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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday, (Die Welt von Gestern) is a unique love letter to the lost world of pre-war Europe The famous autobiography is published by Pushkin Press, with a cover designed by David Pearson and Clare Skeats. Translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell. Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of pre- war Europe its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall. Through the story of his life, and his relationships with the leading literary figures of the day, Zweig s passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction. This new translation by the award- winning Anthea Bell captures the spirit of Zweig's writing in arguably his most important work, completed shortly before his death in a suicide pact with his wife in 1942. The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed.'— David Hare 'This absolutely extraordinary book is more than just an autobiography. (...) This is a book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942. That should cover a fair number of you.'— Nicholas Lezard, Guardian Translated from the German by Anthea Bell, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, is published by Pushkin Press. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
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‘One of the greatest memoirs of the twentiethcentury, as perfect in its evocation of theworld Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayalof how that world was destroyed’
DAVID HARE
‘Absolutely extraordinary’
NICHOLAS LEZARD, GUARDIAN
‘One of the great accounts of life in Europein the first part of the twentieth century’
SHEILA HETI, NEW YORKER
‘Stefan Zweig’s time of oblivion isover… it’s good to have him back’
SALMAN RUSHDIE, NEW YORK TIMES
‘Zweig deserves to be famous again, and for good’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘Fits the uneasy mood of the moment, thenightmarish ways that history can abruptlyoverturn even the most secure lives’
RON CHERNOW, NEW YORK TIMES
‘One of the canonical European testaments’
JOHN GRAY, NEW STATESMAN
‘A marvellous recapturing of a Europethat Hitler and his thugs destroyed’
JOHN BANVILLE
‘A wonderful book of a lifetime’
EILEEN BATTERSBY, IRISH TIMES
‘Unnervingly topical’
THE WEEK
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY
MEMOIRS OF A EUROPEAN
STEFAN ZWEIG
TRANS LATED FROM THE GERMAN BY ANTHE A BELL
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
It should be remembered in reading this memoir by Stefan Zweig, first published in the original German in 1942, the year of his death, that the Second World War was still going on while he was completing it. That in itself explains why its place of first publication was Stockholm rather than anywhere in Germany or Austria, because as a Jewish writer he had already been banned in those countries under the National Socialist regime, as he tells his readers in the later chapters of his book. In translating, I was often brought up with a jolt of automatic if momentary surprise by comments reminding me that the war was in progress as he wrote. When, for instance, he says: “Inevitably, the dimensions of the present day have changed our point of view”, he is referring to the Nazi regime from 1933 on, culminating in full-scale hostilities from 1939. He never knew the end of the story; he and his second wife committed suicide together in February 1942.
Their double suicide raises another point: there has been discussion of the reason for it, since at that date, when the United States had just entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, there were clear signs that the tide was turning against Hitler. Talk of final victory and a ‘wonder weapon’ may have sounded persuasive in Germany and Austria, where a heavy propaganda system was brought to bear, less so outside those countries. One surmise, with which I concur, is that Zweig’s underlying reason may have been a sense that whether the war was won or lost, the world of civilised culture 10 in which he had lived and worked was gone for ever. I concur merely on the grounds that the close work of translation brings one close to an author’s mind—as Zweig, who often worked as a translator himself early in his literary career, and knew what translation sets out to do (see several passages in this book), might, I think, have agreed. He delivered The World of Yesterday to his publishers not long before his suicide. It was not all written in consecutive order as published, but even the closing chapters, leading up to the declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France in 1939, while Zweig was living in England, simply do not leave me with the impression that the book was a long suicide note. Close to the end of it, Zweig mentions years still unlived ahead of him and books yet to be written, with the evident intention of writing them if he can, and his final sentence is an affirmation of the value of life lived to the full. The suicide note that he did write is reasoned and lucid, but who knows, maybe an element of sudden desperation was also involved. One can only speculate.
Gloomy as Zweig felt about the lives of Jews under Hitler—and he describes their predicament in detail in his closing chapter—it is also a shock to the modern reader to realise that at the time of his death he did not know the full horror of what was still in store. The Wannsee Conference, which discussed the infamous Final Solution policy, the brainchild of Reinhard Heydrich, was held in December 1941. Details of the death camps and the Holocaust did not leak out to the Western media instantly by any means, in many cases not until after the war. When Zweig was writing, he describes the fate facing a Jew under Hitler in 1939—deprived of all his possessions, he would be expelled from the country with only the clothes he stood up in and ten marks in his pocket. It was certainly bad enough, but there was worse to come.
What Stefan Zweig would have thought of the Holocaust one can only imagine. But his memoir, a quintessentially 11 humane document and a record of European culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stands as a sane, civilised counterblast to the horrors of war as he already knew it, and as a well-informed and sometimes quirkily individual account of the cultural life of his time.
ANTHEA BELL 2009
15
Let’s withdraw And meet the time as it seeks us.
