from a vita sexualis pursued only in secrecy. If I try to remember truthfully, I know hardly one of the comrades of my adolescent years who did not at some time look pale and distracted—one because he was sick or feared he would fall sick, another because he was being blackmailed over an abortion, a third because he lacked the money to take a course of treatment without his family’s knowledge, a fourth because he didn’t know how to pay the alimony for a child claimed by a waitress to be his, a fifth because his wallet had been stolen in a brothel and he dared not go to the police. So youth in that pseudo-moral age was much more dramatic and on the other hand unclean, much more exciting and at the same time oppressive, than the novels and plays of the court writers describe it. In the sphere of Eros, young people were almost never allowed the freedom and happiness proper to them at their time of life, any more than they were permitted it at school and at home.

All this has to be emphasised in an honest portrait of the time, because in talking to younger friends of the post-war generation, I often find it very hard to convince them that our young days were definitely not to be preferred to theirs. Certainly, we had more freedom as citizens of the state than the present generation, who are obliged to do military service or labour service, or in many countries to embrace a mass ideology, and are indeed generally at the mercy of the arbitrary stupidity of international politics. We could devote ourselves undisturbed to our artistic and intellectual inclinations; we could pursue our private lives in a more individual and personal way. We were able to live in a more cosmopolitan manner; the whole world was open to us. We could travel anywhere we liked without passes and permits; no one interrogated us about our beliefs, our origins, our race or religion. We certainly did—I do not deny it—have immeasurably more individual freedom, and we did not just welcome that, we made use of it. But as Friedrich Hebbel once nicely put it, “Sometimes we have no wine, sometimes we have no goblet.” Both are seldom granted to one and the same generation; if morality allows a man freedom, the state tries to remould him. If the state allows him freedom, morality will try to impose itself. We knew more of the world then, and knew it better, but the young today live their own youthful years more fully and are more aware of what they experience. Today, when I see young people coming out of their schools and colleges with heads held high, with bright, cheerful faces, when I see boys and girls together in free and easy companionship, competing with each other in studies, sport and games without false shame or bashfulness, racing over the snow on skis, rivalling each other in the swimming pool with the freedom known in the ancient world, driving over the countryside together in motor cars, engaging in all aspects of a healthy, untroubled life like brothers and sisters, without any internal or external pressure on them, I always feel as if not forty but a thousand years lay between them and those of us who had to look for any experience of giving and taking love in a hole-and-corner way in the shadows. I see genuinely happy expressions on their faces. What a great revolution in morality has taken place to the benefit of the young; how much freedom in life and love they have regained, and how much better they thrive both physically and mentally on this healthy new freedom! Women look more beautiful to me now that they are at liberty to display their figures; their gait is more upright, their eyes brighter, their conversation less stilted. What a different kind of confidence this new youth has acquired! They are not called upon by anyone else to account for what they do or do not do—they answer only to themselves and their own sense of responsibility, which has wrested control over them from mothers and fathers and aunts and teachers, and long ago threw off the inhibition, intimidation and tension that weighed down on their own development. They no longer know the devious secrecy we had to resort to to get the forbidden pleasures that they now correctly feel are their right. They happily enjoy their youth with the verve, freshness, lightness of heart and freedom from anxiety proper to their age. But the best of that happiness, it seems to me, is that they do not have to lie to others, while they can be honest with themselves and their natural feelings and desires. It is possible that the carefree way in which young people go through life today means they lack something of our own veneration for intellectual subjects when we were young. It may be that through the easy give and take that is accepted now, they lose an aspect of love that seemed to us particularly valuable and intriguing, they lose a certain reticence caused by shame and timidity, and certain especially tender moments. Perhaps they do not even have any idea how the awe of what is banned and forbidden mysteriously enhances one’s enjoyment of it. But all this seems to me a minor drawback by comparison with the saving grace—the fact that young people today are free from fear and oppression, and enjoy in full what was forbidden us at their age, a sense of frank self-confidence.

UNIVERSITAS VITAE

AT LAST THE LONG-AWAITED moment came, and with the last year of the old century we could also close the door of the hated grammar school behind us. After we had passed our final school examinations, not altogether easily—what did we know about mathematics, physics, and the rest of the scholastic curriculum?—the school principal honoured us with a valedictory speech, delivered with great feeling, an occasion for which we had to wear black frock coats. We were now grown up, he said, and our industry and efficiency must do credit to our native land. Eight years of companionship thus came to an end, and I have seen very few of my comrades in adversity since then. Most of us registered at the university, and those who had to reconcile themselves to other careers and occupations regarded us with envy.

For in those long-distant days in Austria there was still a special, romantic aura about university. The status of a student brought with it certain privileges that gave a young scholar a great advantage over all his contemporaries. I doubt whether much is known outside the German-speaking countries about the old-fashioned oddity of this phenomenon, so its anachronistic absurdity calls for explanation. Most of our universities had been founded in the Middle Ages, at a time when occupying your mind with academic knowledge appeared out of the ordinary, and young men were given certain privileges to induce them to study. Medieval scholars were not subject to the ordinary civil courts, they could not have writs served on them or be otherwise pestered by bailiffs in their colleges, they wore special clothing, had a right to fight duels with impunity, and were recognised as an exclusive guild with its own traditions—be they good or bad. In the course of time, with the gradual coming of democracy to public life and the dissolution of all other medieval guilds, academics in the rest of Europe lost this privileged position. Only in Germany and German-speaking Austria, where class consciousness still had the upper hand, did students cling tenaciously to privileges which had long ago lost any meaning. They even based their own student code of conduct on them. A German student set particular store by a specific kind of ‘student honour’, existing side by side with his honour as an ordinary citizen. Anyone who insulted him must give him satisfaction, meaning that if the man offering the insult was ‘fit to give satisfaction’ they must fight a duel. This smug student criterion of ‘fitness to give satisfaction’, in turn, could not be met by someone like a businessman or a banker, only a man with an academic education, a graduate, or a military officer—no one else, among millions, was good enough to have the honour of crossing swords with one of those stupid, beardless boys. Then again, to be considered a real student you had to have proved your courage, meaning you had fought as many duels as possible, and even showed the signs of those heroic deeds on your face in the form of duelling scars; unscarred cheeks and a nose without a nick in it were unworthy of an academic in the genuine German tradition. This meant that the students who wore fraternity colours, showing that they belonged to a particular student body, felt obliged to go in for mutual provocation, also insulting other perfectly peaceful students and officers so that they could fight more duels. In the fraternities, every new student had his aptitude for this worthy occupation tested on the fencing floor, and he was also initiated into other fraternity customs. Every ‘fox’, the term for a novice, was assigned to an older fraternity member whom he had to serve with slavish obedience, and who in turn instructed him in the noble arts required by the student code of conduct, which amounted to drinking until you threw up. The acid test was to empty a heavy tankard of beer in a single draught, proving in this glorious manner that you were no weakling, or to bawl student songs in chorus and defy the police by going on the rampage and goose-stepping through the streets by night. All this was considered manly, proper student behaviour, suitably German, and when the fraternities went out on a Saturday, waving their banners and wearing their colourful caps and ribbons, these simple-minded young men, with senseless arrogance fostered by their own activities, felt that they were the true representatives of intellectual youth. They looked down with contempt on the common herd who did not know enough to pay proper tribute to this academic culture of German manliness.

To a boy still wet behind the ears, coming to Vienna straight from a provincial grammar school, such dashing, merry student days may well have seemed the epitome of all that was romantic. For decades to come, indeed, when village notaries and physicians now getting on in years were in their cups, they would look up with much emotion at the crossed swords and colourful student ribbons hanging on the walls of their rooms, and proudly bore their duelling scars as the marks of their ‘academic’ status. To us, however, this stupid, brutish way of life was nothing short of abhorrent, and if we met a member of those beribboned hordes we sensibly kept out of his way. We saw individual freedom as the greatest good, and to us this urge for aggression, combined with a tendency towards servility en masse, was only too clearly evidence of the worst and most dangerous aspects of the German mind. We also knew that this artificially mummified romanticism hid some very cleverly calculated and practical aims, for membership of a duelling fraternity ensured a young man the patronage of its former members who now held high office, and would smooth the path for his subsequent career. Joining the Borussia fraternity in Bonn was the one sure way into the German Diplomatic Service; membership of the Catholic fraternities in Austria led to well-endowed benefices in the gift of the ruling Catholic Socialist party, and most of these ‘heroes’ knew very well that in future their coloured student ribbons would have to make up for the serious studies they had neglected, and that a couple of duelling scars on their faces could be much more useful in a job application than anything they had inside their heads. The mere sight of those uncouth, militarised gangs, those scarred and boldly provocative faces, spoilt my visits to the university halls, and when other students who genuinely wanted to study went to the university library they, too, avoided going through the main hall, opting for an inconspicuous back door so as not to meet these pathetic heroes.

It had been decided long ago by my family, consulting together, that I was to study at the university. The only question was which faculty to choose. My parents left that entirely to me. My elder brother had already joined our father’s business, so for me, as the second son, there was no great hurry. After all, it was just a case of making sure, for the sake of the family honour, that I gained a doctorate, never mind in what subject. Curiously enough, I didn’t mind what subject either. I had long ago given my heart to literature, so none of the professionally taught academic branches of knowledge really interested me in themselves. I even had a secret distrust, which has not yet left me, of all academic pursuits. Emerson’s axiom that good books are a substitute for the best university still seems to me accurate, and I am convinced to this day that one can become an excellent philosopher, historian, literary philologist, lawyer, or anything else without ever having gone to university or even a grammar school. In ordinary everyday life I have found confirmation, again and again, that in practice second-hand booksellers often know more about books than the professors who lecture on them; art dealers know more than academic art historians; and many of the most important ideas and discoveries in all fields come from outsiders. Practical, useful and salutary as academic life may be for those of average talent, it seems to me that creative individuals can dispense with it, and may even be inhibited by the academic approach, in particular at a university like ours in Vienna. It had six or seven thousand students, whose potentially fruitful personal contact with their teachers was restricted from the first by overcrowding, and it had fallen behind the times because of excessive loyalty to its traditions. I did not meet a single man there whose knowledge would have held me spellbound. So the real criterion of my choice was not what subject most appealed to me in itself, but which would burden me least and would allow me the maximum time and liberty for my real passion. I finally chose philosophy—or rather, ‘exact philosophy’, as the old curriculum called it in our time—but not out of any real sense of a vocation, since I do not have much aptitude for purely abstract thought. Without exception, my ideas come to me from objects, events and people, and everything purely theoretical and metaphysical remains beyond my grasp. But in exact philosophy the purely abstract material to be mastered was well within bounds, and it would be easy to avoid attending lectures and classes. I would only have to hand in a dissertation at the end of my eighth semester and take a few exams. So I drew up a plan for my time—for three years I would not bother with my university studies at all. Then, in my final year, I would put on a strenuous spurt, master the academic material and dash off some kind of dissertation. The university would thus have given me all I really wanted of it: a couple of years of freedom to lead my own life and concentrate on my artistic endeavours—universitas vitae, the university of life.

