The World of Yesterday (23 page)

After this first overseas journey my second, to America, followed a little later. It too was for no other purpose than to see the world and, if possible, a little of the future that lay ahead of us. I believe I really was one of the few writers at the time to have travelled there not to make financial or journalistic capital out of the United States, but just to compare my rather vague idea of the New World with the reality.

That vague idea, I am not ashamed to say, was extremely romantic. To me, America meant Walt Whitman, the land of new rhythm, the coming brotherhood of the whole world. Before making the crossing I reread the wild, long lines of the great
Camerado
,
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a flowing torrent like a cataract, and so I entered Manhattan with an open-minded sense of fraternity instead of the European’s usual arrogance. I remember how the first thing I did was to ask the hotel receptionist where Walt Whitman’s grave was, so that I could visit it. My question had the poor man, an Italian, in great difficulty; he had never even heard the poet’s name.

My first impression was very striking, although New York did not yet have its present captivating nocturnal beauty. The
foaming cascades of light in Times Square were still to come, and so was the city’s dream-like starry firmament shining up at the real sky by night with billions of artificial stars. The general layout of the city and its traffic were not as bold and generous as today; the new architecture was still uncertainly trying its hand at a few high-rise buildings, and only a tentative beginning was being made on the astonishingly lavish and tasteful displays in store windows. But to look down from Brooklyn Bridge, always swaying slightly, at the harbour, and wander through the stony ravines of the avenues was discovery and excitement enough, although admittedly after two or three days it gave way to another and stronger feeling, a sense of great loneliness. I had nothing to do in New York, and at the time a man with no occupation was more out of place there than anywhere. The city did not yet have cinemas where you could amuse yourself for an hour, or comfortable little cafeterias; there were not as many art galleries, libraries and museums as today, and culturally everything was still far behind Europe. After I had spent two or three days dutifully seeing the museums and the main sights, I drifted like a rudderless boat along the icy, windy streets. Finally the sense that I was pointlessly wandering the streets became so strong that I could overcome it only by tricking myself into seeing it as more attractive. I invented a game to play. I told myself that I was wandering around here all alone, one of the countless emigrants who didn’t know what to do with themselves and had only seven dollars in their pockets. You are voluntarily doing, I said to myself, what they do from necessity. Imagine that you are obliged to earn your bread after three days at the latest. Look around and see how you could start out in life here as a stranger, with no connections or friends, so you must look for a job at once. I began going from employment bureau to employment bureau, studying the notes tacked to their doors. A baker was wanted here, an assistant clerk with a knowledge of French and Italian there, a bookshop assistant somewhere
else. This last was a chance for my imaginary self. So I climbed an iron spiral staircase three floors up, asked about the pay, and compared it with the newspaper ads quoting prices for a room in the Bronx. After two days of job-hunting I had, in theory, found five posts with which I could have earnt my living, so I had convinced myself better than by merely strolling around of how much space and how many possibilities this young country held for everyone willing to work. That impressed me. In my wanderings from agency to agency, imagining myself working in the various businesses, I had also gained an insight into the country’s wonderful freedom. No one asked about my nationality, my religion, my origin, and what was more—an amazing thing to imagine in our modern world of fingerprints, visas and police permits—I had travelled without a passport. But there was work waiting for people to do it, and that was all that counted. Fabulous as it now seems, a contract could be instantly agreed without today’s inhibiting intervention of state formalities and trade unions. Thanks to my job-hunting, I learnt more about America in those first few days than in later weeks, when travelling in comfort as a tourist I saw Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Chicago, spending a few companionable hours in Boston with Charles Loeffler, who had composed music for some of my poems, but otherwise always alone. Only once did a surprise interrupt the total anonymity of my existence. I remember that moment clearly. I was strolling down a broad avenue in Philadelphia; I stopped outside a large bookshop to get a sense of something familiar to me from the names of the authors at least. Suddenly I gave a start. There were six or seven German books on display to the left of the bookshop window, and my own name jumped out at me from one of them. I gazed as if I were under a spell, and began thinking. So something of my Self, the Self now drifting unknown and apparently aimlessly through strange streets, had been here before me, known to no one, noticed by no one. The bookseller must have
written my name on an order form to get that book travelling over the ocean for ten days. For a moment my sense of isolation was dispelled, and when I visited Philadelphia again two years ago, I kept looking for that bookshop without meaning to.

