Читать книгу The World of Yesterday - Stefan Zweig - Страница 8

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As a matter of course I was sent to a Gymnasium when I had finished attending elementary school. Every well-to-do family took great care to have its sons “educated,” if only for purely social reasons. They were taught French and English, they were made familiar with music, and were given governesses at first and then tutors to teach them good manners. But only the so-called “academic” education, which led to the University, carried full value in those days of enlightened liberalism; and that is why it was the ambition of every “good” family to have some sort of doctor’s title prefixed to the name of at least one of its sons. The path to the University, however, was fairly long and by no means rosy. Five years of elementary school and eight years of Gymnasium were spent on wooden benches; five to six hours were thus taken up each day, and homework was to be mastered in the time that was left. What is more, a “general education” required French, English, Italian—the “living” languages—together with classical Greek and Latin in addition to the regular school work—that is, five languages plus geometry, physics, and the other subjects. It was more than too much, and scarcely left any time for physical development, sport and walks, to say nothing of recreation and gaiety. I can vaguely remember that when we were seven, we had to memorize a song about “joyous and blissful childhood,” and sing it in chorus. The melody of that simple, artless little song is still in my ears, but even then the words passed my lips only with difficulty and made an even less convincing impression upon my heart. For, if I am to be honest, the entire period of my schooling was nothing other than a constant and wearisome boredom, accompanied year after year by an increased impatience to escape from this treadmill. I cannot recall ever having been either “joyous” or “blissful” during that monotonous, heartless, and lifeless schooling which thoroughly spoiled the best and freest period of our existence. I must admit that even today I cannot help experiencing a certain feeling of envy when I see with how much more freedom, happiness, and independence children are permitted to develop in the present century. It still seems hardly credible to me when I observe today how naturally they chat as equals with their teachers, how they hurry to school without a care, whereas we were constantly filled with a feeling of inadequacy; how they may freely express the desires and inclinations of their young and curious souls both at home and in school—free, independent and natural beings, whereas all of us, as soon as we stepped into the hated building, were forced to cringe lest we strike our foreheads against an invisible yoke. 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.

It was not that our Austrian schools were bad in themselves. On the contrary, after a hundred years of experience, the curriculum had been carefully worked out and, had it been transmitted with any inspiration, could have been the basis for a fruitful and fairly universal education. But because of their accurate arrangement and their dry formulary our lessons were frightfully barren and lifeless, a cold teaching apparatus which never adapted itself to the individual, but automatically registered the grades, “good,” “sufficient,” and “insufficient,” depending on how far we had complied with the “requirements” of the curriculum. It was exactly this lack of human affection, this empty impersonality and the barracks-like quality of our surroundings, that unconsciously embittered us. We had to learn our lessons and were examined on what we had learned. For eight years no teacher asked us even once what we personally wished to learn, and that encouraging stimulus, for which every young person secretly longs, was totally lacking.

This sobriety was outwardly expressed in our schoolhouse, a functional building which fifty years before had been quickly, cheaply, and thoughtlessly thrown together. With its cold, badly whitewashed halls, its low classrooms without pictures or any other decoration that might have delighted the eye, its toilets that perfumed the whole house, this learning-mill was something like an old hotel which had been used by countless numbers before us, and would be used by as many more, no less indifferent and reluctant. Even today I cannot forget the musty, moldy smell that clung to this house as it did to all official buildings in Austria. We called it the “treasury” smell. It was an odor of overheated, overcrowded rooms, never properly aired, which first attached itself to our clothes and then to our souls. We sat in pairs like galley slaves, on low wooden benches that twisted our spines, and we sat until our bones ached. In the winter the bluish light of the open gas jets flickered over our books, whereas in the summer the windows were carefully covered so that we could not dreamily enjoy the view of the little square of blue sky. That century had not yet discovered that young, unformed bodies required air and exercise. A pause of ten minutes in the cold, narrow halls was thought sufficient in a period of four or five hours of motionless squatting. Twice a week we were led into the gymnasium; and there, with the windows carefully closed, we marched stupidly around on the wooden floor, and every step sent the dust high into the air. With that the demands of hygiene had been satisfied and the State had done its “duty” towards us, so far as mens sana in corpore sano was concerned. For years after, whenever I passed by the gloomy, cheerless building I felt a sense of relief that I was no longer forced to enter this prison of our youth. And when the fiftieth anniversary of this exalted institution was being celebrated and I, as an erstwhile star pupil, was asked to deliver the address of the day in the presence of the Minister and the Burgomaster, I politely declined. I had no reason to be thankful to this school, and every word of that sort would have been a lie.

Nor were our teachers to blame for the dreariness of the institution. They were neither good nor bad; they were not tyrants, nor on the other hand were they helpful comrades, but poor devils who were slavishly bound to the schedule, the officially designated curriculum. They had to accomplish their task as we had to do ours, and—we felt this clearly—they were as happy as we were when in the afternoon the school bell rang and gave them, and us, freedom. They did not love us, they did not hate us, and why should they, for they knew nothing about us; even after a year or two they knew only a few of us by name. According to the teaching methods of those times, they had nothing to do but to determine how many mistakes we had made in our last lesson. They sat up at their desks and we sat below, they questioned and we had to reply, and there was no other relation between us. For between teacher and pupil, between teacher’s desk and school bench, the visible above and the visible below, stood the invisible barrier of “authority” which prevented all contact. For a teacher to regard a pupil as an individual (which would have demanded particular attention to the special qualities of the pupil, or the preparation of “reports” or written observations about him, which is a matter of course today) would at that time have exceeded not only the teacher’s authority but his capabilities as well. On the other hand, a private conversation would have lessened the teacher’s authority, for this would have placed the scholars on the same level with him, the superior. 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. With photographic precision my memory still retains the picture of the teacher’s desk and the classbook, into which we always tried to peep because it contained our marks. I can see the little red notebook in which the grades were entered, I can see the short black pencil with which our marks were recorded, and I can see my own book strewn with the teacher’s corrections in red ink, but I can no longer see a single one of their faces—possibly for the reason that we always stood before them with eyes indifferent or cast down.