When I look back at my life I can remember few happier moments than those at the beginning of what might be called my non-university studies. I was young, and did not yet feel that I ought to be achieving perfection. I was reasonably independent, the day had twenty-four hours in it and they were all mine. I could read what I liked and work on what I liked, without having to account to anyone for it. The cloud of academic exams did not yet loom on the bright horizon. To a nineteen-year-old, three years are a long time, rich and ample in its possibilities, full of potential surprises and gifts!

The first thing I began to do was to make a collection—an unsparing selection, as I thought—of my own poems. I am not ashamed to confess that at nineteen, fresh from grammar school, printer’s ink seemed to me the finest smell on earth, sweeter than attar of roses from Shiraz. Whenever I had a poem accepted for publication in a newspaper, my self-confidence, not naturally very strong, was boosted. Shouldn’t I take the crucial step of trying to get a whole volume published? The encouragement of my friends, who believed in me more than I believed in myself, made up my mind for me. I was bold enough to submit the manuscript to the most outstanding publishing house of the time specialising in German poetry, Schuster & Löffler, the publishers of Liliencron, Dehmel, Bierbaum and Mombert,[1] in fact the whole generation of poets who, with Rilke and Hofmannsthal at the same period, had created the new German style. And then, marvellous to relate, along in quick succession came those unforgettably happy moments, never to be repeated in a writer’s life even after his greatest successes. A letter arrived with the publisher’s colophon on it. I held it uneasily in my hands, hardly daring to open it. Next came the moment, when, with bated breath, I read the news it contained—the firm had decided to publish my poems, and even wanted an option on my next one as a condition. After that came a package with the first proofs, which I undid with the greatest excitement to see the typeface, the design of the page, the embryonic form of the book, and then, a few weeks later, the book itself, the first copies. I never tired of looking at them, feeling them, comparing them with each other again and again and again. Then there was the childish impulse to visit bookshops and see if they had copies on display, and if so whether those copies were in the middle of the shop, or lurking inconspicuously in some corner. After that came the wait for letters, for the first reviews, for the first communication from unknown and unpredictable quarters—such suspense and excitement, such moments of enthusiasm! I secretly envy young people offering their first books to the world those moments. But this delight of mine was not self-satisfaction; it was only a case of love at first sight. Anyone can work out, from the mere fact that I have never allowed these Silberne Saiten—Silver Strings—the title of my now forgotten firstborn, to be reprinted, what I myself soon came to feel about those early verses. Nor did I not let a single one of them appear in my collected poetry. They were verses of vague premonition and unconscious empathy, arising not from my own experience but from a passion for language. They did show a certain musicality and enough sense of form to get them noticed in interested circles, and I could not complain of any lack of encouragement. Liliencron and Dehmel, the leading poets of the time, gave warm and even comradely recognition, to their nineteen-year-old author; Rilke, whom I idolised, sent me, in return for my “attractively produced book” a copy from a special edition of his latest poems inscribed to me “with thanks”. I saved this work from the ruins of Austria as one of the finest mementos of my youth, and brought it to England. (I wonder where it is today?) At the end, it seemed to me almost eerie that this kind present to me from Rilke—the first of many—was now forty years old, and his familiar handwriting greeted me from the domain of the dead. But the most unexpected surprise of all was that Max Reger, together with Richard Strauss the greatest living composer, asked my permission to set six poems from this volume to music. I have often heard one or another of them at concerts since then—my own verses, long forgotten and dismissed from my own mind, but brought back over the intervening time by the fraternal art of a master.

This unhoped-for approval, together with a friendly reception by the critics, encouraged me to take a step that, in my incurable self-distrust, I would never otherwise have taken, or not so early. Even when I was at school I had published short novellas and essays as well as poems in the modern literary journals, but I had never tried offering any of these works to a powerful newspaper with a wide circulation. There was really only one such quality newspaper in Vienna, the Neue Freie Presse, which with its high-minded stance, its concentration on culture and its political prestige occupied much the same position thoughout the entire Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as The Times did in England and Le Temps in France. None of even the imperial German newspapers were so intent on maintaining a high cultural level. The editor, Moritz Benedikt, a man of inexhaustible industry and with a phenomenal talent for organisation, put all his positively daemonic energy into outshining all the German newspapers in the fields of literature and culture. When he wanted something from a famous author, no expense was spared; ten, twenty telegrams were sent off to him one after another, any kind of fee agreed in advance; the literary supplements of the holiday numbers at Christmas and New Year were whole volumes full of the greatest names of the time. Anatole France, Gerhart Hauptmann, Ibsen, Zola, Strindberg and Shaw found themselves keeping company in the paper on such occasions, and its influence on the literary orientation of the entire city and country was immeasurable. Progressive and liberal in its views as a matter of course, sound and circumspect in its opinions, this paper was a fine example of the high cultural standards of old Austria.

There was a special holy of holies in this temple of progress, the section known as the ‘feuilleton’ which, like the great daily papers of Paris, Le Temps and Le Journal des Débats, published the best and soundest essays on poetry, the theatre, music and art under a line at the bottom of the page, keeping it clearly distinct from the ephemera of politics and the news of the day. Only authorities who had proved their worth could write for this section. Nothing but sound judgement, wide experience over many years and perfect artistic form could get an author who had proved himself over the course of time into this sanctuary. Ludwig Speidel, a master essayist, and Eduard Hanslick had the same papal authority in the fields of the theatre and music as Sainte-Beuve in his columns known as les Lundis in Paris. The thumbs-up or thumbs-down of these critics determined the success in Vienna of a musical work, a play, a book, and often of its author or composer himself. At the time every one of these feuilleton essays was the talk of the town in educated circles; they were discussed and criticised, they aroused admiration or hostility, and when now and then a new writer’s name appeared among the long-acknowledged feuilletonists, it created a sensation. Of the younger generation, only Hofmannsthal had sometimes found his way into the feuilleton with some of his best essays; other young authors had to be satisfied if they could contrive to get themselves into the separate literary supplement of the paper. As Vienna saw it, an author writing in the feuilleton on the front page had his name carved in marble.

How I found the courage to submit a small essay on poetry to the Neue Freie Presse, which my father regarded as an oracle and the abode of the Lord’s anointed, is more than I can understand today. But after all, nothing worse than rejection could happen to me. The editor of the feuilleton interviewed would-be essayists only once a week, between two and three o’clock, since the regular cycle of famous and firmly established contributors very seldom left any room for an outsider’s work. With my heart racing, I climbed the little spiral staircase to his office and sent in my name. A few minutes later the servant came back—the editor of the feuilleton would see me, and I entered the small, cramped room.

The editor of the feuilleton of the Neue Freie Presse was Theodor Herzl, and he was the first man of international stature whom I had met in my life—not that I knew what great changes he would bring to the destiny of the Jewish people and the history of our times. His position at that point was rather contradictory and indeterminate. He had set out to become a writer, had shown dazzling journalistic talents at an early age, and became the darling of the Viennese public first as Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse, then as a writer for its feuilleton. His essays are still captivating in their wealth of sharp and often wise observation, their felicity of style and their high-minded tone, which never lost its natural distinction even when he was in cheerful or critical mood. They were the most cultivated imaginable kind of journalism, and delighted a city that had trained itself to appreciate subtlety. He had also had a play successfully produced at the Burgtheater, and now he was a highly esteemed man, idolised by us young people and respected by our fathers, until one day the unexpected happened. Fate can always find a way to track down the man it needs for its secret purposes, even if he tries to hide from it.

Theodor Herzl had had an experience in Paris that shook him badly, one of those moments that change an entire life. As Paris correspondent, he had been present at the official degradation of Alfred Dreyfus. He had seen the epaulettes torn from the pale man’s uniform as he cried out aloud, “I am innocent.” And he had known in his heart at that moment that Dreyfus was indeed innocent, and only the fact that he was Jewish had brought the terrible suspicion of treason down on him. As a student, Theodor Herzl had already suffered in his straightforward and manly pride from the fate of the Jews—or rather, thanks to his prophetic insight, he had anticipated all its tragic significance at a time when it hardly seemed a serious matter. At that time, with a sense of being a born leader, which was justified by both his extremely imposing physical appearance and the wide scope of his mind and his knowledge of the world, he had formed the fantastic plan of bringing the Jewish problem to an end once and for all by uniting Jews and Christians in voluntary mass-baptism. Always inclined to think in dramatic terms, he had imagined himself leading thousands upon thousands of Austrian Jews in a long procession to St Stephen’s Cathedral, there to liberate his persecuted, homeless people for ever from the curse of segregation and hatred in an exemplary symbolic act. He had soon realised that this plan was impracticable, and years of his own work had distracted him from the problem at the heart of his life, although he saw solving it as his true vocation. However, at the moment when he saw Dreyfus degraded the idea of his own people’s eternal ostracism went to his heart like a dagger. If segregation is inevitable, he said to himself, why not make it complete? If humiliation is always to be our fate, let us meet it with pride. If we suffer from the lack of a home, let us build ourselves one! So he published his pamphlet on The Jewish State, in which he pronounced all adaptation through assimilation and all hope of total tolerance impossible for the Jewish people. They would have to found a new home for themselves in their old homeland of Palestine.

When this pamphlet, which was short but had the power and forcefulness of a steel bolt, was published I was still at school, but I remember the general astonishment and annoyance it aroused in bourgeois Jewish circles in Vienna. What on earth, they said angrily, has that usually clever, witty and cultivated writer Herzl taken into his head? What stupid stuff is he saying and writing? Why would we want to go to Palestine? We speak German, not Hebrew, our home is in beautiful Austria. Aren’t we very well off under good Emperor Franz Joseph? Don’t we make a respectable living and enjoy a secure position? Don’t we have equal rights, aren’t we loyal, established citizens of our beloved Vienna? And don’t we live in a progressive time which will do away with all religious prejudice within a few decades? If he’s a Jew who wants to help other Jews, why does he present our worst enemies with arguments, trying to segregate us from the German-speaking world when every day unites us more closely with it? Rabbis waxed indignant in their pulpits, the managing director of the Neue Freie Presse banned even the mention of the word Zionism in his allegedly progressive newspaper. Karl Kraus, the Thersites of Viennese literature and a past master of venomous mockery, wrote a pamphlet entitled A Crown for Zion, and when Theodor Herzl entered the theatre sarcastic murmurs ran through the rows of spectators: “Here comes His Majesty!”