I did not have the courage to reach San Francisco—Hollywood had not yet been invented. But there was at least one other place where I could have the view of the Pacific Ocean that I longed for, a view that had fascinated me since, as a child, I had read accounts of the first circumnavigation of the world. It was a place now gone, a place that no mortal eye will ever see again—the last mounds of earth from the Panama Canal, which was then being built. I had travelled in a small ship past Bermuda and Haiti. Our literary generation had been educated by Verhaeren to admire the technical marvels of our time with the same enthusiasm as our forefathers admired the buildings of Roman antiquity. Panama itself was an unforgettable sight, a river bed excavated by diggers, glaring ochre-yellow burning the eye even through dark glasses, air like the fires of hell teeming with millions upon millions of mosquitoes. You could see their victims in endless rows in the cemetery. How many had fallen victim to this project, begun by Europe and to be completed by America? Only now, after thirty years of disasters and disappointments, was it really taking shape. A few months before the final work on the sluices was done, then a finger pressing an electric button, and after thousands of years the two oceans would flow into each other again for ever. I was one of the last of my time to have seen them before they joined, in the full and conscious awareness that this was a historic moment. That view of its greatest creative act was a good way to say goodbye to America.

I
HAD NOW LIVED THROUGH TEN YEARS
of the new century; I had seen India, part of America, and I began thinking of Europe with a new and better-informed sense of pleasure. I never loved our old world
more
than in those last years before the First World War; I never hoped more for a united Europe; I never believed more in its future than at that time, when we thought there was a new dawn in sight. But its red hue was really the firelight of the approaching international conflagration.

Today’s generation has grown up amidst disasters, crises, and the failure of systems. The young see war as a constant possibility to be expected almost daily, and it may be difficult to describe to them the optimism and confidence in the world that we felt when we ourselves were young at the turn of the century. Forty years of peace had strengthened national economies, technology had speeded up the pace of life, scientific discoveries had been a source of pride to the spirit of our own generation.. The upswing now beginning could be felt to almost the same extent in all European countries. Cities were more attractive and densely populated year by year; the Berlin of 1905 was not like the city I had known in 1901. From being the capital of a princely state it had become an international metropolis, which in turn paled beside the Berlin of 1910. Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, Amsterdam—whenever you came back to them you were surprised and delighted. The streets were broader and finer, the public buildings more imposing, the shops more elegant. Everything conveyed a sense of the growth and wider
distribution of wealth. Even we writers noticed it from the editions of our books printed; in the space of ten years the number of copies printed per edition tripled, then multiplied by fivefold and by tenfold. There were new theatres, libraries and museums everywhere. Domestic facilities such as bathrooms and telephones that used to be the prerogative of a few select circles became available to the lower middle class, and now that hours of work were shorter than before, the proletariat had its own share in at least the minor pleasures and comforts of life. There was progress everywhere. Who dared, won. If you bought a house, a rare book, a picture you saw its value rise; the bolder and more ambitious the ideas behind an enterprise, the more certain it was to succeed. There was a wonderfully carefree atmosphere abroad in the world—for what was going to interrupt this growth, what could stand in the way of the vigour constantly drawing new strength from its own momentum? Europe had never been stronger, richer or more beautiful, had never believed more fervently in an even better future, and no one except a few shrivelled old folk still bewailed the passing of the ‘good old days’.

