The World of Yesterday (12 page)

A
T LAST THE LONG-AWAITED MOMENT CAME,
and with the last year of the old century we could also close the door of the hated grammar school behind us. After we had passed our final school examinations, not altogether easily—what did we know about mathematics, physics, and the rest of the scholastic curriculum?—the school principal honoured us with a valedictory speech, delivered with great feeling, an occasion for which we had to wear black frock coats. We were now grown up, he said, and our industry and efficiency must do credit to our native land. Eight years of companionship thus came to an end, and I have seen very few of my comrades in adversity since then. Most of us registered at the university, and those who had to reconcile themselves to other careers and occupations regarded us with envy.

For in those long-distant days in Austria there was still a special, romantic aura about university. The status of a student brought with it certain privileges that gave a young scholar a great advantage over all his contemporaries. I doubt whether much is known outside the German-speaking countries about the old-fashioned oddity of this phenomenon, so its anachronistic absurdity calls for explanation. Most of our universities had been founded in the Middle Ages, at a time when occupying your mind with academic knowledge appeared out of the ordinary, and young men were given certain privileges to induce them to study. Medieval scholars were not subject to the ordinary civil courts, they could not have writs served on them or be otherwise pestered by bailiffs in their colleges, they wore
special clothing, had a right to fight duels with impunity, and were recognised as an exclusive guild with its own traditions—be they good or bad. In the course of time, with the gradual coming of democracy to public life and the dissolution of all other medieval guilds, academics in the rest of Europe lost this privileged position. Only in Germany and German-speaking Austria, where class consciousness still had the upper hand, did students cling tenaciously to privileges which had long ago lost any meaning. They even based their own student code of conduct on them. A German student set particular store by a specific kind of ‘student honour’, existing side by side with his honour as an ordinary citizen. Anyone who insulted him must give him satisfaction, meaning that if the man offering the insult was ‘fit to give satisfaction’ they must fight a duel. This smug student criterion of ‘fitness to give satisfaction’, in turn, could not be met by someone like a businessman or a banker, only a man with an academic education, a graduate, or a military officer—no one else, among millions, was good enough to have the honour of crossing swords with one of those stupid, beardless boys. Then again, to be considered a real student you had to have proved your courage, meaning you had fought as many duels as possible, and even showed the signs of those heroic deeds on your face in the form of duelling scars; unscarred cheeks and a nose without a nick in it were unworthy of an academic in the genuine German tradition. This meant that the students who wore fraternity colours, showing that they belonged to a particular student body, felt obliged to go in for mutual provocation, also insulting other perfectly peaceful students and officers so that they could fight more duels. In the fraternities, every new student had his aptitude for this worthy occupation tested on the fencing floor, and he was also initiated into other fraternity customs. Every ‘fox’, the term for a novice, was assigned to an older fraternity member whom he had to serve with slavish obedience, and who in turn instructed him in
the noble arts required by the student code of conduct, which amounted to drinking until you threw up. The acid test was to empty a heavy tankard of beer in a single draught, proving in this glorious manner that you were no weakling, or to bawl student songs in chorus and defy the police by going on the rampage and goose-stepping through the streets by night. All this was considered manly, proper student behaviour, suitably German, and when the fraternities went out on a Saturday, waving their banners and wearing their colourful caps and ribbons, these simple-minded young men, with senseless arrogance fostered by their own activities, felt that they were the true representatives of intellectual youth. They looked down with contempt on the common herd who did not know enough to pay proper tribute to this academic culture of German manliness.

