by Stefan Zweig
What a wild, anarchic, improbable time were those years when, with the dwindling value of money, all other values in Austria and Germany began to slide! An era of frenzied ecstasy and chaotic deception, a unique mixture of impatience and fanaticism. This was the golden age of all that was extravagant and uncontrolled—theosophy, occultism, spiritualism, somnambulism, anthroposophy, palm-reading, graphology, the teachings of Indian yoga and Paracelsian mysticism. Everything that promised an extreme, unheard-of experience, every form of narcotic—morphine, cocaine, heroin—sold like hot cakes, in the theatre incest and patricide featured in plays, the extremes of communism and fascism were the only subjects of conversation in politics. Any kind of normality and moderation was rejected. But I would not like to have missed experiencing that chaotic time, for the sake of either my own experience or the development of art. Advancing, like all intellectual revolutions, with orgiastic energy in its first fine frenzy, it cleared the air of musty traditions, discharging the tensions of many years, and in spite of everything its audacious experiments produced some valuable ideas that would last. Uneasy as we felt with its exaggerations, we sensed that we had no right to condemn and reject them arrogantly, for at heart this new generation was trying—if too heatedly and too impatiently—to make good our own generation’s sins of omission when we cautiously stood aloof. Their fundamental feeling that the post-war time must be different from the period before the war was right. A new time, a better world—wasn’t that just what we, their elders, had wanted before and during the war? It was true that even after the war we older people had only recently proved unable to counter the dangerous re-politicisation of the world with an supranational organisation at the right time. Even during the peace negotiations Henri Barbusse, who had acquired international stature with his novel Le Feu, had tried to set up a union of all European intellectuals with a view to reconciliation. This group was to be called Clarté—Clarity—an association of people who thought clearly, and it was to unite the writers and artists of all nations in a vow to oppose any future encouragement of inflammatory popular feeling. Barbusse had asked me and René Schickele to head the German-language section of the association, thus giving us the more difficult part of the work, for bitterness over the Treaty of Versailles still smouldered in Germany. There were few prospects of winning over prominent German figures to an intellectual supranationalism as long as the Rhineland, the Saar and the Mainz bridgehead were still occupied by foreign troops. All the same, we might have succeeded in setting up an organisation such as Galsworthy founded later in the PEN Club, if Barbusse had not then let us down. Fatally, a journey to Russia and his enthusiastic reception there by large crowds had convinced him that bourgeois states and democracies could never usher in true fraternity between nations; he thought international fraternity was conceivable only under communism. By imperceptible degrees, he was trying to make Clarté a weapon in the class struggle. We declined to commit ourselves to a radicalism that was inevitably sure to weaken our ranks. So this project too, in itself a major one, fell through. Once again, valuing our own freedom and independence too highly, we had failed in the struggle for intellectual freedom.
So there was only one thing for it—we must get on with our own work quietly and in seclusion. In the eyes of the Expressionists and the Excessionists—if I may coin a term—at the age of thirty-six I had already reverted to the older, defunct generation through refusing to adapt to the new generation by aping it. I did not like my own earlier work any more; I would not let new editions of any of the books of my ‘aesthetic’ period be brought out. That meant beginning again, waiting for the impatiently rolling wave of all these ‘isms’ to ebb away, and here my lack of personal ambition came in useful. I began to write my series of Baumeister der Welt7 deliberately, in the knowledge that it would certainly occupy me for years. I also wrote novellas like Amok and Letter from an Unknown Woman in a far from ‘activist’ spirit of composure. The country and the world around me gradually began returning to a state of order, so I myself could no longer hold back. The time for deceiving myself into thinking that everything I began was just a temporary expedient was over. I had reached the middle of life; I was beyond the age of mere promise. It was time to show that something had come of that promise, and either prove myself or give up the attempt.
NOTES
1 The first words of the old Austrian national anthem, Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser—God Save Emperor Franz. When Joseph Haydn wrote the melody, Franz II was Emperor of Austria. Haydn also included it in his Emperor Quartet, and the tune is now in use as the national anthem of Germany. It is known in the English-speaking world as the melody of the hymn Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken.