And not only were the cities more beautiful, their inhabitants too were more attractive and healthier, thanks to sporting activities, better nutrition, shorter working hours and a closer link with nature. People had discovered that up in the mountains winter, once a dismal season to be spent gloomily playing cards in taverns or feeling bored as you sat around in overheated rooms, was a source of filtered sunlight, nectar for the lungs that sent blood coursing deliciously just beneath the skin. The mountains, the lakes and the sea no longer seemed so far away. Bicycles, motor cars, electric railways had shrunk distance and given the world a new sense of space. On Sundays thousands and tens of thousands, clad in brightly coloured sportswear, raced down the snowy slopes on skis and toboggans; sports centres and swimming baths were built everywhere. You could see the change clearly
in those swimming baths—while in my own youth a really fine figure of a man stood out among all the bull-necked, paunchy or pigeon-chested specimens, nowadays athletically agile young men, tanned by the sun and fit from all their sporting activities, competed cheerfully with each other as they did in classical antiquity. Only the most poverty-stricken stayed at home now on a Sunday; all the young people went walking, climbing or competing in all kinds of sports. When they went on holiday they did not, as in my parents’ time, find somewhere to stay near the city, or at the most no further away than the Salzkammergut. Their curiosity about the world had been aroused; they wanted to see if it was as beautiful everywhere, or maybe beautiful in a different way in other places, and while once only the privileged few travelled abroad, now bank clerks and small tradesmen went away to Italy or France. Foreign travel had become cheaper and more comfortable, but above all a new bold, adventurous attitude made travellers willing to venture further afield, less thrifty, less anxious—indeed, anxiety was something to be ashamed of. That whole generation was determined to be more youthful; unlike young people in the world of my parents, everyone was proud of youth. Suddenly beards disappeared, first in the younger men, then shaved off by their elders, imitating them so as not to be thought of as old. Youthful freshness was more desirable than dignity. Women threw away the corsets that had constricted their breasts, stopped fearing fresh air and sunlight and gave up sunshades and veils; they shortened their skirts so that they could move more freely when they played tennis, and they were not shy about showing a well-turned pair of legs. Fashions became more and more natural, men wore breeches, women dared to ride astride, and the sexes stopped concealing themselves from each other. There was more freedom as well as more beauty in the world.

It was the health and self-confidence of the generation after ours that also laid claim to freedom for itself in manners and
morals. For the first time, you saw young girls enjoying excursions and sporting activities in open and confident friendship with young men, and without a governess going along as chaperone. They were no longer timid and prudish; they knew what they wanted and what they did not. Escaping the anxious authority of their parents, earning their own living as secretaries or clerks, they took control of their own lives. This new, healthier freedom led to a clear decrease in prostitution, the sole permitted erotic institution of the old world, and prudery of every kind now seemed old-fashioned. Increasingly, the wooden partitions in swimming baths that used to divide the gentlemen’s and ladies’ pools from each other were taken down. Women and men were not ashamed to show their figures any more. In those ten years there was more freedom, informality and lack of inhibition than there had been in the entire preceding century.

For the world was moving to a different rhythm. A year—so much could happen in a year now! Inventions and discoveries followed hard on each other’s heels, and each in turn swiftly became a general good. For the first time the nations all felt in common what was for the benefit of all. On the day when the Zeppelin
1
rose in the air for its first flight, I was on my way to Belgium and happened to be in Strasburg where, to shouts of jubilation from the crowd, it circled the Münster as if bowing to the thousand-year-old cathedral while it hovered in the air. That evening, at the Verhaerens’, news came that the airship had crashed in Echterdingen. Verhaeren had tears in his eyes, and was badly upset. Belgian though he was, this German catastrophe did not leave him unmoved; it was as a European, a man of our time, that he felt for our common victory over the elements as well as this common setback. When Blériot made the first cross-Channel flight in an aeroplane, we rejoiced in Vienna as if he were a hero of our own nation; pride in the triumphs of our technology and science, which succeeded one another by the hour, had led for the first time to a European sense of
community, the development of a European identity. How pointless, we said to ourselves, frontiers were if it was child’s play for any aircraft to cross them, how provincial and artificial were customs barriers and border guards, how contrary to the spirit of our times that clearly wished for closer links and international fraternity! This upward surge of feeling was no less remarkable than the upward rise of aircraft; I feel sorry for all who did not live through these last years of European confidence while they were still young themselves. For the air around us is not a dead and empty void, it has in it the rhythm and vibration of the time. We absorb them unconsciously into our bloodstream as the air carries them deep into our hearts and minds. Perhaps, ungrateful as human beings are, we did not realise at the time how strongly and securely the wave bore us up. But only those who knew that time of confidence in the world know that everything since has been regression and gloom.

