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In 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.
Even in the abyss of despair in which today, half-blinded, we grope about with distorted and broken souls, I look up again and again to those old star-patterns that shone over my childhood, and comfort myself with the inherited confidence that this collapse will appear, in days to come, as a mere interval in the eternal rhythm of the onward and onward.
That he never asked anything of anyone, that he was never obliged to say “please” or “thanks” to anyone, was his secret pride and meant more to him than any external recognition.
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.
Vienna was, we know, an epicurean city; but what is culture, if not to wheedle from the coarse material of life, by art and love, its finest, its most delicate, its most subtle qualities?
Not even in their darkest nights was it possible for them to dream how dangerous man can be, or how much power he has to withstand dangers and overcome trials.
Austria was an old State, dominated by an aged Emperor, ruled by old Ministers, a State without ambition, which hoped to preserve itself unharmed in the European domain solely by opposing all radical changes.
Perhaps nothing has contributed as much to the intellectual mobility and the international orientation of the Austrian as that he could keep abreast of all world events in the coffeehouse, and at the same time discuss them in the circle of his friends.
That one did not have to be born a prince or a duke to achieve power at an early age, that one might come from any humble and even poor family and yet be a general at twenty-four, ruler of France at thirty and of the entire world, caused hundreds, after this unique success, to abandon petty vocations and provincial abodes.
The masses rose, and we wrote and discussed poetry. We did not see the fiery signs on the wall, and like King Belshazzar of old we feasted without care on the precious dishes of art, not looking anxiously into the future. And only decades later, when roof and walls fell in upon us, did we realize that the foundations had long since been undermined and that together with the new century the decline of individual freedom in Europe had begun.
The more of a “lady” a woman was to be, the less was her natural form to be seen. Fundamentally, the mode, with this as its obvious motive, merely obeyed the general moral tendency of the time, whose chief care was dissembling and concealment.
old women died, the lines of whose shoulders or knees no one had ever seen, with the exception of the midwife, their husbands, and the undertaker.
For it is only the forbidden that occupies the senses, only the forbidden excites desire; and the less the eyes manage to see and the ears to hear, the more the mind will dream.
For a society is always most cruel to those who disclose and reveal its secrets, when through dishonesty society itself has outraged Nature.
But generally speaking, prostitution was still the foundation of the erotic life outside of marriage; in a certain sense it constituted a dark underground vault over which rose the gorgeous structure of middle-class society with its faultless, radiant façade.
But as Friedrich Hebbel once so aptly said: “Now we lack the wine, now we lack the cup.” One and the same generation is rarely granted both. If morality gives man freedom, then the State confines him. If the State permits him freedom, then morality attempts to enslave him.
It may well be that through this freedom from care with which these young people go through life, some of that respect for intellectual things, which animated us, may be lacking in them. It may well be that through this modern and natural give-and-take, something which seemed particularly precious and attractive to us may be lost to them in love – a secret reticence of modesty and shame, some kindliness and gentleness. Perhaps they do not even suspect that awe of the forbidden and self-denial secretly increase enjoyment. But all this seems little to me in contrast to the one saving change,
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Vienna, startled, became aware that it was not just a writer or a mediocre poet who had passed away, but one of those creators of ideas who disclose themselves triumphantly in a single country, to a single people at vast intervals.
The Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, not one of them can remember how much freedom and joy the soulless, voracious bogy of the “State” has sucked from the very marrow of their soul.
But in Paris the inheritance of the Revolution was still in the blood. The proletarian worker felt himself as free and important a citizen as his employer. In the café the waiter cordially shook the hand of the gold-braided general, the small solid sober bourgeoise did not stick up her nose at the prostitute who lived on the same floor, but chatted with her daily on the staircase, and the children gave her flowers.
It is only through an intellectual friendship with the living that one gains insight into the true connection between folk and land; all observation from without can give no more than a spurious premature view.
They constituted a guild, an almost monastic order in the midst of our clattering time; to them, awaredly rejecting life’s workaday round, nothing in the whole universe was more significant than the note – delicate, yet surviving the booming of the age – emitted when rhyme joining rhyme created the indescribable stir, softer than the sound of a leaf falling in the wind, that vibrates to the most distant soul.
All that was vulgar was unbearable to him, and although he lived in restricted circumstances, his clothes always gave evidence of care, cleanliness, and good taste. At the same time they showed thought and poetic imagination; they were a masterpiece of unpretension, always with an unobtrusive personal touch, a little something additional which gave him pleasure, such as perhaps a thin silver bracelet around his wrist. For his aesthetic sense of perfection and symmetry entered into the most intimate and the most personal details.
Unless he was able to raise leisure to a social art by means of millions, this city energetically eliminated the idler, the mere observer, as a foreign body, instead of permitting him, as in Paris, to amble along contentedly in its bustling life.
The fact that the two greatest actors of Germany had died while rehearsing my verses made me (I am not ashamed to confess it) superstitious.
I knew that he had inherited from Kainz the Iffland ring, which is always bequeathed by Germany’s greatest actor to his greatest successor.
But it is only early in life that one believes fate to be identical with chance. Later one knows that the actual course of one’s life was determined from within; however confusedly and meaninglessly our way may deviate from our desires, after all it does lead us inevitably to our invisible goal.
This was my first sight of the pest of the racial purity mania which has become more dangerous for our world of today than the actual plague had been centuries ago.
I could not rid myself of the uneasy feeling that the coming decades and centuries would bring about transformations and changes in these absurd conditions, which we Europeans in our comfortable and fondly imagined security did not dare to dream about.