At first Herzl could reasonably feel misunderstood—Vienna, where he thought himself most secure after enjoying years of popularity, was abandoning him, even laughing at him. But then the answer came thundering back with such a weight of approval that he was almost alarmed to see what a mighty movement, far greater than his own person, he had called into being with his few dozen pages. Admittedly the answer did not come from the well-situated, middle-class Western Jews with their comfortable lives, but from the great masses in the East, the Galician, Polish and Russian proletariat. Without knowing it, Herzl’s pamphlet had fanned the heart of Judaism into flame. The Messianic dream, two thousand years old, of the return to the Promised Land as affirmed in the holy books, had been smouldering among the ashes of foreign domination. It was a hope and at the same time a religious certainty, the one thing that still gave meaning to life for those downtrodden and oppressed millions. Whenever someone, whether prophet or impostor, had plucked that string in the millennia of exile, the soul of the people had vibrated in sympathy, but never so powerfully as now, never echoing back with such a clamorous roar. One man, with a few dozen pages, had shaped a scattered and disunited throng into a single entity.

That first moment, when the idea was still taking dreamlike but uncertain shape, was to be the happiest in Herzl’s short life. As soon as he began to define the aims of the movement in real terms, trying to combine its forces, he could not help seeing how different these people had become under various different nationalities, with their different histories, sometimes religious, sometimes free-thinking, some of them socialist and others capitalist Jews, stirring themselves up against each other in a wide variety of languages, and none of them willing to fall into line with a single unified authority. In the year 1901, when I first met him, he was in mid-struggle, and was perhaps at odds with himself as well; he did not yet believe in ultimate success enough to give up the post that earned him and his family a living. He had to divide himself between his lesser work of journalism and the mission that was his real life. It was as feuilleton editor that Theodor Herzl received me that day.

Theodor Herzl rose to greet me, and instinctively I felt there was a grain of truth in the ill-intentioned joke about the King of Zion—he really did look regal with his high forehead, his clear-cut features, his long and almost blue-black beard and his deep-blue, melancholy eyes. His sweeping, rather theatrical gestures did not seem affected, because they arose from a natural dignity, and it would not have taken this particular occasion to make him look imposing to me. Even standing in front of the shabby desk heaped high with papers in that miserably cramped editorial office with its single window, he was like a Bedouin desert sheikh; a billowing white burnous would have looked as natural on him as his black morning coat, well-cut in an obviously Parisian style. After a brief and deliberately inserted pause—as I often noticed later, he liked such small effects, and had probably studied them at the Burgtheater—he deigned to give me his hand, though in a very friendly way. Indicating the chair beside him, he asked, “I think I’ve heard or read your name somewhere before. You write poetry, don’t you?” I said that I did. “Well,” he said leaning back, “so what have you brought me?”

I told him I would very much like to submit a little prose essay to him, and handed him my manuscript. He looked at the title page, turned to the end to assess its extent, and then leant back further in his chair. And to my surprise (I had not expected it) I saw that he had already begun to read the manuscript. He read slowly, turning the page without looking up. When he had finished the final page, he slowly folded the manuscript, then ceremoniously and still without looking at me put it into an envelope, and wrote something on the envelope in pencil. Only then, after keeping me in suspense for some time with these mysterious moves, did he raise his dark, weighty glance to me, saying with deliberate and slow solemnity, “I am glad to tell you that your fine piece is accepted for publication in the feuilleton of the Neue Freie Presse.” It was like Napoleon presenting a young sergeant with the cross of the Légion d’Honneur on the battlefield.

This may seem a minor, unimportant episode in itself. But you would have to be Viennese, and Viennese of my generation, to understand what a meteoric rise this encouragement meant. In my nineteenth year, I had risen to a position of prominence overnight, and Theodor Herzl, who was kind to me from that first moment, used the occasion of our meeting to say, in one of his next essays, that no one should believe the arts were in decline in Vienna. On the contrary, he wrote, as well as Hofmannsthal there were now a number of gifted young writers around who might be expected to do great things, and he mentioned my name first. I have always felt it a particular distinction that a man of the towering importance of Theodor Herzl, in his highly visible and thus very responsible position, was the first to express support for me.

It was a difficult decision for me to make when I said later, with apparent ingratitude, that I felt I could not join his Zionist movement actively and even help him to lead it, as he had asked. However, I could never have made a real success of such a connection; I was alienated most of all by the lack of respect, hardly imaginable today, that his real comrades expressed towards Herzl himself. The Eastern Jews complained that he understood nothing about the Jewish way of life and wasn’t even conversant with Jewish customs, while the economists among them regarded him as a mere journalist and feuilletonist. Everyone had his own objection, and did not always express it respectfully. I knew how much goodwill, particularly just then, those truly attuned to Herz’s ideas, particularly the young, could and should owe him, and the quarrelsome, opinionated spirit of constant opposition, the lack of honest, heartfelt acceptance in the Zionist circle, estranged me from a movement that I would willingly have approached with curiosity, if only for Herzl’s sake. Once, when we were discussing the subject, I openly confessed my dislike of the indiscipline in his ranks. He smiled rather bitterly and said, “Don’t forget, we’ve been used to dealing with problems and arguing over ideas for centuries. After all, historically speaking, we Jews have gone two thousand years without any experience of bringing something real into the world. Unconditional commitment has to be learnt, and I still haven’t learnt it myself. I still write for feuilletons now and then, I am still Feuilleton Editor of the Neue Freie Presse, when it should really be my duty to have only one thought in the world and never write a line about anything else. But I’m on my way to rectifying that; I’ll have to learn unconditional commitment myself first, and then maybe the rest of them will learn with me.” I still remember the deep impression these remarks made on me, for none of us could understand why it took Herzl so long to give up his position with the Neue Freie Presse—we thought it was for his family’s sake. But the world did not know until much later that such was not the case, and he had even sacrificed his own private fortune to the cause. This conversation showed me how much Herzl suffered personally in this dilemma, and many accounts in his diaries confirm it.

I met him many more times, but of all our encounters only one other seems to me really worth remembering, indeed unforgettable, because it was the last. I had been abroad, keeping in touch with Vienna only by letter, and met him one day in the city park. He was obviously coming away from the editorial offices, walking very slowly and not with his old, swinging step, but stooping slightly. I greeted him politely and was going to pass on, but he quickly came towards me, straightening his posture, and gave me his hand. “Now, why are you hiding away? There’s no need for that.” He approved of my frequent trips abroad. “It’s our only way,” he said. “All I know I learnt abroad. Only there do you get used to thinking on a wide scale. I’m sure that I would never have had the courage to form my first concept here, it would have been nipped in the bud. But thank God, when I came up with it, it was all ready, and they couldn’t do anything but try tripping me up.” He then spoke very bitterly about Vienna where, he said, he had found most opposition, and if new initiatives had not come from outside, particularly from the East and now from America too, he would have grown weary. “What’s more,” he said, “my mistake was to begin too late. Victor Adler was leader of the Social Democratic party at the age of thirty, the age when he was best fitted for the struggle, and I won’t even speak of the great figures of history. If you knew how I suffer mentally, thinking of the lost years—regretting that I didn’t find my vocation earlier. If my health were as strong as my will, then all would still be well, but you can’t buy back the past.” I went back to his house with him. Arriving there, he stopped, shook hands with me, and said, “Why do you never come to see me? You’ve never visited me at home. Telephone first and I’ll make sure I am free.” I promised him, firmly determined not to keep that promise, for the more I love someone the more I respect his time.

But I did join him after all, only a few months later. The illness that was beginning to make him stoop at that last meeting of ours had suddenly felled him, and now I could accompany him only to the cemetery. It was a strange day, a day in July, and no one who was there will ever forget it. For suddenly people arrived at all the Viennese railway stations, coming with every train by day and night, from all lands and countries; Western, Eastern, Russian, Turkish Jews—from all the provinces and small towns they suddenly stormed in, the shock of the news of his death still showing on their faces. You never felt more clearly what their quarrels and talking had veiled over—the leader of a great movement was being carried to his grave. It was an endless procession. Suddenly Vienna realised that it was not only a writer, an author of moderate importance, who had died, but one of those original thinkers who rise victorious in a country and among its people only at rare intervals. There was uproar in the cemetery itself; too many mourners suddenly poured like a torrent up to his coffin, weeping, howling and screaming in a wild explosion of despair. There was an almost raging turmoil; all order failed in the face of a kind of elemental, ecstatic grief. I have never seen anything like it at a funeral before or since. And I could tell for the first time from all this pain, rising in sudden great outbursts from the hearts of a crowd a million strong, how much passion and hope this one lonely man had brought into the world by the force of his ideas.

The real significance to me of my ceremonial admission to the rank of feuilletonist on the Neue Freie Presse was in my private life. It gave me unexpected confidence within the family. My parents had little to do with literature, and did not presume to make literary judgements; to them, and to the entire Viennese bourgeoisie, important works were those that won praise in the Neue Freie Presse, and works ignored or condemned there didn’t matter. They felt that anything published in the feuilleton was vouched for by the highest authority, and a writer who pronounced judgement there demanded respect merely by virtue of that fact. And now, imagine such a family glancing daily at the front page of their newspaper with reverent awe and one morning, incredibly, finding that the rather unkempt nineteen-year-old sitting at their table, who had been far from a high-flyer at school and whose writing they accepted with kindly tolerance as a harmless diversion (better than playing cards or flirting with disreputable girls, anyway), has been giving his opinions, not much valued previously at home, in that highly responsible journal among famous and experienced men. If I had written the finest poems of Keats, Hölderlin or Shelley, it would not have caused such a total change of attitude in my entire family circle. When I came into the theatre, they pointed this puzzling Benjamin of theirs out to each other, a lad who in some mysterious way had entered the sacred precincts of the old and dignified. And since I was published quite often in the feuilleton, almost on a regular basis, I soon risked winning high esteem and respect locally. But fortunately I avoided that danger in good time by telling my parents one morning, to their surprise, that I would like to spend the next semester studying in Berlin. My family respected me, or rather the Neue Freie Presse in whose golden aura I stood, too much not to grant my wish.

