The World of Yesterday (2 page)

I
F I TRY TO FIND
some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our Austrian Monarchy, then almost a thousand years old, seemed built to last, and the state itself was the ultimate guarantor of durability. The rights it gave its citizens were affirmed by our parliament, a freely elected assembly representing the people, and every duty was precisely defined. Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in the form of shiny gold coins, thus vouching for its own immutability. Everyone knew how much he owned and what his income was, what was allowed and what was not. Everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight. If you had wealth, you could work out precisely how much interest it would earn you every year, while civil servants and officers were reliably able to consult the calendar and see the year when they would be promoted and the year when they would retire. Every family had its own budget and knew how much could be spent on food and lodging, summer holidays and social functions, and of course you had to put a small sum aside for unforeseen contingencies such as illness and
the doctor. If you owned a house you regarded it as a secure home for your children and grandchildren; property in town or country was passed on from generation to generation. While a baby was still in the cradle, you contributed the first small sums to its way through life, depositing them in a money box or savings account, a little reserve for the future. Everything in this wide domain was firmly established, immovably in its place, with the old Emperor at the top of the pyramid, and if he were to die the Austrians all knew (or thought they knew) that another emperor would take his place, and nothing in the well-calculated order of things would change. Anything radical or violent seemed impossible in such an age of reason.

This sense of security was an asset owned by millions, something desirable, an ideal of life held in common by all. Life was worth living only with such security, and wider and wider circles were eager to have their part in that valuable asset. At first only those who already owned property enjoyed advantages, but gradually the population at large came to aspire to them. The era of security was also the golden age of the insurance industry. You insured your house against fire and theft, your land against damage by storms and hail, your body against accidents and sickness; you bought annuities for your old age; you put insurance policies in your girl children’s cradles to provide their future dowries. Finally even the working classes organised themselves to demand a certain level of wages as the norm, as well as health insurance schemes. Servants saved for their old age, and paid ahead of time into policies for their own funerals. Only those who could look forward with confidence to the future enjoyed the present with an easy mind.

But for all the solidity and sobriety of people’s concept of life at the time, there was a dangerous and overweening pride in this touching belief that they could fence in their existence, leaving no gaps at all. In its liberal idealism, the nineteenth
century was honestly convinced that it was on the direct and infallible road to the best of all possible worlds. The people of the time scornfully looked down on earlier epochs with their wars, famines and revolutions as periods when mankind had not yet come of age and was insufficiently enlightened. Now, however, it was a mere matter of decades before they finally saw an end to evil and violence, and in those days this faith in uninterrupted, inexorable ‘progress’ truly had the force of a religion. People believed in ‘progress’ more than in the Bible, and its gospel message seemed incontestably proven by the new miracles of science and technology that were revealed daily. In fact a general upward development became more and more evident, and at the end of that peaceful century it was swift and multifarious. Electric lights brightly lit the streets by night, replacing the dim lamps of the past; shops displayed their seductive new brilliance from the main streets of cities all the way to the suburbs; thanks to the telephone, people who were far apart could speak to each other; they were already racing along at new speeds in horseless carriages, and fulfilling the dream of Icarus by rising in the air. The comfort of upper-class dwellings now reached the homes of the middle classes; water no longer had to be drawn from wells or waterways; fires no longer had to be laboriously kindled in the hearth; hygiene was widespread, dirt was disappearing. People were becoming more attractive, stronger, healthier, and now that there were sporting activities to help them keep physically fit, cripples, goitres and mutilations were seen in the streets less and less frequently. Science, the archangel of progress, had worked all these miracles. Social welfare was also proceeding apace; from year to year more rights were granted to the individual, the judiciary laid down the law in a milder and more humane manner, even that ultimate problem, the poverty of the masses, no longer seemed insuperable. The right to vote was granted to circles flung wider and wider, and with it the opportunity
for voters to defend their own interests legally. Sociologists and professors competed to make the lives of the proletariat healthier and even happier—no wonder that century basked in its own sense of achievement and regarded every decade, as it drew to a close, as the prelude to an even better one. People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches; our fathers were doggedly convinced of the infallibly binding power of tolerance and conciliation. They honestly thought that divergences between nations and religious faiths would gradually flow into a sense of common humanity, so that peace and security, the greatest of goods, would come to all mankind.

Today, now that the word ‘security’ has long been struck out of our vocabulary as a phantom, it is easy for us to smile at the optimistic delusion of that idealistically dazzled generation, which thought that the technical progress of mankind must inevitably result in an equally rapid moral rise. We who, in the new century, have learnt not to be surprised by any new outbreak of collective bestiality, and expect every new day to prove even worse than the day just past, are considerably more sceptical about prospects for the moral education of humanity. We have found that we have to agree with Freud, who saw our culture and civilization as a thin veneer through which the destructive forces of the underworld could break at any moment. We have had to accustom ourselves slowly to living without firm ground beneath our feet, without laws, freedom or security. We long ago ceased believing in the religion of our fathers, their faith in the swift and enduring ascent of humanity. Having learnt our cruel lesson, we see their overhasty optimism as banal in the face of a catastrophe that, with a single blow, cancelled out a thousand years of human effort. But if it was only a delusion, it was a noble and wonderful delusion that our fathers served, more humane and fruitful than today’s slogans.
And something in me, mysteriously and in spite of all I know and all my disappointments, cannot quite shake it off. What a man has taken into his bloodstream in childhood from the air of that time stays with him. And despite all that is dinned into my ears daily, all the humiliation and trials that I myself and countless of my companions in misfortune have experienced, I cannot quite deny the belief of my youth that in spite of everything, events will take a turn for the better. Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.

