Messages from a Lost World
Page 13
I believe that if we could endow the history of tomorrow with this certitude that the idea that drove people against people was erroneous and that the only important thing is to push forwards under the banner of a community of nations, the mentality of mankind, that is to say what is civilized and progressive, would be healthier, more optimistic. Let us compare the history of yesterday with that of tomorrow from the point of view of moral impulsion. What does this war history teach us? Only what evil peoples and countries have wreaked on each other for 3,000 years. How France plundered Germany and Germany France, how Persia submitted to Greece and Greece to Persia. And what conclusion might we draw? That people hate each other and yearn to go to war. The history of culture, on the other hand, describes the polar opposite. It does not show the evil to which one people subjects another, but what one people owes to another. It shows that almost everything we have invented, thought, dreamt, discovered, is a collective work, that all invention or discovery was already gestating somewhere else and was necessarily passing from one country to another, and that knowing who conquered and who was conquered was of no concern when the conqueror was learning something from the conquered and that in the end all peoples collaborated on building the Tower of Babel. Whilst the history of yesterday, that of the wars, relentlessly drives on the young to admire power as the pre-eminent law and success as the clearest proof of superiority, the history of culture will teach us to honour the spirit in multiple forms, this immortal spirit of humanity, which dictatorship and censorship may gag for a time but can never entirely snuff out. No longer will it be the Alexanders, the Napoleons and the Attilas who are the heroes, but those who served the spirit, who gave it new form and new expression, those who gathered our accrued communal knowledge and granted our earthly senses power over events and clearer understanding of so many secrets of the sky and earth.
But perhaps you will object that placing our history solely in the domain of the spirit, of the intellect and of progress is never going to excite the imagination in the same way as wars, revolutions and audacious expeditions. This objection is quite justified. In our youth we were all more readily inspired by Alcibiades and Alexander, by the heroes of Thermopylae than by the just Solon and the wise Marcus Aurelius. The description of violent passions always favours a writer more than those of moral qualities, justice and humanity, which do not act directly on the imagination and lack explicit emotion. I know from experience that it is more difficult and less advantageous to paint the gentle humanity of an Erasmus than to recount the amours of a Casanova, for example, or the prolific rise of a Napoleon. But why always concede to the unconscious desires of the masses, who only crave thrilling, brutal, warlike historical accounts, served up like so many cheap stimulants? Is our duty not then the contrary, since we are so aware of the implicit danger of this penchant for the sensational, to show, instead of war heroism, this other heroism that we consider superior, the great lives of men of knowledge who sacrificed themselves in their laboratories, isolated, impoverished and overlooked? Those of princes, or men of state who resisted war and who, conscious of their responsibilities, threw all their strength into a spirit of conciliation and humanity? Is it not our duty to advance towards a complete overturning of this destructive hero cult and to replace it with reverence for those who died for an idea, replace those who sent thousands, millions of men to their deaths in a personal craving for power or national supremacy? Is that not the real task of the history of tomorrow, precisely because it is such a difficult and thankless task?
What a vibrant sound will issue from this new way of writing history when it demonstrates the eternal unity of the creative spirit, when it proves that a veritable chain stretches across time, from country to country, from people to people, to which each nation and each year adds a new link. When it will show that the three millennia of our conscious humanity have not been solely a bloody gladiatorial game that an intoxicated God designed for amusement, but that in this grandiose drama we are all at one and the same time poets, actors and heroes; when it will be understood there is a genuine sense to this eternal effort of humanity, that it has a labour to accomplish, to which we all, whoever we are, can permit our modest existence to contribute. In the same way that man is never truly alive until he knows his life has meaning, we can only grasp the past if we recognize some meaning there, namely that of progress towards a higher state of humanity.