Shakespeare Cymbeline
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Inever considered myself important enough to feel tempted to tell others the story of my life. Much had to happen, far more in the shape of terrible events, disasters and trials than any other single generation has known, before I found the courage to embark on a book in which I feature as the main or, more accurately, the central character. Nothing is further from my mind than to bring myself to the fore, unless in the sense of being the presenter of a lecture illustrated by slides. The times provide the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, and it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation—our unique generation, carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history. We have all, even the least of us, known the turmoil of almost constant volcanic shocks suffered by our native continent of Europe, and the only precedence I can claim for myself among a countless multitude is that as an Austrian, a Jew, a writer, a humanist and a pacifist I have always stood where those volcanic eruptions were at their most violent. Three times they have wreaked havoc with my home and my way of life, cutting me off from the past and all that it once comprised, and flinging me with dramatic force into a void where I soon became familiar with the feeling that there was nowhere to turn. But that in itself was no great cause for complaint; the homeless, more than anyone, are free in a new way, and only those with no more ties can afford to cast consideration to the winds. So I hope that I can fulfil at least one of the main requirements of every proper account of a certain era, and look at it with honest impartiality.18
For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths. In the brief interval between the time when I first began to grow a beard and today, when it is beginning to turn grey, more radical changes and transformations have taken place than in ten normal human generations, and we all feel: this is too much! My today is so different from all my yesterdays; I have risen and fallen so often, that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not just one but several completely different lives. When I say, without thinking, ‘my life’, I often find myself instinctively wondering which life. My life before the world wars, before the First or the Second World War, or my life today? Then again I catch myself saying, ‘my house’, and I am not sure which of my former homes I mean: my house in Bath, my house in Salzburg, my parental home in Vienna? Or I find myself saying that ‘at home’ we do this or that, by ‘we’ meaning Austrians, and remember, with a shock, that for some time I have been no more of an Austrian than I am an Englishman or an American; I am no longer organically 19 bound to my native land and I never really fit into any other. I feel that the world in which I grew up and the world of today, not to mention the world in between them, are drawing further and further apart and becoming entirely different places. Whenever, in conversation with younger friends, I mention something that happened before the First World War, their startled questions make me realise how much of what I still take for granted as reality has become either past history or unimaginable to them. And a lurking instinct in me says that they are right; all the bridges are broken between today, yesterday and the day before yesterday. I can only marvel at the wealth and variety of events that we have compressed into the brief span of a single lifetime—admittedly a very uncomfortable and dangerous lifetime—especially when I compare it with the life my forebears led. Both my father and my grandfather lived their lives in a single, direct way—it was one and the same life from beginning to end, without many vicissitudes, without upheaval and danger, a life of small tensions, imperceptible transitions, always lived in the same easy, comfortable rhythm as the wave of time carried them from the cradle to the grave. They spent all their days in the same country, the same city, usually even in the same house. As for what went on in the outside world, fundamentally that was only something they read in the newspaper, it did not come knocking at their doors. There was probably a war of some kind in progress somewhere in their time, but only a little one compared to the dimensions of modern warfare, and waged far away from their borders. They did not hear the cannon, it was all over and forgotten after six months, a dry-as-dust page in a history book, and the same old life began again. But we have lived through everything without ever returning to our former lives, nothing was left of them, nothing was restored. It was for our generation to experience, to the highest degree, events that history usually bestows sparingly on a single land over a whole century. One generation might see revolution, the next 20 a coup, the third a war, the fourth famine, the fifth national bankruptcy—and many lucky countries and lucky generations never knew any of that. But as for those of us who are now sixty years old, and de jure should still have a little time left ahead of us, what have we not seen, not suffered, not experienced? We have made our way through the catalogue of all imaginable catastrophes from beginning to end, and we have not reached the last page of it yet. I myself have lived at the time of the two greatest wars known to mankind, even experiencing each on a different side—the first on the German side and the second among Germany’s enemies. Before those wars I saw individual freedom at its zenith, after them I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years; I have been acclaimed and despised, free and not free, rich and poor. All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life: revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration; I have seen great mass ideologies grow before my eyes and spread, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general. I have been a defenceless, helpless witness of the unimaginable relapse of mankind into what was believed to be long-forgotten barbarism, with its deliberate programme of inhuman dogma. It was for our generation, after hundreds of years, to see again wars without actual declarations of war, concentration camps, torture, mass theft and the bombing of defenceless cities, bestiality unknown for the last fifty generations, and it is to be hoped that future generations will not see them again. Yet paradoxically, at the same time as our world was turning the moral clock back a thousand years, I have also seen mankind achieve unheard-of feats in the spheres of technology and the intellect, instantly outdoing everything previously achieved in millions of years: the conquest of the air with the aeroplane, words travelling all over the world at the moment when they 21 are spoken, the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the defeat of even the most insidious diseases. Almost daily, things still impossible yesterday have become possible. Never until our time has mankind as a whole acted so diabolically, or made such almost divine progress.
It seems to me a duty to bear witness to our lifetime, which has been fraught with such dramatic events, for we have all, I repeat, witnessed these vast transformations—we have been forced to witness them. For our generation, there was no other option, no chance such as earlier generations had of standing aside. Thanks to our new methods of spreading news as soon as it happens, we have been constantly drawn into the events of our time. When bombers smashed buildings in Shanghai, we knew it in our sitting rooms in Europe even before the injured were carried out. Incidents thousands of miles away overseas came vividly before our eyes. There was no shelter, no safety from constant awareness and involvement. There was no country to which you could escape, no way you could buy peace and quiet; all the time, everywhere, the hand of Fate took us and dragged us back into its insatiable game.
