The World of Yesterday (36 page)

I
SPENT 1919, 1920 AND 1921
, the three worst post-war years in Austria, buried in Salzburg, almost giving up hope of ever seeing the wider world again. Taken together, the effects of the post-war collapse, hatred in other countries of anyone German or writing in German, and the devaluation of our currency were so catastrophic that we had already reconciled ourselves to the prospect of staying within the narrow borders of our own country for life. But everything was better now. There was enough to eat again. I could sit at my desk undisturbed. There had been no looting, no revolution. I was alive and conscious of my powers. Why shouldn’t I revisit the pleasures of my youth and travel abroad?

A long journey was out of the question. But Italy was close, only eight or ten hours away. Why not make the venture? The Italians considered Austrians their arch-enemies, but I myself had never felt that. Must I accept the likelihood of a hostile reception and feel obliged to ignore my old friends in case I embarrassed them? No, I
would
try it, and at noon one day I crossed the border into Italy.

I arrived in Verona that evening and went to a hotel. The receptionist handed me the registration form, I filled it in. He read what I had entered, and was astonished when, under the heading of ‘Nationality’ he saw the word, ‘
Austriaco
’. “
Lei è Austriaco?
”—You are Austrian? he asked. Was he going to show me the door, I wondered. But when I said yes, he was positively delighted. “
Ah, che piacere! Finalmente!
”—Oh, what a pleasure! At last. That was my welcome to Italy, and further confirmation of
the impression I had gained in the war that all the propaganda and incitement to hatred had caused only a short fit of feverish mental illness, but fundamentally had never touched the great majority of Europeans. A quarter-of-an-hour later the friendly receptionist came up to my room to make sure everything was all right. He praised my Italian enthusiastically, and we shook hands warmly when we parted.

Next day I was in Milan, where I saw the cathedral and wandered through the Galleria.
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It was good to hear the musical sound of the Italian language I loved so much again, to find my way so confidently around all the streets, and enjoy my familiarity with this foreign city. In passing, I saw the words
Corriere della Sera
on one of the large buildings. It suddenly struck me that my old friend G A Borgese held a top post in the editorial offices of that newspaper—Borgese, in whose company I, Count Keyserling, and Benno Geiger had spent many lively evenings in Berlin and Vienna. One of Italy’s best and most impassioned writers, a man with enormous influence on the younger generation, he had adopted a firm stance of opposition to Germany and Austria in the war, even though he had translated Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
and was fanatically enthusiastic about German philosophy. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Mussolini (they fell out later), he had urged the country to fight. All through the war it had been strange for me to think of an old friend as an interventionist on the other side. I wanted to see my ‘enemy’ all the more now. However, I didn’t want to run the risk of a cold dismissal, so I left my card for him, writing the address of my hotel on it. I wasn’t even down the steps when someone came running after me, his lively face beaming with pleasure—it was Borgese himself. Within five minutes we were on the same friendly terms as before, perhaps even friendlier. He too had learnt lessons from the war, and from our respective sides of the conflict we had come closer than ever to each other.

It was the same everywhere. In Florence, my old friend the painter Albert Stringa came up to me in the street to fling his arms around me so suddenly and vigorously that my wife, who was with me and didn’t know him, thought this bearded stranger was planning to assassinate me. Everything was just as it had been, or even better. I breathed a sigh of relief—the war was buried. The war was over.

But it was not over. We just didn’t know it. In our innocent gullibility, we were all deceived, confusing our personal friendly feelings with those of the world. Not that there was any need for us to be ashamed of our mistake, since the politicians, economists and bankers were equally deceived. In those years they, too, thought that deceptive upward trends denoted real recovery and sheer exhaustion was actually satisfaction. In reality the struggle had merely shifted from the national to the social sphere, and in my first few days abroad I witnessed a scene the full significance of which I understood only later. All we knew in Austria about Italian politics at this time was that, with the disappointment of the post-war period, strong socialist and even Bolshevik tendencies had spread. You could see “
Viva Lenin
” scrawled clumsily with charcoal or chalk on every wall. We had also heard that a Socialist leader called Mussolini had left the party during the war and organised some kind of opposition group. But we listened to such news with indifference. What could a small group like that mean? There were similar cliques in every country at the time; irregulars on the move in the Baltic, separatist groups forming in the Rhineland and Bavaria, there were demonstrations and coups everywhere, but they were almost always put down. And it did not occur to anyone to see these ‘Fascists’, who wore black shirts instead of the red shirts of Garibaldi’s old movement, as a significant factor in the future development of Europe.