2 Although Zweig keeps personal details of his private life out of his account, this first use of the first person plural shows that by now he was married to his first wife Friderike. It was her own second marriage.
3 In Goethe’s Faust, Part II, the demonic figure of Mephistopheles advises an emperor of the Middle Ages to extricate himself from his difficulties by printing paper money.
4 Béla Kun, 1886-1938, headed the Soviet Republic of Hungary, which lasted for only six months in 1919.
5 See above, page 252.
6 Literally meaning ‘migratory birds’, these groups began as a non-political form of organisation, but later took on nationalistic colouring.
7 This, translated into English as Master Builders, was the general title that Stefan Zweig gave to his long series of biographies of famous figures such as Tolstoy, Casanova, Stendhal, Dickens and a number of others.
OUT INTO THE WORLD AGAIN
I SPENT 1919, 1920 AND 1921, the three worst post-war years in Austria, buried in Salzburg, almost giving up hope of ever seeing the wider world again. Taken together, the effects of the post-war collapse, hatred in other countries of anyone German or writing in German, and the devaluation of our currency were so catastrophic that we had already reconciled ourselves to the prospect of staying within the narrow borders of our own country for life. But everything was better now. There was enough to eat again. I could sit at my desk undisturbed. There had been no looting, no revolution. I was alive and conscious of my powers. Why shouldn’t I revisit the pleasures of my youth and travel abroad?
A long journey was out of the question. But Italy was close, only eight or ten hours away. Why not make the venture? The Italians considered Austrians their arch-enemies, but I myself had never felt that. Must I accept the likelihood of a hostile reception and feel obliged to ignore my old friends in case I embarrassed them? No, I would try it, and at noon one day I crossed the border into Italy.
I arrived in Verona that evening and went to a hotel. The receptionist handed me the registration form, I filled it in. He read what I had entered, and was astonished when, under the heading of ‘Nationality’ he saw the word, ‘Austriaco’. “Lei è Austriaco?”—You are Austrian? he asked. Was he going to show me the door, I wondered. But when I said yes, he was positively delighted. “Ah, che piacere! Finalmente!”—Oh, what a pleasure! At last. That was my welcome to Italy, and further confirmation of the impression I had gained in the war that all the propaganda and incitement to hatred had caused only a short fit of feverish mental illness, but fundamentally had never touched the great majority of Europeans. A quarter-of-an-hour later the friendly receptionist came up to my room to make sure everything was all right. He praised my Italian enthusiastically, and we shook hands warmly when we parted.
Next day I was in Milan, where I saw the cathedral and wandered through the Galleria.1 It was good to hear the musical sound of the Italian language I loved so much again, to find my way so confidently around all the streets, and enjoy my familiarity with this foreign city. In passing, I saw the words Corriere della Sera on one of the large buildings. It suddenly struck me that my old friend G A Borgese held a top post in the editorial offices of that newspaper—Borgese, in whose company I, Count Keyserling, and Benno Geiger had spent many lively evenings in
Berlin and Vienna. One of Italy’s best and most impassioned writers, a man with enormous influence on the younger generation, he had adopted a firm stance of opposition to Germany and Austria in the war, even though he had translated Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and was fanatically enthusiastic about German philosophy. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Mussolini (they fell out later), he had urged the country to fight. All through the war it had been strange for me to think of an old friend as an interventionist on the other side. I wanted to see my ‘enemy’ all the more now. However, I didn’t want to run the risk of a cold dismissal, so I left my card for him, writing the address of my hotel on it. I wasn’t even down the steps when someone came running after me, his lively face beaming with pleasure—it was Borgese himself. Within five minutes we were on the same friendly terms as before, perhaps even friendlier. He too had learnt lessons from the war, and from our respective sides of the conflict we had come closer than ever to each other.
