Читать книгу The World of Yesterday - Stefan Zweig - Страница 9

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During the eight years of our higher schooling, something had occurred which was of great personal importance to each one of us: we ten-year-olds had grown into virile young men of sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, and Nature began to assert its rights. The awakening of puberty appears to be a purely private matter which each growing person has to fight out in his own fashion, and at first glance does not seem at all suitable for public discussion. As far as we were concerned, that crisis grew beyond its proper sphere. At the same time it brought about an awakening in another sense: for the first time it taught us to observe more critically the social world in which we had grown up, and its conventions. Children and even young people are at first inclined to adapt themselves respectfully to the laws of their surroundings. But they submit to the conventions demanded of them only so long as they see that these are honestly observed by everyone else. A single untruthfulness on the part of teachers or parents inevitably leads a young person to regard his entire surroundings with a suspicious and therefore a sharper eye. It did not take us long to discover that all those authorities in whom we had previously confided—school, family, and public morals—manifested an astonishing insincerity in this matter of sex. But what is more, they also demanded secrecy and reserve from us in this connection.

For they thought differently about these things thirty or forty years ago than they do now. It is quite possible that there is no sphere of public life in which a series of factors—the emancipation of women, Freudian psychoanalysis, physical culture, the independence of youth—have brought about so complete a change within one generation as in the relationship between the sexes. If we attempt to differentiate between the middle-class morality of the nineteenth century, which was essentially a Victorian morality, and the freer and unaffected views of today, we shall probably come closest if we say that that epoch anxiously evaded the sexual problem out of an inner feeling of uncertainty. Earlier religious ages, that still were honest, and strict Puritanism in particular, made things easier for themselves. Filled with an upright conviction that sensual desire was the sting of the Devil, and that bodily lust was unchaste and sinful, the authorities of the Middle Ages approached the problem fairly and squarely with harsh interdictions: and—particularly in Calvinist Geneva—they enforced their strict morality with cruel punishments. Our century, however, being an epoch that no longer believed in the Devil and scarcely believed in God, had no heart for so drastic an anathema, but looked upon sexuality as an anarchical and therefore disturbing element, which had no place in its ethics and which was not allowed to see the light of day, because every form of free and extra-marital love was in opposition to middle-class “decency.” In this dilemma the times invented a remarkable compromise. It limited its morality, not by forbidding a young man to carry on his vita sexualis, but by demanding of him that this painful matter be attended to in as inconspicuous a manner as possible. If it was not feasible to do away with sexuality, then at least it must not be visible in the world of morality. A silent pact was therefore reached, by which the entire bothersome affair was not mentioned in school, in the family, or in public, and everything which brought its existence to mind was suppressed.

It is easy for us, who since the time of Freud know that whoever seeks to suppress the consciousness of natural desires not only fails to remove them but dangerously displaces them into the subconscious, to laugh at the unenlightenment of that naïve technique of concealment. But the nineteenth century labored under the illusion that all conflicts could be solved by rationalization, and that the more we hid the natural, the more we could temper our lawless powers. Therefore, if young people were not enlightened about the presence of these forces, they would forget their own sexuality. In this illusion of control through ignoring, all authorities were united in a boycott of hermetic silence. School and church, salon and courts, newspapers and books, modes and manners, in principle avoided every mention of the problem, and even science, whose real task should have been to approach all problems impartially, shamefully subscribed to the naturalia sunt turpia. Science also surrendered with the excuse that it was beneath its dignity to handle such improper themes. In paging through books of those times, philosophical, legal, or even medical, we find that they consistently and scrupulously avoided any mention of the subject. When professors of criminal law, in their meetings, discussed more humane methods in prisons and the injurious moral effects of incarceration there, they shyly passed by the main problem. Nor did the nerve specialists, although in many cases they were fully aware of the etiology of some hysterical illnesses, dare to admit how matters really stood. We read in Freud that even his own respected teacher, Charcot, had privately admitted to him that although he knew the true cause, he had never spoken of it in public. But least of all did the so-called belles lettres of the times dare to represent things honestly, for the aesthetically beautiful alone had been apportioned to them as their proper domain. Whereas in earlier centuries a writer had not been afraid to give an honest and inclusive cultural picture of his times, and while in the writings of Defoe, the Abbé Prévost, Fielding and Rétif de la Bretonne, one still meets with unvarnished descriptions of conditions as they actually were, our epoch thought that it could only portray the “sentimental” and the “sublime,” but not the painful and the true. For this reason we find, in the literature of the nineteenth century, only the merest trace of all the perils, shadows, and confusions of the city youth. Even if a writer boldly mentioned prostitution, he thought it necessary to ennoble it, and perfumed the heroine as a veritable Camille. So we are confronted with the amazing fact that if, wishing to know how the young of the last century, and even the century before that, fought their way through life, a young man of today picks up the novels of the greatest masters of those times, the works of Dickens and Thackeray, Gottfried Keller and Björnson—with the exception of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, who being Russian stood outside of European pseudo-idealism—he will find nothing but sublimated and toned-down events described there, for the entire generation was inhibited in its freedom of speech by the pressure of the times. And nothing shows more clearly the almost hysterical overexcitement of the morality of our forefathers and its incredible atmosphere than the fact that even this literary reticence was not sufficient. Is it possible for us to understand that so objective a novel as Madame Bovary was forbidden by a French court as being indecent, or that in the time of my youth Zola’s novels were held to be pornographic, and that even so calm and epic a writer as Thomas Hardy had raised storms of indignation in England and America? As reticent as they were, these books had already revealed too much of reality.