In Venice, however, the term ‘Fascist’ suddenly assumed real significance for me. It was afternoon, and I was on my
way from Milan to my beloved city of lagoons. There was no porter in sight when I arrived, no gondola. Workmen and railwaymen stood around idle with their hands ostentatiously in their pockets. I was carrying two quite heavy suitcases, so I looked around for help and asked an elderly gentleman where I could find a porter. “You’ve picked a bad day,” he said regretfully. “But we get days like this quite often. There’s another general strike on.” I didn’t know the cause of this strike, but asked no more questions. We were used to these things in Austria, where the Social Democrats, much to their own disadvantage, only too often resorted to that strongest of threats without making effective use of it. So I went on laboriously carrying my cases until at last I saw a gondolier quickly bringing his boat towards me out of a minor canal and giving me a surreptitious wave. He took me and my two suitcases on board. In half-an-hour, after passing several men shaking their fists at strike-breakers, we were at my hotel. It was the most natural thing in the world, an old habit of mine, to go straight to the Piazza San Marco. It looked remarkably deserted. The shutters were down over most of the shop-fronts, there was no one sitting in the cafés, only a large crowd of workers standing under the arcades in isolated groups, as if waiting for something out of the ordinary. I waited with them. And then, suddenly, it came. Out of a side street marched or rather strode, rapidly but keeping in step, a group of young men in good order, singing a well-rehearsed song with words that I didn’t know. Later, I discovered that it was the
Giovinezza
.
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And soon they had passed at their swift pace, swinging batons, before the hundreds of men waiting for them in far superior numbers had time to make a move against their enemy. The audacious and genuinely brave march staged by this small, organised group was all over so quickly that the waiting crowd were aware of the provocation only when there was no chance for them to get to grips with their adversaries. Angrily, they
crowded together, clenching their fists, but it was too late. They could not catch up with the little storm troop.

Visual impressions are always particularly convincing. For the first time, I realised that the now legendary Fascist movement, hardly known to me at all at the time, was something real, very well led, and fanatically supported by determined, bold young men. After that experience, I could not agree with my older friends in Florence and Rome who dismissed these young men as a hired gang, and laughed at their ‘Fra Diavolo’.
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Out of curiosity, I bought several issues of the
Popolo d’Italia,
and from the Latinate brevity of Mussolini’s sharp, graphic style of writing I gained the same impression of determination as I had from those young men briskly marching across the Piazza San Marco. Naturally I could not guess the dimensions this struggle was to assume only a year later. But from then on I was aware that a struggle did lie ahead, here and everywhere, and that the peace of the time was not real peace at all.

To me, that was the first warning that there were dangerous undercurrents beneath the apparently calm surface of Europe. I did not have to wait long for the second. Now that my pleasure in travelling had been revived, I had decided to go to Westerland on the German North Sea coast that summer. At the time it was still good for morale to visit Germany. So far, the German mark had stood its ground well by comparison with the decline of the Austrian crown, and recovery seemed to be going full speed ahead. The trains ran punctually; the hotels shone with cleanliness; you saw new houses and new factories rising on both sides of the railway tracks. The immaculate, silent, well-disciplined order of Germany was back—we had hated it in the pre-war period, and learnt to value it again in the chaos of war. Yes, there was a certain tension in the air, because the whole country was waiting to find out whether, as it hoped, the negotiations in Genoa and Rapallo, the first in which Germany took part on equal terms with the former enemy powers,
would bring any relief from the full burden of war reparations, or at least some small gesture of reconciliation. Heading the German negotiating team on this memorable occasion was my old friend Rathenau. His brilliant organisational instinct had shown to very good effect during the war; right at the start he had identified the weakest spot in the German economy, the place where it later suffered a mortal blow—the supply of raw materials. Ahead of his time as usual, he had organised the entire economy centrally at just the right moment. After the war, when a man who was the equal of the cleverest and most experienced diplomats among the enemy nations had to be found, to put the country’s case as German Foreign Minister, he was the obvious choice.

