The World of Yesterday (48 page)

Those days, when appeals for help cried out from our native land, when you knew your close friends were being taken away, tortured and humiliated, and you trembled for every helpless soul you loved, were among the most terrible of my life. And I am not ashamed to say—for a time like that perverts our hearts so much—that I was not horrified or plunged into grief when news came of the death of my old mother, who had been left behind in Vienna. On the contrary, I even felt a kind of relief to know that now she was safe from any suffering and danger. Aged eighty-four, almost stone deaf, she had been living in an apartment that was part of our family home, so that for the time being she could not be dislodged from it even under the new Aryan laws, and we had hoped to be able to bring her out of Austria in some way or other after a while. One of the first decrees issued for Vienna had hit her hard. At eighty-four she was not good on her legs, and when she took her little daily constitutional, after five or ten minutes’ walking with some difficulty she used to sit down and rest on a bench beside the Ringstrasse or in the park. Hitler had not been master of the city for a week before brutal orders were given that no Jew must sit on any public bench—one of those prohibitions obviously and exclusively designed for the sadistic purpose of maliciously tormenting people. For there was some kind of logic and perceptible point in robbing Jews, since the Nazis could feed their own forces and pay their hangers-on with the proceeds of the loot they had taken from factories, dwelling houses, villas, and other places now vacated. After all, Goering’s picture gallery owes its splendours mainly to that practice, in his case exerted on the grand scale. But forbidding an old lady or an exhausted elderly gentleman to rest for a couple of minutes on
a bench was an idea reserved for the twentieth century and the man adored by millions as the greatest of his age.

Fortunately my mother was spared long experience of such brutal humiliation. She died a few months after the occupation of Vienna, and I cannot refrain from recording an incident connected with her death. It seems to me important to mention such details for the benefit of posterity, who will surely consider these things impossible. My mother, aged eighty-four, was found unconscious one morning. The doctor who was called in said at once that she was unlikely to live through the next night, and found a nurse, a woman of about forty, to stay beside her deathbed. Neither my brother nor I, her only children, were in the city, and of course we couldn’t come back; even returning to see our dying mother would have been considered a crime by the representatives of German culture. A cousin said he would spend the evening there, so that at least one of the family was with her when she died. This cousin of ours was a man of sixty at the time, not in good health himself, and in fact he died a year later. When he began improvising himself a bed for the night in the next room, the nurse came in and said—to her credit, looking ashamed of it—that under the new German laws she was afraid that meant she couldn’t stay with her patient overnight. My cousin was Jewish, and as a woman under fifty she wasn’t allowed to spend a night under the same roof as a Jew, even to care for a dying woman. By the standards of the Streicher mentality, any Jew’s first thought was bound to be to commit an act of ‘racial disgrace’ with her.
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Of course, she said, this prohibition was terribly embarrassing to her, but she was obliged to obey the law. So my sixty-year-old cousin had to leave the apartment that evening, just to enable the nurse to stay with my dying mother. It will perhaps be understandable that I thought my mother lucky not to have to live among such people any longer.