Of course I had no intention of ‘studying’ in Berlin. I called in at the university there, just as I had in Vienna, only twice in the course of a semester—once to register for lectures, the second time for certification of my alleged attendance at them. I was not looking for colleges or professors in Berlin, I wanted a greater and even more complete form of freedom. In Vienna, I still felt tied to my environment. The literary colleagues with whom I mingled almost all came from the same middle-class Jewish background as I did; in a small city where everyone knew everyone else, I was inevitably the son of a ‘good’ family, and I was tired of what was considered ‘good’ society’; I even liked the idea of decidedly bad society, an unconstrained way of life with no one checking up on me. I hadn’t even looked in the university register to see who lectured on philosophy in Berlin. It was enough for me to know that modern literature was cultivated more actively and eagerly there than at home, that Dehmel and other writers of the younger generation could be met in Berlin, that new journals, cabarets and theatres were being opened, and in short, that the whole place was in a buzz.

In fact I arrived in Berlin at a very interesting moment in its history. Since 1870, when it had ceased to be the modest and by no means rich little capital of the Kingdom of Prussia and became the residence of the German Kaiser, this unassuming city on the river Spree had seen its fortunes soar to great heights. However, Berlin had not yet assumed leadership in culture and the arts. Munich, with its painters and writers, was still considered the real artistic centre; the Dresden Opera dominated music; the smaller capital cities of former princely states attracted notable artistic figures, but Vienna above all, with its centuries of tradition, concentrated cultural force, and wealth of natural talent had still, until this point, been considered greatly superior. In the last few years, however, with the rapid economic rise of Germany, all that had begun to change. Great industrial companies and prosperous families moved to Berlin, and new wealth accompanied by daring audacity opened up greater opportunities in architecture and the theatre there than in any other large German city. Under the patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm museums began to expand, the theatre found an excellent director in Otto Brahm, and the very fact that there was no real cultural tradition going back for centuries encouraged young artists to try something new. For tradition also and always means inhibition. Vienna, bound to the old ways and idolising its own past, was cautious when faced with young people and bold experiments, waiting to see what came of them. In Berlin, on the other hand, a city seeking to mould itself quickly and in its own individual form, innovation was much in demand. It was only natural, then, for young people to come thronging to Berlin from all over the Reich and even from Austria, and the talented among them were proved right by the success they achieved. Max Reinhardt of Vienna, for instance, would have had to wait patiently for a couple of decades in his native city to reach the position that he was holding in Berlin within two years.

It was at exactly this point of its change from a mere capital city to an international metropolis that I arrived in Berlin. After the rich beauty of Vienna, a legacy of our great forebears, my first impression was rather disappointing; the crucial move towards the Westend district, where a new style of architecture was to replace that of the rather ostentatious buildings of the Tiergarten, had only just begun, and architecturally uninteresting Friedrichstrasse and Leipziger Strasse, with their ponderous splendours, still formed the centre of the city. Suburbs such as Wilmersdorf, Nikolassee and Steglitz could be reached only with some difficulty by tram, and in those days visiting the austerely beautiful lakes of the March of Brandenburg still meant quite an elaborate expedition. Apart from the old Unter den Linden, there was no real centre, no place for showy parades such as the Graben in Vienna, and old Prussian habits of thrift died hard—there was no sign of elegance in general. Women went to the theatre in unfashionable home-made dresses, and wherever you went you never found the light, skilful, prodigal touch that in Vienna and Paris could make something that cost very little look enchantingly extravagant. Every detail showed the miserly economy of the period of Frederick the Great; the coffee was weak and bad because every bean was grudged, food was carelessly prepared and had no zest in it. Cleanliness and a strict, painstaking sense of order ruled here, not the musical verve of Vienna. Nothing seemed to me more typical than the contrast between my Viennese and my Berlin landladies. The woman from whom I rented rooms in Vienna was cheerful and talkative; she did not keep everything sparkling clean, and would carelessly forget things, but she was ready and willing to oblige her tenants. My landlady in Berlin was correct and kept the place immaculate, but on receiving her first monthly bill I found every small service she had done me charged in her neat, upright hand—three pfennigs for sewing on a trouser button, twenty pfennigs for removing a splash of ink from the table top, until finally, under a strong line ruled above, the total sum I owed for such labours, they amounted to sixty-seven pfennigs in all. At first this made me smile, but more telling was the fact that after a few days I myself was infected with this Prussian passion for meticulous order, and for the first and last time in my life found myself keeping precise accounts of my expenditure.

My friends in Vienna had given me a whole series of letters of introduction, but I did not use any of them. After all, the real point of my venture was to escape the secure, bourgeois atmosphere of home and instead live free of all ties, cast entirely on my own resources. The only people I wanted to meet were those to whom I found the way through my own literary endeavours—and I wanted them to be as interesting as possible. After all, not for nothing had I read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème,[2] and at the age of twenty I was bound to want to try the bohemian life for myself.

I did not have to search long for a lively and motley assortment of friends. Back in Vienna I had been contributing for some time to the leading journal of the Berlin modernists, which went by the almost ironic title of Das Gesellschaft—Society—and was edited by Ludwig Jacobowski. Shortly before his early death, this young writer had founded a society called ‘Die Kommenden’—The Coming Generation—a name calculated to entice the young, which met once a week on the first floor of a coffee house on Nollendorfplatz. A truly heterogeneous company met in this society, which was created on the model of the Parisian ‘Closerie des Lilas’—writers and architects, snobs and journalists, young women who liked to be regarded as artists or sculptors, Russian students and ash-blonde Scandinavian girls who had come to Berlin to perfect their German. From Germany itself came representatives of all its provinces—strong-boned Westphalians, unsophisticated Bavarians, Silesian Jews, all mingling freely in fervent discussion. Now and then poems or dramas were read aloud, but for all of us our main business was getting to know each other. Amidst these young people who deliberately called themselves bohemians sat one old, grey-bearded man, a figure like Father Christmas—Peter Hille, whom we all loved and respected because he was a real writer and a real bohemian. Hille, then aged seventy, gazed kindly and guilelessly at the curious crowd of children that we were to him. He always wore his grey raincoat, which hid a frayed suit and dirty linen, and would bring badly crumpled manuscripts out of one of his pockets and read his poems aloud. They were poems like no others, more like the improvisations of a poetic genius, but too loosely formed, with too much left to chance. He wrote them in pencil, on trams or in cafés, then forgot them, and had difficulty deciphering the words on the smudged, stained piece of paper when he read them aloud. He never had any money, but he didn’t care about money, sleeping the night now at one friend’s, now at another’s, and there was something touchingly genuine about his total unworldliness and absolute lack of ambition. It was hard to work out when and how this kindly child of nature had made his way to the big city of Berlin, and what he wanted here. However, as in fact he wanted nothing, not even to be famous or celebrated, thanks to his poetically dreamy nature he was more carefree and at ease with himself than anyone else I have ever met. Ambitious disputants shouted each other down in vociferous argument all around him; he listened quietly, did not argue with anyone, sometimes raised his glass to someone in friendly greeting, but he never joined in the conversation. You felt as if, even in the wildest tumult, words and verses were in search of each other in his shaggy and rather weary head, without ever quite touching and finding one another.

The aura of childlike truthfulness emanating from this naive poet, who is almost forgotten today even in Germany, may perhaps have distracted my attention from the chosen chairman of the Coming Generation, yet this was a man whose ideas and remarks were to have a crucial influence on the lives of countless people. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, in whose honour his adherents built the most magnificent schools and academies to put his ideas into practice, was the first man I met after Theodor Herzl who was destined to show millions of human beings the way to go. In person he did not suggest a leader as strongly as Herzl, but his manner was more persuasive. There was hypnotic force in his dark eyes, and I could listen to him better and more critically if I did not look at him, for his ascetically lean face, marked by intellectual passion, was inclined to influence people by itself, men as well as women. At this time Rudolf Steiner had not yet worked out his own doctrines, but was still seeking and learning. He sometimes spoke to us about Goethe’s theory of colour, and in Steiner’s account of him the poet became more Faustian and Paracelsian. It was exciting to listen to him, for his learning was vast, and in particular it was magnificently wide and diverse by comparison with ours, which was confined to literature. After his lectures and many enjoyable private conversations I always went home both full of enthusiasm and slightly depressed. All the same—when I wonder now whether, at the time, I could have foretold that this young man would have such strong philosophical and ethical influence on so many people, I have to confess, to my shame, that I would not. I expected his questing spirit to do great things in science, and it would not have surprised me at all to hear of some great biological discovery made by his intuitive mind, but when many years later I saw the great Goetheanum in Dornach, the ‘school of wisdom’ that his followers founded for him as the Platonic academy of anthroposophy, I was rather disappointed that his influence had declined so far into the ordinary and sometimes even banal. I will not presume to pronounce judgement on anthroposophy itself, for to this day it is not perfectly clear to me what it aims for and what it means; I am inclined to think that in essence its seductive force came not from an idea but from the fascinating person of Rudolf Steiner himself. But in any case, to meet a man of such magnetic power at that early stage, when he was still imparting his ideas to younger men in a friendly manner and without dogmatism, was an inestimable benefit to me. His astonishing and at the same time profound knowledge showed me that true universality, which with schoolboy arrogance the rest of us thought we had already mastered, cannot be achieved by superficial reading and discussion, but calls for many years of ardent effort.