But we grew up in this sticky, perfumed, sultry, unhealthy atmosphere. This dishonest and unpsychological morality of secrecy and hiding hung over us like a nightmare, and since true literary and culturally historical documents are lacking because of the universality of this technique of concealment, it may not be easy to reconstruct what already has become incomprehensible. A certain clue, however, is available. We need merely look at the fashions, for the modes of a century, with their trends in visual taste, unintentionally also reveal its morals. It is no mere chance that today, in the year 1941, when men and women of society of the year 1900 are shown on the cinema screen in the costumes of their time, audiences in every city and in every village of Europe or America break out into uncontrolled laughter. Even the most naïve persons of today laugh at them as caricatures. These strange figures of yesteryear appear as unnaturally, uncomfortably, unhygienically, and unpractically dressed fools. And even to us who still saw our mothers and aunts and friends in these absurd costumes (to say nothing of the fact that we ourselves went about as ridiculously attired), it seems like a ghost-like dream that an entire generation could have submitted itself to such stupid fashions without a murmur. The male fashions alone—the high, stiff collar, the “choker” which made any easy motion impossible, the buttoned-up black frock coats with their flapping skirts, and the high “stove-pipe” hats—are cause for mirth, to say nothing of the “lady” of former times in her careful and complicated attire, violating Nature in every single detail! The middle of her body laced into a wasp’s shape in a corset of stiff whalebone, blown out like a huge bell from the waist down, the neck closed in up to the chin, legs shrouded to the toes, the hair towering aloft with countless curls, locks, and braids under a majestically swaying monstrosity of a hat, the hands encased in gloves, even on the warmest summer day, this long since archaic being, the “lady,” in spite of the jewelry with which she was bespangled, in spite of the perfume which surrounded her, the costly laces, the ruchings and other adornments, was an unhappy, pitifully helpless person. At first glance one is aware that a woman, once she is encased in such a toilette, like a knight in armor, could no longer move about freely, gracefully and lightly. Every movement, every gesture, and consequently her entire conduct, had to be artificial, unnatural and affected in such a costume. The mere make-up of such a “lady”—to say nothing of her social education—the putting on and taking off of these robes, was a troublesome procedure and quite impossible without the help of others. First a countless number of hooks and eyes had to be fastened in the back from waist to neck, and the corset pulled tight with all the strength of the maid in attendance. The long hair (must I remind the young people that thirty years ago, with the exception of a few dozen Russian students, every woman in Europe could let her hair down to her waist?) was curled, brushed, combed, flattened, piled up, with the aid of a legion of hairpins, barrettes, and combs and with the additional help of a curling iron and curlers, by a hairdresser who called daily, before one could swathe and build her up with petticoats, camisoles, jackets, and bodices like so many layers of onion skin, until the last trace of her womanly and personal figure had fully disappeared. But this nonsense had a secret reason. The true lines of the body of a woman had to be so completely hidden that even her bridegroom at the wedding banquet could not have the faintest idea whether his future life-partner was straight or crooked, whether she was fat or lean, short-legged, bowlegged, or long-legged. This “moral” era by no means regarded as impermissible the building up of the bosom, the hair, or the use of a bustle for reasons of deception or as an adaptation to the common ideal of beauty. 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.