This dissatisfaction with school was by no means a personal attitude. I cannot recall a single one of my comrades who would be reluctant to admit that our interests and good intentions were wearied, hindered and suppressed in this treadmill. It was only much later that I realized that this unfeeling and soulless method of the education of our youth was not due to the carelessness of the authorities, but represented a definite, and what is more, a carefully guarded secret intention. The world about and above us, which directed all its thoughts only to the fetish of security, did not like youth; or rather it constantly mistrusted it. Proud of its systematic “progress” and of its order, bourgeois society proclaimed moderation and leisure in all forms of life as the only effective virtues of man; all hasty efforts to advance ourselves were to be avoided. 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. 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. And so there was no reason for making our school years pleasant; we were first to earn every form of advancement by patient waiting. Being thus constantly pushed back, the various age groups were valued quite differently than they are today. An eighteen-year-old student at the Gymnasium was treated like a child; he was punished if he was caught with a cigarette, and he had to raise his hand obediently if he wished to leave the room. But a man of thirty was also regarded as an unfledged person, and even one of forty was not yet considered ripe for a position of responsibility. Once, when a surprising exception occurred and Gustav Mahler was appointed Director of the Imperial Opera at thirty-eight, the frightened whisper and astonished murmur went through Vienna that the first artistic institution of the city had been entrusted to “so young a man” (completely forgetting that Schubert at thirty-one, and Mozart at thirty-six, had already finished their life’s work). This distrust that every young man was “not quite reliable” was felt at that time in all circles. My father would never have taken a young man into his business, and whoever was unfortunate enough to appear young had to overcome this distrust on all sides. So arose the situation, incomprehensible today, that youth was a hindrance in all careers, and age alone was an advantage. Whereas today, in our changed state of affairs, those of forty seek to look thirty, and those of sixty wish to seem forty, and youth, energy, determination and self-confidence recommend and advance a man, in that age of security everyone who wished to get ahead was forced to attempt all conceivable methods of masquerading in order to appear older. The newspapers recommended preparations which hastened the growth of the beard, and twenty-four- and twenty-five-year-old doctors, who had just finished their examinations, wore mighty beards and gold spectacles even if their eyes did not need them, so that they could make an impression of “experience” upon their first patients. Men wore long black frock coats and walked at a leisurely pace, and whenever possible acquired a slight embonpoint, in order to personify the desired sedateness; and those who were ambitious strove, at least outwardly, to belie their youth, since the young were suspected of instability. Even in our sixth and seventh school years we refused to carry school bags, and used briefcases instead so that we might not be recognized as attending the Gymnasium. All those qualities which today we look upon as enviable possessions—freshness, self-assertion, daring, curiosity, youth’s lust for life—were regarded as suspect in those days that only had use for “substance.”

It is from this unusual attitude alone that we can understand how the State exploited the schools as an instrument for the maintenance of its authority. 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. A second cardinal principle of the pedagogy of those times, which also was applied within the family, directed that young people were not to have things too easy. Before any rights were allowed them they were to learn that they had duties, and above all others the obligation of complete docility. It was to be impressed upon us from the very start that we, who had not yet accomplished anything in life and were entirely without experience, should simply be thankful for all that was granted to us, and had no right to ask or demand anything. In my time this stupid method of intimidation was practiced from earliest childhood. Servants and ignorant mothers frightened three- and four-year-old children with the threat of calling a “policeman” if they did not at once stop being naughty. When we were still in the Gymnasium and brought home a poor mark in some unimportant subject, we were threatened with being taken out of school and put to learning a trade—the worst threat in a middle-class world, a return to the proletariat. When young people, in an honest desire for education, sought explanation of some earnest, timely problem from adults, they were rebuffed with a haughty “you can’t understand that yet.” Everywhere this technique was utilized, at home, in school, and in the State. They never tired of drilling into a young person that he was not yet “mature,” that he did not understand anything, that he was merely to listen credulously but never to enter into a conversation or to contradict. And for this reason also the poor devil of a teacher, who sat up at his desk, had to remain an unapproachable idol, and to confine our entire feeling and conduct to the curriculum. Whether we were happy at school or not was unimportant. Its true mission, according to the spirit of the times, was not to advance but to retard us, not to form us inwardly but to fit us with as little opposition as possible into the ordered scheme, not to increase our energy but to discipline it and to level it off.

Such psychological or, rather, unpsychological pressure upon youth can have only one of two effects: it can be paralyzing or it can be stimulating. We can look, into the records of the psychoanalysts to see how many “inferiority complexes” this absurd method of teaching brought about. It is perhaps not chance that this complex was discovered by men who themselves went through our old Austrian schools. Personally I thank this pressure for the early emergence of a passion to be free—vehement to a degree that is scarcely known to present-day youth—and a hatred for all authority, for all “talking down,” which has accompanied me throughout my lifetime. For years and years this aversion to the apodictic and the dogmatic was merely instinctive, and I had already forgotten its origin. But once, on one of my lecture tours, when the large auditorium of the university had been chosen for me, and when I suddenly discovered that I was to speak from the rostrum while my listeners were to sit down below on the benches like good schoolboys who did not speak or contradict, I was suddenly filled with discomfort. I remembered how I had suffered during my school years under this uncomradely, authoritative, doctrinaire “talking down,” and I was filled with anxiety lest my speech, delivered from the rostrum, might be as impersonal in its effect as was that of our teachers upon us. Because of this obstacle, that speech was the worst of my life.

Until our fourteenth or fifteenth year we still felt ourselves perfectly at home in school. We made fun of the teachers and we learned our lessons with cold curiosity. But then the hour struck when school began to bore and disturb us. A remarkable phenomenon had quietly taken place: we, who had entered the Gymnasium as ten-year-olds, had intellectually outgrown the school already, in the first four of our eight years. We felt instinctively that there was nothing more of importance to be learned from it, and that in many of the subjects which interested us we knew more than our poor teachers, who had not opened a book out of personal interest since their own student years. But there was another contrast which became more apparent from day to day: on the benches, where no more of us than our breeches was sitting, we heard nothing new or nothing that to us seemed worth knowing, and outside there was a city of a thousand attractions, a city with theaters, museums, bookstores, universities, music, a city in which each day brought new surprises. And so our pent-up desire for knowledge, our intellectual, artistic and sensuous inquisitiveness, which found no nourishment in school, passionately yearned for all that went on outside of school. At first only two or three of us discovered in themselves such artistic, literary and musical interests, then a dozen, and finally nearly all of us.