I telephoned him in Berlin, but with some hesitation. How could I intrude on a man while he was deciding on the course of current events? “Yes, it’s difficult,” he said on the phone. “I even have to sacrifice friendship to duty these days.” But with his extraordinary ability to use every minute to the full, he immediately found a way for us to meet. He had to leave a few visiting cards at various embassies, he said, and as that meant he would have to spend half-an-hour travelling by car from Grunewald, it would be the simplest thing if I came to him and we talked during his half-hour’s drive around the city. His power of intellectual concentration and the astonishing ease with which he switched from one subject to another were so prodigious that he could talk in a car or train at any time as profoundly and incisively as if he were in his own room. I didn’t want to waste the opportunity, and I think it did him good as well to talk to someone who had been a friend of his for years but was not involved in politics. It was a long conversation, and I can vouch for it that Rathenau, who was by no means free of personal vanity, had not accepted his appointment as Foreign Minister lightly, still less with any impatient greed for office. He knew in advance that his task was impossible for the time being, and at
best he would be able to bring home only a token of success, a few minor concessions. A genuine peace, a generous meeting of minds, was too much to hope for just yet. “In ten years’ time, maybe,” he said to me, “always supposing that everyone else is in difficulties as well, not just us. First the older generation must leave the diplomatic path open, and the generals must keep their mouths shut, like monuments in a public square.” He was well aware of the double responsibility he bore, having the added disadvantage of being a Jew. I think that seldom in history can so sceptical a man with so many private reservations have undertaken a task which he knew only time could solve, and he also knew how personally dangerous it was. Since the assassination of Erzberger,
4
who had taken on the thankless task of negotiating the armistice—which Ludendorff avoided by going abroad—he had no doubt that a similar fate lay in wait for him, as another champion of rapprochement. But unmarried and childless as he was, and a loner at heart, he did not shrink from the danger. I did not feel bold enough to urge him to be cautious. It is now seen as a historical fact that Rathenau carried out his mission in Rapallo as well as possible in the circumstances. His brilliant talent for seizing every favourable moment, his sophistication and his personal prestige were never used to better effect. But already certain groups were gaining ground in the country, knowing that they would recruit supporters only if they kept assuring defeated Germany that it had not been defeated after all, and all negotiations and concessions were treasonous. There were already secret associations (with strong homosexual leanings) wielding greater power than was suspected by the new republic’s leaders, whose own ideas of liberty led them to allow all kinds of developments that would have done away with true liberty in Germany for ever.

I said goodbye to him in the city, outside the Ministry, never guessing that it was for the last time. Later, I saw from press photographs that the street down which we had been driving
together was the one where, shortly afterwards, his assassins lay in wait for the same car. It was pure chance that I had not witnessed that historically fateful scene myself, a fact that left me more deeply impressed and emotionally aware than ever of the tragic episode with which the misfortune of Germany and indeed of all Europe began.

