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Never – and I say this without pride, but rather with shame – has any generation experienced such a moral retrogression from such a spiritual height as our generation has.
All the bridges between our today and our yesterday and our yesteryears have been burnt.
have been celebrated and despised, free and unfree, rich and poor. All the livid steeds of the Apocalypse have stormed through my life – revolution and famine, inflation and terror, epidemics and emigration. I have seen the great mass ideologies grow and spread before my eyes
in the same era when our world fell back morally a thousand years, I have seen that same mankind lift itself, in technical and intellectual matters, to unheard-of deeds, surpassing the achievement of a million years with a single beat of its wings.
There was no protection, no security against being constantly made aware of things and being drawn into them.
For I look upon our memory not as an element which accidentally retains or forgets, but rather as a consciously organizing and wisely exclusionary power. All
Golden Age of Security.
its liberal idealism, the nineteenth century was honestly convinced that it was on the straight and unfailing path toward being the best of all worlds.
Progress was also made in social matters; year after year new rights were accorded to the individual, justice was administered more benignly and humanely, and even the problem of problems, the poverty of the great masses, no longer seemed insurmountable. The right to vote was being accorded to wider circles, and with it the possibility of legally protecting their interests. Sociologists and professors competed with one another to create healthier and happier living conditions for the proletariat.
There was as little belief in the possibility of such barbaric declines as wars between the peoples of Europe as there was in witches and ghosts.
Early emancipated from their orthodox religion, they were passionate followers of the religion of the time, “progress,” and in the political era of liberalism they supported the most esteemed representatives in parliament.
“thinking of the future” – this is another phrase of the age of security – as
It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.
A “good” family therefore means more than the purely social aspect which it assigns to itself with this classification; it means a Jewry that has freed itself of all defects and limitations and pettiness which the ghetto has forced upon it, by means of adaptation to a different culture and even possibly a universal culture.
one was not a real Viennese without this love for culture, without this sense, aesthetic and critical at once, of the holiest exuberance of life.
Adapting themselves to the milieu of the people or country where they live is not only an external protective measure for Jews, but a deep internal desire. Their longing for a homeland, for rest, for security, for friendliness, urges them to attach themselves passionately to the culture of the world around them.
Practically all the great art collections of the nineteenth century were formed by them, nearly all the artistic attempts were made possible only by them; without the ceaseless stimulating interest of the Jewish bourgeoisie, Vienna, thanks to the indolence of the court, the aristocracy, and the Christian millionaires, who preferred to maintain racing stables and hunts to fostering art, would have remained behind Berlin in the realm of art as Austria remained behind the German Reich in political matters.
Because of their passionate love for the city, through their desire for assimilation, they had adapted themselves fully, and were happy to serve the glory of Vienna.
Freedom in one’s private affairs, which is no longer considered comprehensible, was taken for granted. One did not look down upon tolerance as one does today as weakness and softness, but rather praised it as an ethical force.
Speed was not only thought to be unrefined, but indeed was considered unnecessary, for in that stabilized bourgeois world with its countless little securities, well palisaded on all sides, nothing unexpected ever occurred. Such catastrophes as took place outside on the world’s periphery never made their way through the well-padded walls of “secure” living.
How little they knew, as they muddled through in security and comfort and possessions, that life can also be tension and profusion, a continuous state of being surprised, and being lifted up from all sides; little did they think in their touching liberalism and optimism that each succeeding day that dawns outside our window can smash our life. Not
For us school was compulsion, ennui, dreariness, a place where we had to assimilate the “science of the not-worth-knowing” in exactly measured portions – scholastic or scholastically manufactured material which we felt could have no relation to reality or to our personal interests. It was a dull, pointless learning that the old pedagogy forced upon us, not for the sake of life, but for the sake of learning. And the only truly joyful moment of happiness for which I have to thank my school was the day that I was able to shut the door behind me forever.
In my opinion nothing is more characteristic of the total lack of spiritual and intellectual relationship between our teachers and ourselves than the fact that I have forgotten all their names and faces.
Young people, who always instinctively desire rapid and radical changes, were therefore considered a doubtful element which was to be held down or kept inactive for as long a time as possible.
So arose the situation, incomprehensible today, that youth was a hindrance in all careers, and age alone was an advantage.
Above all else we were to be educated to respect the existing as perfect, the opinion of the teacher as infallible, our father’s words as uncontradictable, the provisions of the State as absolute and valid for all eternity.
the Viennese coffeehouse is a particular institution which is not comparable to any other in the world. As a matter of fact, it is a sort of democratic club to which admission costs the small price of a cup of coffee.