I think it is in this spirit that the history of tomorrow must be written: that of the development of civilization. Such a thing is proven possible and already there are clear indications that something is happening. Particularly in the last few decades we have seen attempts to present history not merely as a roll call of battles, as a blood-soaked labyrinth, but as a succession of rungs which humanity has climbed, and I consider it an honour for America that it was here that certain pertinent books found the greatest success and the widest distribution. I recall the narrative of Wells, which constitutes the first serious attempt to consider history as the fruitful reciprocity of nations; I recall America’s national history, which was not consciously named History of America but The Rise of American Civilization; and also van Loon’s Tolerance. And for me it was a subject of particular fascination when a book like the biography of Madame Curie conquered the States, won millions of hearts, for to my eyes it represented exactly the kind destined for the history of tomorrow, the kind which show the heroism of the human soul, an inward conviction, the heroism of the individual spirit in the service of a wider humanity. This last theme, to know what a man has done, not for himself, not only for his country but for all mankind, is the theme that must pervade the history of tomorrow. Of what relevance today are Napoleon’s successes on the Italian battlefields against Austria at Arcole and Rivoli? His empire has long crumbled away into the dust of the past, and the Austria that he conquered has even ceased to exist. But in 1797, in that same year of his victory at Rivoli, and in the same region, a scholar, Alessandro Volta, laboured away beside a tiny instrument. A spark glinted from his first battery, producing a power which today determines and transforms our whole way of life, illuminates the very room in which we are now gathered and makes the human voice resonate around the world, a power which keeps our trains running and has created between peoples a veritable network, a community even the most audacious dreams of our ancestors could never have realized. These then are the acts that our new history will record first, not the ephemeral transformations of the geographic map; and none of it will be lacking, this substance, new acts, heroic acts—of this I am convinced—once the bloody barbarism of conflict finally comes to an end. I was struck by a phrase in the preface to an exhibition of scientific achievements I visited recently. It read: “Never since the beginning of the world has humanity discovered and invented so much as in the past year and yet remained so little informed.” A shocking phrase, for we are just not properly informed of what great and encouraging things are happening right under our noses, in our own epoch. We latch on to the minor or major successes of prominent politicians, of leaders, the conquest of a piece of earth, as being the history of our time, but in reality it is merely the history of a moment. What really transforms the interior and exterior life of the next generation is being created now in hundreds of laboratories through some minor experiment or complicated calculation that we have no understanding of yet. But to make the hidden comprehensible and encourage it to enter the bloodstream of our time, to pulse through our thought—this seems to me the key task of the history of tomorrow. That is the true work to which we must apply ourselves and that we must pursue unceasingly, so that we progress in the intellectual domain at every moment of our lives, and through our common bond enjoy the yet to be visible successes, remaining safe in the knowledge that the spirit of humanity will eventually reveal triumphs as yet obscured. It is only in this way that we can console ourselves and guard against the insanity of nationalism and dictators who are bent on launching peoples against one another, ever forcing us backwa
rds politically when the natural momentum is to go forwards. Only when we access this new sense of being will we learn the history of tomorrow; only then will it be possible no longer to despair of our epoch and to retain, even if we failed as citizens, the pride to be men of our time. Only then will we be able to face without horror the bloody vortex of history, when we see it as a necessary creative stage for a new and more meaningful future, as preparation for a complete reworking of humanity. If history is to have any meaning it must recognize our mistakes and overcome them. The history of yesterday describes our eternal relapses, whilst that of tomorrow must describe our illimitable ascent, the history of human civilization.
THE VIENNA OF YESTERDAY
IF I SPEAK TO YOU of the Vienna of yesterday, it is not an obituary or funeral oration that I am giving. We have not yet buried her in our hearts and we refuse to believe that temporary subjugation is synonymous with total surrender. I think of Vienna as one does of brothers or friends who are at the Front. You spent your childhood in their company, you lived many years in their midst, and many golden hours were spent in kind. Now they are far from you and you know they are in danger. It is precisely in these hours of enforced distance that you feel closest to those held most dear. It is in this sense that I speak to you of Vienna, my home city and one of the capitals of our European culture.
You will have learnt in school that Vienna was always the capital of Austria. That is quite right, but the city of Vienna is a good deal older than Austria itself, older than the Hapsburg monarchy and the former and present German Reichs. When Vindobona was founded by the Romans, who, being such experienced founders of cities, had a wonderful eye for geographic locations, nothing existed of what one might call Austria; neither from Tacitus nor from any other Roman historian is there any mention of an Austrian tribe. The Romans then established in this most favourable site on the Danube a castrum, a military stronghold, to repel the attacks of the barbarians against their empire. From this day on the historic mission of Vienna was inscribed: to defend a superior culture, namely the Latin one. In the heart of a territory not yet civilized and belonging to no one were laid the Roman foundations from which later would rise the Hofburg of the Hapsburgs. And in a time when the German and Slavonic peoples living along the banks of the Danube still practised a nomadic lifestyle, it was in our Vienna that the wise Marcus Aurelius wrote his immortal Meditations, one of the masterpieces of Latin philosophy.