But this wise morality completely forgot that if one shuts the front door on the Devil, he usually forces an entrance through the chimney or the back door. What catches the more impartial eye of today, looking at these fashions which sought in despair to cover up every trace of naked skin and honest growth, is not their decency but, on the contrary, their minutely provocative revelation of the radical difference between the sexes. Whereas the young man and young woman of our day, both tall and slim, both beardless and with short hair, have a certain conformity even in their outward appearance, the sexes in those days set themselves as far apart as they could. The men sported long beards or at least twirled a mighty mustache, so that their manhood was apparent even from afar, while in the case of woman the corset ostentatiously outlined the bosom, the chief characteristic of her sex. The stronger sex was accentuated over the weaker one in the bearing demanded of each, the man vigorous, chivalrous, and aggressive, the woman shy, timid and on the defensive, the hunter and his prey, instead of their being equal. By this unnatural differentiation in external habits the inner tension between the poles, the erotic, was necessarily strengthened, and thus, by its unpsychological method of concealment and reticence, the society of that time achieved the directly opposite effect. While in its incessant fear and prudishness it was constantly tracking down the indecent in all forms of life, literature, art, and dress, in order to avoid every possible incitement, it was actually forced to think constantly of the indecent. Since it searched without interruption for all that was “improper,” it found itself in a constant state of alert; to the world of that day “decency” was always in mortal danger, in every word and in every gesture. Perhaps we can still understand that in those days it would have been a crime for a woman to wear a pair of trousers at play. The possibility of two young people of the same social class, but of different sexes, going on an excursion together without proper supervision was unthinkable; or rather, the first thought would have been that “something might happen.” Such companionship was only permissible if some chaperone, a mother or a governess, followed the young people step by step. That even in the hottest summers young girls should play tennis in clothes that permitted freedom to their legs or with naked arms, would have been scandalous, and when a well-behaved woman crossed her feet in society, custom found this to be horribly improper, because her ankles might be disclosed under the hem of her dress. Even the elements, sun, water, and air, were not permitted to touch the skin of a woman. In the open sea women made painful progress in heavy suits which covered them from top to toe, and in the boarding schools and convents the young girls, in order to forget that they had bodies, were forced to bathe in long, white shirts. It is neither legendary nor exaggerated to say that 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. Yet after forty years all this must appear to be either a fairy tale or humorous exaggeration. But this fear of everything physical and natural dominated the whole people, from the highest to the lowest, with the violence of an actual neurosis. Can one still imagine today that at the turn of the century when women first ventured to ride a bicycle or rode a man’s saddle, these daring creatures were stoned by peasants? Or that once, when I still went to school, the Viennese papers printed columns of discussion about the proposed horribly indecent innovation—the ballerinas of the Imperial Opera were to dance without stockings? Or that it was an incomparable sensation when Isadora Duncan, in her highly classical dances, for the first time showed the soles of her feet below her white tunic (which fortunately floated all the way down!) instead of wearing the customary silk slippers? And now think of the young people who grew up with eyes wide open in such an era, and how ridiculous these fears over the constant threat to decency must have seemed to them, as soon as they discovered that the cloak of morality, which had been thought to conceal all these things, was threadbare and full of holes. After all, it was unavoidable that one of the fifty Gymnasium students would occasionally meet his professor in a dimly lighted back street, or that in the family circle we heard that this one or that one, who was particularly haughty in our presence, had various lapses from grace on his conscience. As a matter of fact, nothing increased and troubled our curiosity as much as this clumsy business of concealment; and since all that was natural was not permitted to run its course freely and openly, in a big city curiosity created its own not very clean underground outlets. In all classes, through this suppression of youth, an overexcitation was felt which worked itself out in a childish and helpless fashion. There was scarcely a fence or a privy that was not besmeared with obscene words and drawings, hardly a bathing pool in which the wooden wall of the women’s quarters was not bored full of peepholes. Entire industries, which have perished today now that customs are more natural, flowered secretly. “Art” and nude photographs in particular were offered to half-grown boys for sale under the table by peddlers in every café. Since serious literature was forced to be careful and idealistic, pornographic literature of the very worst sort called sous le manteau, printed on bad paper and written in bad language, none the less found a tremendous public, as did magazines of a racy nature. None can be found today as vile and repulsive as they were. In addition to the Imperial Theater, which had to serve the ideal of the times with all its nobility of purpose and its snow-white purity, there were theaters and cabarets given over exclusively to obscenity. Everywhere the suppressed sought byways, loopholes, and detours. In the final analysis that generation, to whom all enlightenment and all innocent association with the opposite sex was prudishly denied, was a thousand times more erotically inclined than the younger generation of today with its greater freedom of love. 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. The less air, light, and sun were allowed to the body, the more the senses were troubled. To sum up, the pressure of society on our youth, instead of bringing about a higher morality, brought forth nothing but mistrust and bitterness against all authorities. From the very first day of our awakening, we had felt instinctively that this dishonest morality, with its concealment and reticence, wished to take something that rightly belonged to our age away from us, and our will to honesty was sacrificed to a convention which had long since become false.