To a boy still wet behind the ears, coming to Vienna straight from a provincial grammar school, such dashing, merry student days may well have seemed the epitome of all that was romantic. For decades to come, indeed, when village notaries and physicians now getting on in years were in their cups, they would look up with much emotion at the crossed swords and colourful student ribbons hanging on the walls of their rooms, and proudly bore their duelling scars as the marks of their ‘academic’ status. To us, however, this stupid, brutish way of life was nothing short of abhorrent, and if we met a member of those beribboned hordes we sensibly kept out of his way. We saw individual freedom as the greatest good, and to us this urge for aggression, combined with a tendency towards servility en masse, was only too clearly evidence of the worst and most dangerous aspects of the German mind. We also knew that this artificially mummified romanticism hid some very cleverly calculated and practical aims, for membership of a duelling fraternity ensured a young man the patronage of its former members who now held high office, and would smooth the path for his subsequent career. Joining the Borussia fraternity
in Bonn was the one sure way into the German Diplomatic Service; membership of the Catholic fraternities in Austria led to well-endowed benefices in the gift of the ruling Catholic Socialist party, and most of these ‘heroes’ knew very well that in future their coloured student ribbons would have to make up for the serious studies they had neglected, and that a couple of duelling scars on their faces could be much more useful in a job application than anything they had inside their heads. The mere sight of those uncouth, militarised gangs, those scarred and boldly provocative faces, spoilt my visits to the university halls, and when other students who genuinely wanted to study went to the university library they, too, avoided going through the main hall, opting for an inconspicuous back door so as not to meet these pathetic heroes.

It had been decided long ago by my family, consulting together, that I was to study at the university. The only question was which faculty to choose. My parents left that entirely to me. My elder brother had already joined our father’s business, so for me, as the second son, there was no great hurry. After all, it was just a case of making sure, for the sake of the family honour, that I gained a doctorate, never mind in what subject. Curiously enough, I didn’t mind what subject either. I had long ago given my heart to literature, so none of the professionally taught academic branches of knowledge really interested me in themselves. I even had a secret distrust, which has not yet left me, of all academic pursuits. Emerson’s axiom that good books are a substitute for the best university still seems to me accurate, and I am convinced to this day that one can become an excellent philosopher, historian, literary philologist, lawyer, or anything else without ever having gone to university or even a grammar school. In ordinary everyday life I have found confirmation, again and again, that in practice second-hand booksellers often know more about books than the professors who lecture on them; art dealers know more than academic
art historians; and many of the most important ideas and discoveries in all fields come from outsiders. Practical, useful and salutary as academic life may be for those of average talent, it seems to me that creative individuals can dispense with it, and may even be inhibited by the academic approach, in particular at a university like ours in Vienna. It had six or seven thousand students, whose potentially fruitful personal contact with their teachers was restricted from the first by overcrowding, and it had fallen behind the times because of excessive loyalty to its traditions. I did not meet a single man there whose knowledge would have held me spellbound. So the real criterion of my choice was not what subject most appealed to me in itself, but which would burden me least and would allow me the maximum time and liberty for my real passion. I finally chose philosophy—or rather, ‘exact philosophy’, as the old curriculum called it in our time—but not out of any real sense of a vocation, since I do not have much aptitude for purely abstract thought. Without exception, my ideas come to me from objects, events and people, and everything purely theoretical and metaphysical remains beyond my grasp. But in exact philosophy the purely abstract material to be mastered was well within bounds, and it would be easy to avoid attending lectures and classes. I would only have to hand in a dissertation at the end of my eighth semester and take a few exams. So I drew up a plan for my time—for three years I would not bother with my university studies at all. Then, in my final year, I would put on a strenuous spurt, master the academic material and dash off some kind of dissertation. The university would thus have given me all I really wanted of it: a couple of years of freedom to lead my own life and concentrate on my artistic endeavours—
universitas vitae
, the university of life.

When I look back at my life I can remember few happier moments than those at the beginning of what might be called my non-university studies. I was young, and did not yet feel that I ought to be achieving perfection. I was reasonably independent, the day had twenty-four hours in it and they were all mine. I could read what I liked and work on what I liked, without having to account to anyone for it. The cloud of academic exams did not yet loom on the bright horizon. To a nineteen-year-old, three years are a long time, rich and ample in its possibilities, full of potential surprises and gifts!

