The World of Yesterday (35 page)

Yet in spite of everything I would find it hard to explain to anyone how our poor, plundered, unhappy country did survive at that time. To our right was Bavaria, where a Communist Republic of People’s Councils was now governing, to the left Hungary had turned Bolshevik under Béla Kun,
4
and it still seems to me astonishing that revolution did not also spread to Austria. There was no shortage of explosive material to set it off. Demobilised soldiers walked the streets half-starved, in torn clothes, looking bitterly at the shameless luxury in which war profiteers lived and at the results of inflation; a battalion of Red Guards was already drawn up and armed in the barracks, and there was no well-organised opposition. Two hundred determined men could have seized power over Vienna and the whole of Austria at that time. But nothing too drastic happened. Only once did an ill-disciplined group try a coup, and it was easily countered by four or five dozen armed police officers. So the miraculous became reality—this impoverished country, cut off from its former factories, coal mines and oilfields, its now worthless paper currency falling like an avalanche, asserted
itself. Perhaps that was even due to its weakness, because the people were too enfeebled and hungry to fight for anything, or perhaps it was because of the characteristic, secret strength of the Austrians, their innate tendency to be conciliating. For in this darkest hour, and in spite of their deep differences, the two main political parties, Social Democrats and Christian Socialists, came together in a coalition government. Each made concessions to the other to prevent a catastrophe that would have carried all Europe away with it. Slowly, conditions began to consolidate, some kind of order imposed itself, and to our own surprise an incredible thing happened—the mutilated state went on existing, and later was even ready to defend its independence when Hitler came to carry off the soul of this loyal nation, ready as it had bravely been to make sacrifices in its time of deprivation.

But radical upheaval was averted only outwardly and in the political sense; in the minds of the people a huge revolution took place in those first post-war years. Something had been crushed along with the armies—a belief in the infallibility of those authorities to which my generation had been brought up to be so subservient in our youth. But how could the Germans go on admiring their Kaiser, a man who had sworn to fight “to the last breath drawn by man and horse”, and then escaped over the border under cover of night and fog? Or their army commanders and politicians, or the writers who kept writing their patriotic verses, still rhyming
Not
with
Tod
and
Krieg
with
Sieg
?
5
Only now, as the gunpowder smoke over the country dispersed, was the full terrible extent of the devastation inflicted by the war visible. How could moral commandments be considered still in force, when for four years murder and robbery had been committed in the name of heroism and the necessity of requisitions? How could a nation believe the promises of a state that simply annulled all its duty to its citizens when it liked? And now the same people, the same clique of old, allegedly
experienced men, had outdone themselves, compounding the folly of the war by patching up a botched peace. Everyone knows now—and a few of us knew at the time—that the peace following the Great War had presented one of the greatest moral opportunities of history, if not
the
greatest. Wilson had known it. With far-ranging vision, he had sketched out a plan for true and enduring international understanding. But the old generals, the old statesmen, the old interests had mangled his great idea, tearing it into little scraps of paper. The great and sacred promise made to millions that this was the war to end wars, the one thing that had brought the soldiers, desperate, half-exhausted and already half-disillusioned, to draw on their last reserves of strength, was cynically sacrificed to the interests of the munitions manufacturers and the gambling of politicians, who triumphantly rescued their old, fateful tactics of secret treaties and negotiations behind closed doors from Wilson’s wise and humane demands. In so far as the eyes of the world were open, it saw that it had been betrayed. The mothers who had sacrificed their children were betrayed, so were the soldiers who came home as beggars, all those who had patriotically contributed to the war loan, everyone who had believed in the promises of the state. All of us who had dreamt of a new and better world, and now saw the old game, on which our lives, our happiness, our time and our possessions were staked, about to begin again, played by the same gamblers or new ones—we had all been betrayed. No wonder a whole young generation looked bitterly and scornfully at their fathers, who had allowed themselves to be deprived first of victory and then of peace, who had done everything wrong, had foreseen nothing, and had made the wrong calculations in every respect. Was it not understandable for the new generation to feel no respect whatsoever for their elders? None of these young people believed their parents, the politicians or their teachers. Every state decree or proclamation was read with distrust. The
post-war generation emancipated itself, with a sudden, violent reaction, from all that had previously been accepted. It turned its back on all tradition, determined to take its fate into its own hands, moving forcefully away from the old past and on into the future. An entirely new world, a different order, was to begin with these young people in every area of life, and of course it all started with wild exaggeration. Anyone or anything not their own age was finished, out-of-date, done for. Instead of going away on holiday with their parents, children of eleven and twelve went hiking through the countryside in the
Wandervögel
6
groups—organised and well-instructed in sexual matters—reaching Italy and the North Sea. Schools councils on the Russian model were set up, with young people keeping a sharp eye on the teachers and making their own changes to the curriculum, because children wanted to learn only what they liked. There was rebellion, purely for the fun of rebelling against everything once accepted, even against the natural order and the eternal difference between the sexes. Girls had their hair cut in such short bobs that they could not be told from boys; young men shaved off their beards to look more like girls. Homosexuality and lesbianism were very much in fashion, not a result of a young person’s instinctive drives but in protest against all the old traditional, legal and moral kinds of love. Every form of expression, of course including art, tried to be as radical and revolutionary as possible. The new painters declared everything done by Rembrandt, Holbein and Velázquez out of date, and embarked on the wildest of Cubist and Surrealist experiments. In every field, what could be understood was poorly esteemed—melody in music, a good likeness in portraiture, clarity in language. The definite article was omitted, sentence structure reversed, everything was written in abbreviated, telegraphese style, with excitable exclamations—and in addition all literature that was not ‘activist’, meaning based on political theory, was thrown on the garbage heap. Music persistently strove
for a new tonality, splitting up the notes; architecture turned buildings inside out; in dance, Cuban and black American rhythms replaced the waltz; fashion, emphasising nudity, came up with more and more absurdities;
Hamlet
was acted in modern dress and tried to express explosive drama. A period of wild experimentation began in all fields of art, in an attempt to overtake all that had ever been done in the past in a single mighty bound. The younger you were and the less you had learnt, the more your freedom from tradition was welcomed—ultimately, this was youth triumphantly working off its grudge against the parental generation. But in the midst of this hectic carnival, nothing seemed to me a more tragi-comic spectacle than the way many intellectuals of the older generation, panic-stricken at the idea of being outstripped and considered outdated, aped an artificial wildness with desperate haste, trying to limp along and keep up with the most obvious deviations from the norm. Staid, grey-haired professors at the art academies added symbolic cubes and dice to their now unsaleable still lifes, because young curators—you had to be young now, the younger the better—were clearing all other pictures out of the galleries and putting them into store, on the grounds that they were too neoclassical. Authors who had written in good, clear German for years chopped up their sentences and went to extremes of ‘activism’; stout Prussians proudly bearing the honorary title of Privy Councillor lectured on Karl Marx; former court ballerinas danced half-naked with strange contortions to Beethoven’s
Appassionata
sonata or Schönberg’s
Verklärte Nacht.
Everywhere, old age frantically pursued the latest fashion. Suddenly all that mattered was your desire to be young, promptly following up yesterday’s latest topical trend with one even more topical, more radical and unprecedented.

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 Welt
7
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.