This “social morality,” which, on the one hand privately presupposed the existence of sexuality and its natural course, but on the other would not recognize it openly at any price, was doubly deceitful. While it winked one eye at a young man and even encouraged him with the other “to sow his wild oats,” as the kindly language of the home put it, in the case of a woman it studiously shut both eyes and acted as if it were blind. That a man could experience desires, and was permitted to experience them, was silently admitted by custom. But to admit frankly that a woman could be subject to similar desires, or that creation for its eternal purposes also required a female polarity, would have transgressed the conception of the “sanctity of womanhood.” In the pre-Freudian era, therefore, the axiom was agreed upon that a female person could have no physical desires as long as they had not been awakened by man, and that, obviously, was officially permitted only in marriage. But even in those moral times, in Vienna in particular, the air was full of dangerous erotic infection, and a girl of good family had to live in a completely sterilized atmosphere, from the day of her birth until the day when she left the altar on her husband’s arm. In order to protect young girls, they were not left alone for a single moment. They were given a governess whose duty it was to see that they did not step out of the house unaccompanied, that they were taken to school, to their dancing lessons, to their music lessons, and brought home in the same manner. Every book which they read was inspected, and, above all else, young girls were constantly kept busy to divert their attention from any possible dangerous thoughts. They had to practice the piano, learn singing and drawing, foreign languages, and the history of literature and art. They were educated and overeducated. But while the aim was to make them as educated and as socially correct as possible, at the same time society anxiously took great pains that they remain innocent of all natural things to a degree unthinkable today. A young girl of good family was not allowed to have any idea of how the male body was formed, or to know how children came into the world, for the angel was to enter into matrimony not only physically untouched, but completely “pure” spiritually as well. “Good breeding,” for a young girl of that time, was identical with ignorance of life; and this ignorance ofttimes lasted for the rest of their lives. I am still amused by a grotesque story of an aunt of mine who, on the night of her marriage, stormed the door of her parents’ house at one o’clock in the morning. She never again wished to see the horrible creature to whom she had been married. He was a madman and a beast, for he had seriously attempted to undress her. It was only with great difficulty that she had been able to escape from this obviously perverted desire.

Now I cannot conceal the fact that this innocence lent the young girls of those days a secret charm. These unfledged creatures sensed that besides their own world there was another of which they knew nothing and were not permitted to know anything, and this made them curious, dreaming, yearning, and covered them with an alluring confusion. When we greeted them on the street they blushed—are there any young girls today who blush? When they were among themselves, they giggled and whispered and laughed incessantly as if they were slightly tipsy. Full of expectation for all this unknown experience from which they were locked out, they dreamed their lives romantically, but at the same time they were bashful lest someone discover how much their bodies yearned for a tenderness of which they knew nothing clearly. A sort of mild confusion constantly irritated their conduct. They walked differently from the girls of today whose bodies have been steeled by sports, who move about freely with young men of their own kind; in those days one could distinguish at a distance a young girl from a woman who had already known a man, simply by the way she walked. They were more girlish, and less womanly, than the girls are today. In their nature they were akin to the exotic delicacy of a hothouse plant cultivated under glass in an artificially over-warmed atmosphere, protected against any strong gust of wind, the artfully tended product of a definite education and culture.