For among young people enthusiasm is a kind of catching phenomenon. In a class at school it infects one after another like scarlet fever or measles, and while the neophytes, with childish, vain ambition, try to outdo each other as rapidly as possible in their knowledge, they lead each other on. It is therefore merely a matter of chance which direction these passions take: if there is a stamp collector in one class he will soon make a dozen as foolish as himself, and if three rave about dancers, the others will daily stand before the stagedoor of the Opera. Three years after us came a class which was possessed with a passion for football, and before ours there was another that was wholly devoted to Tolstoy or socialism. By chance I entered a class in which my comrades were art enthusiasts; and this may possibly have been decisive for the development of my life. In itself this enthusiasm for the theater, for literature and for art was quite natural in Vienna. The newspapers devoted special space to all the cultural events that took place in the city, and wherever we went, right and left, we heard the grown-ups discuss the opera or the Burgtheater. The pictures of the great actors were on display in all the stationery stores. Sport was still considered to be a brutal affair of which a student of the Gymnasium should rightly be ashamed, and the cinema with its mass ideals had not yet been invented. At home there was no opposition to be feared; literature and the theater belonged to the “innocent” passions, in contrast to playing cards or friendships with girls. Finally, my father, like all Viennese fathers, had also been smitten with the theater, and had attended the performance of Lohengrin under Richard Wagner with the same enthusiasm that we felt at the premières of Richard Strauss and Gerhart Hauptmann. For it was to be expected that we Gymnasium students should throng to each première; how ashamed we would have been before our more fortunate colleagues had we not been able to report every single detail on the morrow! Had our teachers not been completely indifferent, it would have occurred to them that on the afternoon of an important première—we had to stand in line at three o’clock to secure standing room, the only places available to us—two-thirds of all the students were taken with some mysterious illness. With strict attention they would also have discovered that the poems of Rilke were stuck between the covers of our Latin grammars, and that we used our mathematics notebooks to copy the loveliest poems out of books which we had borrowed. Daily we invented new techniques for using the dull school hours for our reading. While the teacher delivered his time-worn lecture about the “naïve and sentimental poetry” of Schiller, under our desks we read Nietzsche and Strindberg, whose names the good old man had never heard. A fever had come over us to know all, to be familiar with all that occurred in every field of art and science. In the afternoon we pushed our way among the university students to listen to the lectures, we visited all of the art exhibitions, we went in to the anatomy classrooms to watch dissections. We sniffed at all and everything with inquisitive nostrils. We crept in to the rehearsals of the Philharmonic, we hunted about in the antique shops, we examined the booksellers’ displays daily, so that we might know at once what had turned up since yesterday. And above all, we read! We read everything that came into our hands. We got books from all of the public libraries, and lent each other whatever we had been able to discover. But the coffeehouse was still the best place to keep up with everything new.

In order to understand this, it must be said that 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. Upon payment of this mite every guest can sit for hours on end, discuss, write, play cards, receive his mail, and, above all, can go through an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines. In the better-class Viennese coffeehouse all the Viennese newspapers were available, and not the Viennese alone, but also those of the entire German Reich, the French and the English, the Italian and the American papers, and in addition all of the important literary and art magazines of the world, the Revue de France no less than the Neue Rundschau, the Studio, and the Burlington Magazine. And so we knew everything that took place in the world at first hand, we learned about every book that was published, and every production no matter where it occurred; and we compared the notices in every newspaper. 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. For, thanks to the collectivity of our interests, we followed the orbis pictus of artistic events not with two, but with twenty and forty eyes. What one of us had overlooked was noticed by another, and since in our constant childish, boastful, and almost sporting ambition we wished to outdo each other in our knowledge of the very latest thing, we found ourselves actually in a sort of constant rivalry for the sensational. If, for example, we discussed Nietzsche, who then was still scorned, one of us would suddenly say with feigned superiority, “But in the idea of egotism Kierkegaard is superior to him,” and at once we became uneasy: “Who is Kierkegaard, whom X knows and of whom we know nothing?” The next day we stormed into the library to look up the books of this time-obscured Danish philosopher, for it was a mark of inferiority not to know some exotic thing that was familiar to someone else. We had a passion to be the first to discover the latest, the newest, the most extravagant, the unusual, which had not yet been dwelt upon at length, particularly by the official literary critics of our daily papers. I personally was a slave to this mania for many years. 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. And nothing was so hidden or remote that it could not be brought forth from its hiding place by our collective, eager, competitive curiosity. At the time when we were attending the Gymnasium, the works of Stefan George or Rilke, for example, had appeared in editions of no more than two or three hundred copies, and of these three or four at most had found their way to Vienna; no bookseller kept them in stock and none of the official critics had ever mentioned Rilke’s name. But through a miracle of determination our group knew every verse and every line. We beardless, immature boys, who were forced to sit all day long on our school benches, were actually the ideal audience a young poet might dream of; we were curious, critically understanding, and quick to rapture. Our capacity for enthusiasm was boundless; during our school hours, on our way to and from school, in the coffeehouse, in the theater, on our walks, we half-grown young colts did nothing but discuss books, pictures, music, and philosophy. Whoever was in the public eye as actor or conductor, whoever had published a book or written for a newspaper, was a star in our firmament. I was almost frightened when many years later I found the following sentence in Balzac’s description of his youth: “Les gens célèbres étaient pour moi comme des dieux qui ne parlaient, ne mangeaient pas comme les autres hommes.” For we felt exactly the same way. To have seen Gustav Mahler on the street was an event that we proudly reported to our comrades the next morning as a personal triumph; and when as a boy I was once introduced to Johannes Brahms and he patted me on the shoulder in a friendly fashion, I was dazed for some days after by the astonishing experience. For although at twelve I was not quite certain what he had achieved, the mere fact of his reputation, the aura of the creative, exercised overwhelming power over me. A première of Gerhart Hauptmann’s in the Burgtheater had our entire class on edge for weeks before the rehearsals began. We slipped in to the actors and understudies to be the first—before the others!—to know the plot and learn about the cast. We had (I do not hesitate to report upon absurdities) our hair cut by the barber of the Burgtheater, so that we could gather secret information about Wolter or Sonnenthal, and a pupil in one of the lower classes was particularly spoiled by us older boys and bribed with all sorts of attentions, merely because he was the nephew of one of the lighting inspectors at the Opera, and through him we were sometimes smuggled on to the stage during rehearsals—the shock of treading on that stage exceeded that of Virgil when he mounted into the holy circles of Paradise. The radiant power of fame was so strong for us that even if it were seven times removed from us, it still forced us to respect it; a certain poor little old woman seemed like an immortal being to us because she was a grand-niece of Franz Schubert, and on the street we gazed respectfully at Josef Kainz’s valet because he had the good fortune to be close to the most beloved and most genial of all actors.

