The World of Yesterday (27 page)

My position within my circle of friends proved more difficult than my position in the War Archive. Most of our Austrian writers, who had little European experience and saw life entirely from the German point of view, thought their best course was to reinforce the enthusiasm of the masses, promoting the alleged glories of war with literary calls to arms or scholarly ideologies. Almost all the German writers, headed by Hauptmann and Dehmel, thought it their duty to imitate the bards of ancient Germanic times and inspire the advancing warriors, by singing lays and casting runes, to go willingly to their death. Poems rhyming
Krieg
—war—with
Sieg
—victory—and
Not
—necessity—with
Tod
—death—came thick and fast. Writers swore to have nothing to do culturally with a Frenchman or an Englishman ever again. Indeed, overnight they took to denying that there had ever been any such thing as British or French culture. It was all slight and worthless, they said, by comparison with German art and the German nature. Scholars were even worse—all of a sudden philosophers could think of nothing better than to call the war an “immersion in steel”, which would have a beneficial effect by keeping the strength of the nations from being sapped. They were joined by the medical doctors, who sang the praises of their new prosthetic limbs so eloquently that you almost felt like having a healthy leg amputated, so as to get it replaced by an artificial limb. The clerics of all religious faiths were not to be outdone and joined the chorus. Sometimes it was like listening to the rantings of a horde of men possessed, yet they were all figures whose reason, creative power and humane attitudes we had admired only a week or a month ago.

But the worst of this madness was that the majority of its proponents were honest men. Most of them were too old to do military service, or physically incapable of it, but felt it was their right and proper duty to make some kind of helpful contribution to the war. They owed what they had done in life to their language and their country, so now they wished to serve the country with its language. They would tell people what they wanted to hear—that right was entirely on one side in this conflict and wrong entirely on the other; Germany would triumph and the enemy be shamefully defeated—with no idea that they were betraying the writer’s true mission of preserving and defending values in common to all humanity. It is true that, once the fumes of that first intoxicating enthusiasm had dispersed, many of them were soon nauseated by the bitter taste of their own words in their mouths. But during those first months, the more wildly you raved the more of a hearing you got, and so writers on both sides shouted and sang in a crazy chorus.

To me, the most typical and distressing case of such well-meant yet pointless ecstasy was embodied in Ernst Lissauer. I knew him well. He wrote succinct, cogent and harsh little poems, yet he was the kindest man imaginable. Even now I remember how I had to tighten my lips to hide a smile when he first visited me. Instinctively, I had pictured the author of those pithy verses, which aimed for the utmost concision, as a lean, bony young poet. But into my room waddled a stout little man, fat as a barrel, with a friendly face above two double chins, bubbling over with enthusiasm and a sense of his own importance as his words tumbled over themselves. He was possessed by poetry; it was impossible to stop him quoting and reciting his own verses over and over again. For all his absurdities, you couldn’t help liking him because he was warm-hearted, honest and a good friend, and had an almost daemonic devotion to his art.

He came from a prosperous German family, had been educated at the Friedrich Wilhelm Grammar School in Berlin,
and he was perhaps the most Prussian or Prussian-assimilated Jew I knew. He spoke no living language apart from German, and had never been outside Germany. Germany was the whole world to him, and the more German something was the more enthusiastic he felt about it. His heroes were Yorck, Luther and Stein;
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the German War of Liberation of 1813-1815 was his favourite subject. Bach was his musical idol; he played him very well in spite of his short, stubby, thick and doughy fingers. No one knew more about German poetry; no one was more in love with the German language or more enchanted by it—like many Jews whose families came to German culture only quite late in the day, he believed more fervently in Germany than the most fervent of native Germans.