We have constantly had to subordinate ourselves to the demands of the state, a prey to the most stupid of policies, we have had to adjust to the most fantastic of vicissitudes, we have always been chained to a common fate, bitterly as we might resent it; it swept us irresistibly away. Those of us who passed through that time, or rather were hunted and hounded through it, have hardly had time to draw breath. We have experienced more history than any of our forefathers did. Even today we stand at another watershed, at an end and a new beginning. If I conclude this survey of my life at a certain particular date, I do so intentionally—that September day in 19391 drew the closing line under the epoch that had formed and reared those of us who are of the generation now reaching the age of sixty. But if we can salvage only a splinter of truth from the structure of its 22 ruin, and pass it on to the next generation by bearing witness to it, we will not have lived entirely in vain.
I am well aware of the unfortunate circumstances, so characteristic of our times, in which I am trying to give some kind of form to these memoirs of mine. I write in the middle of the war, I write abroad and with nothing to jog my memory; I have no copies of my books, no notes, no letters from friends available here in my hotel room. There is nowhere I can go for information, because all over the world postal services between countries have been halted or are subject to censorship. We all live apart from each other, just as we did hundreds of years ago before the invention of steamships and railways, air travel and the postal system. I have nothing left of my past, then, but what I carry in my head. At this moment everything else is either lost or beyond my reach. But our generation has learnt the fine art of not mourning for what is lost, and perhaps the loss of documentation and detail will even be an advantage in this book of mine. For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago. Only what I want to preserve for myself has any claim to be preserved for others. So I ask my memories to speak and choose for me, and give at least some faint reflection of my life before it sinks into the dark.
note
1 3rd September 1939, the day when Britain (where Zweig was living in exile at the time) and France declared war on Germany.
THE WORLD OF SECURITY
Reared as we are, in quiet and in peace, Now all at once we’re thrown upon the world. Thousands of waves wash round us without cease, Often delighted, sometimes pleased, we’re whirled From joy to grief, and so from hour to hour Our restless feelings waver, change and sway. Our senses know a strange, tumultuous power, And in the turmoil find no place to stay.
Goethe
If i try to find some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our Austrian Monarchy, then almost a thousand years old, seemed built to last, and the state itself was the ultimate guarantor of durability. The rights it gave its citizens were affirmed by our parliament, a freely elected assembly representing the people, and every duty was precisely defined. Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in the form of shiny gold coins, thus vouching for its own immutability. Everyone knew how much he owned and what his income was, what was allowed and what was not. Everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight. If you had wealth, you could work out precisely how much interest it would earn you every year, while civil servants and officers were reliably able to consult the calendar and see the year when they would be promoted and the year when they would retire. Every family had its own budget and knew how much could be spent on food and lodging, summer holidays and social functions, and of course you had to put a small sum aside for unforeseen contingencies such as illness and 24 the doctor. If you owned a house you regarded it as a secure home for your children and grandchildren; property in town or country was passed on from generation to generation. While a baby was still in the cradle, you contributed the first small sums to its way through life, depositing them in a money box or savings account, a little reserve for the future. Everything in this wide domain was firmly established, immovably in its place, with the old Emperor at the top of the pyramid, and if he were to die the Austrians all knew (or thought they knew) that another emperor would take his place, and nothing in the well-calculated order of things would change. Anything radical or violent seemed impossible in such an age of reason.
This sense of security was an asset owned by millions, something desirable, an ideal of life held in common by all. Life was worth living only with such security, and wider and wider circles were eager to have their part in that valuable asset. At first only those who already owned property enjoyed advantages, but gradually the population at large came to aspire to them. The era of security was also the golden age of the insurance industry. You insured your house against fire and theft, your land against damage by storms and hail, your body against accidents and sickness; you bought annuities for your old age; you put insurance policies in your girl children’s cradles to provide their future dowries. Finally even the working classes organised themselves to demand a certain level of wages as the norm, as well as health insurance schemes. Servants saved for their old age, and paid ahead of time into policies for their own funerals. Only those who could look forward with confidence to the future enjoyed the present with an easy mind.
But for all the solidity and sobriety of people’s concept of life at the time, there was a dangerous and overweening pride in this touching belief that they could fence in their existence, leaving no gaps at all. In its liberal idealism, the nineteenth 25 century was honestly convinced that it was on the direct and infallible road to the best of all possible worlds. The people of the time scornfully looked down on earlier epochs with their wars, famines and revolutions as periods when mankind had not yet come of age and was insufficiently enlightened. Now, however, it was a mere matter of decades before they finally saw an end to evil and violence, and in those days this faith in uninterrupted, inexorable ‘progress’ truly had the force of a religion. People believed in ‘progress’ more than in the Bible, and its gospel message seemed incontestably proven by the new miracles of science and technology that were revealed daily. In fact a general upward development became more and more evident, and at the end of that peaceful century it was swift and multifarious. Electric lights brightly lit the streets by night, replacing the dim lamps of the past; shops displayed their seductive new brilliance from the main streets of cities all the way to the suburbs; thanks to the telephone, people who were far apart could speak to each other; they were already racing along at new speeds in horseless carriages, and fulfilling the dream of Icarus by rising in the air. The comfort of upper-class dwellings now reached the homes of the middle classes; water no longer had to be drawn from wells or waterways; fires no longer had to be laboriously kindled in the hearth; hygiene was widespread, dirt was disappearing. People were becoming more attractive, stronger, healthier, and now that there were sporting activities to help them keep physically fit, cripples, goitres and mutilations were seen in the streets less and less frequently. Science, the archangel of progress, had worked all these miracles. Social welfare was also proceeding apace; from year to year more rights were granted to the individual, the judiciary laid down the law in a milder and more humane manner, even that ultimate problem, the poverty of the masses, no longer seemed insuperable. The right to vote was granted to circles flung wider and wider, and with it the opportunity 26 for voters to defend their own interests legally. Sociologists and professors competed to make the lives of the proletariat healthier and even happier—no wonder that century basked in its own sense of achievement and regarded every decade, as it drew to a close, as the prelude to an even better one. People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches; our fathers were doggedly convinced of the infallibly binding power of tolerance and conciliation. They honestly thought that divergences between nations and religious faiths would gradually flow into a sense of common humanity, so that peace and security, the greatest of goods, would come to all mankind.