It was the same everywhere. In Florence, my old friend the painter Albert Stringa came up to me in the street to fling his arms around me so suddenly and vigorously that my wife, who was with me and didn’t know him, thought this bearded stranger was planning to assassinate me. Everything was just as it had been, or even better. I breathed a sigh of relief—the war was buried. The war was over.
But it was not over. We just didn’t know it. In our innocent gullibility, we were all deceived, confusing our personal friendly feelings with those of the world. Not that there was any need for us to be ashamed of our mistake, since the politicians, economists and bankers were equally deceived. In those years they, too, thought that deceptive upward trends denoted real recovery and sheer exhaustion was actually satisfaction. In reality the struggle had merely shifted from the national to the social sphere, and in my first few days abroad I witnessed a scene the full significance of which I understood only later. All we knew in Austria about Italian politics at this time was that, with the disappointment of the post-war period, strong socialist and even Bolshevik tendencies had spread. You could see “Viva Lenin” scrawled clumsily with charcoal or chalk on every wall. We had also heard that a Socialist leader called Mussolini had left the party during the war and organised some kind of opposition group. But we listened to such news with indifference. What could a small group like that mean? There were similar cliques in every country at the time; irregulars on the move in the Baltic, separatist groups forming in the Rhineland and Bavaria, there were demonstrations and coups everywhere, but they were almost always put down. And it did not occur to anyone to see these ‘Fascists’, who wore black shirts instead of the red shirts of Garibaldi’s old movement, as a significant factor in the future development of Europe.
In Venice, however, the term ‘Fascist’ suddenly assumed real significance for me. It was afternoon, and I was on my way from Milan to my beloved city of lagoons. There was no porter in sight when I arrived, no gondola. Workmen and railwaymen stood around idle with their hands ostentatiously in their pockets. I was carrying two quite heavy suitcases, so I looked around for help and asked an elderly gentleman where I could find a porter. “You’ve picked a bad day,” he said regretfully. “But we get days like this quite often. There’s another general strike on.” I didn’t know the cause of this strike, but asked no more questions. We were used to these things in Austria, where the Social Democrats, much to their own disadvantage, only too often resorted to that strongest of threats without making effective use of it. So I went on laboriously carrying my cases until at last I saw a gondolier quickly bringing his boat towards me out of a minor canal and giving me a surreptitious wave. He took me and my two suitcases on board. In half-an-hour, after passing several men shaking their fists at strike-breakers, we were at my hotel. It was the most natural thing in the world, an old habit of mine, to go straight to the Piazza San Marco. It looked remarkably deserted. The shutters were down over most of the shop-fronts, there was no one sitting in the cafés, only a large crowd of workers standing under the arcades in isolated groups, as if waiting for something out of the ordinary. I waited with them. And then, suddenly, it came. Out of a side street marched or rather strode, rapidly but keeping in step, a group of young men in good order, singing a well-rehearsed song with words that I didn’t know. Later, I discovered that it was the Giovinezza.2 And soon they had passed at their swift pace, swinging batons, before the hundreds of men waiting for them in far superior numbers had time to make a move against their enemy. The audacious and genuinely brave march staged by this small, organised group was all over so quickly that the waiting crowd were aware of the provocation only when there was no chance for them to get to grips with their adversaries. Angrily, they crowded together, clenching their fists, but it was too late. They could not catch up with the little storm troop.
Visual impressions are always particularly convincing. For the first time, I realised that the now legendary Fascist movement, hardly known to me at all at the time, was something real, very well led, and fanatically supported by determined, bold young men. After that experience, I could not agree with my older friends in Florence and Rome who dismissed these young men as a hired gang, and laughed at their ‘Fra Diavolo’.3 Out of curiosity, I bought several issues of the Popolo d’Italia, and from the Latinate brevity of Mussolini’s sharp, graphic style of writing I gained the same impression of determination as I had from those young men briskly marching across the Piazza San Marco. Naturally I could not guess the dimensions this struggle was to assume only a year later. But from then on I was aware that a struggle did lie ahead, here and everywhere, and that the peace of the time was not real peace at all.