Anything that was not yet generally recognized, or was so lofty as to be attainable only with difficulty, the new and radical times, provoked our particular love.
Youth, like certain animals, possesses an excellent instinct for change of weather, and so our generation sensed, before our teachers and our universities knew it, that in the realm of the arts something had come to an end with the old century, and that a revolution, or at least a change of values, was in the offing.
But there was something else that interested and fascinated us so boundlessly in this new art: it was almost exclusively the art of young people. In the generation of our fathers, the poet, the musician, or the critic only achieved recognition when he had been “tried,” when he had adapted himself to the leisurely, proved taste of bourgeois society.
Hofmannsthal
With that magical knowledge which is peculiar to the immature, we had known in advance that this miracle of our youth was unique and without recurrence in our life.
It is always an individual young person who achieves the unattainable for the first time in any field, and thus encourages all the youngsters around him or who come after him, by the mere fact of his success.
It was a particularly propitious atmosphere, conditioned by the artistic soil of the city, the unpolitical era, the emerging constellation of intellectual talents and the new literary orientation at the turn of the century; and it was chemically related in us to the immanent will to produce which perforce belongs to that stage of life.
attached but little weight to pleasing young girls, since we thought to impress higher tribunals. It seemed to us that walking with the girls was time lost, for in our intellectual arrogance we looked from the start upon the other sex as being mentally inferior, and did not wish to waste our precious hours in inane conversation.
Fights, athletic clubs, and heavyweight records were still regarded in our time as a thing of the outer city, and butchers and porters really made up their audience; at best the noble and more aristocratic sport of racing drew the so-called “good society” several times a year to the racetrack, but could not lure us who looked upon every physical activity as a plain waste of time.
games as we were about training our bodies. Chess alone found favor in our eyes, because it required mental exertion, and what was more absurd, although we felt ourselves to be, at least potentially, the coming poets, we bothered but little about nature.
passion for the intellectual
What one’s muscles have missed can be made up later; the élan toward the intellectual, the soul’s inner grasping power, is set in motion in those decisive formative years, and only he who has learned early to spread his soul out wide may later hold the entire world within himself.
The masses, which had silently and obediently permitted the liberal middle classes to retain the leadership for decades, suddenly became restless, organized themselves and demanded their rights.
The new century wanted a new order, a new era.
socialist movement.
white carnation, the sign of membership in the Christian Social Party!
An able and popular leader was Dr. Karl Lueger, who mastered this unrest and worry and with the slogan “the little man must be helped,” carried with him the entire small bourgeoisie and the disgruntled middle class, whose envy of the wealthy was markedly less than the fear of sinking from its bourgeois status into the proletariat. It was exactly the same worried group which Adolf Hitler later collected around him as his first substantial following. Karl Lueger was also his prototype in another sense, in that he taught him the usefulness of the anti-semitic catchword, which put an opponent
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The entire vulgarization and brutalization of present-day politics, the horrible decline of our century, is demonstrated in the comparison of these two figures.
He always maintained a certain chivalry towards his opponents, and his official anti-semitism never stopped him from being helpful and friendly to his former Jewish friends. When his movement had finally captured the Viennese town council and he, after Emperor Franz Josef (who detested the anti-semitic tendency) had twice refused to sanction him, was appointed mayor, his city administration remained perfectly just and even typically democratic. The Jews, who had trembled at this triumph of the anti-semitic party, continued to live with the same rights and esteem as always.
third flower appeared, the blue cornflower, Bismarck’s favorite flower, and the emblem of the German National Party, which – although not then recognized as such – was consciously a revolutionary party, and worked with brutal forcefulness for the destruction of the Austrian monarchy in favor of a Greater Germany under Prussian and Protestant leadership, such as Hitler dreams of.
Hitler also took over from him the anti-semitic racial theory – ”In that race lies swinishness,” his illustrious prototype had said. But above all else, he took from the German Nationals the beginning of a ruthless storm troop that blindly hit out in all directions, and with it the principle of terroristic intimidation by a small group of a numerically superior but humanely more passive majority.
Wherever this tiny though loud-mouthed party of the German Nationals wished to obtain anything by force in Austria, they sent this student storm troop on ahead.
But so great was the abhorrence of that tragically weak and touchingly human era for any violent tumult or the shedding of blood, that the Government retired in the face of the German National terror.
