The World of Yesterday (5 page)

We lived well, we lived with light hearts and minds at ease in old Vienna, and the Germans to the north looked down with some annoyance and scorn at us, their neighbours on the Danube who, instead of being capable and efficient like them and observing strict principles of order, indulged themselves, ate well, enjoyed parties and the theatre, and made excellent music on those occasions. Instead of cultivating German efficiency, which finally embittered and destroyed the lives of all other peoples, instead of the greedy will of Germany to rise supreme and forge a way forward, we Viennese loved to chat at our ease; we liked pleasant social gatherings, and in a kindly and perhaps lax spirit of concord we let all have their share without grudging it. ‘Live and let live’ was famous as a Viennese principle, a principle that still seems to me more humane than any categorical imperative, and it reigned supreme in all social circles. Poor and rich, Czechs and Germans, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together in spite of the occasional needling remark, and even political and social movements did not have that terrible spitefulness that eventually made its way
into the bloodstream of the time as a poisonous residue of the First World War. In the old Austria you fought chivalrously; you might complain in the newspapers and parliament, but then the deputies, after delivering their Ciceronian tirades, would sit happily together over coffee or a beer, talking on familiar terms. Even when Lueger, leader of the anti-Semitic party,
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became mayor of the city, nothing changed in private social relationships, and I personally must confess that I never felt the slightest coldness or scorn for me as a Jew either in school, at the university, or in literature. Hatred between country and country, nation and nation, the occupants of one table and those of another, did not yet leap to the eye daily from the newspaper, it did not divide human beings from other human beings, nations from other nations. The herd instinct of the mob was not yet as offensively powerful in public life as it is today; freedom in what you did or did not do in private life was something taken for granted—which is hardly imaginable now—and toleration was not, as it is today, deplored as weakness and debility, but was praised as an ethical force.

For I was not born into a century of passion. It was a well-ordered world with a clear social structure and easy transitions between the parts of that structure, a world without haste. The rhythm of the new speed had not yet transferred itself from machinery, the motor car, the telephone and the aeroplane to humanity. Time and age were judged by different criteria. People lived a more leisurely life, and when I try to picture the figures of the adults who played a large part in my childhood it strikes me how many of them grew stout before their time. My father, my uncle, my teacher, the salesmen in shops, the musicians in the Philharmonic at their music desks were all portly, ‘dignified’ men at the age of forty. They walked slowly, they spoke in measured tones, and in conversation they stroked their well-groomed beards, which were often already grey. But grey hair was only another mark of dignity, and a ‘man of
mature years’ deliberately avoided the gestures and high sprits of youth as something unseemly. Even in my earliest childhood, when my father was not yet forty, I cannot remember ever seeing him run up or down a staircase, or indeed do anything in visible haste. Haste was not only regarded as bad form, it was in fact superfluous, since in that stable bourgeois world with its countless little safeguards nothing sudden ever happened. Those disasters that did take place on the periphery of our world did not penetrate the well-lined walls of our secure life. The Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, even the Balkan Wars did not make any deep impression on my parents’ lives. They skimmed all the war reporting in the paper as indifferently as they looked at the sports headlines. And what, indeed, did anything that happened outside Austria have to do with them, what change did it bring to their lives? In the serene epoch of their Austria, there was no upheaval in the state, no abrupt destruction of their values. Once, when securities fell by four or five points on the stock exchange, it was called a ‘crash’ and discussed with furrowed brow as a catastrophe. People complained of high taxes more out of habit that from any real conviction, and by comparison with those of the post-war period the taxes then were only a kind of little tip you gave the state. The most precise stipulations were laid down in wills for ways to protect grandsons and great-grandsons from any loss of property, as if some kind of invisible IOU guaranteed safety from the eternal powers, and meanwhile people lived comfortably and tended their small worries like obedient domestic pets who were not really to be feared. When an old newspaper from those days happens to fall into my hands, and I read the excitable reports of some small local council election, when I try to remember the plays at the Burgtheater with their tiny problems, or think of the disproportionate agitation of our youthful debates on fundamentally unimportant matters, I cannot help smiling. How Lilliputian all those anxieties were, how serene that time! The
generation of my parents and grandparents was better off, they lived their lives from one end to the other quietly in a straight, clear line. All the same, I do not know whether I envy them. For they drowsed their lives away remote from all true bitterness, from the malice and force of destiny; they knew nothing about all those crises and problems that oppress the heart but at the same time greatly enlarge it. How little they knew, stumbling along in security and prosperity and comfort, that life can also mean excess and tension, constant surprise, can be turned upside down; how little they guessed in their touching liberal optimism that every new day dawning outside the window could shatter human lives. Even in their darkest nights they never dreamt how dangerous human beings can be, or then again how much power they can have to survive dangers and surmount trials. We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.