The fall of Austria brought a change in my private life which at first seemed to me entirely unimportant, a mere formality. I lost my Austrian passport and had to apply to the British authorities for a white substitute document, a passport for a stateless person. In my cosmopolitan reveries I had often secretly thought what a fine thing it would be, how very much in accordance with my own feelings, to be stateless, owing no obligation to any country and for that very reason belonging to them all without distinction. But yet again I was forced to recognise how inadequate the human imagination is, since we understand our strongest feelings only when we have suffered them in person. Ten years earlier, when I happened to meet Dmitri Merezhkovsky in Paris and he was bewailing the fact that his books were banned in Russia, I had tried to console him—rather thoughtlessly, given my own inexperience—by making light of that fact, which was as nothing compared to their distribution all over the world. I understood his grief that his words could now appear only in translation, in a changed and diluted medium, much better when my own books disappeared from the German language. And only at the moment when, after some time spent in the applicants’ waiting room, I was admitted to the British office dealing with these matters, did I really understand what exchanging my passport for a document describing me as an alien meant. I had had a right to my Austrian passport. It had been the duty of every Austrian consular official or police officer to issue it to me as an Austrian citizen with full civil rights. But I had had to ask for the favour of receiving this English document issued to me as an alien, and it was a favour that could be withdrawn at any time. Overnight I had gone down another step in the social scale. Yesterday I had still been a foreign guest with something of the status of a gentleman, spending his internationally earned money here and paying his taxes, but now I was an emigrant, a refugee. I had been placed in a lower although not dishonourable category. From now on
I also had to ask specially for every foreign visa stamped on that sheet of white paper, since all countries were suspicious of the kind of person I had suddenly become, without rights or a native land, someone who could be turned out at will and deported back to his birthplace if he was a nuisance or outstayed his welcome. I kept thinking of something a Russian exile had said to me years before: “A man used to have only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport too, or he won’t be treated as a man.”

And indeed, perhaps nothing more graphically illustrates the monstrous relapse the world suffered after the First World War than the restrictions on personal freedom of movement and civil rights. Before 1914 the earth belonged to the entire human race. Everyone could go where he wanted and stay there as long as he liked. No permits or visas were necessary, and I am always enchanted by the amazement of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I travelled to India and America without a passport. Indeed, I had never set eyes on a passport. You boarded your means of transport and got off it again, without asking or being asked any questions; you didn’t have to fill in a single one of the hundred forms required today. No permits, no visas, nothing to give you trouble; the borders that today, thanks to the pathological distrust felt by everyone for everyone else, are a tangled fence of red tape were then nothing but symbolic lines on the map, and you crossed them as unthinkingly as you can cross the meridian in Greenwich. It was not until after the war that National Socialism began destroying the world, and the first visible symptom of that intellectual epidemic of the present century was xenophobia—hatred or at least fear of foreigners. People were defending themselves against foreigners everywhere; they were kept out of everywhere. All the humiliations previously devised solely for criminals were now inflicted on every traveller before and during a journey. You had to be photographed from right and left, in profile and full face, hair cut short enough to
show your ears; you had to have fingerprints taken—first just your thumbs, then all ten digits; you had to be able to show certificates—of general health and inoculations—papers issued by the police certifying that you had no criminal record; you had to be able to produce documentary proof of recommendations and invitations, with addresses of relatives; you had to have other documents guaranteeing that you were of good moral and financial repute; you had to fill in and sign forms in triplicate or quadruplicate, and if just one of this great stack of pieces of paper was missing you were done for.

All this seems petty, and at first glance it may seem petty of me to mention it at all. But this pointless pettiness has cost our generation a great deal of valuable and irretrievable time. When I work out how many forms I have filled in over the last few years—declarations before making any journey, tax returns, certificates of foreign exchange, forms made out for crossing borders, applications for permits to stay in a country and travel out of it, registration forms for arrival and departure—when I think how many hours I have spent in the waiting rooms of consulates and government offices, facing officials friendly and unfriendly, bored or over-stressed; when I think of the time taken being searched and questioned at border crossing points, only then do I realise how much human dignity has been lost in this century. When we were young we dreamt of it trustingly as a century of liberty and the advent of an era of international citizenship. So much of our productivity, creativity and thought has been wasted by this unproductive and simultaneously soul-destroying fretfulness! Every single one of us has studied more official regulations than books to nurture the mind in these years. Your introduction to a foreign city or a foreign country was no longer, as it used to be, by way of its museums or its scenery, but through getting a permit at a consulate or police station. When we were together—and by ‘we’ I mean those of us who used to discuss the poetry of Baudelaire and hold
impassioned conversations on intellectual problems—we found ourselves talking about affidavits and permits, and whether to apply for a long-term visa or a tourist visa. In the last decade, knowing a girl who works in a consulate and can cut the waiting time short has been more crucially important than the friendship of someone like Toscanini or Rolland. We have been constantly made to feel that we might have been born free, but we were now regarded as objects, not subjects, and nothing was our right but was merely a favour granted by the authorities. We have been repeatedly questioned, registered, issued with numbers, searched, rubber-stamped, and today, incorrigible representative of a freer age that I am, the would-be citizen of a world republic, I regard every one of those rubber stamps in my passport as a brand, all those questionings and searches as demeaning. Yes, all these things are petty, mere pettiness, I know it, pettiness in a time when the value of human life has fallen even faster than the value of currencies. But only if we record these little symptoms will a later world be able to make a correct diagnosis of the circumstances and intellectual devastation of the world we knew between the two world wars.