However, at that receptive time of life when friendships are easily made, and social and political differences have not yet become entrenched, a young man really learns better from his contemporaries in the same line of business than from his superiors. Once again I felt—although now on a higher and more international level than at school—how fruitful collective enthusiasm is. While my Viennese friends almost all came from the bourgeoisie, and indeed nine-tenths of them from the Jewish bourgeoisie, so that we were merely duplicating and multiplying our own inclinations, the young people of this new world came from very different social classes both upper and lower. One might be a Prussian aristocrat, another the son of a Hamburg shipowner, a third from a Westphalian farming family. Suddenly I was living in a circle where there was also real poverty, people in ragged clothes and worn-out shoes; I had never been near anything like it in Vienna. I sat at the same table as heavy drinkers, homosexuals and morphine addicts, I shook hands—proudly—with a well-known con man who had served a jail sentence (and later published his memoirs, thus joining our company as a writer). What I had hardly credited in realist novels was present here, teeming with life, in the little bars and cafés that I frequented, and the worse someone’s reputation was the more I wanted to know him personally. This particular liking for or curiosity about people living on the edge of danger has, incidentally, stayed with me all my life; even at times when more discrimination would have been seemly, my friends used to point out that I seemed to like mingling with amoral and unreliable people whose company might be compromising. Perhaps the very fact that I came from a solidly established background, and felt to some extent that this ‘security’ complex weighed me down, made me more likely to be fascinated by those who almost recklessly squandered their lives, their time, their money, their health and reputation—passionate monomaniacs obsessed by aimless existence for its own sake—and perhaps readers may notice this preference of mine for intense, intemperate characters in my novels and novellas. And then there was the charm of the exotic and outlandish; almost everyone presented my questing mind with a gift from a strange new world. For the first time I met a genuine Eastern Jew, the graphic artist E M Lilien, son of a poor Orthodox master turner from Drohobycz, and so I encountered an aspect of Jewishness previously unknown to me in its force and tough fanaticism. A young Russian translated for my benefit the finest passages from the Brothers Karamazov, unknown in Germany at the time; a young Swedish woman first introduced me to the pictures of Munch; I visited painters’ studios to observe their technique (admittedly they were not very good painters), a believer in spiritualism took me to seances—I sensed the diversity of a thousand forms of life, and never tired of it. The intense interest which at school I had shown only in literary form, in rhymes, verses and words, was now bent on human beings. From morning to night, I was always with new and different acquaintances in Berlin, fascinated, disappointed, even sometimes cheated by them. I think that in ten years elsewhere I never have enjoyed such a variety of intellectual company as I did in that one short semester in Berlin, the first of my total freedom.

It would seem only logical for my creative impulse to have been enhanced to a high degree by all this stimulation. In fact exactly the opposite happened—much of my self-confidence, greatly boosted at first by the intellectual exhilaration of my schooldays, was now draining away. Four months after the appearance of that immature volume of poetry I couldn’t understand how I had ever summoned up the courage to publish it. I still thought the verses good in themselves, skilful, some of them even remarkably craftsmanlike, the end result of my ambitious enjoyment of playing about with form, but there was a false ring to their sentimentality. In the same way, after this encounter with reality I felt there was a whiff of scented notepaper about my first novellas. Written in total ignorance of real life, they employed other people’s techniques at second hand. A novel that I had brought to Berlin with me, finished except for the last chapter, was soon heating my stove, for my faith in my powers and those of my class at school in Vienna had suffered a severe setback after this first look at real life. I felt as if I were still a schoolboy and had been told to move two classes lower down. After that first volume of poems there was a gap of six years before I published a second, and only after three or four years did I publish my first prose work. Following the advice of Dehmel, to whom I am still grateful, I used my time translating from foreign languages, which I still regard as the best way for a young writer to gain a deeper, more creative understanding of the spirit of his own mother tongue. I translated Baudelaire, some poems by Verlaine, Keats, William Morris, a short play by Charles Van Lerberghe, and a novel by Camille Lemonnier[3] to get my hand in. The more personal turns of phrase in every foreign language initially present a translator with difficulties, and that in itself is a challenge to a young writer’s powers of expression which will not come into play unsought, and this struggle to persist in wresting its essence from the foreign language and making your own equally expressive has always given me a special kind of artistic pleasure. Since this quiet and rather unappreciated work calls for patience and stamina, virtues that I had tended to ignore out of a sense of daring ease while I was at school, it became particularly dear to me, because in this modest activity of interpreting illustrious works of art I felt certain, for the first time, that I was doing something really meaningful which justified my existence.

I was now clear in my mind about the path I would tread for the next few years; I would see and learn a great deal, and only then would I really begin. I did not plan to present myself to the world with rashly premature publications—first I wanted to know what the world was all about! The astringency of Berlin had only increased my thirst for such knowledge. And I wondered what country to visit that summer. I opted for Belgium, which had seen a great artistic upturn around the turn of the century, in some ways even outshining France.

Khnopff and Rops in painting, Constantin Meunier and Minne in sculpture, van der Velde in arts and crafts, Maeterlinck, Eekhoud and Lemonnier in literature set high standards for modern Europe. But above all I was fascinated by Emile Verhaeren, because he showed an entirely new way ahead in poetry. He was still unknown in Germany—where for a long time the established critics confused him with Verlaine, just as they got Rolland mixed up with Rostand—and it could be said that I discovered him for myself. And to come to love someone in that way always redoubles one’s affection.

Perhaps I should add a little parenthesis here. Today we get too much experience, and get it too fast, to remember it well, and I do not know if the name of Emile Verhaeren still means anything. Verhaeren was the first Francophone poet to try doing for Europe what Walt Whitman did for America—declare his belief in the present and the future. He had begun to love the modern world and wanted to conquer it for literature. While other writers regarded machines as evil, cities as ugly, the present as unpoetic, he felt enthusiasm for every new discovery and technical achievement, and his own enthusiasm spurred him on; he took a close interest in science so that he could feel that passion more strongly. The minor poems of his early work led on to great, flowing hymns. “Admirez-vous les uns les autres”, marvel at one another, was his message to the nations of Europe. All the optimism of our generation, incomprehensible today at the time of our terrible relapse, found its first poetic expression in him, and some of his best poems will long bear witness to the Europe of the time and the kind of humanity that we dreamt of then.

I had really gone to Brussels on purpose to meet Verhaeren, but Camille Lemonnier, the fine and now unjustly forgotten author of Un Mâle, one of whose novels I had myself translated into German, told me regretfully that Verhaeren seldom left the little village where he lived to come to Brussels, and was not in that city now. To make up for my disappointment, he gave me valuable introductions to other Belgian artists. So I saw the old master Constantin Meunier, the greatest sculptor of the time to depict labour and a heroic labourer in his own field, and after him van der Stappen,[4] whose name is now almost forgotten in the history of art. But what a friendly man that small, chubby-cheeked Fleming was, and how warmly he and his tall, broad, cheerful Dutch wife welcomed their young visitor. He showed me his work, and we talked about art and literature for a long time that bright morning. The couple’s kindness soon banished any awkwardness on my part. I told them frankly how disappointed I had been in Brussels to miss seeing the very man for whose sake I had really come to Belgium, Emile Verhaeren.

Had I said too much? Had I said something silly? I noticed both van der Stappen and his wife smiling slightly and glancing surreptitiously at each other. I felt that my words had set off some secret understanding between them. Feeling embarrassed, I said I must be going, but they wouldn’t hear of it, and insisted on my staying to lunch. Once again that odd smile passed between their eyes. I felt that if there was some kind of secret here, then it was a friendly one, and was happy to abandon my original plan of going on to Waterloo.

It was soon lunchtime, we were already in the dining room—on the ground floor, as in all Belgian houses—where you looked out on the street through stained-glass panes, when suddenly a shadowy figure stopped, sharply outlined, on the other side of the window. Knuckles tapped on the stained glass, and the doorbell rang a loud peal. “Le voilà,” said Mme van der Stappen, getting to her feet, and in he came with a strong, heavy tread. It was Verhaeren himself. I recognised the face that had long been familiar to me from his pictures at first glance. Verhaeren was their guest to lunch today, as he very often was, and when they heard that I had been looking for him in vain they had agreed, in that quick exchange of glances, not to tell me but to let his arrival take me by surprise. And now there he was before me, smiling at the success of their trick when he heard about it. For the first time I felt the firm grip of his sinewy hand, for the first time I saw his clear and kindly gaze. He came—as always—into the house as if full of vigour and enthusiasm. Even as he ate heartily, he kept talking. He had been to see friends, he told us, they had gone to a gallery, he still felt inspired by that visit. This was his usual manner of arrival, his state of mind intensified by chance experiences anywhere and everywhere, and this enthusiasm was his established habit. Like a flame, it leapt again and again from his lips, and he was master of the art of emphasising his words with graphic gestures. With the first thing he said, he reached into you because he was perfectly open, accessible to every newcomer, rejecting nothing, ready for everyone. He sent his whole being, you might say, out to meet you again and again, and I saw him make that overwhelming, stormy impression on many other people after experiencing it for myself on that first meeting. He knew nothing about me, but he already trusted me just because he had heard that I appreciated his works.

After lunch and that first delightful surprise came a second. Van der Stappen, who had long been meaning to fulfil an old wish of his own and Verhaeren’s, had been working for days on a bust of the poet, and today was to be the last sitting. My presence, said van der Stappen, was a very lucky chance, because he positively needed someone to talk to Verhaeren—who was only too inclined to fidget—while he sat for the sculptor so that his face would be animated as he talked and listened. And so I looked deeply into his face for two hours, that unforgettable face with its high forehead, ploughed deeply by the wrinkled furrows of his bad years, his brown, rust-coloured hair falling over it, the hard, stern structure of his features surrounded by brownish weather-beaten skin, his chin jutting like a rock and above the narrow lips, large and lavish, his drooping moustache in the Vercingetorix style. All his nervousness was in his hands—those lean, firm, fine and yet strong hands where the veins throbbed strongly under the thin skin. The whole weight of his will was expressed in his broad, rustic shoulders; the intelligent, bony head almost seemed too small for them. Only when he was moving did you see his strength. If I look at the bust of him now—and van der Stappen never did anything better than the work of that day—I know how true to life it is, and how fully it catches the essence of the man. It is documentary evidence of literary stature, a monument to unchanging power.

In those three hours I learnt to love the man as I have loved him all the rest of my life. There was a confidence in him that did not for a moment seem self-satisfied. He did not mind about money; he would rather live in the country than write a line meant only for the day and the hour. He did not mind about success either, did not try to increase it by granting concessions or doing favours or showing cameraderie—his friends of the same cast of mind were enough for him. He was even independent of the temptation so dangerous to a famous man when fame at last came to him at the zenith of his life. He remained open in every sense, hampered by no inhibitions, confused by no vanity, a free and happy man, easily giving vent to every enthusiasm. When you were with him, you felt inspired in your own will to live.