I
T WAS TAKEN FOR GRANTED
that I would go on from elementary school to grammar school. If only for the sake of social standing, every well-to-do family was anxious to have ‘educated’ sons, who were taught English and French and familiarised with music. First governesses and then tutors were engaged to teach them good manners. But in those days of ‘enlightened’ liberalism, only an education regarded as academic and leading to university really counted, and as a result it was the ambition of every ‘good’ family for at least one son to have some kind of doctoral degree. The path to university was rather a long one, and by no means a bed of roses. You had to spend five to six hours a day sitting on the wooden school bench for five years of elementary school and eight of grammar school. In your free time you did homework, and in addition you had to master the subjects required for ‘general culture’ outside school: the living languages of French, English and Italian, classical Greek and Latin—that is to say, five languages in all as well as geometry, physics, and the other school subjects. It was more than too much, leaving almost no time for physical exercise, sporting activities, walking, and above all none for light-hearted amusements. I vaguely remember that at the age of seven we had to learn by heart some ditty about “happy, blissful childhood days” and sing it in chorus. I can still hear the tune of this simple, naive little song, but even at the time I could hardly bring myself to utter the words, and still less was my heart convinced of their message. For if I am to be honest, my entire school career was
nothing but a constant surfeit of tedium, increased yearly by my impatience to escape this treadmill. I don’t recollect ever having felt either ‘happy’ or ‘blissful’ during that monotonous, heartless, dismal schooling, which thoroughly spoilt the happiest days of our lives, and I will confess that even today I cannot resist a certain envy when I see how much happier, freer, and more independent childhood can be in the present century. It still strikes me as incredible that children today will talk to their teachers naturally, almost on a par with them, and that they hurry to school free of fear, instead of with our old constant sense of inadequacy. At school and at home today’s children are often allowed to express the preferences and wishes of their young, inquisitive hearts openly—they are free, independent, natural creatures, while as soon as we entered the hated school building we had to keep our heads down, so to speak, to avoid coming up against the invisible yoke of servitude. School, to us, meant compulsion, dreary boredom, a place where you had to absorb knowledge of subjects that did not seem worth knowing, sliced into neat portions. This was scholastic material, or material made to seem scholastic, which we felt could have no connection with any real interests of our own. The old style of teaching meant a dull, dreary kind of learning for the mere sake of learning, not for the sake of life. And the one real moment of elation for which I have to thank my school was the day when I closed its doors behind me for ever.

Not that our Austrian schools need necessarily have been bad in themselves. Far from it; the curriculum had been carefully devised on the basis of a hundred years of experience, and if inspiringly taught could have laid the foundations of a fruitful all-round cultural education. But the very fact that it was taught according to a dry-as-dust plan made the lessons themselves dry and lifeless, a cold apparatus of learning that was never adjusted to the individual and, like an automaton programmed to recite the terms ‘good, satisfactory, unsatisfactory’, showed only how
far we met the demands of the curriculum. It was this lack of human feeling, this sober impersonality and the barracks-like atmosphere about the whole process that subconsciously embittered us. We had our allotted quota of work to learn, and we were tested on what we had learnt; through the whole eight years of our secondary education no teacher ever asked what we personally wanted to learn, and the encouraging stimulation that is just what every young person secretly longs for was entirely lacking.