Today, now that the word ‘security’ has long been struck out of our vocabulary as a phantom, it is easy for us to smile at the optimistic delusion of that idealistically dazzled generation, which thought that the technical progress of mankind must inevitably result in an equally rapid moral rise. We who, in the new century, have learnt not to be surprised by any new outbreak of collective bestiality, and expect every new day to prove even worse than the day just past, are considerably more sceptical about prospects for the moral education of humanity. We have found that we have to agree with Freud, who saw our culture and civilization as a thin veneer through which the destructive forces of the underworld could break at any moment. We have had to accustom ourselves slowly to living without firm ground beneath our feet, without laws, freedom or security. We long ago ceased believing in the religion of our fathers, their faith in the swift and enduring ascent of humanity. Having learnt our cruel lesson, we see their overhasty optimism as banal in the face of a catastrophe that, with a single blow, cancelled out a thousand years of human effort. But if it was only a delusion, it was a noble and wonderful delusion that our fathers served, more humane and fruitful than today’s slogans. 27And something in me, mysteriously and in spite of all I know and all my disappointments, cannot quite shake it off. What a man has taken into his bloodstream in childhood from the air of that time stays with him. And despite all that is dinned into my ears daily, all the humiliation and trials that I myself and countless of my companions in misfortune have experienced, I cannot quite deny the belief of my youth that in spite of everything, events will take a turn for the better. Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.
Now that a great storm has long since destroyed it, we know at last that our world of security was a castle in the air. Yet my parents lived in it as if it were a solid stone house. Not once did a storm or a cold draught invade their warm, comfortable existence. Of course they had special protection from cold winds; they were prosperous people who grew rich, then even very rich, and wealth comfortably draught-proofed your windows and walls in those times. Their way of life seems to me typical of the Jewish middle classes that had made significant contributions to Viennese culture, only to be exterminated root and branch by way of thanks, and I can say impersonally of their comfortable and quiet existence that, in that era of security, ten or twenty thousand Viennese families lived just as my parents did.
My father’s family came from Moravia. The Jewish communities there lived in small country towns and villages, on excellent terms with the peasants and the lower middle classes. They felt none of the sense of oppression suffered by the Jews of Galicia further to the east, nor did they share their impatience to forge ahead. Made strong and healthy by life in 28 the country, they walked the fields in peace and security, just as the peasants of their native land did. Emancipated at an early date from orthodox religious observance, they were passionate supporters of the contemporary cult of ‘progress’, and in the political era of liberalism they provided parliament with its most respected deputies. When they moved from their places of origin to Vienna, they adapted with remarkable speed to a higher cultural sphere, and their personal rise was closely linked to the general economic upswing of the times. Here again, my family was entirely typical in its development. My paternal grandfather had sold manufactured goods. Then, in the second half of the century, came the industrial boom in Austria. Mechanical looms and spinning machines imported from Britain rationalised manufacturing, bringing a great reduction in costs by comparison with traditional handloom weaving, and Jewish businessmen, with their gift for commercial acumen and their international perspective, were the first in Austria to recognise the necessity of switching to industrial production and the rewards it would bring. Usually beginning with only a small capital sum, they founded swiftly erected factories, initially driven by water power, which gradually expanded to become the mighty Bohemian textiles industry that dominated all Austria and the Balkans. So while my grandfather, a middleman dealing in ready-made products, was a typical representative of the previous generation, my father moved firmly into the modern era at the age of thirty-three by founding a small weaving mill in northern Bohemia. Over the years, he slowly and carefully built it up into a business of considerable size.
