Cultural Amnesia (37 page)

He was a bit like that. There was always a naivety underlying what he knew. An unquenchable naivety is
part of an artist’s power, and that Freud was an artist should never be in doubt: he was one of the great prose writers in German, which would be worth learning to read for him alone. But
his naivety had a way of coming to the surface even in his most subtly elaborate formulations. He thought there was something psychologically wrong with his rich female Viennese patients who did
not want to sleep with their husbands. Schnitzler’s writings would have taught him better if he had known how to read them. Schnitzler’s writings should also have told him about the
potential danger to the Jews. But Freud, the master psychologist, was not equipped to receive the message. Freud took holidays at Berchtesgaden without being much troubled by the demeanour of
some of its newer visitors. Stefan Zweig, who had a house in Salzburg from which the activities in Berchtesgaden could be observed, was less confident. With the top Nazis in plain sight, Zweig
guessed what was coming all too well, but if he ever told Freud, Freud didn’t take it in. Freud’s sensitivity to his fellow masters of prose was at the level of the ego. When Thomas
Mann published a testimonial piece about Freud’s scientific achiev-ment, Freud was miffed to note that it was really a tribute to his literary style, with the stuff about science tacked on
at the top and tail. He was sensitive enough on that level. But he was cut off from the cultural information that the writers were providing as the situation in Europe steadily deteriorated. He
would have been more likely to view them as neurotic. His attention was focused on personalities and their individual neuroses, not on politics and its collective disease. The real psychodrama
was too big for him to see.

He could have escaped so much sooner, and from exile he could have saved all his relatives in good time. There would have
been no financial problems: from the beginning of the post-war inflation, he had always based his finances on the hard currency brought in by foreign patients. Moving to where the patients were
would have boosted his income. Leaving early would have been a better way for him to love
Vienna. Alas, he seems to have believed that the Nazi irrationality was just one more
instance of the destructive impulse like any other, and could be contained in balance with the impulses to order, continuity and creativity. (At a meeting in his Hampstead house, I once heard a
letter of his quoted in which he said, months after he had reached safety, that the Catholic Church would probably be able to sort the whole matter out.) He never grasped that Nazi
destructiveness was a complete mind in itself. Surely he was the victim of his own poetry, which was so vivid that he took it to be a map of reality. From the realm of the human spirit he had
banished God and the Devil, and replaced them with a family of contending deities bearing proud Greek names. They were household gods: aided by judicious therapy, they would one way or another
always reach an accommodation, in a world where people like his old sisters, even if they were not happy, would die in bed. But the Devil came back. The Devil had never been away.

EGON FRIEDELL

Egon Friedell (1878–1938), a student of natural sciences who graduated to the twin status of
cabaret star and polymath, was a figure unparalleled even in Vienna, where there were several learned cabaret artists and even a few funny polymaths, but nobody else who could be both those
things on such an heroic scale. To think of an equivalent in an English-speaking context is impossible: you would have to imagine a combination of George Saintsbury, Aldous Huxley, Peter
Ustinov, Kenneth Clark and Isaiah Berlin. Translated into English in 1930, the three-volume set of his
Cultural History of the Modern Age
was such a
publishing disaster that it simply vanished. Today it can be obtained only from a dealer in rare books. In the original German, however,
Kulturgeschichte der
Neuzeit
turns up second-hand all over the world, because it was a talisman for the emigration: the refugees took it with them even though, in its usual format of three volumes on thick
paper, it weighed more than a brick. Of the several copies I own, the most beautifully printed, which I bought in Buenos Aires in 2000, was put out as a single volume on thin paper by Phaidon
Press in London in 1947, for export back to the newly democractic Germany and Austria. (Phaidon also ensured that the book’s
unfinished companion piece
Kulturgeschichte des Altertums
—
The Cultural History of the Ancient World
—was published with fitting splendour.)
The scholars and book lovers of the emigration gave Friedell’s capital work a context, which could be picked up on by the German publishers after the war. I own three copies of the
handsome, single-volume post-war edition put out by Beck. My intention was to use one of them as a workbench, and put into its endpapers the notes that have gone into this book. But I ended
up defacing my beautiful Phaidon edition, perhaps guessing in advance that my graffiti would be labours of love. It’s that kind of book: it makes you feel civilized. The best
explanation for Friedell’s continued presence in the German-speaking countries, and his absence everywhere else, is that they needed him. His writings give the comforting illusion that
the historical accumulation of knowledge makes some kind of steadily increasing, and therefore irreversible, sense. He himself might have thought differently by the time of the
Anschluß
, when he anticipated his inevitable arrest by jumping out of his window, calling a warning as he descended: a cry whose lingering echo contains an
era, with all its promise of a just world, and the despair of that world cruelly lost.

Of all the good wishes I received for my fiftieth birthday, it
was yours that delighted me most.