This sobriety was expressed even outwardly in the school building, a typically functional place erected hastily, thoughtlessly and on the cheap fifty years earlier. With its cold, poorly whitewashed walls, its low-ceilinged classrooms without pictures or any other kind of ornament to please the eye, and the smell of the lavatories that pervaded the whole building, this educational barracks was rather like an old piece of hotel furniture that had been used by countless people before us, and would be used by countless others with equal indifference or reluctance. To this day I have not forgotten the musty, mouldy odour clinging to that building, as it does to all Austrian official institutions. We described it as the ‘treasury smell’, a reek of overheated, overcrowded rooms. It settled first on your clothes and then on your soul. We sat in pairs, like convicts in their galley, on low wooden benches that made us bend our backs, and we sat there until our bones ached. In winter the bluish light of open gas flames flickered over our books, while in summer the windows were covered, in case we were to enjoy gazing wistfully at a small square of blue sky. The century of our youth had not yet discovered that young, still-developing bodies need fresh air and exercise. Ten minutes’ break in the cold, narrow corridor were considered sufficient in the space of four or five hours of sitting still. Twice a week we were taken to the gym, where all the windows were carefully closed, to run around pointlessly on the wooden floorboards, from which dust rose high in the air at
every step. That was enough to ensure hygiene, and meant that the state had done its duty to us in the cause of promoting
mens sana in corpore sano
. Passing the gloomy, dismal building even years later, I felt relieved to know that I no longer had to set foot in the dungeon of our youth, and when the fiftieth anniversary of that illustrious institution was celebrated, and as a former star pupil I was asked to deliver a speech on the occasion before the Minister of Education and the Mayor, I politely declined. I had no reason to be grateful to the school, and anything I said to that effect would have been a lie.

Our teachers were not to blame for the dreariness of school life. They were neither good nor bad, they were not tyrants, but on the other hand nor were they helpful companions—they were merely poor devils who, bound like slaves to the set pattern of the officially ordained curriculum, had to do their quota of work just as we had to do ours, and—as we clearly perceived—were as glad as we were when the school bell rang at midday, setting both them and us free. They didn’t like us, they didn’t hate us, and why should they? They knew nothing about us; after a couple of years they still knew very few of us by name, and in the spirit of the teaching methods of the time they had nothing to bother about apart from establishing how many mistakes a pupil had made in his last piece of homework. They sat raised above us at the schoolmaster’s lectern, we sat down below; they asked questions and we had to answer. There was no other connection between us. For between teachers and students, the schoolmaster’s lectern and the students’ bench, visibly representing Above and Below respectively, stood the invisible barrier of authority preventing any contact. At the time it would have been beyond both a teacher’s competence and his ability to consider a pupil as an individual whose particular qualities called for special attention, nor did he have to write reports on his work, which is taken for granted today, while on the other hand a private conversation would have
diminished the teacher’s standing, because it would have put us as pupils too much on the same level as a man set in authority over us. Nothing, to my mind, is more characteristic of the total lack of mental and intellectual connection between us and our teachers than the fact that I have forgotten all their names and faces. My memory retains, with photographic clarity, images of the schoolmaster’s lectern and the class register, which we always tried to squint at because it contained our marks; I see the little red notebook in which categories were marked out, and the short black pencil entering our results; I see my own exercise books sprinkled with the teacher’s corrections in red ink, but I can no longer conjure up the face of a single one of our mentors—perhaps because we always stood in front of them with our heads down or our eyes wandering elsewhere.