And that is how the society of those days wished young girls to be, silly and untaught, well educated and innocent, curious and shy, uncertain and unpractical, and predisposed to this education without knowledge of the world from the very beginning, to be led and formed by a man in marriage without any will of their own. Custom seemed to preserve them as a symbol of its most secret ideals, as an emblem of womanly chastity, virginity, and unworldliness. But what a tragedy it was if one of these young girls missed her time, if she was not yet married at twenty-five or thirty! Custom pitilessly demanded of women of thirty and forty years of age that for the sake of “family” and “morality” they maintain this condition of inexperience and freedom from desire, of naïveté, although it no longer suited their age. But then the sweet picture usually turned into a sharp and cruel caricature. The unmarried maiden became an article left on the shelf, and the left-over became an old maid, the butt of the shallow derision of all the comic papers. Whoever picks up a volume of the Fliegende Blätter, or any one of the humorous magazines of that period, will shudder at their stupid jeering at aging maidens, who with nerves disturbed did not know how to conceal their natural desire for love. Instead of recognizing the tragedy which beset these sacrificed lives, which for reasons of family and good name were forced to suppress the demands of Nature and the desire for love and motherhood, people ridiculed them with a lack of understanding that disgusts us today. For a society is always most cruel to those who disclose and reveal its secrets, when through dishonesty society itself has outraged Nature.

Although middle-class usage strove frantically to uphold the fiction that a well-born woman neither possessed sexual instincts nor was permitted to possess any as long as she remained unmarried—anything else would have made her an “immoral person,” an outcast from the family—it was obliged to admit the existence of such desires on the part of young men. Since experience had taught that those who had grown to manhood could not be hindered from carrying on their sexual life, the only restriction was the modest wish that they accomplish their unworthy pleasures outside the walls of sacred morality. Just as cities, under the cleanly swept streets with their handsome de luxe shops and elegant promenades, hide a system of subterranean sewers which carry off their filth, so the entire sexual life of youth was supposed to go on under the moral surface of “society.” The perils to which a young man was exposed, and the company into which he might come, were a matter of indifference; school and family carefully avoided enlightening the young man in this connection. Occasionally, in later years, there were cautious or “enlightened” fathers, as they were then called, who, the moment their sons showed the first signs of a sprouting beard, wished to guide them into the right path. Then the family physician was called in, and at the proper time bade the young man come into the room, polished his glasses unnecessarily before he began his lecture on the dangers of venereal diseases, and admonished the young man, who usually at this point had long since taught himself, to be moderate and not to overlook certain preventive measures. Other fathers used an even more astonishing method; they engaged a pretty servant girl for the house whose task it was to give the young lad some practical experience. It seemed best to them that the youngster take care of this bothersome matter under their own roof, for it not only preserved decorum outwardly, but also averted the danger of his falling into the hands of some designing person. One method of enlightenment was frowned upon by all the authorities: the open and honest method.

What possibilities actually existed for a young man of the middle-class world? In all the others, in the so-called lower classes, the problem was no problem at all. In the country the farmhand slept with a maid when he was seventeen, and even if the affair had any consequences, it was of no further importance. In most of our Alpine villages the number of natural children greatly exceeded the legitimate ones. Among the proletariat, the worker, before he could get married, lived with another worker in free love. Among the orthodox Jews of Galicia, a bride was given to the seventeen-year-old, that is, at the normal age of puberty, and it was possible for him to be a grandfather at forty. It was only in our middle-class society that such a remedy as an early marriage was scorned. No father of a family would have entrusted his daughter to a twenty- or twenty-two-year-old man, since so “young” a man was not considered sufficiently mature. Here too, an inner dishonesty disclosed itself, for the middle-class calendar in no way agreed with that of Nature. As far as society was concerned, a young man did not reach manhood until he had secured a “social position” for himself—that is, hardly before his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year. And so there was an artificial interval of six, eight, or ten years between actual manhood and manhood as society accepted it; and in this interval the young man had to take care of his own “affairs” or adventures.