—EGON FRIEDELL, QUOTED BY
FRIEDRICH TORBERGIN
Die Tante Jolesch
, P. 195

E
GON FRIEDELL’S
POLITE
message doesn’t sound witty at all until you are supplied with the information that it was sent as a printed card. The recipients must have loved it. You can imagine them
considering themselves members of an exclusive club for the rest of their lives. A lot of Viennese wit was like that: shared jokes that travelled in a collective memory, and often didn’t
get into print until a long time later. Friedrich Torberg’s retro-guide
Die Tante Jolesch
(Aunt Jolesch) is full of such moments, all recorded after
the war, when the
Anschluß
, the deportations, the mass murder and the rigours of exile had trimmed the cast of characters to a
random few. (One of them, the publisher Lord Weidenfeld, put me on to
Die Tante Jolesch
: like Alfred Brendel, he never sent me away from a conversation
without a reading list.) The minor Hungarian literatus Friedrich Karinthy has vanished into obscurity but his eternal question remains unanswered: “What can you make out of a day that
starts with getting out of bed?” Ferenc Molnár, the internationally successful playwright, had an acute business sense to go with his enviably marketable talent, but he was much put
upon by women. When he and his ex-wife, the actress Sari Fedak, were both in American exile, she traded on his name by billing herself as Sari Fedak-Molnár. He published a brief but
effective newspaper advertisement declaring that the woman calling herself Sari Fedak-Molnár was not his mother.

Molnár’s quietly delivered bombshells always dug in deep before they went off. One famous
compulsive fabulist, the Jeffrey Archer of his time, never recovered what was left of his credibility after Molnár said: “He’s such a liar that not even the opposite is
true.” As happens in any literary circle, some of the Viennese writers were better in conversation than they were on paper. The journalist Anton Kuh (who later died of a broken heart in New
York, unable to survive out of his café context) wrote pointed articles and sketches that are well worth reading today, but his talk, by all accounts, was on another level: too good to
miss and therefore, alas, too fast to catch. One of his few lines to survive is a definitive physical description of Stefan George: “He looks like an old woman who looks like an old
man.” Most writers would be pleased with themselves if they could get even one crack like that into an article. Kuh talked like that all the time. A lot of them did. The main reason more of
the stuff wasn’t written down was because everyone was Johnson and nobody was Boswell. It was the stuff of common interchange. The sense of something precious came after the collapse.

Although most of the Jewish figures in Vienna’s intellectual life were secular and assimilated, the rabbinical
tradition was strong. The wisecracks were concentrated wisdom, and the verbal thumbnail sketches that were treasured, polished, elaborated and passed on had a moral background. The unrolling
scroll of illuminated talk was a continuously enriched compendium of edifying stories: an unwritten literary
text, a spoken Talmud. Wit and point were taken for granted. When
everyone was a famous talker, there were no great individual reputations that could be marketed to a wider public. The contrast with pre-war New York could not be more complete. The Algonquin
Round Table wits prepared their epigrams with the intention of being quoted in newspapers and magazines. The results, even at best, sound strained: they hark back to Oscar and Bosie at the
Café Royal rather than to Friedell, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg and Alfred Polgar at the Café Central, or Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Franz Werfel and Joseph Roth at the
Café Herrenhof. The tradition began in the 1890s at the Café Griensteidl, where Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal were both regulars. But really it can’t be confined
to the cafés: in the whole culture right through until the Nazis turned out the lights, talk was a way of being, and it was universally understood that the best talkers had the right to
talk it all away. When the distinguished and wildly eccentric legal advocate Hugo Sperber played cards, people would take turns to stand behind him so they could overhear his running commentary:
the queue would stretch down the aisle between the tables all the way to the door of the café. Talk was one thing and literature was something else. Even the feuilleton, a demanding genre
that reached a high state of development in Vienna, was commonly thought to be more talk than literature. Alfred Polgar, the supreme master of the form, was praised to his face by Molnár
as the world champion of the one-metre sprint.

For more than forty years in Vienna, talk was a way of life, and then it ended. In 1938, just before the Nazis took over,
there were about 180,000 Jews in the city—down from about 201,000 in 1923. (As George Clare tells us in his exquisite memoir
Last Waltz in Vienna,
it
was already a dying community, but nobody wanted to admit it.) After 1945 only 10,000 came back, and most of the rest, of course, had not chosen to be absent: they were absent because they had
been slaughtered. But even in the great period not all the participants were Jews, and post-war, it has been argued, the tradition might well have revived, even if in restricted form. Torberg
contends that there was more than one reason it didn’t. In the old days, people concerned with literature and journalism had time for a café existence even when they were busy. Peter
Altenberg was only one of the many literati who did everything
but sleep in the café, although he might have been unique in having it as his only address: P. Altenberg,
Café Central, Wien 1. Novelists and critics wrote in the café, impresarios made their plans there, publishers read manuscripts and corrected proofs. Today, people use machinery to
write, and need a telephone right in front of them, instead of in a little booth downstairs next to the lavatory. They write at the studio or in the office. They might meet for lunch at the
café, but a lunch hour isn’t long enough to get the unimportant things said. The talk that counts is the talk that doesn’t matter, and to get that you need time to spare.