Perhaps I had been over-indulged in the old days. Perhaps my sensitivity was gradually over-exacerbated by the abrupt reversals of the last few years. Every form of emigration inevitably, of its nature, tends to upset your equilibrium. You lose—and this too has to be experienced to be understood—you lose something of your upright bearing if you no longer have the soil of your own land beneath your feet; you feel less confident, more distrustful of yourself. And I do not hesitate to confess that since the day when I first had to live with papers or passports essentially foreign to me, I have not felt that I entirely belong to myself any more. Something of my natural identity has been destroyed for ever with my original, real self. I have become less outgoing than really suits me, and today I—the former cosmopolitan—keep feeling as if I had to offer special
thanks for every breath of air that I take in a foreign country, thus depriving its own people of its benefit. If I think about it clearly, of course I know that is absurd, but when has reason ever had the upper hand of your own feelings? It has not been any help that for almost half-a-century I trained my heart to beat as the heart of a citizen of the world. On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders.

But I was not alone in this sense of insecurity. Unrest gradually began spreading all over Europe. The political horizon had been dark since the day Hitler marched into Austria, and those in Britain who had secretly prepared the way for him, hoping that would buy peace for their own country, began having second thoughts. From 1938 onwards every conversation in London, Paris, Rome, Brussels, in any town or village, far removed as it might initially seem from the subject, led to the inevitable question of whether and how war could be avoided or at least postponed. Looking back at all those months of the constant and growing fear of war in Europe, I remember only two or three days of real confidence, two or three days when I felt once more, and for the last time, that the clouds would pass over, and we would be able to breathe freely and in peace again. Perversely, those two or three days were the very ones that are now described as the most fateful in recent history—the days when Chamberlain and Hitler met in Munich.

I know that no one now likes to be reminded of that meeting, when Chamberlain and Daladier, with their backs to the wall and helpless, caved in to Hitler and Mussolini. But as I am trying to present the facts of the matter here, I must admit that everyone who lived through those three days in England felt that they were wonderful while they lasted. The situation
at the end of September 1938 was dire. Chamberlain was just back from his second flight to see Hitler, and a few days later we knew what had happened. He had gone to Godesberg to grant Hitler, without reservation, everything that Hitler had previously demanded of him in Berchtesgaden. But what had seemed adequate to Hitler a few weeks earlier was no longer enough to satisfy his hysterical lust for power. The policy of appeasement and the principle of ‘try, try and try again’ had failed miserably; the epoch of trust and confidence came to an end in Britain overnight. Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Europe as a whole had to choose between bowing to Hitler’s will for power or taking up arms against him, with no other option. Britain seemed determined to fight. The country’s rearmament was not being hushed up any longer, but was shown openly, even ostentatiously. Workmen suddenly appeared and began digging in the London parks—Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, right opposite the German Embassy—building shelters for the air raids that were expected. The navy was mobilised; officers of the general staff kept flying between Paris and London to ensure that France and Britain coordinated their final preparations. Ships bound for America were besieged by foreigners wanting to get to safety in good time. Britain had not been so much on the alert since 1914. People were visibly more serious and thoughtful. You looked at the buildings and the crowded railway stations wondering, secretly, whether bombs would be dropping on them next day. And Londoners stood and sat behind closed doors to listen to the radio news. Invisibly, yet perceptibly in everyone at every moment, there was great tension throughout the country.