When the war broke out, therefore, the first thing he did was hurry to the barracks and volunteer. I can imagine the mirth of the recruiting sergeants and their men as his stout form, panting for breath, made its way up the steps. They sent him straight away again. Lissauer was in despair, but now, like other writers, he wanted at least to serve Germany with his pen. As he saw it, everything the German newspapers and military communiqués said was Gospel truth. His country had been attacked, and the worst offender—this was how they had staged the scenario in Wilhelmstrasse
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—was Lord Grey, the perfidious British Foreign Minister. Lissauer vented his belief that Britain was chiefly to blame for opposition to Germany and for the war in a
Hymn of Hate For England
, a poem—I do not now have it before me—which in cutting, succinct verse raised the writer’s abhorrence of that country to an eternal oath never to forgive England for its ‘crime’. Disastrously, it was soon obvious how easy it is to set the forces of hatred working, for here the stout, deluded little Jew Lissauer was anticipating Hitler. His poem had all the effect of a bomb thrown into an ammunition depot. Perhaps no poem made the rounds of Germany as quickly as his notorious Hymn of Hate,
not even
The Watch on the Rhine
.
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The Kaiser was enthusiastic, and gave Lissauer the Order of the Red Eagle; the poem was printed in all the newspapers, schoolteachers read it to their pupils, army officers at the front recited it to their men until everyone knew the litany of hatred by heart. But even that was not enough. The little poem, set to music and arranged for a chorus, was performed in theatres; soon there was not a single one of the seventy million Germans populating the country at the time who did not know the
Hymn of Hate For England
from the first line to the last, and not long after that so did the whole world—if with rather less enthusiasm. Overnight, Ernst Lissauer had won the most fiery reputation that any poet ever did in that war. Later, it was to burn him like the shirt of Nessus. For no sooner was the war over, businessmen were beginning to trade again and politicians were genuinely making efforts to achieve a rapprochement, than they did all they could to disown a poem calling for eternal hostility to England. And to absolve themselves of any blame, they pilloried poor Lissauer, the ‘England-hater’, as the man solely responsible for the crazy hysteria of hatred that in point of fact was shared by everyone in 1914. All who had praised him then now turned ostentatiously away from him. The papers stopped printing his poems, and when he appeared among his literary colleagues a dismayed silence fell. Finally, deserted by one and all, he was exiled by Hitler from the Germany he loved with every fibre of his heart and died a forgotten man, a tragic victim of that one poem that had raised him so high, only to dash him down to the depths again.

But they were all like Lissauer. These poets and professors, the sudden patriots of that time, were honest about what they felt and thought they were acting honourably. I do not deny it. However, after a very short time it was obvious what terrible
harm their praise of the war and orgies of hatred had done. All the bellicose nations were in an overheated frame of mind anyway in 1914; the worst rumours were rapidly turned into the truth, the most ridiculous slanders were believed. Germans swore in dozens that just before the outbreak of war they had seen, with their own eyes, cars laden with gold driving from France to Russia. On the third or fourth day horror stories of eyes put out and hands cut off, anecdotes that promptly emerge in every war, filled the newspapers. How little the poor innocents who spread such lies knew that the technique of accusing enemy soldiers of every imaginable atrocity is as much a part of war as ammunition and aircraft, or that similar stories are regularly brought out of storage in the first few days of any conflict. War cannot be conducted with reason and proper feeling. It requires an exaggerated emotional state, enthusiasm for one side and hatred for the other.

It is not in human nature for strong emotion to be prolonged for ever, in either an individual or a nation, and the military organisations understand that. They therefore need artificial incitement, agitation administered like a constant drug, and it was supposed to be the intellectuals—the writers and authors, the journalists—who did their country the service of whipping up feeling in this way, with a good or a guilty conscience, either honestly or as a matter of professional routine. They had beaten the drum of hate and beaten it loud and long, until the ears of every impartial person rang with the sound and their hearts were afraid. Almost everyone in Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Belgium obediently served this war propaganda, and thereby served the mass delusion and mob hatred of war instead of resisting it.