Those days did not give him too many opportunities. Only a very few particularly rich young men could afford the luxury of keeping a mistress, that is, taking an apartment and paying her expenses. And only a very few fortunate young men achieved the literary ideal of love of the times—the only one which it was permitted to describe in novels—an affair with a married woman. The others helped themselves for the most part with shopgirls and waitresses, and this offered little inner satisfaction. For at that time, before the emancipation of women and their active participation in public life, it was only the girls of the very poorest proletarian background who were sufficiently unresisting on the one hand, and had enough freedom on the other, for such passing relationships without serious thoughts of marriage. Badly dressed, tired after a twelve-hour day of poorly paid work, unkempt (a bathroom in those days was still only the privilege of the rich), and brought up in narrow circumstances, these poor creatures were so much below the standing of their lovers that these in turn were mostly ashamed of being seen openly with them. But convention, always cautious, had invented its own measures for this painful situation, the so-called chambres séparées, where one could dine unseen with a girl; the rest was accomplished in the dark side streets in the little hotels which were equipped for these purposes exclusively. But all these meetings had to be fleeting and without any real beauty, more sex-drive than eros, for they were always hasty and secret as all forbidden things are. Then, of course, there was still the possibility of an affair with one of those amphibious creatures who were half inside, half outside society—actresses, dancers, and artistes, the only “emancipated” women of the times. 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.

The present generation has hardly any idea of the gigantic spread of prostitution in Europe before the World War. Whereas today it is as rare to meet a prostitute on the streets of a big city as it is to meet a wagon in the road, then the sidewalks were so sprinkled with women for sale that it was more difficult to avoid than to find them. To this was added the countless number of “closed houses,” the night clubs, the cabarets, the dance parlors with their dancers and singers, and the bars with their “come-on” girls. At that time female wares were offered for sale at every hour and at every price, and it cost a man as little time and trouble to purchase a woman for a quarter of an hour, an hour, or a night, as it did to buy a package of cigarettes or a newspaper. Nothing seems to me to confirm the greater honesty and naturalness of our present-day life and love forms than the fact that it is possible and almost normal for the youth of today to do without this once indispensable institution. It is not the police nor the laws that have restricted prostitution in our world. This tragic product of a pseudo-morality, except for a small remnant, has liquidated itself because of a decreased demand.

The official attitude of the State and its morality towards this shady affair was never a very comfortable one. From the moral point of view, the State did not dare acknowledge the right of a woman to sell herself, and from the hygienic viewpoint, on the other hand, prostitution could not be spared because it canalized the troublesome extra-marital sexuality. And so the authorities sought to avail themselves of an ambiguity, in that a distinction was made between private prostitution, which the State prosecuted as being immoral and dangerous, and legalized prostitution, which it supplied with a sort of trade license and which it taxed. A girl who had decided to become a prostitute was given a particular concession by the police and received her own book as a qualifying certificate. Inasmuch as she submitted to police control and complied with her duty of being examined by a physician twice each week, she had acquired the business right to lease out her body at any price she saw fit. Prostitution was recognized as a profession among the other professions; but—and here is the rub of morality—it was not quite fully recognized. So, for example, a prostitute who sold her wares, that is, her body, to a man and later did not receive the price agreed upon, had no right to sue him. For then suddenly her suit—ob turpem causam as the law saw it—had become an immoral one and stood without the protection of the law.

It was in such matters that one felt the duplicity of a concept which, although it incorporated these girls into a legally permitted profession, still considered them personally as outcasts beyond the law. But the actual dishonesty lay in the fact that these limitations applied only to the poorer classes. A ballet dancer, who was available for any man at any hour in Vienna for two hundred crowns, just as the girl of the streets was available for two crowns, obviously did not need a trade license. The great demi-mondaines were even mentioned in the papers as among those present at the Derby or the trotting-races, because they were already a part of “society.” And again, certain of the most fashionable go-betweens, who furnished the Court, the aristocracy, and the rich with luxury wares, were above the law, though usually procuring was punished with a heavy prison sentence. The strict discipline, the pitiless surveillance, the social ostracism, applied only to the army of thousands and thousands who defended, with their bodies and their humiliated souls, an old and long since undermined moral prejudice against free and natural love.