So there he was in the flesh before me, young as I then was—a poet such as I had hoped to find him, exactly as I had dreamt of him. And even in that first hour of our personal acquaintance my decision was taken; I would put myself at the service of this man and his work. It was a bold decision, for this hymnodist of Europe was little known at the time in Europe itself, and I knew in advance that translating his monumental body of poetry and his three-verse dramas would keep me from writing my own work for two or three years. But as I determined to devote all my power, time and passion to someone else’s work, I was giving myself the best thing imaginable—a moral mission. My vague seeking, my own attempts, now had a point. And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him. If you are a beginner there is more security in such self-sacrifice than in your own creativity, and nothing that you ever do with all your heart is done in vain.

In the two years that I spent almost exclusively in translating the poetry of Verhaeren and preparing to write a biography of him, I travelled a good deal at various times, sometimes to give public lectures. And I had already received unexpected thanks for my apparently thankless devotion to Verhaeren’s work; his friends abroad noticed me, and soon became my friends too. One day, for instance, the delightful Swede Ellen Key came to see me—a woman who, with extraordinary courage in those still blind and backward times, was fighting for the emancipation of women, and in her book The Century of the Child pointed a warning finger, long before Freud, at the mental vulnerability of young people. Through her, I was introduced to the poetic circle in Italy of Giovanni Cena, and made an important friend in the Norwegian Johan Bojer. Georg Brandes, international master of the history of literature, took an interest in me, and thanks to my promotion of it the name of Verhaeren began to be better known in Germany than in his native land. Kainz, that great actor, and Moissi gave public recitations of his poems in my translation. Max Reinhardt produced Verhaeren’s Les Moines—The Monks—on the German stage. I had good reason to feel pleased.

But now it was time to think of myself and remember that I had taken on other duties as well as those to Verhaeren. I had to bring my university career to a successful conclusion and take my doctorate in philosophy home. Now it was a matter of catching up within a few months with the entire scholastic material on which more conscientious students had been labouring for almost four years. With Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, a literary friend of my youth who may not be too happily remembered today because he was one of the acknowledged public writers and academics of Hitler’s Germany, I crammed by night. But the examination was not made difficult for me. In a private preliminary conversation the kindly professor, who knew too much about me from my public literary activities to trouble me with details, said with a smile, “I expect you’d rather not be tested in the field of exact logic,” and then gently led me into spheres where he knew I was sure of myself. It was the first time that I had to take an examination, and I hope the last, and I passed with distinction. Now I was outwardly free, and all the years from then until the present day have been given to my struggle to remain equally free in my mind—a struggle that, in our times, is becoming ever harder.

BRIGHTNESS AND SHADOWS OVER EUROPE

I HAD NOW LIVED THROUGH ten years of the new century; I had seen India, part of America, and I began thinking of Europe with a new and better-informed sense of pleasure. I never loved our old world more than in those last years before the First World War; I never hoped more for a united Europe; I never believed more in its future than at that time, when we thought there was a new dawn in sight. But its red hue was really the firelight of the approaching international conflagration.

Today’s generation has grown up amidst disasters, crises, and the failure of systems. The young see war as a constant possibility to be expected almost daily, and it may be difficult to describe to them the optimism and confidence in the world that we felt when we ourselves were young at the turn of the century. Forty years of peace had strengthened national economies, technology had speeded up the pace of life, scientific discoveries had been a source of pride to the spirit of our own generation. The upswing now beginning could be felt to almost the same extent in all European countries. Cities were more attractive and densely populated year by year; the Berlin of 1905 was not like the city I had known in 1901. From being the capital of a princely state it had become an international metropolis, which in turn paled beside the Berlin of 1910. Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, Amsterdam—whenever you came back to them you were surprised and delighted. The streets were broader and finer, the public buildings more imposing, the shops more elegant. Everything conveyed a sense of the growth and wider distribution of wealth. Even we writers noticed it from the editions of our books printed; in the space of ten years the number of copies printed per edition tripled, then multiplied by fivefold and by tenfold. There were new theatres, libraries and museums everywhere. Domestic facilities such as bathrooms and telephones that used to be the prerogative of a few select circles became available to the lower middle class, and now that hours of work were shorter than before, the proletariat had its own share in at least the minor pleasures and comforts of life. There was progress everywhere. Who dared, won. If you bought a house, a rare book, a picture you saw its value rise; the bolder and more ambitious the ideas behind an enterprise, the more certain it was to succeed. There was a wonderfully carefree atmosphere abroad in the world—for what was going to interrupt this growth, what could stand in the way of the vigour constantly drawing new strength from its own momentum? Europe had never been stronger, richer or more beautiful, had never believed more fervently in an even better future, and no one except a few shrivelled old folk still bewailed the passing of the ‘good old days’.

And not only were the cities more beautiful, their inhabitants too were more attractive and healthier, thanks to sporting activities, better nutrition, shorter working hours and a closer link with nature. People had discovered that up in the mountains winter, once a dismal season to be spent gloomily playing cards in taverns or feeling bored as you sat around in overheated rooms, was a source of filtered sunlight, nectar for the lungs that sent blood coursing deliciously just beneath the skin. The mountains, the lakes and the sea no longer seemed so far away. Bicycles, motor cars, electric railways had shrunk distance and given the world a new sense of space. On Sundays thousands and tens of thousands, clad in brightly coloured sportswear, raced down the snowy slopes on skis and toboggans; sports centres and swimming baths were built everywhere. You could see the change clearly in those swimming baths—while in my own youth a really fine figure of a man stood out among all the bull-necked, paunchy or pigeon-chested specimens, nowadays athletically agile young men, tanned by the sun and fit from all their sporting activities, competed cheerfully with each other as they did in classical antiquity. Only the most poverty-stricken stayed at home now on a Sunday; all the young people went walking, climbing or competing in all kinds of sports. When they went on holiday they did not, as in my parents’ time, find somewhere to stay near the city, or at the most no further away than the Salzkammergut. Their curiosity about the world had been aroused; they wanted to see if it was as beautiful everywhere, or maybe beautiful in a different way in other places, and while once only the privileged few travelled abroad, now bank clerks and small tradesmen went away to Italy or France. Foreign travel had become cheaper and more comfortable, but above all a new bold, adventurous attitude made travellers willing to venture further afield, less thrifty, less anxious—indeed, anxiety was something to be ashamed of. That whole generation was determined to be more youthful; unlike young people in the world of my parents, everyone was proud of youth. Suddenly beards disappeared, first in the younger men, then shaved off by their elders, imitating them so as not to be thought of as old. Youthful freshness was more desirable than dignity. Women threw away the corsets that had constricted their breasts, stopped fearing fresh air and sunlight and gave up sunshades and veils; they shortened their skirts so that they could move more freely when they played tennis, and they were not shy about showing a well-turned pair of legs. Fashions became more and more natural, men wore breeches, women dared to ride astride, and the sexes stopped concealing themselves from each other. There was more freedom as well as more beauty in the world.

It was the health and self-confidence of the generation after ours that also laid claim to freedom for itself in manners and morals. For the first time, you saw young girls enjoying excursions and sporting activities in open and confident friendship with young men, and without a governess going along as chaperone. They were no longer timid and prudish; they knew what they wanted and what they did not. Escaping the anxious authority of their parents, earning their own living as secretaries or clerks, they took control of their own lives. This new, healthier freedom led to a clear decrease in prostitution, the sole permitted erotic institution of the old world, and prudery of every kind now seemed old-fashioned. Increasingly, the wooden partitions in swimming baths that used to divide the gentlemen’s and ladies’ pools from each other were taken down. Women and men were not ashamed to show their figures any more. In those ten years there was more freedom, informality and lack of inhibition than there had been in the entire preceding century.

For the world was moving to a different rhythm. A year—so much could happen in a year now! Inventions and discoveries followed hard on each other’s heels, and each in turn swiftly became a general good. For the first time the nations all felt in common what was for the benefit of all. On the day when the Zeppelin[1] rose in the air for its first flight, I was on my way to Belgium and happened to be in Strasburg where, to shouts of jubilation from the crowd, it circled the Münster as if bowing to the thousand-year-old cathedral while it hovered in the air. That evening, at the Verhaerens’, news came that the airship had crashed in Echterdingen. Verhaeren had tears in his eyes, and was badly upset. Belgian though he was, this German catastrophe did not leave him unmoved; it was as a European, a man of our time, that he felt for our common victory over the elements as well as this common setback. When Blériot made the first cross-Channel flight in an aeroplane, we rejoiced in Vienna as if he were a hero of our own nation; pride in the triumphs of our technology and science, which succeeded one another by the hour, had led for the first time to a European sense of community, the development of a European identity. How pointless, we said to ourselves, frontiers were if it was child’s play for any aircraft to cross them, how provincial and artificial were customs barriers and border guards, how contrary to the spirit of our times that clearly wished for closer links and international fraternity! This upward surge of feeling was no less remarkable than the upward rise of aircraft; I feel sorry for all who did not live through these last years of European confidence while they were still young themselves. For the air around us is not a dead and empty void, it has in it the rhythm and vibration of the time. We absorb them unconsciously into our bloodstream as the air carries them deep into our hearts and minds. Perhaps, ungrateful as human beings are, we did not realise at the time how strongly and securely the wave bore us up. But only those who knew that time of confidence in the world know that everything since has been regression and gloom.

That world was a wonderful tonic, its strength reaching our hearts from all the coasts of Europe. At the same time, however, although we did not guess it, what delighted us was dangerous. The stormy wind of pride and confidence sweeping over Europe brought clouds with it. Perhaps the upward movement had come too fast, states and cities had made themselves powerful too swiftly—and an awareness of having power always leads states, like men, to use or misuse it. France was extremely wealthy, yet it wanted still more, it wanted another colony although it did not have enough people for the old ones, and it almost went to war over Morocco. Italy had its eye on Cyrenaica;[2] Austria annexed Bosnia; Serbia and Bulgaria advanced on Turkey; and Germany, although inactive for the moment, was flexing its claws to strike in anger. All the states were suffering a rush of blood to the head. Everywhere, and at the same time, the productive wish for consolidation at home began to develop, like an infectious illness, into a greedy desire for expansion. High-earning French industrialists agitated against their German counterparts, who were also rolling in riches, because both Krupp and Schneider-Creusot wanted to be able to supply more artillery. The Hamburg shipping industry, which earned huge dividends, was vying with shipping based in Southampton, Hungarian and Bulgarian agriculture were in competition, one group of companies was set against all the rest—the economic situation had maddened them all in their frantic wish to get their hands on more and more. If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is not one sensible reason to be found, nor even any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved, it was not really about drawing minor borderlines; I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had built up during those forty years of peace, and now demanded release. Every state suddenly felt that it was strong, and forgot that other states felt exactly the same; all states wanted even more, and wanted some of what the others already had. The worst of it was that the very thing we loved most, our common optimism, betrayed us, for everyone thought that everyone else would back down at the last minute, and so the diplomats began their game of mutual bluff. In four or five instances, for instance in Agadir and in the Balkan Wars, it was still only a game, but the great coalitions drew closer and closer together and became increasingly militant. Germany introduced a war tax in the middle of peacetime, France extended its term of military service. Finally the accumulated head of steam had to be released. And the weather over the Balkans showed the way the wind was blowing as the clouds approached Europe.

