The World of Yesterday (22 page)

I happened to be in Vienna myself when the first rehearsals were to begin. I looked forward to seeing Pirandello again, and I was curious to hear the words of my translation spoken with Moissi’s musicality. But by eerie coincidence, the events of a quarter-of-a-century earlier were repeated. When I opened the newspaper first thing in the morning, I heard that Moissi had arrived from Switzerland with a bad attack of flu. Flu, I thought, that can’t be too serious. But my heart was thudding as I approached his hotel—thank God, I said to myself, not the Hotel Sacher, the Grand Hotel—to visit my sick friend. The memory of that futile visit to Kainz came back to me like a shudder running down my spine. And the events of over twenty-five years ago were repeated, once again affecting the greatest actor of his time. I was not allowed in to see Moissi; he had fallen into a fevered delirium. Two days later I was not at
a rehearsal but standing by his coffin, just as I had stood beside the coffin of Kainz.

I have looked ahead in time by mentioning that final instance of the mysterious curse on my ventures into the theatre. Of course I see nothing but coincidence in that succession of events. But undoubtedly the deaths of Matkowsky and Kainz, so soon after one another, affected the direction my life took at the time. If my first plays, written when I was twenty-six, had been performed by Matkowsky in Berlin and Kainz in Vienna, then thanks to their art, which could make a success even of the weakest play, I would quickly have come to wide public notice, perhaps more quickly than would have been good for me, and would thus have missed my years of slow learning and getting to know the world. At the time, understandably enough, I felt like a victim of Fate, since at the very beginning of my career the theatre offered me opportunities I would never have dared to dream of, temptingly holding them out and then cruelly taking them away again at the last minute. But only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination.

D
ID TIME MOVE FASTER THEN
than it does today, when it is crammed with incidents that will change our world utterly for centuries? Or do the last years of my youth, before the first European war, seem blurred to me now only because they were spent steadily working? I was writing, my work was published, my name was known in Germany and Austria and to some extent further afield. There were some who liked my work and—which really says more for its originality—some who did not. I could write for any of the major newspapers of the Reich; I no longer had to submit articles but was asked for them. Inwardly, however, I do not deceive myself into thinking that anything I did and wrote in those years matters today. Our ambitions, anxieties, setbacks and reasons for embitterment of that time now seem to me positively lilliputian. Inevitably, the dimensions of the present day have changed our point of view. If I had begun this book several years ago, I would have mentioned conversations with Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Beer-Hofmann, Dehmel, Pirandello, Wassermann, Shalom Asch and Anatole France. (The last of those would have made an amusing story, for the old gentleman dished us up risqué anecdotes all afternoon, but with distinguished gravity and indescribable grace.) I could have written about great premieres—of Gustav Mahler’s
Tenth Symphony
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in Munich, of
Der Rosenkavalier
in Dresden, of Karsavina and Nijinsky dancing. As a man easily able to travel and full of curiosity, I was present at many artistic events now considered historic. But anything unconnected with the problems
of today pales in importance when judged by our sterner criteria. Today, the men who directed my attention to literature in my youth seem to me not nearly as important as those who diverted it to reality.

First and foremost among them was a man involved with the fate of the German Reich at one of he most tragic epochs of its history, and who suffered the first murderous onslaught of the National Socialists eleven years before Hitler took power. This was Walther Rathenau. Our friendship was warm and of long standing; it had begun in a strange way. One of the first to give me encouragement at the age of nineteen was Maximilian Harden, whose journal
Die Zukunft
—The Future—played an important part in the last decades of the Imperial Reich of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Harden, personally introduced into politics by Bismarck, who liked to use him as a mouthpiece or lightning conductor, was behind the fall of ministers, brought the Eulenburg affair
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to the point of explosion, and had the Imperial Palace trembling every week for fear of more attacks and revelations. In spite of all that, Harden’s private love was for the theatre and literature. One day
Die Zukunft
published a series of aphorisms signed by a pseudonymous name that I no longer remember, and I was greatly impressed by the author’s clever mind and powers of linguistic concentration. As a regular contributor, I wrote to Harden asking: “Who is this new writer? I haven’t seen such polished aphorisms for years.”