Such caution in expanding the business, even when the economic situation looked enticingly favourable, was very much in the spirit of the times. It also exactly suited my father’s reserved and far from avaricious nature. He had taken the ‘safety first’ creed of his epoch as his own watchword; it was more important to him to own a sound business (the ideal of 29 something sound and solid was also characteristic of the period), with the force of his own capital behind it, than to extend it to huge dimensions by taking out bank loans and mortgages. The one thing of which he was truly proud was that no one had ever in his life seen his name on a promissory note, and he had never failed to be in credit with his bank—which of course was the soundest bank of all, the Kreditanstalt founded by the Rothschilds. Any kind of transaction carrying the faintest suggestion of risk was anathema to him, and he never in all his years took part in any foreign business dealings. The fact that he still gradually became rich, and then even richer, was not the result of bold speculation or particularly farsighted operations, but of adapting to the general method of that cautious period, expending only a modest part of his income and consequently, from year to year, making an increasingly large contribution to the capital of the business. Like most of his generation, my father would have considered anyone who cheerfully spent half his annual income without thought for the future a dubious wastrel at the very least. Providing for the future was another recurrent idea in that age of security. Steadily setting profits aside meant rising prosperity. In addition, the state had no plans to take more than a few per cent of even the largest incomes in taxes, while state and industrial securities brought in good rates of interest, so that making money was quite a passive process for the well-to-do. And it was worth it; the savings of the thrifty were not stolen, as they are during times of inflation; no pressure was put on sound businesses, and even those who were particularly patient and refrained from any kind of speculation made good profits. Thanks to adapting to the general system of his time, in his fifties my father could be regarded as a very prosperous man by international standards. But the lifestyle of our family lagged well behind the increasingly rapid rise of its property. We did gradually acquire small comforts. We moved from a small apartment to a larger one, we hired a car for outings on 30 spring afternoons, we travelled second class by train and booked a sleeper, but it was not until he was fifty that my father first allowed himself the luxury of taking my mother to Nice for a month in the winter. All things considered, he stuck to his basic attitude of enjoying wealth by knowing that he had it, rather than by making a great display of it. Even as a millionaire, my father never smoked any imported product but—like Emperor Franz Joseph with his cheap Virginia tobacco—the ordinary Trabuco cigars of the time, and when he played cards it was only for small stakes. He inflexibly maintained his restraint and his comfortable but discreet way of life. Although he was very much better educated than most of his colleagues, and culturally superior to them—he played the piano extremely well, wrote a good, clear hand, spoke French and English—he firmly declined any distinctions or honorary positions, and never in his life either aspired to or accepted any honour or dignity of the kind frequently offered to him in his position as a leading industrialist. His secret pride in never having asked anyone for anything, never having been obliged to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, meant more to him than any outward show.
There inevitably comes a moment in every man’s life when he sees his father reflected in himself. That preference for privacy, for an anonymous way of life, is beginning to develop in me more and more strongly as the years go by, though in fact it runs contrary to my profession, which is bound to make my name and person to some extent public. But out of the same secret pride as his, I have always declined any form of outward honour, never accepted any decoration or title, or the presidency of any association. I have never been a member of an academy, nor have I sat on the board of any company or on any jury panel. Attending a festive occasion is something of an ordeal for me, and the mere thought of asking someone a favour is enough—even if my request were to be made through a third party—to make my mouth dry up before uttering the 31 first word. I know that such inhibitions are out of tune with the times, in a world where we can remain free only through cunning and evasion, and where, as Goethe wisely said, “in the general throng, many a fool receives decorations and titles.” But my father in me, with his secret pride, makes me hold back, and I cannot resist him. After all, it is my father I have to thank for what I feel is, perhaps, my one secure possession: my sense of inner freedom.
My mother, whose maiden name was Brettauer, was not of the same origin. Hers was an international family. She was born in Ancona in Italy, and Italian and German had both been the languages of her childhood. When she was discussing something with her mother, my grandmother or her sister, and they did not want the servants to know what they were saying, they would switch to Italian. From my earliest youth I was familiar with risotto, artichokes (still a rarity in Vienna at the time) and the other specialities of Mediterranean cookery, and whenever I visited Italy later I immediately felt at home. But my mother’s family was not by any means Italian, and saw itself as more cosmopolitan than anything else. The Brettauers, who had originally owned a bank, came from Hohenems, a small town on the Swiss border, and spread all over the world at an early date on the model of the great Jewish banking families, although of course on a much smaller scale. Some went to St Gallen, others to Vienna and Paris. My grandfather went to Italy, an uncle to New York, and these international contacts gave the family more sophistication, a wider outlook, and a certain arrogance. There were no small tradesmen in the family, no brokers, they were all bankers, company directors, professors, lawyers and medical doctors; everyone spoke several languages, and I remember how naturally the conversation around my aunt’s table in Paris moved from one language to 32 another. It was a family that thought well of itself, and when a girl from one of its poorer branches reached marriageable age, everyone contributed to providing her with a good dowry so that she need not marry ‘beneath herself’. As a leading industrialist, my father was respected, but my mother, although theirs was the happiest of marriages, would never have allowed his relations to consider themselves the equals of hers. It was impossible to root out the pride of their descent from a ‘good family’ from the Brettauers, and in later years, if one of them wanted to show me particular goodwill, he would condescend to say, “You’re more of a Brettauer really”, as if stating approvingly that I took after the right side of my family.