There was no panic yet, but there was a constant sense of smouldering uneasiness; we still felt only slightly uncomfortable when shots rang out from the Balkans. Was war really going to descend on us, when we had no idea why? Slowly—but too slowly, too hesitantly, as we now know—the forces rejecting war came together. There was the Socialist Party, millions of people on all sides, with a programme opposing war; there were powerful Catholic groups under the leadership of the Pope and several international groups of companies; there were a few reasonable politicians who spoke out against any undercover dealings. We writers also ranged ourselves against war, although as usual we spoke in isolation, expressing ourselves as individuals rather than closing ranks to speak firmly as an organisation. Most intellectuals, unfortunately, adopted an indifferent and passive stance, for our optimism meant that the problem of war, with all its moral consequences, had not yet entered our personal field of vision—you will not find a single discussion of the principles involved, or a single passionate warning, in the major works of the prominent writers of that time. We thought we were doing enough if we thought in European terms and forged fraternal links internationally, stating in our own sphere—which had only indirect influence on current events—that we were in favour of the ideal of peaceful understanding and intellectual brotherhood crossing linguistic and national borders. And the younger generation was more strongly attached than anyone to this European ideal. In Paris, I found my friend Bazalgette surrounded by a group of young people who, in contrast to the older generation, had abjured all kinds of narrow-minded nationalism and imperialist aggression. Jules Romains, who was to write a great work on Europe at war, Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac, Durtain, René Arcos,[3] Jean-Richard Bloch, meeting first in the Abbaye and then in the Effort Libre groups, were passionate in their pioneering work for the future unity of Europe, and when put to the crucial test of war, were implacable in their abhorrence of every kind of militarism. These were young people of such courage, talent and moral determination as France has not often produced. In Germany, it was Franz Werfel with his collection of poems entitled Der Weltfreund—Friend of the World—who promoted international fraternity most strongly. René Schickele, an Alsatian whose fate it therefore was to stand between the two opposing nations, worked passionately for understanding; G A Borgese sent us comradely greetings from Italy, and encouragement came from the Scandinavian and Slavonic countries. “Come and visit us!” one great Russian author wrote to me. “Show the pan-Slavists who urge us to go to war that you are against it in Austria!” How we all loved our time, a time that carried us forward on its wings; how we all loved Europe! But that overconfident faith in the future which, we were sure, would avert madness at the last minute, was also our own fault. We had certainly failed to look at the writing on the wall with enough distrust, but should not right-minded young people be trusting rather than suspicious? We trusted Jaurès and the Socialist International, we thought railway workers would blow up the tracks rather than let their comrades be loaded into trains to be sent to the front as cannon fodder; we relied on women to refuse to see their children and husbands sacrificed to the idol Moloch; we were convinced that the intellectual and moral power of Europe would assert itself triumphantly at the critical last moment. Our common idealism, the optimism that had come from progress, meant that we failed to see and speak out strongly enough against our common danger.

Moreover, what we lacked was an organiser who could bring the forces latent in us together effectively. We had only one prophet among us, a single man who looked ahead and saw what was to come, and the curious thing about it was that he lived among us, and it was a long time before we knew anything about him, although he had been sent by Fate as a leader. To me, finding him in the nick of time was a crucial stroke of luck, and it was hard to find him too, since he lived in the middle of Paris far from the hurly-burly of la foire sur la place.[4] Anyone who sets out to write an honest history of French literature in the twentieth century will be unable to ignore a remarkable phenomenon—the names of all kinds of writers were lauded to the skies in the Parisian newspapers of the time, except for the three most important of them, who were either disregarded or mentioned in the wrong context. From 1900 to 1914 I never saw the name of Paul Valéry mentioned as a poet in Le Figaro or Le Matin; Marcel Proust was considered a mere dandy who frequented the Paris salons, and Romain Rolland was thought of as a knowledgeable musicologist. They were almost fifty before the first faint light of fame touched their names, and their great work was hidden in darkness in the most enquiring city in the world.

It was pure chance that I discovered Romain Rolland at the right time. A Russian woman sculptor living in Florence had invited me to tea, to show me her work and try her hand at a sketch of me. I arrived punctually at four, forgetting that she was, after all, a Russian, so time and punctuality meant nothing to her. An old babushka who, I discovered, had been her mother’s nurse, took me into the studio—the most picturesque thing about it was its disorder—and asked me to wait. In all there were four small sculptures standing around, and I had seen them all within two minutes. So as not to waste time, I picked up a book, or rather a couple of brown-covered journals lying about the studio. These were entitled Cahiers de la Quinzaine,[5] and I remembered having heard that title in Paris before. But who could keep track of the many little magazines that sprang up all over the country, short-lived idealistic flowers, and then disappeared again? I leafed through one of them, containing L’Aube, by Romain Rolland, and began to read, feeling more astonished and interested as I went on. Who was this Frenchman who knew Germany so well? Soon I was feeling grateful to my Russian friend for her unpunctuality. When she finally arrived, my first question was, “Who is this Romain Rolland?” She couldn’t give me any very clear information, and only when I had acquired other issues of the magazine (the next was still in production) did I know that here at last was a work serving not just one European nation, but all of them and the fraternal connection between them. Here was the man, here was the writer who brought all the moral forces into play—affectionate understanding and an honest desire to find out more. He showed a sense of justice based on experience, and an inspiring faith in the unifying power of art. While the rest of us were squandering our efforts on small declarations of faith, he had set to work quietly and patiently to show the nations to one another through their most appealing individual qualities. This was the first consciously European novel being written at the time, the first vital call for fraternity, and it would be more effective in reaching a wider readership than Verhaeren’s hymns, and in being more cogent than all the pamphlets and protests. What we had all unconsciously been hoping and longing for was being quietly written here.

The first thing I did in Paris was to ask about him, bearing in mind what Goethe had said: “He has learnt, he can teach us.” I asked my friends about him. Verhaeren thought he remembered a play called The Wolves that had been staged at the socialist Théâtre du Peuple. Bazalgette had heard that Rolland was a musicologist and had written a short book on Beethoven. In the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale I found a dozen works of his about old and modern music, and seven or eight plays, all of which had appeared under the imprint of small publishing houses or in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Finally, by way of a first approach to him, I sent him a book of my own. A letter soon arrived inviting me to visit him, and thus began a friendship that, together with my relationships with Freud and Verhaeren, was one of the most fruitful and often crucial of my life.

Notable days in our lives have a brighter aura about them than the ordinary kind. So I now remember that first visit with great clarity. I climbed five narrow, winding flights of stairs in an unpretentious building in the boulevard Montparnasse, and even outside the door I felt a special kind of stillness; the noise in the street sounded hardly any louder than the wind blowing in the trees of an old monastery garden below the windows. Rolland opened the door and took me into his small room, which was crammed with books up to the ceiling. For the first time I saw his remarkably bright blue eyes, the clearest and at the same time kindest eyes I ever saw in any human being, eyes that drew colour and fire from his inmost feelings in conversation, darkly shadowed in sorrow, appearing to grow deeper when he was thinking, sparkling with excitement—those unique eyes, under lids that were a little overtired, easily became red-rimmed when he had been reading or staying up late, but could shine radiantly in a congenial and happy light. I observed his figure with a little anxiety. Tall and thin, he stooped slightly as he walked, as if the countless hours at his desk had weighed his head down; his very pale complexion and angular features made him look rather unwell. He spoke very quietly and was sparing of physical effort in general; he almost never went out walking, he ate little, did not drink or smoke, but later I realised, with admiration, what great stamina there was in that ascetic frame, what a capacity for intellectual work lay behind his apparent debility. He would write for hours at his small desk, which was piled high with papers; he would read in bed for hours, never allowing his exhausted body more than four or five hours of sleep, and the only relaxation in which he indulged was music. He played the piano very well, with a delicate touch that I shall never forget, caressing the keys as if to entice rather than force the notes out of them. No virtuoso—and I have heard Max Reger, Busoni and Bruno Walter playing in small gatherings—gave me such a sense of direct communication with the master composers he loved.

His knowledge was very wide, putting most of us to shame; although he really lived only through his reading eyes; he had a fine command of literature, philosophy, history, and the problems of all nations at all times. He knew every bar of classical music; he was familiar with even the least-known works of Galuppi and Telemann, and with the music of sixth-rate or seventh-rate composers as well, yet he took a passionate interest in all events of the present day. The world was reflected in this monastic cell of his as if in a camera obscura. He had been on familiar terms with the great men of his time, had been a pupil of Renan, a guest in Wagner’s house, a friend of Jaurès. Tolstoy had written him a famous letter that would go on record as human appreciation of his literary works. Here—and this always rejoices my heart—I sensed a human and moral superiority, an inner freedom without pride, something to be taken for granted in a strong mind. At first sight, and time has proved me right, I recognised him as the man who would be the conscience of Europe in its time of crisis. We talked about his Jean-Christophe novels. Rolland told me that he had tried to make the work fulfil a triple purpose—conveying his gratitude to music, his commitment to the cause of European unity, and an appeal to the nations to stop and think. Now we must all do what we could in our own positions, our own countries, our own languages. It was time, he said, to be more and more on our guard. The forces working for hatred, in line with their baser nature, were more violent and aggressive than the forces of reconciliation, and there were material interests behind them which, of their very nature, were more unscrupulous than ours. I found such grief over the fragility of earthly structures doubly moving in a man whose entire work celebrated the immortality of art. “It can bring comfort to us as individuals,” he replied to me, “but it can do nothing against stark reality.”