Of course today I know exactly how much absurdity there was in this haphazard enthusiasm, how much was merely mutual imitation, how much was merely a sporting desire to outbid each other, how much childish pride there was in feeling oneself arrogantly above the ordinary world of relatives and teachers which surrounded us. But even today I am still surprised how much we young lads learned through this exaggerated literary passion, how prematurely we acquired a faculty of critical discernment through our endless discussion and analysis. At seventeen I not only knew every poem of Baudelaire and Walt Whitman, but I knew each of the important ones by heart, and I believe that never in my later years have I read as intensely as I did during my school and university years. As a matter of fact we were familiar with names that were not commonly honored until ten years later, and even the most ephemeral remained in our memory because we had acquired it with such zeal. Once I told my revered friend Paul Valéry how old my literary acquaintanceship with him was; that thirty years before I had known and loved some of his verses. Valéry laughed at me kindly and said, “Do not try to deceive me, dear friend, my verses did not appear until 1916.” He was astonished when I described to him in detail the color and format of the little literary magazine in Vienna in which we had found his first verses in 1898. “But hardly anyone in Paris knew them,” he said with wonderment, “how could you have got hold of them in Vienna?” “Just as you did when you were a Gymnasium student in your provincial town, and were able to find the poems of Mallarmé, who was also as little known in official literature,” I was able to reply. And he agreed with me that “young people discover their poets because they wish to discover them.” In fact we scented the wind before it crossed the frontier, because we constantly lived with quivering nostrils. We found the new because we desired the new, because we hungered for something that belonged to us alone, and not to the world of our fathers, to the world around us. 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. So far as we were concerned, the good, solid masters of our fathers’ time—Gottfried Keller in literature, Ibsen in the drama, Johannes Brahms in music, Leibl in painting, Eduard von Hartmann in philosophy—were as suspect as the rest of the world of security. In spite of their technical and intellectual mastery, they no longer interested us. Instinctively we felt that their cool, well-tempered rhythm was alien to our restless blood and no longer in keeping with the accelerated tempo of our time. Just then there lived in Vienna the most vigilant spirit of the younger German generation, Hermann Bahr, who lay about him furiously as the intellectual champion of all that was forming but still unborn. With his help the “Secession” was opened in Vienna, and, to the horror of the old school, exhibited the Impressionists and the Pointillists of Paris, Munch of Norway, Rops of Belgium, and all the other extremists imaginable. And with this the way was opened for their neglected predecessors, Grünewald, El Greco, and Goya. Suddenly one learned a new way of seeing, and at the same time a new rhythm and tone through Moussorgsky, Debussy, Strauss, and Schönberg. In literature realism broke through with Zola and Strindberg and Hauptmann, the Slavic genius with Dostoievsky, and with Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé a hitherto unknown sublimation and refinement of the lyric art of words. Nietzsche revolutionized philosophy, and a more daring, freer architecture was announced by the unadorned functional building, instead of the classical over-adornment. Suddenly the old, comfortable order was disturbed, its former and infallible norms of the “aesthetically beautiful” (Hanslick) were questioned, and while the official critics of our correct bourgeois newspapers were dismayed by the often daring experiments and sought to dam the irresistible stream with such epithets as “decadent” and “anarchistic,” we young ones threw ourselves enthusiastically into the surf where it foamed at its wildest. We had the feeling that a time had set in for us, our time, in which youth had finally achieved its rights. And so suddenly our restless, seeking, perceptive passion had a meaning: we youngsters on the school bench would take part in this wild and often rabid struggle for the new art. Wherever an experiment was attempted, perhaps a Wedekind production, or the reading of some new lyrics, unfailingly we were on the spot with all the power not only of our souls but with that of our hands as well. I was present at a première of one of Arnold Schönberg’s early atonal works, when a gentleman energetically hissed and whistled, and when my friend Buschbeck gave him an equally energetic slap in the face. Everywhere we were the vanguard and the shock troops of every sort of new art, merely because it was new, merely because it wished to change the world for us, whose turn had now come to live our lives. Because we felt that “nostra res agitur.”

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. All the men whom we were taught to respect behaved and acted respectably. Wilbrandt, Ebers, Felix Dahn, Paul Heyse, Lenbach, these long-forgotten favorites of that epoch, wore their handsome beards tinged with gray over their poetic velvet jackets. They had themselves photographed with pensive expressions, always in a “worthy” and “poetic” pose; they behaved like privy councilors and excellencies, and like them were covered with decorations. But young poets, painters, or musicians were at best alluded to as “hopeful talents,” and positive recognition was temporarily put on ice. That age of circumspection did not like to distribute its favors prematurely to anyone, before he had proved himself by long years of “solid” achievement. But all the new poets, musicians, and painters were young. Gerhart Hauptmann, who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, reigned over the German stage at the age of thirty; Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke had achieved literary fame and a fanatic following at twenty-three, even before they reached their majority according to Austrian law. In our own city there appeared overnight the group known as “Young Vienna” with Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Peter Altenberg, in whom the specific Austrian culture, through a refinement of all artistic means, had for the first time found European expression. Above all there was one figure that fascinated, enticed, roused, and captivated us, that wonderful and unique phenomenon, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in whom our youth saw not only its highest ambitions but also absolute poetic perfection come into being, in the person of one of its own age.