The answer came not from Harden but from a man signing himself Walther Rathenau who, as I learnt from his letters as well as other sources, was none other than the son of the all-powerful director of the Berlin Electricity Company, a big businessman and industrialist himself, the director of many companies—one of the new breed of German businessmen who, in a phrase of Jean Paul’s, knew what was what in the world. He wrote to me warmly, thanking me and saying that my letter had been the first positive mention he had received for his
literary venture. Although at least ten years older than me, he frankly admitted that he was not sure whether he should really try to publish a whole book of his reflections and aphorisms. After all, he said, he was an outsider, and so far he had been active only in the field of economics. I gave him my honest encouragement, and we stayed in touch by correspondence. When I next visited Berlin I called him on the telephone. A hesitant voice answered: “Ah, it’s you. What a pity, I have to set out at six tomorrow morning for South Africa …” I interrupted him: “Then let’s meet some other time.” But the voice went on, slowly thinking aloud: “No, wait a moment … this afternoon is full of meetings … this evening I have to go to the Ministry, and then there’s a dinner at the club … but could you call on me at eleven-fifteen?” I agreed, and we talked until two in the morning. At six he did indeed leave for South West Africa—on a mission from the Kaiser of Germany, as I later discovered.

I mention this detail because it is so characteristic of Rathenau. Busy as he was, he always had time for a friend. I saw him in the most desperate days of the war, and just before the Conference of Genoa, and a few days before his assassination I drove with him in the very car in which he would be shot taking the same route as he did that day. He always had his day divided up to the minute, yet he could switch from subject to subject without any difficulty because his mind was always alert, an instrument of such precision and speed as I have never known in any other human being. He spoke as fluently as if he were reading aloud from an invisible sheet of paper, yet forming every sentence so clearly and graphically that if anyone had taken down his conversation in shorthand the text could have gone straight into print. He spoke French, English and Italian as well as his native German—his memory never let him down, he never needed special preparation for any subject. When you talked to him you felt simultaneously stupid, inadequately educated, uncertain and confused in the face of his calm objectivity as
he assessed and clearly surveyed the subject of conversation. But there was something in the dazzling brilliance and crystal clarity of his mind that had an uncomfortable effect, just as the finest of furniture and pictures felt not quite right in his apartment. His mind was like a brilliantly constructed mechanism, his apartment like a museum, and you could never really feel at ease in his feudal castle of the time of Queen Luise
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in the March of Brandenburg, it was so neat and tidy and well-ordered. There was something as transparent as glass and thus insubstantial in his thinking; I seldom felt the tragedy of the Jewish identity more strongly than I did in him. In spite of his obvious distinction, he was full of profound uneasiness and uncertainty. My other friends, for instance Verhaeren, Ellen Key and Bazalgette, were not one-tenth as clever nor one-hundredth as knowledgeable and experienced as he was, but they were sure of themselves. With Rathenau, I always felt that for all his extraordinarily clever mind he had no solid ground beneath his feet. His whole life was a conflict of contradictions. He had inherited great power from his father, yet he did not want to be his heir. He was a businessman, and wanted to feel that he was an artist; he owned millions and toyed with socialist ideas; he felt that he was Jewish but flirted with Christianity. His thinking was international, but he idolised the Prussian spirit; he dreamt of a people’s democracy, yet always felt highly honoured to be received and questioned by Kaiser Wilhelm, whose weaknesses and vanities he clearly saw without being able to overcome some vanity of his own. So his constant busy activity may have been just an opiate to dull private nervousness and dispel the solitude of his real nature. Only at his hour of responsibility when in 1919, after the collapse of the German armies, he was given the hardest task in history—the reconstruction of the shattered state from chaos to a point where it was capable of life again—did the great potential forces in him suddenly unite, and he rose to the
greatness natural to his genius by devoting his life to the single idea of saving Europe.