That world was a wonderful tonic, its strength reaching our hearts from all the coasts of Europe. At the same time, however, although we did not guess it, what delighted us was dangerous. The stormy wind of pride and confidence sweeping over Europe brought clouds with it. Perhaps the upward movement had come too fast, states and cities had made themselves powerful too swiftly—and an awareness of having power always leads states, like men, to use or misuse it. France was extremely wealthy, yet it wanted still more, it wanted another colony although it did not have enough people for the old ones, and it almost went to war over Morocco. Italy had its eye on Cyrenaica
2
; Austria annexed Bosnia; Serbia and Bulgaria advanced on Turkey; and Germany, although inactive for the moment, was flexing its claws to strike in anger. All the states were suffering a rush of blood to the head. Everywhere, and at the same time, the productive wish for consolidation at home began to develop, like an infectious illness, into a greedy desire for expansion. High-earning French industrialists agitated
against their German counterparts, who were also rolling in riches, because both Krupp and Schneider-Creusot wanted to be able to supply more artillery. The Hamburg shipping industry, which earned huge dividends, was vying with shipping based in Southampton, Hungarian and Bulgarian agriculture were in competition, one group of companies was set against all the rest—the economic situation had maddened them all in their frantic wish to get their hands on more and more. If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is not one sensible reason to be found, nor even any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved, it was not really about drawing minor borderlines; I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had built up during those forty years of peace, and now demanded release. Every state suddenly felt that it was strong, and forgot that other states felt exactly the same; all states wanted even more, and wanted some of what the others already had. The worst of it was that the very thing we loved most, our common optimism, betrayed us, for everyone thought that everyone else would back down at the last minute, and so the diplomats began their game of mutual bluff. In four or five instances, for instance in Agadir and in the Balkan Wars, it was still only a game, but the great coalitions drew closer and closer together and became increasingly militant. Germany introduced a war tax in the middle of peacetime, France extended its term of military service. Finally the accumulated head of steam had to be released. And the weather over the Balkans showed the way the wind was blowing as the clouds approached Europe.

There was no panic yet, but there was a constant sense of smouldering uneasiness; we still felt only slightly uncomfortable when shots rang out from the Balkans. Was war really going to descend on us, when we had no idea why? Slowly—but too slowly, too hesitantly, as we now know—the forces rejecting
war came together. There was the Socialist Party, millions of people on all sides, with a programme opposing war; there were powerful Catholic groups under the leadership of the Pope and several international groups of companies; there were a few reasonable politicians who spoke out against any undercover dealings. We writers also ranged ourselves against war, although as usual we spoke in isolation, expressing ourselves as individuals rather than closing ranks to speak firmly as an organisation. Most intellectuals, unfortunately, adopted an indifferent and passive stance, for our optimism meant that the problem of war, with all its moral consequences, had not yet entered our personal field of vision—you will not find a single discussion of the principles involved, or a single passionate warning, in the major works of the prominent writers of that time. We thought we were doing enough if we thought in European terms and forged fraternal links internationally, stating in our own sphere—which had only indirect influence on current events—that we were in favour of the ideal of peaceful understanding and intellectual brotherhood crossing linguistic and national borders. And the younger generation was more strongly attached than anyone to this European ideal. In Paris, I found my friend Bazalgette surrounded by a group of young people who, in contrast to the older generation, had abjured all kinds of narrow-minded nationalism and imperialist aggression. Jules Romains, who was to write a great work on Europe at war, Georges Duhamel, Charles Vildrac, Durtain, René Arcos,
3
Jean-Richard Bloch, meeting first in the Abbaye and then in the Effort Libre groups, were passionate in their pioneering work for the future unity of Europe, and when put to the crucial test of war, were implacable in their abhorrence of every kind of militarism. These were young people of such courage, talent and moral determination as France has not often produced. In Germany, it was Franz Werfel with his collection of poems entitled
Der Weltfreund
—Friend of the World—who promoted
international fraternity most strongly. René Schickele, an Alsatian whose fate it therefore was to stand between the two opposing nations, worked passionately for understanding; G A Borgese sent us comradely greetings from Italy, and encouragement came from the Scandinavian and Slavonic countries. “Come and visit us!” one great Russian author wrote to me. “Show the pan-Slavists who urge us to go to war that you are against it in Austria!” How we all loved our time, a time that carried us forward on its wings; how we all loved Europe! But that overconfident faith in the future which, we were sure, would avert madness at the last minute, was also our own fault. We had certainly failed to look at the writing on the wall with enough distrust, but should not right-minded young people be trusting rather than suspicious? We trusted Jaurès and the Socialist International, we thought railway workers would blow up the tracks rather than let their comrades be loaded into trains to be sent to the front as cannon fodder; we relied on women to refuse to see their children and husbands sacrificed to the idol Moloch; we were convinced that the intellectual and moral power of Europe would assert itself triumphantly at the critical last moment. Our common idealism, the optimism that had come from progress, meant that we failed to see and speak out strongly enough against our common danger.