The emergence of the young Hofmannsthal is and remains remarkable as one of the great wonders of early perfection. In universal literature I know no example of anyone, with the exception of Keats and Rimbaud, who at so early an age reached a like flawless mastery of speech, such elevation of ideals, or such saturation with the substance of poetry even in the least of his random lines, as this majestic genius, who in his sixteenth and seventeenth years had inscribed himself upon the eternal rolls of the German language, with verses that will not die, and with a prose that has not yet been excelled in our day. His sudden beginning and immediate perfection constituted a phenomenon that rarely occurs twice in one and the same generation. His appearance was a preternatural event, and those who first had news of it were amazed. Hermann Bahr has often told me of his astonishment when he received an essay by one “Loris” (the Gymnasium did not permit us to publish anything under our own name), which came from Vienna for his magazine. Among contributions from all over the world he had never received a piece written in such winged, noble speech, and showing at the same time such a wealth of thought. He wondered who this unknown “Loris” might be. Undoubtedly it was an old man who for years and years had silently distilled his thoughts and had, in some cell apart, worked the sublimest essence of the language into an almost sensuous magic. And so wise a man, so blessed a poet, lived in the same city and he had never heard of him! Bahr wrote at once to the unknown and arranged for a meeting in a coffeehouse—the famous Café Grienstadl, the chief meeting place of the young literati. One day a slender, beardless Gymnasium student in short trousers approached his table with quick, light steps, bowed, and, in a high voice which had not yet broken, said briefly and to the point, “Hofmannsthal! I am ‘Loris.’ ” For years after, when Bahr spoke of his astonishment, he was moved to excitement. At first he could not believe it. A Gymnasium student endowed with such art, such breadth and depth of vision, such a stupendous knowledge of life with life still before him! And Arthur Schnitzler told me practically the same thing. He was still a practicing physician, since his first literary successes had as yet by no means guaranteed him a livelihood; but even then he was looked upon as the head of “Young Vienna,” and those who were still younger gladly turned to him for counsel and judgment. He had met the gangling young Gymnasium student through some casual acquaintances, and remarked him because of his nimble wit. When the young student asked him the favor of being permitted to read a short play in verse to him, he kindly invited him to his bachelor quarters, obviously without great expectations—it was probably nothing but a Gymnasium student’s play, sentimental or pseudo-classical, he thought. He asked several friends to join them. Hofmannsthal appeared in his short trousers, somewhat nervous and ill at ease, and began to read. “After a few minutes,” Schnitzler told me, “we riveted our attention on him, and exchanged astonished, almost frightened glances. We had never heard verses of such perfection, such faultless plasticity, such musical feeling, from any living being, nor had we thought them possible since Goethe. But more wondrous than this unique mastery of form (which has never since been achieved by anyone else in the German language) was his knowledge of the world, which could only have come from a magical intuition in a youth whose days were spent sitting on a school bench.” When Hofmannsthal had finished, all remained silent. “I had the feeling,” Schnitzler said, “of having encountered a born genius for the first time in my life, and never again during my entire lifetime was I so overwhelmed.” Whoever at sixteen had thus begun—or rather had not begun, but was perfected in beginning—would indeed become a brother of Goethe and Shakespeare. And in truth this perfection seemed to grow even more perfect. After this first piece in verse, Gestern, came the majestic fragment, Tod des Tizian, in which the German language was raised to the harmony of Italian; then the verses, each one of which was an event for us—today, years afterwards, I know them line for line by heart; then the short dramas and those essays whose wealth of knowledge, faultless understanding of art, and world visions were magically compressed into the wondrously ordered space of a few dozen pages. All that this Gymnasium pupil, this university student wrote was like crystal, glowing from within, dark and luminous at once. Verse and prose bent in his hands like perfumed wax of Hymettus. By some unrepeatable miracle each poem always had its correct measure, never too much, never too little. One always felt that an unknown something, an incomprehensible mystery had led him by this way into a hitherto untrodden land.

I can hardly describe how such a phenomenon fascinated us, who had taught ourselves to sense values. For what can be more intoxicating for a young generation than to realize that the born, the pure, the sublime poet was in their midst in the flesh—the poet whom they imagined only in the legendary forms of Hölderlin and Keats and Leopardi, unapproachable, already half dream and half vision? That is why I can so clearly recall the day on which I saw Hofmannsthal in person. I was sixteen years old, and since we avidly pursued everything that our ideal mentor did, I was unusually aroused by a small notice hidden in the newspaper, announcing a lecture by him on Goethe in the Scientific Club (incomprehensible it was to us that such a genius was to speak in so modest a place; in our schoolboy adoration we had expected that the largest hall would be filled to overflowing when a Hofmannsthal allowed himself to be seen in public). On this occasion I was again aware of how far in advance of the public at large and the official critics we little Gymnasium students were in our evaluation, our instinct, proved here and elsewhere, for the thing that would survive. All in all, about ten to twelve dozen listeners had gathered in the narrow hall, and so it would not have been necessary for me in my impatience to start out half an hour too early to be sure of a seat. We waited for a little while, when suddenly a slim, inconspicuous young man passed between the seats towards the desk, and began so unexpectedly that I hardly had time to look at him carefully. Hofmannsthal, with his soft, incipient mustache and his elastic figure, appeared to be even younger than I had expected him to be. His sharply profiled, dark, somewhat Italian face was nervously tense, and the impression of tension was heightened by the unrest of his very dark, velvety, markedly near-sighted eyes. With one plunge he threw himself into his talk like a swimmer into a familiar stream, and the more he spoke the freer his gestures became, and the more assured his demeanor. No sooner was he in his intellectual element (and I often noticed this later in our private conversations) than his initial nervousness was overcome by an amazing lightness and soaring of speech, as is always the case with men who are inspired. It was only in his opening sentences that I was aware of the fact that his voice was unlovely, ofttimes close to a falsetto and near to breaking; soon his talk bore us aloft high and free, so that we were barely aware of his voice or his face. He spoke without a script, without notes, and possibly without careful preparation, but out of his natural feeling for form each sentence was rounded out to perfection. Brilliantly the most daring antitheses unfolded only to dissolve themselves in clear, though amazing, formulations. Perforce we had the feeling of an overpowering abundance; we knew that what was being cast by chance before us was but part of a much greater fullness, and that inspired as he was and uplifted into a higher sphere, he could continue to talk thus for hours on end without impoverishing himself or descending from his level. Later on in private conversations I again experienced the magic power of this “inventor of rolling speech,” as Stefan George called him. Restless, fiery, sensitive, exposed to every movement of the air, often moody and nervous in private, he was not easy to get close to. But the very moment that a problem interested him, it was like a spark; with a gleaming, sparkling, rocket-like flight he carried every discussion aloft into the sphere that was his own and attainable only to him. With the exception of several conversations with Valéry, who thought more clearly and with more measure, and the élan of Keyserling, I have never experienced any conversation on so high an intellectual plane. In these truly inspired moments, everything was objectively close to his daemonic awareness, every book that he had read, every picture that he had seen, every landscape. One metaphor was bound to the next as naturally as hand to hand. Perspectives arose like unexpected stage sets behind the horizon one had already believed was reached. On the occasion of that lecture and later in personal encounters, I sensed in him the true afflatus, the enlivening, inspiriting breath of the incommensurable, the something that cannot be grasped fully by reason alone.