This kind of distinction, claimed for themselves by many Jewish families, sometimes amused and sometimes annoyed my brother and me, even as children. We were always hearing that certain persons were ‘refined’, while others were less so. Enquiries were made about any new friends of ours—were they from a ‘good family’?—and every ramification of their origins in respect of both family and fortune was investigated. This constant classification, which was in fact the main subject of all family and social conversations, seemed to us at the time ridiculous and snobbish, since after all, the only difference between one Jewish family and another was whether it had left the ghetto fifty or a hundred years ago. Only much later did I realise that this idea of the ‘good family’, which seemed to us boys the farcical parody of an artificial pseudo-aristocracy, expresses one of the most mysterious but deeply felt tendencies in the Jewish nature. It is generally assumed that getting rich is a Jew’s true and typical aim in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting rich, to a Jew, is only an interim stage, a means to his real end, by no means his aim in itself. The true desire of a Jew, his inbuilt ideal, is to rise to a higher social plane by becoming an intellectual. Even among Orthodox Eastern Jews, in whom the failings as well as the virtues of the Jewish people as a whole are more strongly marked, this 33 supreme desire to be an intellectual finds graphic expression going beyond merely material considerations—the devout Biblical scholar has far higher status within the community than a rich man. Even the most prosperous Jew would rather marry his daughter to an indigent intellectual than a merchant. This high regard for intellectuals runs through all classes of Jewish society, and the poorest pedlar who carries his pack through wind and weather will try to give at least one son the chance of studying at university, however great the sacrifices he must make, and will consider it an honour to the entire family that one of them is clearly regarded as an intellectual: a professor, a scholar, a musician. It is as if such a man’s achievements ennobled them all. Unconsciously, something in a Jew seeks to escape the morally dubious, mean, petty and pernicious associations of trade clinging to all that is merely business, and rise to the purer sphere of the intellect where money is not a consideration, as if, like a Wagnerian character, he were trying to break the curse of gold laid on himself and his entire race. Among Jews, then, the urge to make a fortune is nearly always exhausted within two or at most three generations of a family, and even the mightiest dynasts find that their sons are unwilling to take over the family banks and factories, the prosperous businesses built up and expanded by the previous generation. It is no coincidence that Lord Rothschild became an ornithologist, one of the Warburgs an art historian, one of the Cassirer family was a philosopher, one of the Sassoons a poet; they were all obeying the same unconscious urge to liberate themselves from the mere cold earning of money that has restricted Jewish life, and perhaps this flight to the intellectual sphere even expresses a secret longing to exchange their Jewish identity for one that is universally human. So a ‘good’ family means more than a mere claim to social status; it also denotes a Jewish way of life that, by adjusting to another and perhaps more universal culture, has freed itself or is freeing itself from all the drawbacks and constraints and 34 pettiness forced upon it by the ghetto. Admittedly, it is one of the eternal paradoxes of the Jewish destiny that this flight into intellectual realms has now, because of the disproportionately large number of Jews in the intellectual professions, become as fatal as their earlier restriction to the material sphere.1
In hardly any other European city was the urge towards culture as passionate as in Vienna. For the very reason that for centuries Austria and its monarchy had been neither politically ambitious nor particularly successful in its military ventures, native pride had focused most strongly on distinction in artistic achievement. The most important and valuable provinces of the old Habsburg empire that once ruled Europe—German and Italian, Flemish and Walloon—had seceded long ago, but the capital city was still intact in its old glory as the sanctuary of the court, the guardian of a millennial tradition. The Romans had laid the foundation stones of that city as a castrum, a far-flung outpost to protect Latin civilization from the barbarians, and over a thousand years later the Ottoman attack on the West was repelled outside the walls of Vienna. The Nibelungs had come here, the immortal Pleiades of music shone down on the world from this city, Gluck, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Johann Strauss, all the currents of European culture had merged in this place. At court and among the nobility and the common people alike, German elements were linked with Slavonic, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, French and Flemish. It was the peculiar genius of Vienna, the city of music, to resolve all these contrasts harmoniously in something new and unique, specifically Austrian and Viennese. Open-minded and particularly receptive, the city attracted the most disparate of forces, relaxed their tensions, eased and placated them. It was pleasant to live here, in this atmosphere of intellectual tolerance, and unconsciously every citizen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world.
This art of adaptation, of gentle and musical transitions, was 35 evident even in the outward appearance of the city. Growing slowly over the centuries, developing organically from its centre, with its two million inhabitants Vienna had a large enough population to offer all the luxury and diversity of a metropolis, and yet it was not so vast that it was cut off from nature, like London or New York. The buildings on the edge of the city were reflected in the mighty waters of the Danube and looked out over the wide plain, merged with gardens and fields or climbed the last gently undulating green and wooded foothills of the Alps. You hardly noticed where nature ended and the city began, they made way for one another without resistance or contradiction. At the centre, in turn, you felt that the city had grown like a tree, forming ring after ring, and instead of the old ramparts of the fortifications, the Ringstrasse enclosed the innermost, precious core with its grand houses. In that core, the old palaces of the court and the nobility spoke the language of history in stone; here Beethoven had played for the Lichnowskys; there Haydn had stayed with the Esterházys; the premiere of his Creation was given in the old university; the Hofburg saw generations of emperors, Napoleon took up residence at Schönbrunn Palace; the united rulers of Christendom met in St Stephen’s Cathedral to give thanks for their salvation from the Turks, the university saw countless luminaries of scholarship and science in its walls. Among these buildings the new architecture rose, proud and magnificent, with shining avenues and glittering emporiums. But old Vienna had as little to do with the new city as dressed stone has to do with nature. It was wonderful to live in this city, which hospitably welcomed strangers and gave of itself freely; it was natural to enjoy life in its light atmosphere, full of elation and merriment like the air of Paris. Vienna, as everyone knew, was an epicurean city—however, what does culture mean but taking the raw material of life and enticing from it its finest, most delicate and subtle aspects by means of art and love? The people of Vienna were gourmets who appreciated good 36 food and good wine, fresh and astringent beer, lavish desserts and tortes, but they also demanded