This was in 1913. It was the first conversation that showed me it was our duty not to confront the possibility of a European war passively and unprepared. When the crucial moment came, nothing gave Rolland such great moral superiority over everyone else as the way he had already, and painfully, strengthened his mind to face it in advance. Perhaps the rest of our circle had done something too. I had translated many works, I had promoted the best writers in the countries that were our neighbours, I had accompanied Verhaeren on a lecture tour all over Germany in 1912, and the tour had turned out to be a symbolic demonstration of Franco-German fraternity. In Hamburg Verhaeren and Dehmel, respectively the greatest poets of their time writing in French and German, had embraced in public. I had interested Reinhardt in Verhaeren’s new play; our collaboration on both sides had never been warmer, more intense or more unconstrained, and in many hours of enthusiasm we entertained the illusion that we had shown the world the way that would save it. The world, however, took little notice of such literary manifestations, but went its own way to ruin. There was a kind of electrical crackling in the structural woodwork as if of invisible friction. Now and then a spark would fly up—the Zabern Affair,[6] the crises in Albania, the occasional unfortunate interview. Never more than a spark, but each one could have caused the accumulation of explosive material to blow up. We in Austria were keenly aware that we were at the heart of the area of unrest. In 1910 Emperor Franz Joseph passed the age of eighty. The old man, an icon in his own lifetime, could not last much longer, and a mystical belief began to spread among the public at large that after his death there would be no way to prevent the dissolution of the thousand-year-old monarchy. At home, the pressure of opposing nationalities grew; abroad Italy, Serbia, Romania and to some extent even Germany were waiting to divide up the Austrian empire. The war in the Balkans, where Krupp and Schneider-Creusot competed in trying out their artillery on ‘human material’, just as later the Germans and Italians tried out their aeroplanes during the Spanish Civil War, drew us further and further into the raging torrent. We kept waking with a start, but to breathe again and again, with a sigh of relief, “Not this time. Not yet, and let us hope never!”

As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. That atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes of the kind that I am going to recount here. To be honest, I did not believe that war was coming at the time. But I twice had what might be called a waking dream of it, and woke with my mind in great turmoil. The first time was over the ‘Redl Affair’, which like many of those episodes that form a backdrop to history is not widely known.

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 of 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. 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, not entirely trusting the competence of the military authorities, also let it be known without first informing the General Staff—a typical example of the jealous rivalry of those organisations—that they were going to follow the matter up independently, and to this end gave the police the job of taking various measures, including the opening of letters from abroad sent poste restante, regardless of the principle that such correspondence was strictly private.

One day, then, a post office received a letter from the Russian border station at Podvolokzyska to a poste-restante address code-named ‘Opera Ball’. On being opened, it proved to contain no letter, but six or eight new Austrian thousand-crown notes. This suspicious find was reported at once to the chief of police, who issued instructions for a detective to be stationed at the post-office counter to arrest the person who came to claim the suspect letter on the spot.

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 pair, the driver of the cab considered himself far 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 carriage. This man, fortunately, had noticed the number of the cab that had just driven off. In 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. Frantic telephone conversations began, finally reaching Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of General Staff of the Austrian army. An eyewitness of this scene told me that on hearing the first few words he turned white as a sheet. Phone calls to the Hofburg palace ensued, discussion following discussion. What should be done next? The police had now made sure that Colonel Redl could not get away. When he was leaving the Hotel Klomser, and was giving the hotel porter some instructions, a detective unobtrusively approached him, offered him the pocketknife and asked, in civil tones, “Did you happen to leave this pocketknife in your cab, Colonel?” At that moment Redl knew that the game was up. Wherever he turned, he saw the familiar faces of secret policemen keeping watch on him, and when he returned to the hotel, two officers followed him up to his room and put a revolver down in front of him, for by now a decision had been reached in the Hofburg—the end of an affair showing the Austrian army in such an ignominious light would be best hushed up. The two officers stayed on duty outside Redl’s room in the Hotel Klomser until two in the morning. Only then did they hear the sound of the revolver being fired inside the room.

Next day a brief obituary of the highly regarded officer Colonel Redl, who had died suddenly, appeared in the evening papers. But too many people had been involved in tracking him down for the secret to be kept. Gradually, moreover, details that explained a great deal in psychological terms came to light. Unknown to any of his superiors or colleagues, Colonel 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. Everyone knew that if war came, this one man could have cost the country the lives of hundreds of thousands, bringing the monarchy to the brink of the abyss. Only then did we Austrians realise how very close we had been to world war already during the past year.

That was the first time I felt terror take me by the throat. Next day I happened to meet Bertha von Suttner, the generous and magnificent Cassandra of our times. An aristocrat from one of the first families in the land, in her early youth she had seen the horrors of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 come close to their hereditary castle in Bohemia. With the passion of a Florence Nightingale, she saw only one task in life for herself—preventing a second war, preventing war in general. She wrote a novel entitled Die Waffen nieder—Lay Down Your Arms—which was an international success; she organised countless pacifist meetings, and the great triumph of her life was that she aroused the conscience of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. He was induced to make up for the damage his invention had done by setting up the Nobel Peace Prize to foster international understanding. She came towards me in a state of great agitation. “People don’t realise what’s going on,” she cried out loud in the street, although she usually spoke in quiet, kindly and composed tones. War was so close, and they were hiding everything from us and keeping it secret as usual. “Why don’t you young people do something? It’s more your business than anyone’s! Resist, close ranks! Don’t keep leaving everything to a few old women like us. No one listens to us!”

I told her that I was going to Paris, and perhaps we could try to draw up a joint manifesto there.

“Why ‘perhaps’?” she urged me. “Things look worse than ever, the wheels have begun turning.” Uneasy as I was myself, I had difficulty in calming her down.

But it was in France that a second, personal episode was to remind me how prophetically the old lady, who was not taken very seriously in Vienna, had foreseen the future. It was a very small incident, but it made a powerful impression on me. In the spring of 1914 I had left Paris, with a woman friend, to spend a few days in Touraine, where we were going to see the grave of Leonardo da Vinci. We had walked along the banks of the Loire in mild, sunny weather, and were pleasantly weary by evening. So we decided to go to the cinema in the rather sleepy town of Tours, where I had already paid my respects to the house in which Balzac was born.

It was a small suburban cinema, not at all like our modern picture palaces made of chromium and shining glass. Only a hall perfunctorily adapted for the purpose, and full of labourers, soldiers, market women, a crowd of ordinary people enjoying a gossip and blowing clouds of Scaferlati and Caporal tobacco smoke into the air, in defiance of a No Smoking sign. First on the screen came a newsreel—‘News From All Over the World’. A boat race in England; the people talked and laughed. Then a French military parade, and again the audience took little notice. But the third item was entitled: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Visits Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna’. Suddenly I saw on the screen the familiar platform of the Westbahnhof in Vienna, an ugly railway station building, along with a few policemen waiting for the train to come in. Then a signal was given, and old Emperor Franz Joseph walked past the guard of honour to welcome his guest. As the old Emperor appeared on the screen, stooping slightly and not entirely steady on his feet as he passed the line of men, the audience in Tours smiled kindly at the old gentleman with his white side whiskers. Then there was a picture of the train coming in, the first, the second and the third carriages. The door of the saloon car was opened, and out stepped Wilhelm II, the ends of his moustache bristling, wearing the uniform of an Austrian general.

At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst. It was only a second, a single second. All was forgotten once other pictures were shown. The audience laughed heartily at the comedy that now followed, slapping their knees loudly with delight. Only a second, yes, but it showed me how easy it could be to whip up bad feeling on both sides at a moment of serious crisis, in spite of all attempts to restore understanding, in spite of our own efforts.

The entire evening was spoilt for me. I couldn’t sleep. If it had happened in Paris, it would have made me just as uneasy, but it would not have shaken me so much. However, seeing how far hatred had eaten into the kindly, simple people here in the depths of the provinces made me shudder. In the next few days I told the story of this episode to many friends. Most of them didn’t take it seriously. “Remember how we French mocked stout old Queen Victoria, and two years later came the Entente Cordiale with Britain. You don’t know the French; they don’t feel deeply about politics.” Only Rolland saw it in a different light. “The simpler the people, the easier it is to win them over. Things have looked bad since Poincaré was elected. His journey to Petersburg will not be a pleasure jaunt.” We talked for a long time about the International Socialist Congress that had been fixed for that summer in Vienna, but here too Rolland was more sceptical than most. “Who knows how many will stand firm once the posters ordering mobilisation go up? We have entered a time of mass emotion, crowd hysteria, and we cannot see yet what power it will have if war comes.”

But, as I said earlier, such moments of anxiety passed by like gossamer blowing in the wind. We did think of war now and then, but in much the same way as one sometimes thinks of death—a possibility but probably far away. And Paris was too beautiful at that time, and we ourselves too young and happy to think of it much. I still remember a delightfully farcical ceremony devised by Jules Romains in which the idea of a prince des poètes was to be superseded by the crowning of a prince des penseurs, a good if rather simple-minded man who let the students lead him to the statue of Rodin’s Thinker outside the Panthéon. In the evening we made merry like schoolboys at a parody of a banquet. The trees were in blossom, the air was sweet and mild; who wanted to think of something as unimaginable as war in the face of so many pleasures?

My friends were more my friends than ever, and I was making new friends too in a foreign land—an ‘enemy’ land. The city was more carefree than ever before, and we loved its freedom from care along with our own. In those final days I went with Verhaeren to Rouen, where he was to give a reading. That night we stood outside the cathedral, its spires gleaming magically in the moonlight—did such mild miracles belong to only one fatherland, didn’t they belong to us all? At Rouen station, where one of the railway engines he had celebrated in verse was to crush him two years later,[7] we said our goodbyes. Verhaeren embraced me. “I’ll see you on the first of August at Caillou qui Bique!” I promised to be there. I visited him at his place in the country every year to translate his new poems, working in close collaboration with him, so why not this year too? I said goodbye to my other friends without a care, goodbye to Paris, an unsentimental goodbye such as you say to your own house when you are just going away for a few weeks. My plan for the next few months was clear. I was off to Austria, to somewhere secluded in the country to get on with my work on Dostoevsky (which as things turned out could not be published until five years later), and thus complete my book on Three Masters of Their Destiny, depicting three great nations through the work of their greatest novelists. Then I would visit Verhaeren, and perhaps make my long-planned journey to Russia in winter, to form a group there as part of our movement for intellectual understanding. All lay plain and clear before me in this, my thirty-second year; that radiant summer the world offered itself like a delicious fruit. And I loved it for the sake of what it was now, and what it would be in an even greater future.

Then, on 28th June 1914, a shot was fired in Sarajevo, the shot that in a single second was to shatter the world of security and creative reason in which we had been reared, where we had grown up and were at home, as if it were a hollow clay pot breaking into a thousand pieces.