In a certain sense, Hofmannsthal never surpassed the unique wonder that he was between his sixteenth and his twenty-fourth years. I do not less admire many of his later works, the lovely essays, the fragment of Andreas, that torso of what was probably the most beautiful novel in the German language, and individual portions of his dramas. But his stronger ties to the real theater and the interests of his time, with his definite consciousness and the ambitiousness of his plans, something that was akin to dream-walking, something purely inspirational in those early boyish poems, which had been the ecstasy and exhilaration of our youth, disappeared. 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.

Balzac has incomparably described how the example of Napoleon electrified an entire generation in France. To Balzac the brilliant rise of the insignificant Lieutenant Bonaparte to the rank of emperor of the world meant not only the triumph of an individual, but the victory of the idea of youth. 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. Lieutenant Bonaparte had fired the minds of an entire generation of youth. He drove them to aspire to higher things, he made the generals of the Grande Armée the heroes and careerists of the comédie humaine. 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. In this sense Hofmannsthal and Rilke signified an unusual impulse for our as yet unfermented energies. Without hoping that any one of us could ever repeat the miracle of Hofmannsthal, we were none the less strengthened by his mere physical existence. It proved tangibly that a poet was possible in our time, in our city, in our midst. For after all, his father, a banker, came from the same Jewish middle class as the rest of us; this genius had grown up in a house similar to our own, with similar furniture and similar manners, he had gone to a similarly sterile Gymnasium, he had studied out of the same textbooks and had sat for eight years on the same wooden benches, impatient as we had been, similarly impassioned for all intellectual values; and lo, while he was still fraying his trousers on the benches and was forced to march around in the Gymnasium, he had succeeded in transcending space and its confines, city and family, by his flight into the boundless. Through Hofmannsthal it was to some extent demonstrated to us, ad oculos, that in principle it was possible, even at our age and in the prison-atmosphere of an Austrian Gymnasium, to create poetry, and even to create perfection. It was even possible—a terrific temptation for a youthful temperament—to be published, to be celebrated, to become famous, while at home and in school one was still considered a half-grown, unimportant being.

Rilke stood for a different sort of encouragement and supplemented that of Hofmannsthal in a comforting fashion. It would have seemed blasphemous for even the most daring of us to try to rival Hofmannsthal. We knew that he was a unique miracle of premature perfection, which could never be repeated, and when we sixteen-year-olds compared our rhymes with the highly renowned verses which he had written at the same age, we quaked with shame. In the same way we felt humbled in our knowledge of the eagle’s flight with which he coursed through cosmic space while he was still in the Gymnasium. On the other hand, Rilke had begun to write and publish his poems at an equally early age—when he was seventeen or eighteen. But Rilke’s early verses, in comparison with Hofmannsthal’s, and even in an absolute sense, were immature, childish and naïve, and only forbearance could find a few slender golden traces of talent in them. It was only gradually, in his twenty-second and twenty-third years, that the personality of this majestic poet, so boundlessly loved by us, began to emerge; and that was an enormous consolation for us. It was not necessary therefore to attain perfection while still in the Gymnasium as Hofmannsthal had done, but like Rilke we could feel our way, experiment for ourselves, and climb upward. We did not have to give up in immediate despair because for the time being our writing was unripe, irresponsible and inadequate, and perhaps instead of the miracle of Hofmannsthal we could repeat in ourselves the serener, more normal rise of Rilke.

For as was to be expected, we had long since begun to write or to create verses, to compose music or to recite; every passive passionate attitude is of itself an unnatural one for youth, for it is in its being not only to take up impressions but to reproduce them actively. For a young man to love the theater means that he will at least desire or dream to work for, or in, the theater. To admire talent ecstatically in all its forms irresistibly leads to introspection, to see if it is not possible to discover some trace or possibility of this choicest of essences in one’s unexplored body or still cloudy soul. And so it occurred in our class at school that, in keeping with the Viennese atmosphere and the particular limitations of the times, the impulse to creative production became positively epidemic. Each one of us sought some talent within himself and endeavored to unfold it. Four or five of us wished to be actors. They imitated the diction of the Imperial players, they recited and declaimed without ceasing, secretly took lessons in acting, and, during the recesses at school, distributed parts and improvised entire scenes from the classics, while the rest of us formed a curious but exacting audience. Two or three were splendidly accomplished musicians but had not yet decided whether they would become composers, virtuosi, or conductors. I owe to them my first knowledge of the new music which then was still generally scorned at the official concerts of the Philharmonic, whereas they, in turn, came to us for the texts for their songs and choruses. Another, the son of a fashionable painter who was quite famous at that time, spent hours at school filling our notebooks with sketches, and drew portraits of all of the future geniuses of the class. But the literary endeavors were the strongest. Owing to our mutual stimulation to a constantly more rapid perfection and the exchange of criticisms of every single poem, the level which we seventeen-year-olds had attained was far superior to the merely dilettante and, in some cases, actually approached a truly valid accomplishment, as was proven by the fact that our productions were not only accepted by obscure provincial papers, but by the leading reviews of the new generation; they were accepted, published, and—this is the most convincing proof—paid for. One of my comrades, Ph. A., whom I worshiped as a genius, shone in the first place in Pan, that sumptuous de luxe publication, side by side with Dehmel and Rilke. Another, A. M., under the pseudonym of August Oehler, had gained admission to the most unapproachable and most eclectic of all the German reviews, the Blätter für die Kunst, which Stefan George reserved exclusively for his sacrosanct circle. A third, encouraged by Hofmannsthal, had written a drama about Napoleon, a fourth a new aesthetic theory and important sonnets; I myself had gained admission to Gesellschaft, the leading magazine of the “Moderns,” and to Maximilian Harden’s Zukunft, the weekly which was most determining for the political and cultural history of the new Germany. If I look back today, then I must objectively confess that the sum of our knowledge, the refinement of our literary technique, and our artistic level were really astounding for seventeen-year-olds and only explicable by the inspiring example of Hofmannsthal’s fantastic prematurity, which forced us to a passionate exertion towards giving the very best in order to maintain some show of respect in each other’s eyes. We were masters of all the tricks, the extravagances, the venturesomeness of the language, we possessed the technique of every verse form, and in countless attempts had tested every style from Pindaric pathos to the simple diction of the folksong. Each day we showed each other our work, mutually pointed out the slightest discrepancies, and discussed every metric detail. While our good teachers were unsuspectingly correcting our essays with red ink for missing commas, we practiced criticism on each other with a severity, a knowledge of art, and an exactitude such as none of the official pontiffs of literature on our biggest newspapers applied to the classical masterpieces. In our last school years we went far ahead of the appointed and famous critics in professional judgment and in our capacity for stylistic expression.

