The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
As for Rilke, he represented a different kind of encouragement to us, and he reassuringly complemented Hofmannsthal. The idea of competing with Hofmannsthal would have appeared blasphemy to even the boldest among us. We knew he was an incomparable, inimitable miracle of early perfection, and if we, at sixteen, compared our verses with those famous specimens that he had written at the same age we felt frightened and ashamed, just as we felt humbled by the eagle flight with which he had soared through intellectual space while still at grammar school. Rilke too had begun writing and publishing poetry young, at seventeen or eighteen, but compared to Hofmannsthal’s and even in the absolute sense, those early works of his were immature, childish and naive verses. There were a few golden traces of talent to be found, but you had to make made allowances. Only gradually, at twenty-two and twenty-three, did that wonderful poet, whom we loved beyond measure, begin to form his personal style, and that was a great consolation to us. So it was not essential to be perfect while still at grammar school, like Hofmannsthal; you could feel your way like Rilke, make attempts, create a structure for your work and enhance it. There was no need to give up at once because for the time being your work was inadequate, immature, irresponsible. Despite the Hofmannsthal miracle, you could emulate the quieter, more normal rise of Rilke.
For naturally we had all, long ago, begun writing prose or poetry, making music, giving readings; after all, it is unnatural for young people to be passively enthusiastic; it is in their nature not just to absorb impressions but to respond to them productively. For young people, a love of the theatre means at least wishing and dreaming of working in or for the theatre in some way themselves; ecstatic admiration for talent in all its forms leads them irresistibly to look at themselves, wondering whether they can perhaps detect a trace of that sublime essence in their own unexplored bodies or still partly unenlightened minds. In line with the Viennese atmosphere and the circumstances of that time, the drive to artistic production in our class at school was a positive epidemic. We all looked for some talent in ourselves and tried to develop it. Four or five of us wanted to be actors. They imitated the diction of the Burghof actors, they were always reciting and declaiming, they secretly took drama lessons and, during break at school, improvised whole scenes from the classics, dividing out the parts between them, while the rest of us formed an interested but severely critical audience. Two or three were very well trained musicians, but had not yet decided whether they wanted to be composers, virtuoso performers or conductors. It is to them that I owe my first acquaintance with modern music, which was still strictly excluded from the concerts given by the Philharmonic. The musicians, in turn, asked us to write texts for their lieder and choruses. Another boy, the son of a society painter who was famous at the time, drew in our exercise books during lessons, portraying all the future geniuses of the class. But far the strongest trend was towards literary endeavour. In spurring each other on to ever swifter achievement, and by dint of mutual criticism of every single poem, the level we reached at the age of seventeen was well above that of mere amateurs, and some of us approached genuine achievement, as was witness the fact that our work was published not merely in obscure provincial papers but by leading journals of the modern generation, and was even paid for, the most convincing of all proofs of merit. One of my friends, Ph A, whom I idolised as a genius, shone in Pan, the de luxe literary journal, in the company of Dehmel and Rilke; another, A M, writing under the pseudonym of August Oehler, had made his way into the pages of the most inaccessible and eclectic of all German reviews, the Blätter für die Kunst—Leaves for Art—in which Stefan George usually published only the work of his canonised circle of writers. A third, encouraged by Hofmannsthal, wrote a drama on the subject of Napoleon, a fourth came up with a new theory of aesthetics and some important sonnets. I myself had something published in Gesellschaft—Society—the leading journal of modern literature, and Maxmilian Harden’s Zukunft—Future—a weekly journal prominent in the political and cultural history of modern Germany. When I look back today, I must say perfectly objectively that the sum of our knowledge, the refinement of our literary technique, and our artistic level was really astonishing for boys of seventeen, and can be explained only by the inspiring example of that fantastic early maturing of Hofmannsthal which, if we were to hold our heads high in each other’s company, meant that we had to exert ourselves to the utmost. We mastered all the tricks and extravagances and audacities of language, we had tried the technique of every verse form, making countless attempts at all styles from the Pindaric ode to the simple diction of the folk song, we showed our writings to each other every day, discussing the most fugitive of discrepancies and every metrical detail. While our worthy teachers, unaware of any of this, were still marking our school essays in red ink, pointing out missing commas, we criticised one another with a severity, artistic expertise and attention to detail greater than any of the official literary pundits of our great daily papers applied to the classic masterpieces. In our final years at school, our fanatical enthusiasm meant that in our expert judgements and stylistic ability to express ourselves, we were far ahead of famous critics in established positions.
This account of our literary precocity, which is genuinely faithful to the facts, might tempt one to think that we were a particularly talented class. By no means. The same phenomenon of fanatical enthusiasm and the same precocious talent was to be found at a dozen neighbouring schools in Vienna at the time. It could not be chance. There was something especially favourable to it in the air, something nurtured by the fertile artistic soil of the city, by the apolitical period and all the interlinking new literary and intellectual directions around the turn of the century. By a kind of chemical reaction, all this created in us the kind of desire to create literary works that is almost a compulsion at that age. At puberty every young person writes or feels the urge to write, although admittedly in most cases it is just a fleeting impulse, and it is rare for such an inclination, being a symptom of youth, to survive youth itself. None of our five would-be actors at school became an actor on the real stage. After that amazing initial surge of creativity had petered out, the young contributors to Pan and the Blätter für die Kunst5 became staid lawyers or civil servants, and perhaps smile over their former ambitions with melancholy or irony today. Of them all, I am the only one in whom the creative passion has lasted, has become the meaning and core of my whole life. But I think back very gratefully to our comradeship. It helped me so much. Those fiery discussions, that hectic competition, that mutual admiration and criticism exercised my hand and my nerves at an early date, giving me a view of the intellectual cosmos, and their inspiration raised us all above the bleak and dismal atmosphere of our school. Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden6 … whenever I hear that immortal Schubert song I have a kind of three-dimensional vision in which we are sitting on those unpleasant school benches, shoulders hunched, and then going home with radiant, excited faces, reciting, criticising poems, forgetting time and space in our passionate enthusiasm, truly transported to a better world.