subtler pleasures. To make music, dance, produce plays, converse well, behave pleasingly and show good taste were arts much cultivated here. Neither military, political nor commercial matters held first place in the lives of individuals or society as a whole; when the average Viennese citizen looked at his morning paper, his eye generally went first not to parliamentary debates or foreign affairs but to the theatrical repertory, which assumed an importance in public life hardly comprehensible in other cities. For to the Viennese and indeed the Austrians the imperial theatre, the Burgtheater, was more than just a stage on which actors performed dramatic works; it was a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, a bright mirror in which society could study itself, the one true cartigiano of good taste. In an actor at the imperial theatre, spectators saw an example of the way to dress, enter a room, make conversation, were shown which words a man of taste might use and which should be avoided. The stage was not just a place of entertainment but a spoken, three-dimensional manual of good conduct and correct pronunciation, and an aura of esteem, rather like a saint’s halo, surrounded all who had even the faintest connection with the court theatre. The Prime Minister, the richest magnate, could walk through the streets of Vienna and no one would turn to stare, but every salesgirl and every cab driver would recognise an actor at the court theatre or an operatic diva. When we boys had seen one of them pass by (we all collected their pictures and autographs) we proudly told each other, and this almost religious personality cult even extended to their entourages; Adolf von Sonnenthal’s barber, Josef Kainz’s cab driver were regarded with awe and secretly envied. Young dandies were proud to have their clothes made by the tailors patronised by those actors. A notable anniversary in a famous actor’s career, or a great actor’s funeral, was an event overshadowing all the political news. It was every 37 Viennese dramatist’s dream to be performed at the Burgtheater, a distinction that meant a kind of ennoblement for life and brought with it a series of benefits such as free theatre tickets for life and invitations to all official occasions, because you had been a guest in an imperial house. I still remember the solemn manner of my own reception. The director of the Burgtheater had asked me to visit his office in the morning, where he informed me—after first offering his congratulations—that the theatre had accepted my play. When I got home that evening, I found his visiting card in my apartment. Although I was only a young man of twenty-six, he had formally returned my call; my mere acceptance as an author writing for the imperial stage had made me a gentleman whom the director of that institution must treat as on a par with himself. And what went on at the theatre indirectly affected every individual, even someone who had no direct connection with it whatsoever. I remember, for instance, a day in my earliest youth when our cook burst into the sitting room with tears in her eyes: she had just heard that Charlotte Wolter, the star actress of the Burgtheater, had died. The grotesque aspect of her extravagant grief, of course, lay in the fact that our old, semi-literate cook had never once been to that distinguished theatre herself, and had never seen Charlotte Wolter either on stage or in real life, but in Vienna a great Austrian actress was so much part of the common property of the entire city that even those entirely unconnected with her felt her death was a catastrophe. Every loss, the death of a popular singer or artist, inevitably became an occasion for national mourning. When the old Burgtheater where the premiere of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro had been given was to be demolished, Viennese high society gathered there in a mood of solemn emotion, and no sooner had the curtain fallen than everyone raced on stage to take home at least a splinter from the boards that had been trodden by their favourite artists as a relic. Even decades later, these plain wooden splinters were kept in 38 precious caskets in many bourgeois households, just as splinters of the Holy Cross are preserved in churches.
In my own day, we acted no more rationally when the so-called Bösendorfer Saal was torn down. In itself that little concert hall, which was reserved exclusively for chamber music, was a modest building, not suggesting any great artistic distinction. It had been Prince Liechtenstein’s riding school, and was adapted for musical purposes only by the addition of interior boarding, without any ostentation. But it had the resonance of an old violin, and it was a sacred place to music-lovers because Chopin and Brahms, Liszt and Rubinstein had given recitals there, and many of the famous quartets had first performed in this hall. And now it was to make way for a new purpose-built concert hall; such a thing was beyond the understanding of those of us who had spent many memorable hours there. When the last bars of Beethoven died away, played better than ever by the Rosé Quartet, none of the audience left their seats. We shouted and applauded, some of the women were sobbing with emotion, no one was willing to admit that this was goodbye. The lights in the hall were extinguished to clear us out of the place. Still none of the four or five hundred people present left their seats. We stayed for half-an-hour, an hour, as if our presence could save the sacred hall by force. And as students, how we campaigned, with petitions and demonstrations and articles, to keep the house where Beethoven died from demolition! Whenever one of these historic Viennese buildings went, it was as if a part of our souls were being torn from our bodies.
This fanatical love of art, in particular the art of the theatre, was common to all classes of society in Vienna. Its hundreds of years of tradition had made the city itself a place with a clearly ordered and also—as I once wrote myself—a wonderfully orchestrated structure. The imperial house still set the tone, while the imperial palace represented not only the spatial 39 centre of the city but also the supranational nature of the monarchy. Around that palace lay the grand residences of the Austrian, Polish, Czech and Hungarian nobility, forming what might be called a second rampart. Then came the houses of the members of ‘good society’—the minor nobility, higher civil servants, captains of industry and the ‘old families’. Below them came the lower middle class and the proletariat. All these social classes lived in their own circles and even in their own districts of the city: at the centre the great noblemen in their palaces, the diplomats in District Three, businessmen and industrialists near the Ringstrasse, the lower middle class in the inner districts, Districts Two to Nine, the proletariat on the periphery. However, they all came into contact with each other at the theatre and for major festivities such as the Floral Parade, when three hundred thousand spectators enthusiastically greeted the ‘upper ten thousand’ in their beautifully decorated carriages. Everything in Vienna that expressed itself in colour or music became an occasion for festivities: religious spectacles like the Corpus Christi procession, the military parades, performances by the outdoor musicians of the Burgmusik, even funerals attracted enthusiastic audiences, and it was the ambition of every true Viennese to end up as ‘a handsome corpse’ with a fine funeral procession and many companions escorting him on his last journey. A genuine Viennese turned even his death into a fine show for others to enjoy. The entire city was united in this sensitivity to everything colourful, musical and festive, in this delight in theatrical spectacle as a playful reflection of life, whether on the stage or in real space and time.