This factual and truthful description of our literary prematurity might lead to the opinion that we had been a particular wonder class. By no means! At that time one could observe the same phenomenon, the same fanaticism and the same premature talent in a dozen neighboring schools in Vienna. That could not have been chance. 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. In the age of puberty, the poetic, or the impulse toward the poetic, goes through every young person, usually of course like a passing wave; only rarely does such an inclination outlive youth, since in itself it is only an emanation of youth. None of our five actors on the school bench later became actors on the real stage; the poets of Pan and the Blätter für die Kunst, after that first astonishing beginning, bogged down as sober lawyers or officials, and perhaps today they smile with irony or melancholy at their former ambitions. I am the only one of the whole group in whom the productive passion remained and in whom it became the meaning and quintessence of an entire life. But how thankfully I think of that comradeship! How much it helped me! How those fiery discussions, that wild rivalry, that mutual admiration and criticism gave practice to my hand and nerve, how it widened and heightened my view of the intellectual cosmos, how it gave all of us wings to rise above the emptiness and wretchedness of our school! “Thou noble art! how oft, when sorrow thrill’d me ...” Whenever that immortal song of Schubert resounds, in a sort of plastic vision I see us sitting slump-shouldered on our miserable school benches, and then on our way home, with glowing, excited faces, criticizing poems, reciting, passionately forgetting all bonds of time and space, truly “into a better world upborne.”

Such an artistic monomania, such overvaluation of the aesthetic, carried to the point of absurdity, could only exist at the expense of the normal interests of our age. If I ask myself today when we found time to read all those books, crammed full as our days were with school and private lessons, it becomes clear to me that it was mostly at the expense of our sleep and therefore of our bodily vigor. Although I had to get up at seven, I never put down my book before one or two in the morning—the bad habit of reading for one or two hours no matter how late at night it may be has remained with me ever since. I cannot recall ever having raced to school except with too little sleep, my face hardly washed, devouring my breakfast roll as I ran; small wonder that with all our intellectuality we looked haggard and green as unripe fruit. What is more, our clothes were fairly shabby, for every penny of our pocket money was spent on the theater, concerts, or books, and, on the other hand, we 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. It would not be easy to make a young person of today understand to what degree we ignored all sport and even disdained it. To be sure, in the last century the sport wave had not yet reached our continent from England. There were as yet no stadiums where a hundred thousand people went wild with joy when one boxer hit another on the chin. The newspapers did not yet send reporters to fill columns with Homeric rapture about a hockey game. 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. At thirteen, when this intellectual-literary infection set in, I stopped skating, and used for books the money which my parents allowed me for dancing lessons. At eighteen I could not yet swim, dance, or play tennis; and today I still can neither ride a wheel nor drive a car, and in all sports any ten-year-old could put me to shame. Even now, in 1941, I am highly confused as to the difference between baseball and football, hockey and polo, and the sporting page of a newspaper with its inexplicable figures seems to me to be written in Chinese. In the matter of all speed and ability records in sport, I have always been of the same opinion as the Shah of Persia who, when urged to attend the Derby, replied with Oriental wisdom: “Why? I know that one horse can run faster than another. It makes no difference to me which one it is.” We were as contemptuous about throwing away our time in playing 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. During my first twenty years I saw practically nothing of the wonderful surroundings of Vienna; the loveliest and warmest summer days had a particular appeal for us because on such days the city was empty, we got more papers and magazines in the coffeehouses, and got them more quickly. It took me years and decades to find the balance for this childishly eager overexcitement and to overcome my unavoidable bodily clumsiness. But all in all, I have never regretted that fanaticism of my Gymnasium period—that living through one’s eyes and on one’s nerves. It infused into my blood a passion for the intellectual which I should never care to lose, and all I have since read and learned stands on the firm foundation of those years. 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.

That something new was in the course of preparation in the arts, something that was more passionate, more problematical, more alluring than all that had satisfied our parents and the world around us, was the particular experience of our young years. Fascinated by this one aspect of life, we did not notice that these transitions in the aesthetic realm were nothing but trends and foreshadowings of more far-reaching changes, which were to shake the world of our fathers, the world of security, and finally to destroy it. A remarkable shifting began to prepare itself in our old sleepy Austria. 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. And it was just in the last decade that politics broke into the calm of easy living with sharp and sudden blasts. The new century wanted a new order, a new era.

The first of these great mass movements in Austria was the socialist movement. Up to that time the erroneously denominated “universal suffrage” was only permitted to the well-to-do, who had to submit proof of ability to pay a set minimum tax. The advocates and landholders chosen from this class truly and honestly believed that they were the spokesmen and representatives of “the people” in parliament. They were very proud of being educated—some had had an academic training—they placed weight on dignity, decency, and good diction; for this reason the sessions of parliament were like the discussion evenings in a fashionable club. Because of their liberal belief in the unfailing progress of the world through tolerance and reason, these middle-class democrats honestly thought that with small concessions and gradual improvements they were furthering the welfare of all subjects in the best way possible. But they had completely forgotten that they represented only fifty or a hundred thousand well-situated people in the large cities, and not the hundreds of thousands and millions of the entire country. In the meantime the machine had done its work and had gathered the formerly scattered workers around industry. Under the leadership of an eminent man, Dr. Viktor Adler, a Socialist Party was created in Austria to further the demands of the proletariat, which sought a truly universal suffrage. Hardly had this been granted, or rather obtained by force, before it became apparent how thin though highly valuable a layer of liberalism had been. With it conciliation disappeared from public political life, interests hit hard against interests, and the struggle began.