Such a monomaniac obsession with art, setting store on aestheticism to the point of absurdity, was of course bound to take its toll on the normal interests of young people of our age. If I wonder today where we found the time to read all those books, crammed as our days already were with lessons at school and private coaching, it is clear to me that it must have been mainly at the expense of our sleep and so our physical health. Although I had to get up at seven, I never put down whatever I was reading until one or two in the morning. Incidentally it was then that I acquired the bad habit of always reading for an hour or two before going to sleep, however late it is. So I do not remember ever setting off to school feeling as if I were well rested, and I used to set off in haste, eating my breakfast of a buttered roll on the way, after a mere lick and promise of a wash. No wonder that for all our high-flying intellectuality we cut a poor figure, looking as green as unripe fruit, and we were rather carelessly dressed. Every p
The truly great experience of our youthful years was the realisation that something new in art was on the way—something more impassioned, difficult and alluring than the art that had satisfied our parents and the world around us. But fascinated as we were by this one aspect of life, we did not notice that these aesthetic changes were only the forerunners of the much more far-reaching changes that were to shake and finally destroy the world of our fathers, the world of security. A remarkable process of restructuring was going on in sleepy old Austria. The quiet, obedient masses who for decades had left power to the liberal bourgeoisie were suddenly becoming restive, organising themselves and demanding their own rights. In the last ten years of the century, politics disturbed the serene calm of comfortable Austrian life with keen gusts of a changing wind. The new century called for a new order, a new time.
The first of these great mass movements in Austria was the Socialist movement. Until now, what was misleadingly called the ‘universal’ franchise had been confined to prosperous citizens who could show that they paid a certain amount of tax. However, the lawyers and landed gentlemen whom this class elected sincerely and genuinely believed that they spoke for the people and represented their interests in parliament. They were very proud of being cultivated and even, where possible, academically educated men; they set store by dignity, correct manners and good diction, and as a result parliamentary sessions resembled an evening debate at a good club. Thanks to their liberal belief in a world that had become infallibly progressive, through tolerance and reason, these middle-class democrats honestly thought that they served the good of all Austrian subjects best by making small concessions and gradual improvements. But they had entirely forgotten that they represented only the fifty thousand or a hundred thousand prosperous men of the big cities, not the hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in the entire country. By now machinery had done its work and the working classes, once widely scattered, had gathered around the industries. Under an eminent leader, Dr Victor Adler,7 a Social Democratic Party formed in Austria to carry through the demands of the proletariat, which wanted truly universal suffrage for every man. As soon as that was granted—or rather, forcibly introduced—it became clear what a small if useful part of society had been represented by Liberalism, and with it conciliation too disappeared from public political life; interests now clashed harshly, and the battle began.
I remember, from my earliest childhood, the day that brought the decisive change in the rise of the Social Democratic Party in Austria. By way of a visible demonstration of their power and their numbers, the workers had declared the first of May a holiday for the working class, and were going to march in close formation to the Prater8 and down the Hauptallee itself, where only the horses and carriages of the aristocracy and the rich middle class usually went that day for their own traditional parade down the wide, handsome avenue lined with chestnut trees. This announcement paralysed the liberal middle classes with horror. Socialists—at the time, in Germany and Austria, the word had something of a bloodstained, terrorist aura about it, like the terms Jacobin before and Bolshevik after it. At first no one thought it possible that the red horde from the city suburbs would march without setting fire to houses, looting shops, and committing every imaginable act of violence. A kind of panic spread. The police of the entire city and its surroundings were stationed on Praterstrasse, with the army in reserve ready to open fire. No carriage or cab ventured near the Prater, shopkeepers rolled down the iron shutters over their windows, and I remember my parents strictly forbidding us children to go out into the street on that terrible day when Vienna might go up in flames. The workers, with their wives and children, marched to the Prater with exemplary discipline in ranks four abreast, all of them wearing red carnations, the party symbol, in their buttonholes. As they marched along they sang The Internationale, but then, in the beautiful green of the handsome avenue where they had never set foot before, the children struck up their carefree school songs. No one was abused, no blows were exchanged, no fists were clenched; the police officers and soldiers smiled at the workers in a comradely manner. Thanks to this blameless behaviour on the part of the workers, it was no longer possible for the bourgeoisie to brand them red revolutionaries, concessions were made on both sides—as usual in the wise old country of Austria. No one had yet devised the present system of eradicating demonstrators by clubbing them to the ground, and though the humanitarian ideal was already fading, it was still alive even among the party leaders.
No sooner did the red carnation emerge as a party symbol than another flower suddenly appeared in buttonholes, the white carnation, denoting membership of the Christian Socialist Party (how touching to think that, at
Previous PageNext Page