Along with many stimulating conversations, perhaps comparable only to my conversations with Hofmannsthal, Valéry and Count Keyserling, along with the way he broadened my horizons from being purely literary to include the history of my time, I owe Rathenau his suggestion that I should look beyond Europe. “You can’t understand Great Britain when all you know is the island itself,” he told me. “And you can’t understand our continent until you have gone beyond it at least once. You’re a free agent, use your freedom! Literature is a wonderful profession, because haste is no part of it. Whether a really good book is finished a year earlier or a year later makes no difference. Why don’t you go to India and America?” This casual remark made an impression on me, and I decided to take his advice at once.

India had a stranger and more oppressive effect on me than I had expected. I was shocked by the poverty of the emaciated figures I saw there, the joyless gravity of their dark glances, the often cruel monotony of the landscape, and most of all the rigid distinction between classes and races. I had already seen a sample of that on the voyage. Two charming girls, black-eyed and slender, well-educated and well-mannered, modest and elegant, were travelling on our ship. On the very first day I noticed that they kept away from the rest of us, or perhaps were kept away by some invisible barrier. They did not come to the shipboard dances, they did not join in conversation, but instead sat on their own reading books in French and English. Only on the second or third day did I discover that they were not avoiding the English passengers of their own accord, the English passengers kept aloof from them because they were ‘half-castes’, although these delightful girls were the daughters of a Parsee businessman and a Frenchwoman. They had been on absolutely equal terms with
everyone else for the last two or three years at their boarding school in Lausanne and then their finishing school in England, but a cool, invisible and yet cruel form of social ostracism set in as soon as they began their voyage home to India. This was the first time I had experience of the menace of delusions of racial purity, a plague that has affected our world more disastrously than the real plague ever did in earlier centuries.

This first encounter with it alerted my eye from the start. Feeling rather ashamed of it, I enjoyed the respectful awe—no longer felt, and it is our own fault—shown to a European as a kind of white god when he went on a tourist expedition ashore, like the one I made to Adam’s Mount in Ceylon, inevitably accompanied by twelve to fourteen servants. Anything less would have been beneath a European’s dignity. I couldn’t shake off the uncomfortable feeling that future decades and centuries were bound to bring change and reversal to this absurd state of affairs, but in our comfortable and apparently secure Europe, we dared not begin to imagine that. Because of these observations I did not see India in a rosy, romantic light, as did Pierre Loti and his like; I saw it as a warning, and during my travels I did not gain most from the wonderful temples, the weather-worn old palaces, the Himalayan landscapes, but from the people I met, people of another kind and from another world than those whom a writer used to meet in the interior of Europe. Anyone who travelled beyond Europe at that time, when we were more cautious about money and Cook’s Tours were not yet so well organised, was almost always a man whose position gave him a certain standing—a merchant who travelled was not a small shopkeeper with modest horizons but a big businessman; a doctor was a true research scientist; an entrepreneur was like the conquistadors of the past, adventurous, generous, reckless—even a writer was likely to have a high degree of intellectual curiosity. In the long days and nights of my journey, which were not yet filled by the chatter of the radio, I learnt more about the
forces and tensions that move our world from these people than from a hundred books. A change in distance from my native land brought about a change in my standards. On my return I began to see many small things that used to occupy my mind unduly as petty, and Europe no longer seemed to me the eternal axis of the universe.

One of the men whom I met on my travels in India has had an incalculable if not openly visible influence on the history of our time. Travelling on a river boat along the Irrawaddy from Calcutta to Indochina, I spent hours every day with Karl Haushofer, on his way to Japan with his wife to take up the post of German military attaché. An upright, thin man with a bony face and sharply aquiline nose, he gave me my first insight into the extraordinary qualities and disciplined mind of a German officer of the general staff. In Vienna, of course, I had already mingled at times with military men—pleasant and even amusing young fellows whose families were usually not very prosperous, and had joined the army to get the best they could out of military service. However, you sensed at once that Haushofer came from a cultivated upper-middle-class family—his father had published quite a number of poems, and I think had been a university professor—and his education was wide even outside military life. Commissioned to study the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese war on the spot, both he and his wife had familiarised themselves with the language and even the literature of Japan. I saw him as another example of the way in which if any branch of knowledge, including the military, is understood in a broad sense it must inevitably reach beyond its narrow specialist area and touch all other branches. On board the river boat he worked all day, following every detail of the voyage with his field glasses, writing diaries or reports, studying encyclopedias; I seldom saw him without a book in his hands. He was very observant and good at describing what he had seen. In conversation with him, I learnt a great deal
about the mysteries of the East, and once home I stayed in friendly touch with the Haushofer family. We corresponded, and visited each other in Salzburg and Munich. Serious lung trouble kept him in Davos and Arosa for a year, and while he was not serving in the army he was able to devote himself to science, but during the First World War he took over a military command. After the defeat of Germany I often thought of him with great sympathy; I could only imagine how he must have suffered, after spending years building up a German position of power and perhaps, in his discreet manner, the war machine itself, when he saw Japan, where he had made many friends, side with the victorious enemy.