The first literary and cultural document ascribed to Vienna is around 800 years old. This makes it the leading German-speaking city in terms of the age of its intellectual activity, and for those 800 years Vienna has remained faithful to its task, the highest to which any city can aspire: to create culture and defend it. Vienna became established as an outpost of Latin culture just at the fall of the Roman Empire, acting as a bastion for the Roman Catholic Church. Here was found, at a time when the Reformation was destroying the intellectual unity of Europe, the headquarters of the Counter-Reformation. Beneath the walls of Vienna the Turkish invasion had twice been repulsed. And when now in our own time the barbarians have advanced once more, harder and more tenacious than ever, Vienna and little Austria have remained grimly loyal to their European convictions. For five years Vienna resisted with all her strength; it was only when she was abandoned at a decisive moment that this imperial residence, this capital of our old Austrian culture, was reduced to becoming a provincial city of Germany, to whom she never belonged. For despite being a German-speaking city, Vienna never was a city or capital of the German nation. It was instead the capital of a world empire, far beyond the borders of Germany, from east to west and south to north, spreading as far as Belgium, to Venice and Florence, encompassing Bohemia, Hungary and half the Balkans. Her development and history have never been linked to those of the German people and its national frontiers but to the dynasty of the Hapsburgs, the most powerful in Europe; and the more this Hapsburg dynasty flourished the more the grandeur and beauty of this city grew. It was in the Hofburg, its heart, not Munich or Berlin, which at the time were mere provincial cities of little importance, that history was forged over centuries. It was in the Hofburg that the old dream of a united Europe was unceasingly being born; for it was a supranational empire, a “Holy Roman Reich”, that the Hapsburgs strove for, not Teutonism’s world domination. All these emperors were cosmopolitan in their thoughts, their words and their aspirations. From Spain they learnt protocol, in art they felt closer to Italy and France and through marriage they were bound to all nations of Europe. For two centuries at the Hapsburg court they spoke Spanish, Italian or French rather than German. Moreover, the nobility who gathered around the imperial house were an entirely international set; Hungarian magnates rubbed shoulders with Polish lords, ancient families of Hungarians, Czechs, Italians, Walloons, Tuscans, Brabançons. You would be hard-pressed to find a German name in all these magnificent baroque palaces grouped around that of Eugene of Savoy; these aristocrats married among each other and into the families of foreign nobility. Always fresh foreign blood was flowing from the outside into this cultural milieu, and likewise this constant intermingling affected the nature of the bourgeoisie. From Moravia, Bohemia, the mountainous regions of Tyrol, from Hungary and Italy came artisans and merchants; Slavs, Magyars, Italians, Poles and Jews arrived in greater numbers into the ever-widening circle of the city. Their children and grandchildren spoke German, but their native roots were not entirely effaced. Contrasts gradually lost their sharpness, became blunted from this relentless mixing; all was softer, more engaging, more conciliatory, more complaisant, more gracious—in a word more Austrian, more Viennese.
Composed of so many diverse elements, Vienna was the ideal breeding ground for a communal culture. Foreigner did not mean foe and what came from beyond the borders was not haughtily dismissed as anti-national, non-German, non-Austrian, but sought out and venerated. All outside stimulus was welcomed and this evolved into the characteristic Viennese colour we know so well. This city and its people may like any other have its faults, but Vienna has had the advantage of not being arrogant, of not trying to foist its mores or world-dictatorial mindset on others. The Viennese culture was not a conquering one and this is why each new guest is so easily won over by her. To mix these disparate elements and create this perpetual harmonization has been the true genius of the city. That is why in Vienna there is always the sense of living in a world dominion and not being closed in by any single language, race, nation or idea. At every moment one is reminded of being at the heart of a supranational empire. It’s enough to read off the names on the shop signs: one has an Italian tone, a second Czech and a third Hungarian, and there are even special signs stating that French and English are spoken here. A foreigner without German is never lost. Everywhere one feels, through the local national dress worn so freely and openly, the rich-coloured presence of neighbouring countries. You would see the Hungarian Imperial guards with their back-swords and fur trimmings, the nurses from Bohemia in their colourful dresses, the peasants of Transylvania with their blouses and embroidered bonnets, just like those they wore in their village on Sundays when they went to church, Bosnian peddlers in short trousers and red fezzes who went from house to house selling Tschibuk pipes and daggers, the mountain folk with bare knees and feathered hats, the Galician Jews with their curled braids and long kaftans, the Ruthenians with their sheepskins, the vintners in their blue aprons, and at the centre of this world, as a symbol of unity, the multicoloured uniforms of the soldier and the cassocks of the Catholic priest. All wore the national costume of their homeland as if Vienna itself were that homeland. All had the same feeling, that this was their home, their metropolis; they were not foreigners and never considered themselves as such. The old Viennese scoffed at them in a good-humoured fashion, in popular songs there was often a couplet about the Czechs, the Hungarians and the Jews, but it was always a well-meaning mockery, as that between brothers. They never hated, for it was not in the Viennese mentality to do so.