This gigantic army of prostitution, like the real army, was made up of various branches, cavalry, artillery, infantry, and siege artillery. In the ranks of prostitution the siege artillery was the group which had occupied certain streets in the city as their quarter. They were for the most part the places where in the Middle Ages the gallows had stood, or a leper hospital, or a cemetery had been, or where the “freemen” and other social outcasts had found shelter. In other words, vicinities which the citizens had preferred to avoid as residential quarters. There the authorities had set up certain streets as a love market; door after door, in the twentieth century, from two to five hundred women sat as they did in the Yoshiwara of Japan or the Fish Market in Cairo, one next to the other on display at the windows of their dwellings at street level—cheap goods which were worked in two shifts, day and night.

The cavalry or infantry was made up of the roving prostitutes, the countless girls who sought their clients on the streets. In Vienna they were commonly called “line girls” because the sidewalks had been marked off by the police with an invisible line where they might carry on their trade. By day and by night until the gray of the dawn, they dragged their dearly bought false elegance over the streets, in rain and snow, constantly forced to twist their tired, badly painted faces into an alluring smile for every passer-by. Every city appears to me to be lovelier and more humane since these droves of hungry, unhappy women no longer populate the streets, without pleasure offering pleasure for sale, and after all their wandering from one corner to another finally going one and the same inevitable way, the way to the infirmary.

But even these masses did not suffice for the steady demand. There were some who wished to be more comfortable and more discreet than in chasing these fluttering bats or sorry birds of paradise on the streets. They wanted love at their ease, with light and warmth, with music and dancing and an appearance of luxury. These clients had their “closed houses” or brothels. There the girls were assembled in a so-called salon, furnished in counterfeit luxury, some in evening gowns, others in unreticent negligées. A piano player supplied the music; there was drinking and dancing and conversation before the pairs discreetly retired to a bedroom. In some of the more fashionable houses, particularly in Paris and Milan, which had a sort of international reputation, a naïve person could labor under the illusion of having been invited to a private house with some very merry ladies of society. Outwardly the girls in these houses were better off than the roving girls of the streets. They did not have to wander through wind and rain, through filthy alleys, they sat in warm rooms, were given good clothes, ample food, and, in particular, ample drink. But in return, they were actually the prisoners of their landladies, who forced the clothes they wore upon them at exorbitant prices, and did such magic tricks of arithmetic with the rent and board that even the most industrious and persevering girl remained in debt and could never leave the house of her own free will.

To write the intimate history of some of these houses would be interesting and also of documentary importance for the culture of that period, for they held the strangest secrets, well known to the otherwise strict authorities. There were hidden doors and a special stairway by which the members of the highest society—and, it was whispered, even members of the Court—could pay their visits without being seen by other mortals. There were mirrored rooms and some that offered a hidden view of the neighboring room, in which a couple were unsuspectingly enjoying themselves. There were the weirdest changes of costumes, from the habit of a nun to the dress of a ballerina, locked away in closets and chests for particular fetishists. And this was the same city, the same society, the same morality, that was indignant when young girls rode bicycles, and declared it a disgrace to the dignity of science when Freud in his calm, clear, and penetrating manner established truths that they did not wish to be true. The same world that so pathetically defended the purity of womanhood allowed this cruel sale of women, organized it, and even profited thereby.