He soon turned out to be one of the first to think systematically and on a large scale of a reconstruction of German power. He was editing a geopolitical journal and, as so often happens, I did not understand the true meaning of this new movement at first. I genuinely believed it merely studied the interplay of international forces, and even the word
Lebensraum
,
4
as a term for “living-space” for the nations (I think he coined the term), was something that I understood only in Spengler’s
5
sense, as the relative energy released by every nation at some point in the cycle of time, and changing from epoch to epoch. And there seemed to me nothing wrong about Haushofer’s demand for closer study of the individual qualities of nations, and the construction of a permanent educational apparatus of a scientific nature. I thought that these investigations were solely meant to bring different nations together. Perhaps—I cannot say—Haushofer’s original intentions had not been political. At least, I read his books with great interest (he once, incidentally, quoted me) and with no suspicion of anything amiss; I heard his lectures praised as uncommonly instructive by all impartial people, and no one accused him of putting his ideas to the service of a new policy of power and aggression, designed solely to give a new form of ideological justification to the old
demands for a Greater Germany. One day, however, when I happened to mention his name, someone said, “Ah, Hitler’s friend!” in a tone suggesting that everyone knew it. I couldn’t have been more surprised. For one thing, Haushofer’s wife was certainly not ‘racially pure’, and his very talented and agreeable sons could never have satisfied the Nuremberg Laws affecting Jews; in addition, I could not see any direct intellectual link between a highly cultivated scholar whose mind ranged widely, and a ferocious agitator obsessed with German nationalism in its most narrow and brutal sense. But one of Haushofer’s pupils had been Rudolf Hess, and he had forged the link. From the first, Hitler, who in himself was far from open to other people’s ideas, had an instinct for appropriating everything that could be useful to his personal aims. So for him, the be-all and end-all of geopolitics was to further National Socialist policies, and he drew on as much of that branch of science as could serve his purpose. The National Socialist method was always to shore up its obviously selfish instinct for power with ideological and pseudo-moral justifications, and with this concept ‘living-space’ at last found a philosophical cover for its naked will to aggression. The catchphrase was so vaguely defined as to be apparently innocuous, but it meant that any successful annexation, even the most autocratic, could be justified as an ethical and ethnological necessity. So my old travelling companion—whether knowingly and willingly I do not know—was to blame for the fundamental change for the worse in Hitler’s idea of his aims, which had previously been confined to national and racial purity—a change that was to affect the rest of the world. The theory of ‘living-space’ degenerated into the slogan, “Germany is ours today, tomorrow the whole world”—as obvious an example of the way a single, succinct phrase can turn the immanent power of words into action and disaster as the demand of the
encyclopédistes
to let reason reign supreme, which led to terror and mass emotionalism, the very opposite of reason. Haushofer
himself, so far as I know, never held a prominent position in the Party and may not even have been a Party member. I do not by any means see him, like today’s ingenious journalists, as a demonic ‘grey eminence’ behind the scenes, hatching dangerous plans and whispering them in the Führer’s ear. But there is no doubt that the theories of Haushofer, rather than anything thought up by Hitler’s most deranged advisers, were responsible for the aggressive policy of National Socialism, whether deliberately or not giving it universal instead of strictly national proportions. Only posterity, with better documentation than is available to us today, will be able to see him in the correct historical light.