I can still recall from my earliest childhood the day which marked the turning point in the rise of the Socialist Party in Austria. The workers, in order to demonstrate visibly for the first time their strength and numbers, had given out word that the first of May was to be declared the working people’s holiday, and they had decided to march in closed ranks in the Prater, in whose main avenue, a lovely, broad, chestnut-lined boulevard, usually only the carriages and equipages of the aristocracy and the wealthy middle classes appeared. This announcement paralyzed the good liberal middle classes with fright. Socialists! The word had a peculiar taste of blood and terror in the Germany and Austria of those days, like “Jacobin” before and “Bolshevik” since. At first it was thought impossible for this rabble of the faubourgs to carry out its march without setting houses on fire, plundering shops, and committing every sort of atrocity imaginable. A kind of panic set in. The police of the entire city and the surroundings were posted in the Prater, and the military were held in reserve, ready to shoot. Not a carriage, not a cab, dared to come near the Prater; the merchants let down the iron shutters in front of their shops, and I can remember that our parents strictly forbade us children to go out on the streets on this day of terror which might see Vienna in flames. But nothing happened. The workers marched in the Prater with their wives and children in closed ranks, four abreast, with exemplary discipline, each one wearing a red carnation in his buttonhole as a party emblem. While marching they sang the “Internationale,” and the children, who trod on the lovely green of the Nobelallée for the first time, chanted their carefree school songs. No one was insulted, no one was struck, no fists were clenched; and the police and the soldiers smiled at them like comrades. Thanks to this circumspect conduct, the middle classes were no longer able to brand the workers as “revolutionary rabble” and they came to mutual concessions, as always in wise old Austria. The present-day system of suppression and extirpation had not yet been discovered, and the ideal of humanity (although it had already begun to fade) was alive even among political leaders.

Hardly had the red carnation made its appearance as a party emblem, when another flower began to appear in button-holes, the white carnation, the sign of membership in the Christian Social Party! (Is it not touching that flowers were then still chosen as party emblems instead of top-boots, daggers and death’s heads?) The Christian Social Party, a lower middle-class party throughout, was actually only the organic counterpart of the proletarian movement and, like it, was fundamentally a product of the victory of the machine over manual crafts. For while the machine, through the aggregation of large masses in the factories, brought power and a social rise to the workers, at the same time it threatened the small handicrafts. The large department stores and mass production were the ruin of the bourgeoisie and the small employers and their manufacture by hand. 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 before the eyes of the broad classes of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time imperceptibly diverted their hatred from the great landed gentry and the feudal wealthy class. The entire vulgarization and brutalization of present-day politics, the horrible decline of our century, is demonstrated in the comparison of these two figures. Karl Lueger, with his soft, blond beard, was an imposing person—der schöne Karl, the Viennese called him. He had been academically educated in an age that placed intellectual culture over all else; and he had not gone to school in vain. He could speak in a way that appealed to the people; he was vehement and witty, but even in the most heated speeches—or at least, those that were thought to be heated at that time—he never overstepped the bounds of decency. His Streicher, a certain mechanic named Schneider, who operated with legends of ritual murders and similar vulgarities, was carefully held in check. Lueger was modest and above reproach in his private life. 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 burgomaster, 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. The poison of hatred, and the will to mutual and unsparing destruction, had not yet entered into the blood stream of the time.

But soon a 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. Whereas the Christian Social Party in Vienna and throughout the country was anchored in the industrial centers, the German National Party had its followers in the Bohemian and Alpine border districts; weak in numbers, it compensated its unimportance by wild aggression and unbridled brutality. Its few representatives became the terror and (in the old sense) the shame of the Austrian parliament. In their ideas and technique, Hitler, also a border-Austrian, had his origin. He took over the cry “Los von Rom!” from Georg Schönerer. At that time thousands of German Nationals had followed him with German obedience by going over from Catholicism to the Protestant religion in order to annoy the Emperor and the clergy. 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. What the S. A. men, who broke up meetings with rubber clubs, attacked their opponents by night and felled them to the ground, accomplished for the National Socialists was provided for the German Nationals by the Corps Students [Tr.: Students’ Club or Association with distinctive colors and emblems, such as caps and ribbons] who, under the cover of academic immunity, instituted an unparalleled campaign of violence, and who were organized as a militia to march in, at beck and call, upon every political action. Grouped into so-called Burschenschaften [Tr.: German Students’ Association founded in 1815 in opposition to the Corps], scar-faced, drunken, and brutal, they dominated the University Hall, for they did not wear the cap and ribbon like the others, but were armed with hard, heavy sticks. Unceasingly aggressive, they attacked the Jewish, the Slavic, the Catholic, and the Italian students turn by turn, and drove them, defenseless, out of the University. On the occasion of every Bummel (as the Saturday student spree was called) blood flowed. The police, who because of the ancient privilege accorded the University were not allowed to enter the Hall, had to look on inactively from without and see how these cowardly ruffians worked havoc, and could do no more than carry off the wounded who were thrown bleeding down the steps into the street by these nationalist rowdies. 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. When Count Badeni, with the approval of the Emperor and the parliament, had concluded a language decree calculated to bring about peace between Austria’s national groups, and which, in all probability, would have prolonged the existence of the monarchy for decades, this handful of young hotheaded fellows occupied the Ringstrasse. The cavalry was called out, swords were drawn and shots fired. 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. The Minister-President resigned, and the thoroughly laudable language decree was rescinded. The invasion of brutality into politics thus chalked up its first success. All of the underground cracks and crevices between the classes and races, which the age of conciliation had so laboriously patched up, broke open once again and widened into abysses and chasms. In reality it was during the last decade preceding the new century that the war of all against all had already begun in Austria.

We young people, however, completely wrapped up in our literary ambitions, noticed little enough of these dangerous changes in our homeland: we had eyes only for books and pictures. We did not have the slightest interest in politics and social problems: what did these shrill wranglings mean in our lives? The city was aroused at the elections, and we went to the libraries. 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.