The first thing I began to do was to make a collection—an unsparing selection, as I thought—of my own poems. I am not ashamed to confess that at nineteen, fresh from grammar school, printer’s ink seemed to me the finest smell on earth, sweeter than attar of roses from Shiraz. Whenever I had a poem accepted for publication in a newspaper, my self-confidence, not naturally very strong, was boosted. Shouldn’t I take the crucial step of trying to get a whole volume published? The encouragement of my friends, who believed in me more than I believed in myself, made up my mind for me. I was bold enough to submit the manuscript to the most outstanding publishing house of the time specialising in German poetry, Schuster & Löffler, the publishers of Liliencron, Dehmel, Bierbaum and Mombert,
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in fact the whole generation of poets who, with Rilke and Hofmannsthal at the same period, had created the new German style. And then, marvellous to relate, along in quick succession came those unforgettably happy moments, never to be repeated in a writer’s life even after his greatest successes. A letter arrived with the publisher’s colophon on it. I held it uneasily in my hands, hardly daring to open it. Next came the moment, when, with bated breath, I read the news it contained—the firm had decided to publish my poems, and even wanted an option on my next one as a condition. After that came a package with the first proofs, which I undid with the greatest excitement to
see the typeface, the design of the page, the embryonic form of the book, and then, a few weeks later, the book itself, the first copies. I never tired of looking at them, feeling them, comparing them with each other again and again and again. Then there was the childish impulse to visit bookshops and see if they had copies on display, and if so whether those copies were in the middle of the shop, or lurking inconspicuously in some corner. After that came the wait for letters, for the first reviews, for the first communication from unknown and unpredictable quarters—such suspense and excitement, such moments of enthusiasm! I secretly envy young people offering their first books to the world those moments. But this delight of mine was not self-satisfaction; it was only a case of love at first sight. Anyone can work out, from the mere fact that I have never allowed these
Silberne Saiten
—Silver Strings—the title of my now forgotten firstborn, to be reprinted, what I myself soon came to feel about those early verses, Nor did I not let a single one of them appear in my collected poetry. They were verses of vague premonition and unconscious empathy, arising not from my own experience but from a passion for language. They did show a certain musicality and enough sense of form to get them noticed in interested circles, and I could not complain of any lack of encouragement. Liliencron and Dehmel, the leading poets of the time, gave warm and even comradely recognition, to their nineteen-year-old author; Rilke, whom I idolised, sent me, in return for my “attractively produced book” a copy from a special edition of his latest poems inscribed to me “with thanks”. I saved this work from the ruins of Austria as one of the finest mementos of my youth, and brought it to England. (I wonder where it is today?) At the end, it seemed to me almost eerie that this kind present to me from Rilke—the first of many—was now forty years old, and his familiar handwriting greeted me from the domain of the dead. But the most unexpected surprise of all was that Max Reger, together with Richard Strauss the
greatest living composer, asked my permission to set six poems from this volume to music. I have often heard one or another of them at concerts since then—my own verses, long forgotten and dismissed from my own mind, but brought back over the intervening time by the fraternal art of a master.

This unhoped-for approval, together with a friendly reception by the critics, encouraged me to take a step that, in my incurable self-distrust, I would never otherwise have taken, or not so early. Even when I was at school I had published short novellas and essays as well as poems in the modern literary journals, but I had never tried offering any of these works to a powerful newspaper with a wide circulation. There was really only one such quality newspaper in Vienna, the
Neue Freie Presse
, which with its high-minded stance, its concentration on culture and its political prestige occupied much the same position thoughout the entire Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as
The Times
did in England and
Le Temps
in France. None of even the imperial German newspapers were so intent on maintaining a high cultural level. The editor, Moritz Benedikt, a man of inexhaustible industry and with a phenomenal talent for organisation, put all his positively daemonic energy into outshining all the German newspapers in the fields of literature and culture. When he wanted something from a famous author, no expense was spared; ten, twenty telegrams were sent off to him one after another, any kind of fee agreed in advance; the literary supplements of the holiday numbers at Christmas and New Year were whole volumes full of the greatest names of the time. Anatole France, Gerhart Hauptmann, Ibsen, Zola, Strindberg and Shaw found themselves keeping company in the paper on such occasions, and its influence on the literary orientation of the entire city and country was immeasurable. Progressive and liberal in its views as a matter of course, sound and circumspect in its opinions, this paper was a fine example of the high cultural standards of old Austria.