To me, that was the first warning that there were dangerous undercurrents beneath the apparently calm surface of Europe. I did not have to wait long for the second. Now that my pleasure in travelling had been revived, I had decided to go to Westerland on the German North Sea coast that summer. At the time it was still good for morale to visit Germany. So far, the German mark had stood its ground well by comparison with the decline of the Austrian crown, and recovery seemed to be going full speed ahead. The trains ran punctually; the hotels shone with cleanliness; you saw new houses and new factories rising on both sides of the railway tracks. The immaculate, silent, well-disciplined order of Germany was back—we had hated it in the pre-war period, and learnt to value it again in the chaos of war. Yes, there was a certain tension in the air, because the whole country was waiting to find out whether, as it hoped, the negotiations in Genoa and Rapallo, the first in which Germany took part on equal terms with the former enemy powers, would bring any relief from the full burden of war reparations, or at least some small gesture of reconciliation. Heading the German negotiating team on this memorable occasion was my old friend Rathenau. His brilliant organisational instinct had shown to very good effect during the war; right at the start he had identified the weakest spot in the German economy, the place where it later suffered a mortal blow—the supply of raw materials. Ahead of his time as usual, he had organised the entire economy centrally at just the right moment. After the war, when a man who was the equal of the cleverest and most experienced diplomats among the enemy nations had to be found, to put the country’s case as German Foreign Minister, he was the obvious choice.
I telephoned him in Berlin, but with some hesitation. How could I intrude on a man while he was deciding on the course of current events? “Yes, it’s difficult,” he said on the phone. “I even have to sacrifice friendship to duty these days.” But with his extraordinary ability to use every minute to the full, he immediately found a way for us to meet. He had to leave a few visiting cards at various embassies, he said, and as that meant he would have to spend half-an-hour travelling by car from Grunewald, it would be the simplest thing if I came to him and we talked during his half-hour’s drive around the city. His power of intellectual concentration and the astonishing ease with which he switched from one subject to another were so prodigious that he could talk in a car or tra
in at any time as profoundly and incisively as if he were in his own room. I didn’t want to waste the opportunity, and I think it did him good as well to talk to someone who had been a friend of his for years but was not involved in politics. It was a long conversation, and I can vouch for it that Rathenau, who was by no means free of personal vanity, had not accepted his appointment as Foreign Minister lightly, still less with any impatient greed for office. He knew in advance that his task was impossible for the time being, and at best he would be able to bring home only a token of success, a few minor concessions. A genuine peace, a generous meeting of minds, was too much to hope for just yet. “In ten years’ time, maybe,” he said to me, “always supposing that everyone else is in difficulties as well, not just us. First the older generation must leave the diplomatic path open, and the generals must keep their mouths shut, like monuments in a public square.” He was well aware of the double responsibility he bore, having the added disadvantage of being a Jew. I think that seldom in history can so sceptical a man with so many private reservations have undertaken a task which he knew only time could solve, and he also knew how personally dangerous it was. Since the assassination of Erzberger,4 who had taken on the thankless task of negotiating the armistice—which Ludendorff avoided by going abroad—he had no doubt that a similar fate lay in wait for him, as another champion of rapprochement. But unmarried and childless as he was, and a loner at heart, he did not shrink from the danger. I did not feel bold enough to urge him to be cautious. It is now seen as a historical fact that Rathenau carried out his mission in Rapallo as well as possible in the circumstances. His brilliant talent for seizing every favourable moment, his sophistication and his personal prestige were never used to better effect. But already certain groups were gaining ground in the country, knowing that they would recruit supporters only if they kept assuring defeated Germany that it had not been defeated after all, and all negotiations and concessions were treasonous. There were already secret associations (with strong homosexual leanings) wielding greater power than was suspected by the new republic’s leaders, whose own ideas of liberty led them to allow all kinds of developments that would have done away with true liberty in Germany for ever.