It was not difficult to make fun of the theatrical mania of the Viennese, whose delight in tracking down the tiniest details of the lives of their favourites sometimes became grotesque, and our Austrian political indolence and economic backwardness, by comparison with the determined German Reich next door, may indeed be partly ascribed to our overrating of sensuous 40 pleasure. But in cultural terms the very high value placed on the arts created something unique—a great veneration for all artistic achievement, leading over the centuries to unequalled expertise, and finally, thanks in its own turn to that expertise, to outstandingly high standards in all cultural fields. An artist always feels most at ease and at the same time most inspired in a place where he is valued, even overvalued. Art always reaches its zenith where it is important in the life of an entire nation. And just as Renaissance Florence and Rome attracted painters and trained them to achieve greatness, because every one of them felt bound to keep outdoing others and himself, competing in front of the citizens as a whole, so musicians and actors knew how important they were in Vienna. At the Opera House, in the Burgtheater, nothing was overlooked, every wrong note was instantly detected, every incorrect entry or abridged passage deplored, and this keen surveillance was exercised not only by professional critics at premieres, but day after day by the alert ear of the public at large, honed as it was by constant comparison. While the attitude in politics, the administration and morality was easygoing, and one made allowances for a slipshod piece of work and showed leniency for an offence, no quarter was given in artistic matters. Here the honour of the city was at stake. Every singer, every actor, every musician must constantly give of his best, or his career was finished. It was wonderful to be a darling of the public in Vienna, but it was not easy to maintain that position. No lowering of standards was forgiven. And this awareness of being under constant and pitiless observation forced every artist in Vienna to do his best, bringing the art of the city as a whole to a very high level. All of us who lived there in our youth have brought a stern and implacable standard of artistic performance into our lives from those years. Those who saw discipline exercised down to the smallest detail at the Opera House under Gustav Mahler, and vitality combined with meticulous accuracy taken as the 41 norm in music played by the Philharmonic, are rarely entirely satisfied with theatrical or musical performances today. But we also learnt to criticise our own artistic performance; the example before us was, and still is, a high level of achievement inculcated into rising artists in few other cities in the world. This understanding of the right rhythm and momentum went deep into the people themselves, for even the most unassuming citizen sitting over his Heurige,2 demanded good music from the wind band just as he expected good value from the landlord. Similarly, people knew exactly which military band played with most verve in the Prater, whether it was the German Masters or the Hungarians. Anyone who lived in Vienna absorbed a sense of rhythm as if it were in the air. And just as that musicality expressed itself in writers in the particular attention we paid to writing particularly well-turned prose, in others the sense of delicacy was expressed in social attitudes and daily life. In what was known as ‘high society’, a Viennese with no appreciation of art or pleasure in form was unimaginable, but even among the lower classes the lives of the poorest showed a certain feeling for beauty drawn from the surrounding landscape and genial human attitudes. You were not truly Viennese without a love for culture, a bent for both enjoying and assessing the prodigality of life as something sacred.
For Jews, adaptation to the human or national environment in which they lived was not only a measure taken for their own protection, but also a deeply felt private need. Their desire for a homeland, for peace, repose and security, a place where they would not be strangers, impelled them to form a passionate attachment to the culture around them. And nowhere else, except for Spain in the fifteenth century, were such bonds more happily and productively forged than in Austria. Here the Jews who had been settled in the imperial city for over two hundred years met 42 people who took life lightly and were naturally easygoing, while under that apparently light-hearted surface they shared the deep Jewish instinct for intellectual and aesthetic values. And the two came together all the more easily in Vienna, where they found a personal task waiting for them, because over the last century Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy. In the eighteenth century Maria Theresia had had her daughters taught the pleasures of music, Joseph II had discussed Mozart’s operas with him as a connoisseur, Leopold II was a composer himself, but the later emperors Franz II and Ferdinand had no kind of interest in art, and Emperor Franz Joseph, who in his eighty years of life never read or even picked up a book other than the Army List, even felt a decided antipathy to music. Similarly, the great noblemen had abandoned their former position as patrons; gone were the glorious days when the Esterházys gave house-room to Haydn, when the Lobkowitzes and Kinskys and Waldsteins competed for the first performance of a work by Beethoven to be given in their palaces, when Countess Thun went on her knees to that great daemonic figure asking him not to withdraw Fidelio from the Opera. Even Wagner, Brahms, Johann Strauss and Hugo Wolf no longer received the slightest support from them; the citizens of Vienna had to step into the breach to keep up the old high standard of the Philharmonic concerts and enable painters and sculptors to make a living, and it was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance. They had always loved the city, taking it to their hearts when they settled there, but it was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese. In fact they exerted little influence otherwise in public life; the lustre of the imperial house left all private wealth in the shade, high positions in the leadership of the state were in hereditary hands, diplomacy was reserved for the aristocracy, the army and 43