This dislike of school was not just my personal attitude; I can’t remember one of my school friends who did not hate the way in which our best interests and intentions were inhibited, bored and suppressed on the scholastic treadmill. Only much later did I realise that negligence on the part of the state authorities was not to blame for this loveless, soulless method of educating the young, but that it expressed a definite if carefully concealed intention: the world ahead of us, or set in authority over us, with its mind entirely bent on its fetish of security, did not like young people, or rather it habitually distrusted them. Proud of its systematic ‘progress’ and good order, bourgeois society extolled leisurely moderation in all aspects of life as the sole effective human virtue; any haste in leading us forward was to be avoided. Austria was an old state ruled by an old emperor, governed by old ministers, a state that, having no ambition, hoped only to preserve itself intact by rejecting all radical changes in Europe. Young people, who instinctively always want such swift and radical changes, were therefore regarded as a suspect element that had to be neutralised or kept down as long as possible. So there was no reason to make our schooldays
pleasant for us; we could earn any rise in the world only by waiting patiently. When everything was constantly being put off in this way, the meaning of age was quite different from what it is today. A grammar-school boy of eighteen was treated like a child, punished if he was caught smoking a cigarette, had to put up a docile hand if he wanted to leave his place in class to answer the call of nature. Even a man of thirty was still considered immature, and a forty-year-old was not yet regarded as ready for a position of responsibility. When there was once an astonishing exception, and Gustav Mahler was appointed director of the Court Opera at the age of thirty-eight, horrified murmurs of astonishment ran through the whole of Vienna at the notion of entrusting the highest artistic institution in the country to ‘such a young man’ (no one stopped to think that Mozart had completed all his works at the age of thirty-six, and Schubert his at thirty-one). At the time this distrust of any young person as ‘not quite reliable’ was rife in all circles of society. My father would never have taken a young man into his business, and anyone unfortunate enough to look particularly young had to overcome suspicion wherever he went. Almost incredible as it may seem today, youth was an obstacle in every profession, only age was an advantage. While in today’s entirely different atmosphere men of forty will try hard to look as if they were thirty, and sixty-year-olds to look forty, while these days youth, energy, drive and self-confidence are a recommendation, in that age of security anyone who wanted to get ahead in life had to try all conceivable methods of looking older than his age. Newspapers advertised methods of encouraging your beard to grow, young doctors of twenty-four or twenty-five who had only just qualified as physicians sported heavy beards and wore gold-rimmed glasses even if they had perfect eyesight, just to impress their patients by looking experienced. They wore long, black frock coats and cultivated a measured tread and, if possible, a slight embonpoint in order to achieve that desirably staid
appearance, and if they were ambitious they took a good deal of trouble to dissociate themselves from the suspect immaturity of youth, at least in their outward appearance. In our sixth and seventh years at school we ourselves refused to carry the school satchels that branded us schoolboys, and carried briefcases instead. All that now appears enviable—the freshness of youth, its self-confidence, daring, curiosity and lust for life—was suspect at that time, which set store solely on all that was well established.

Only that odd attitude can explain the way the state exploited its schools as an instrument for maintaining its authority. Above all, we were to be brought up to respect the status quo as perfect, our teachers’ opinions as infallible, a father’s word as final, brooking no contradiction, and state institutions as absolute and valid for all eternity. A second cardinal principle of educational theory, one that was also adopted in the family, was that young people should not have too easy a time. Before they were allowed rights of any kind they were supposed to learn that they had duties, above all the duty of total obedience. From the first it was to be impressed upon us that we had not yet done anything in life, we had no experience, we must be grateful for anything we were allowed, and we had no right to ask questions or make demands. In my day, this stupid method of intimidation was applied from early childhood on. Maidservants and silly mothers would terrify children of three or four by threatening to fetch ‘the policeman’ if they didn’t stop being naughty at once. Even as grammar-school boys, if we brought home a bad mark in some unimportant subject we were threatened with being taken away from school and sent to learn a trade—returning to the proletariat being the worst threat imaginable in bourgeois society—and if young people, in an honest desire for education, sought enlightenment from adults on the serious problems of the day, they were fobbed off with a lofty, “You wouldn’t understand that yet”. This technique was used everywhere—at
home, at school, by the state. It was always being impressed on a boy that he was not grown up yet, didn’t understand anything, had no option but to listen, believing all he was told, although he must never join in a discussion himself, let alone contradict anyone. For the same reason the poor devil of a teacher at his high lectern at school was to remain unapproachable and aloof, restricting all our thoughts and endeavours to the curriculum. It made no difference whether we were happy at school or not. The sole purpose of school in the spirit of those times was not so much to bring us on as to hold us back, not to help us to shape our minds but to fit us into the established mould with as little resistance as possible, not to enhance our energies but to discipline them and level them out.