After two days of job hunting I had theoretically found five jobs by which I could have made my living. In this manner I had convinced myself more vividly than by mere strolling about how much room, how much opportunity there was in this young country for anyone willing to work, and that impressed me.
The world had become not only more beautiful, but more free.
Calmly reflecting on the past, if one asks why Europe went to war in 1914, neither reasonable ground nor even provocation can be found. It had nothing to do with ideas and hardly even with petty frontiers. I cannot explain it otherwise than by this surplus of force, a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had accumulated in those forty years of peace and now sought violent release.
It is also possible that these powers of darkness had their share in the wild frenzy into which everything was thrown – self-sacrifice and alcohol, the spirit of adventure and the spirit of pure faith, the old magic of flags and patriotic slogans, that mysterious frenzy of the millions which can hardly be described in words, but which, for the moment, gave a wild and almost rapturous impetus to the greatest crime of our time.
If war had come, then it could only have come against the wishes of their own statesmen; they themselves were not at fault, indeed no one in the entire land was at fault. Therefore the criminals, the warmongers must be the other fellows; we had taken up arms in self-defense against a villainous and crafty enemy, who had “attacked” peaceful Austria and Germany without the slightest provocation.
A rapid excursion into the romantic, a wild, manly adventure – that is how the war of 1914 was painted in the imagination of the simple man, and the young people were honestly afraid that they might miss this most wonderful and exciting experience of their lives; that is why they hurried and thronged to the colors, and that is why they shouted and sang in the trains that carried them to the slaughter; wildly and feverishly the red wave of blood coursed through the veins of the entire nation.
Not a single individual of the generation of 1939 believed any longer in a God-decreed justice of war: and what was worse they no longer believed in the justice and permanence of the peace it was to achieve. For they remembered all too well the disappointments that the last war had brought; impoverization instead of riches, bitterness instead of contentment, famine, inflation, revolts, the loss of civil rights, enslavement by the State, nerve-destroying uncertainty, distrust of each against all.
The war of 1914, on the other hand, knew nothing of realities, it still served a delusion, the dream of a better, a righteous and peaceful world. And it is only delusion, and not knowledge, that bestows happiness.
It lies in human nature that deep emotion cannot be prolonged indefinitely, either in the individual or in a people, a fact that is known to all military organizations. Therefore it requires an artificial stimulation, a constant “doping” of excitement; and this whipping up was to be performed by the intellectuals, the poets, the writers and the journalists, scrupulously or otherwise, honestly or as a matter of professional routine.
I became aware that among seeming refugees and martyrs in heroic causes, there were some dubious characters who served the German intelligence bureau and were paid to spy and eavesdrop. It became obvious that sound and peaceful, quiet and solid Switzerland was being undermined by the mole-like activities of secret agents from both camps. The chambermaid who emptied the waste basket, the telephone operator, the grave waiter who came suspiciously close, were employed by enemy power, the same person often in the pay of both. Luggage would be mysteriously unlocked, blotters were photographed,
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mankind with its trenches having been content to retrogress to cave-dweller times, it now dissolved the thousand-year-old convention of money and reverted to primitive barter.
a thrifty merchant would raise the price of a box of matches to twenty times the amount charged by his upright competitor who was innocently holding to yesterday’s quotation; the reward for his honesty was the sale of his stock within an hour, because the news got around quickly and everybody rushed to buy whatever was for sale whether it was something they needed or not. Even a goldfish or an old telescope was “goods” and what people wanted was goods instead of paper.
This beer war between two inflations remains one of my oddest recollections because it was a precise reflection, in grotesque graphic miniature, of the whole insane character of those years.
The very fact that what once represented the greatest stability – money – was dwindling in value daily caused people to assess the true values of life, work, love, friendships, art and Nature the more highly, and the whole nation lived more intensively and more buoyantly than ever despite the catastrophe; young people went on mountain tramps and returned healthily tanned, dance halls kept going until late at night, new factories and business enterprises sprang up.
Every extravagant idea that was not subject to regulation reaped a golden harvest: theosophy, occultism, spiritualism, somnambulism, anthroposophy, palm-reading, graphology, yoga and Paracelsism. Anything that gave hope of newer and greater thrills, anything in the way of narcotics, morphine, cocaine, heroin found a tremendous market; on the stage, incest and parricide, in politics, communism and fascism, constituted the most favored themes; unconditionally proscribed, however, was any representation of normality and moderation.
For the German people, a disciplined folk, did not know what to do with their freedom and already looked impatiently toward those who were to take it from them.
I was able to agitate with greater sweep and better effect for the idea which, over the years, had become central to my life: the intellectual unification of Europe.
But what gave me pause was that any trip to Russia in itself implied some kind of partisanship which forced one into either a public acceptance or repudiation; while I, who deeply loathed anything political and dogmatic, did not want to declare a compulsory judgment of an endless country and a still unsolved problem after a few weeks’ survey.
everything was overorganized and thus failed to function properly. The new bureaucracy created to bring about “order” was still reveling in the emission of memoranda, permits, etc., which resulted in every sort of delay.
Here also, like everywhere there was a slight ludicrousness in this honest and well-meant attempt to elevate the “people” overnight from illiteracy to an understanding of Beethoven and Vermeer; but this endeavor, on the one hand to make the highest values intelligible at the first attempt, and, on the other, to understand them, tried the patience of both parties.
what a wonderful, big, gifted and kindly child, this Russia, was the constant thought, and one asked oneself: will it really learn its enormous lesson as quickly as it proposes to do? Will this plan continue to unfold itself magnificently or will it break up on the reef of the traditional Russian Oblomovism.