The consequences were devastating. At this point, when propaganda had not yet become ineffective in times of peace, in spite of thousands of disappointments people of all nations still thought that everything they saw in print was true. And so the
pure, fine, sacrificial enthusiasm of the first few days gradually turned into an orgy of the worst and most stupid emotionalism. Battles against France and Britain were fought in Berlin and Vienna, on the Ringstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, all of them considerably more agreeable battlefields than the real front. Any notices in French and English put up in shops had to be taken down, a ‘Convent of the
Englischen Fräulein
’ had to change its name because of public indignation, since it was not understood that in this context the adjective
englisch
meant ‘angelic’ rather than ‘English’. Modest tradesmen stuck or stamped the slogan
Gott strafe England
—God punish England—on their envelopes, society ladies swore never to speak a word of French again, and wrote to the newspapers saying so. Shakespeare was exiled from German theatres, Mozart and Wagner from French and British concert halls, German professors explained that Dante had really been of Germanic birth, the French claimed Beethoven as a Belgian—in fact the cultural treasures of enemy countries were unscrupulously plundered as if they were supplies of grain or metal ore. As if it was not enough for thousands of the peaceful citizens of those countries to be killing each other at the front daily, behind the lines the famous dead of the hostile nations, who had rested quietly in their graves for hundreds of years, were abused and vilified. Mental confusion grew worse all the time. The cook at the stove, who had never left her town and hadn’t opened an atlas since she was at school, was sure that Austria could not survive without the acquisition of Sandshak (a small border village somewhere in Bosnia). In the street, cabbies disputed the amount of war reparations to be demanded of France, fifty billion or a hundred billion, without knowing how much a billion was. There was no town, no social group that did not fall victim to the terrible hysteria of hatred. Priests preached from their pulpits, the Social Democrats who had branded militarism the greatest of all crimes only a month before made if anything more noise than anyone else to avoid
incurring Kaiser Wilhelm’s accusation of being men with no fatherland. It was the war of a naive generation, and the greatest danger of all in it was the still-intact belief of the nations in the justice of their own cause alone.

Gradually, in those first weeks of the war in 1914, it became impossible to have a reasonable conversation with anyone. The kindest and most friendly acquaintances seemed to be drunk on the smell of blood. Friends whom I had always known as inveterate individualists, even intellectual anarchists, became rabid patriots overnight, and from patriotism they moved on to an insatiable desire to annex land. Every conversation ended either in such stupid phrases as, “If you don’t know how to hate then you don’t know how to love properly either”, or in outright suspicion. Friends with whom I had never quarrelled in years accused me to my face of being no true Austrian any more and said I should go over to France or Belgium. They even cautiously suggested that opinions such as my view that war was a crime ought to be brought to the notice of the authorities, for ‘defeatists’—a word recently coined in France—were committing the worst of crimes against the fatherland.

All I could do was withdraw into myself and keep quiet while everyone else persisted in a feverish state of turmoil. It was not easy. For even life in exile—as I have come to know only too well—is not as bad as life
alone
in one’s own country. In Vienna, my old friends were estranged from me, and this was no time to look for new ones. Only with Rainer Maria Rilke did I sometimes have conversations in which he showed profound understanding. We had managed to get Rilke to come and work for our out-of-the-way War Archive as well. With his over-sensitive nervous system, which meant that dirt, smells and noise caused him actual physical nausea, he would have been a useless soldier. I can never help smiling when I think of him in uniform. One day there was a knock on my door, and there stood a soldier, looking hesitant. Next moment I started up in
alarm. It was Rilke—Rainer Maria Rilke in military disguise! He looked pathetically clumsy, his collar constricting him, upset by the thought of having to salute any officer by clicking the heels of his boots. And as in his urge for perfectionism he wanted to carry out even this pointless formality precisely in accordance with the rules, he was in a state of constant dismay. “I’ve had this uniform since I was at cadet school,” he told me in his quiet voice. “I thought I’d said goodbye to it for ever. And now I’m wearing it again forty years on!” Luckily there were helping hands to protect him, and thanks to a kindly medical examiner he was soon discharged. He came back to my room once, in civilian clothes again, to say goodbye to me. I might almost say that the wind blew him in, he always moved so very quietly. He wanted to thank me for trying, through Rolland, to save his library in Paris, where it had been confiscated. For the first time he no longer looked young; it was as if the idea of the horrors of war had exhausted him. “Ah, to go abroad!” he said. “If only one could go abroad! War is always a prison.” Then he left, and I was all alone again.