We should not permit ourselves to be misled by sentimental novels or stories of that epoch. It was a bad time for youth. The young girls were hermetically locked up under the control of the family, hindered in their free bodily as well as intellectual development. The young men were forced to secrecy and reticence by a morality which fundamentally no one believed or obeyed. Unhampered, honest relationships—in other words, all that could have made youth happy and joyous according to the laws of Nature—were permitted only to the very few. And anyone of that generation who wishes to look back honestly upon his first meetings with women will recall but few episodes that he can think about with unmixed pleasure. For in addition to the social pressure, which constantly enforced precaution and secrecy, there was at that time another element that overshadowed the happiest moments: the fear of infection. Here too, the youth of that era was neglected in comparison with those of today, for it must not be forgotten that forty years ago sexual diseases were spread a hundred times more than they are today, and that they were a hundred times more dangerous and horrible in effect, because medicine did not yet know how to approach them clinically. Science could not yet cure them quickly and completely as it does today, so that now they are no more than episodes. Whereas today, thanks to Paul Ehrlich’s therapy, in the clinics of the small and medium-sized universities weeks often pass by in which the professor is unable to show his students a freshly infected case of syphilis, the statistics of those days show that in the army and in the big cities at least one or two out of every ten young men had fallen victim to infection. Youth was reminded incessantly of the danger. Going through the streets of Vienna, one could read on the door of every sixth or seventh house, Specialist for Skin and Venereal Diseases, and to the fear of infection was added the horror of the disgusting and degrading forms of the erstwhile cures, of which the world of today also knows nothing. For weeks on end the entire body of anyone infected with syphilis was rubbed with mercury, the effect of which was that the teeth fell out and other injuries to health ensued. The unhappy victim of a severe encounter felt himself not only physically but spiritually spotted, and even after so horrible a cure, he could never be certain that the cunning virus might not at any moment awake from its captivity and paralyze the limbs from the spine, or soften the brain. Small wonder then that at that time many young people, once the diagnosis had been made, reached for their revolvers because they could not stand the feeling that they were suspected of being incurable. Then there were the other sorrows of a vita sexualis carried on in secret. Though I try hard to remember, I cannot recall a single comrade of my youth who did not come to me with pale and troubled mien, one because he was ill or feared illness, another because he was being blackmailed because of an abortion, a third because he lacked the money to be cured without the knowledge of his family, the fourth because he did not know how to pay hush money to a waitress who claimed to have had a child by him, the fifth because his wallet had been stolen in a brothel and he did not dare to go to the police. The youth of those pseudo-moral times were much more romantic and yet more unclean, much more excited and yet more depressed, than the novels and dramas of their official writers depict them. In the sphere of eros, in school and home, youth was rarely given the freedom and happiness to which its years entitled it.

All this has to be set down in an honest picture of the times. For often when I converse with younger comrades of the post-war generation, I must convince them almost by force that our youth was by no means specially favored in comparison with their own. True, we had more freedom in the political sense than the present generation, which is compelled to submit to military service, compulsory labor, and in many countries to mass ideologies, and in almost all countries is helplessly delivered up to the arbitrary power of world politics. We were able to devote ourselves to our art and to our intellectual inclinations, and we were able to mold our private existence with more individual personality. We could live a more cosmopolitan life and the whole world stood open to us. We could travel without a passport and without a permit wherever we pleased. No one questioned us as to our beliefs, as to our origin, race, or religion. I do not deny that we had immeasurably more individual freedom and we not only cherished it but made use of it as well. 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. We lived better and tasted more of the world, but the youth of today lives and experiences its own youth more consciously. When today I see young people come out of their schools and their colleges with their heads high, with happy faces, when I see boys and girls in free, untroubled companionship, without false modesty and false shame, at their studies, sport, and play, coursing over the snow on skis, competing classically with one another in the swimming pool, racing over the country in pairs in automobiles, akin in all forms of healthy, carefree life without any inner or outer burden, then each time it seems as if not forty, but a thousand years stand between them and us who, in order to procure or to receive love, always had to seek shadows and hiding places. I am genuinely happy to see how tremendous a moral revolution has occurred in favor of youth, how much freedom in loving and living they have regained, and how much they have recovered physically and spiritually in this freedom. The women appear to be more beautiful since it is permitted them to display their figures, their walk is more erect, their eyes clearer, their talk less artificial. What a different sense of security this new generation possesses, since its members need not give an accounting of their conduct to anyone but themselves, having wrung control from mothers and fathers and aunts and teachers, and no longer dream of all the suppression, intimidation, and tension that was forced upon us, no longer know anything of the bypaths and secretiveness with which we had to secure the forbidden, which they correctly conceive to be their right. Happily it enjoys its age with that vivacity, that freshness, that ease, and that carefreeness which are fitting to this age. But the loveliest thing about this happiness seems to be that it need not lie to others, and may be honest with itself, honest to its natural feelings and desires. 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, that the youth of today is free of fear and depression and enjoys to the full that which was denied us in our time: the feeling of candor and self-confidence.