Now that a great storm has long since destroyed it, we know at last that our world of security was a castle in the air. Yet my parents lived in it as if it were a solid stone house. Not once did a storm or a cold draught invade their warm, comfortable existence. Of course they had special protection from cold winds; they were prosperous people who grew rich, then even very rich, and wealth comfortably draught-proofed your windows and walls in those times. Their way of life seems to me typical of the Jewish middle classes that had made significant contributions to Viennese culture, only to be exterminated root and branch by way of thanks, and I can say impersonally of their comfortable and quiet existence that, in that era of security, ten or twenty thousand Viennese families lived just as my parents did.

My father’s family came from Moravia. The Jewish communities there lived in small country towns and villages, on excellent terms with the peasants and the lower middle classes. They felt none of the sense of oppression suffered by the Jews of Galicia further to the east, nor did they share their impatience to forge ahead. Made strong and healthy by life in
the country, they walked the fields in peace and security, just as the peasants of their native land did. Emancipated at an early date from orthodox religious observance, they were passionate supporters of the contemporary cult of ‘progress’, and in the political era of liberalism they provided parliament with its most respected deputies. When they moved from their places of origin to Vienna, they adapted with remarkable speed to a higher cultural sphere, and their personal rise was closely linked to the general economic upswing of the times. Here again, my family was entirely typical in its development. My paternal grandfather had sold manufactured goods. Then, in the second half of the century, came the industrial boom in Austria. Mechanical looms and spinning machines imported from Britain rationalised manufacturing, bringing a great reduction in costs by comparison with traditional handloom weaving, and Jewish businessmen, with their gift for commercial acumen and their international perspective, were the first in Austria to recognise the necessity of switching to industrial production and the rewards it would bring. Usually beginning with only a small capital sum, they founded swiftly erected factories, initially driven by water power, which gradually expanded to become the mighty Bohemian textiles industry that dominated all Austria and the Balkans. So while my grandfather, a middleman dealing in ready-made products, was a typical representative of the previous generation, my father moved firmly into the modern era at the age of thirty-three by founding a small weaving mill in northern Bohemia. Over the years, he slowly and carefully built it up into a business of considerable size.

Such caution in expanding the business, even when the economic situation looked enticingly favourable, was very much in the spirit of the times. It also exactly suited my father’s reserved and far from avaricious nature. He had taken the ‘safety first’ creed of his epoch as his own watchword; it was more important to him to own a sound business (the ideal of
something sound and solid was also characteristic of the period), with the force of his own capital behind it, than to extend it to huge dimensions by taking out bank loans and mortgages. The one thing of which he was truly proud was that no one had ever in his life seen his name on a promissory note, and he had never failed to be in credit with his bank—which of course was the soundest bank of all, the Kreditanstalt founded by the Rothschilds. Any kind of transaction carrying the faintest suggestion of risk was anathema to him, and he never in all his years took part in any foreign business dealings. The fact that he still gradually became rich, and then even richer, was not the result of bold speculation or particularly farsighted operations, but of adapting to the general method of that cautious period, expending only a modest part of his income and consequently, from year to year, making an increasingly large contribution to the capital of the business. Like most of his generation, my father would have considered anyone who cheerfully spent half his annual income without thought for the future a dubious wastrel at the very least. Providing for the future was another recurrent idea in that age of security. Steadily setting profits aside meant rising prosperity. In addition, the state had no plans to take more than a few per cent of even the largest incomes in taxes, while state and industrial securities brought in good rates of interest, so that making money was quite a passive process for the well-to-do. And it was worth it; the savings of the thrifty were not stolen, as they are during times of inflation; no pressure was put on sound businesses, and even those who were particularly patient and refrained from any kind of speculation made good profits. Thanks to adapting to the general system of his time, in his fifties my father could be regarded as a very prosperous man by international standards. But the lifestyle of our family lagged well behind the increasingly rapid rise of its property. We did gradually acquire small comforts. We moved from a small apartment to a larger one, we hired a car for outings on
spring afternoons, we travelled second class by train and booked a sleeper, but it was not until he was fifty that my father first allowed himself the luxury of taking my mother to Nice for a month in the winter. All things considered, he stuck to his basic attitude of enjoying wealth by knowing that he had it, rather than by making a great display of it. Even as a millionaire, my father never smoked any imported product but—like Emperor Franz Joseph with his cheap Virginia tobacco—the ordinary Trabuco cigars of the time, and when he played cards it was only for small stakes. He inflexibly maintained his restraint and his comfortable but discreet way of life. Although he was very much better educated than most of his colleagues, and culturally superior to them—he played the piano extremely well, wrote a good, clear hand, spoke French and English—he firmly declined any distinctions or honorary positions, and never in his life either aspired to or accepted any honour or dignity of the kind frequently offered to him in his position as a leading industrialist. His secret pride in never having asked anyone for anything, never having been obliged to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, meant more to him than any outward show.