I was already in Westerland that day, where hundreds upon hundreds of visitors to the spa resort were on the beach, happily bathing. Once again a band was playing, like the band in Baden on the day when news came of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. The musicians was entertaining a carefree audience enjoying their summer holiday when newspaper vendors came running along the promenade like a flock of stormy petrels, shouting,: “Walther Rathenau assassinated!” Panic broke out, shaking the entire Reich.
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The mark dropped sharply, and there was no stopping it until it fell to fantastic, crazy numbers running into billions. Only now did a real witches’ sabbath of inflation begin, and by comparison our Austrian figures of fifteen thousand crowns falling to the value of one looked like a mere children’s game. I would need a whole book to describe it in all its incredible detail, and that book would sound like a fairy tale to modern readers. There were days when I had to pay fifty thousand marks for a newspaper in the morning and a hundred thousand in the evening; anyone who had to exchange foreign currency did it piecemeal, by the hour, because at four o’clock he would get many more marks than at three, and at five o’clock many more again than sixty minutes earlier. I sent my publisher a manuscript that I had been working on for a year, and I thought I could safely request an immediate advance payment for what ten thousand copies of the book would earn me. Once the sum was transferred to my account, it hardly covered the postage for the parcel a week before. You paid your tram fare in millions of marks, trucks carted paper money from the central Reichsbank to the commercial banks, and two weeks later you could find
banknotes to the value of a hundred thousand marks lying in the gutter, contemptuously tossed aside by a beggar. A shoelace cost more than a shoe in the past, more than a luxury shop with a stock of two thousand pairs of shoes; repairing a broken window was more expensive than building the whole house had once been, while a book cost more than a printing works with hundred of presses before inflation. You could buy whole rows of six-storey buildings on the Kurfürstendamm for a hundred dollars. Convert the sums of money, and factories cost the same as a wheelbarrow in the past. Teenage boys who had found a crate of bars of soap forgotten on the docks drove around in cars and lived like princes for months on end by selling one bar of soap a day, while their parents, who had once been rich, were now reduced to beggary. Deliverymen founded banking houses and speculated in all kinds of foreign currency. Above them all rose the towering figure of the plutocrat Stinnes
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as he made money on the grand scale. Extending his credit by exploiting the fall in the value of the mark, he bought everything there was to be bought, coal mines and ships, factories, blocks of stocks and shares, castles and country estates, in effect paying nothing for them, because no agreement amounted to anything, nor did any debt. Soon a quarter of Germany was in his hands, and strangely enough the Germans, always intoxicated by visible success, hailed him as a genius. Meanwhile, the unemployed stood around in their thousands, shaking their fists at the black-marketeers and foreigners in their flashy cars who would buy up a whole street like a box of matches. Even the barely literate were dealing and speculating now, earning money with the secret feeling that they were all deceiving themselves and being deceived by some hidden hand, cleverly staging a scene of chaos in order to free the state from its debts and obligations. I think I have a fairly good knowledge of history, and never, so far as I know, has madness of such gigantic dimensions been seen. All values were changed, and not just material
values; state decrees were laughed out of court, manners and morals were thrown overboard, Berlin was the worst sink of iniquity in the world. Bars, amusement arcades and shady dives sprang up like mushrooms. What we had seen in Austria was only a mild and gentle prelude to this witches’ sabbath, for the Germans now turned their methodical methods to the cause of perversions. Youths in wasp-waisted coats, their faces made up, promenaded along the Kurfürstendamm, and not all of them were professional rent boys; every grammar-school student wanted to earn something, and state secretaries and prominent financiers could be seen sitting in darkened bars shamelessly courting the favour of drunken sailors. Even the Rome of Suetonius never knew such orgies as those at the transvestites’ balls in Berlin, where hundreds of men in women’s clothing and women dressed like men danced under the benevolent gaze of the police. Amidst the headlong fall of all values, a kind of madness took hold of the bourgeois circles that had so far resisted any change to their well-ordered society. Young girls boasted proudly of perversities; to be suspected of still being a virgin at the age of sixteen would have been thought a disgrace in any Berlin school. Every girl wanted to be able to boast of her adventures, and the more exotic they were the better. But the outstanding feature of this pathetic eroticism was that it was all pretence. At heart, the orgiastic mood that broke out in Germany with inflation was merely feverish imitation; you could tell that these girls from good middle-class families would rather have been wearing their hair neatly parted than slicked back into a masculine style, and would have been happier eating apple cake with whipped cream than drinking spirits. It was impossible not to notice that the whole country was unhappy with this overheated atmosphere, this daily torture on the rack of inflation, nerves stretched to breaking point, or that all the entire war-weary nation really wanted was peace and quiet, good order and a little security. And secretly it hated the new
German Republic, not because the government might suppress some of this wild freedom but, on the contrary, because it held the reins too loosely.