The World of Yesterday (37 page)

Anyone who lived through those apocalyptic months and years, repelled and embittered, also felt that there must be some reaction, a terrible backlash. And there, waiting in the wings with a smile, stopwatches in their hands, were the very people responsible for bringing Germany to this plight. “The worse things are in the country, the better for us!” was their motto. They knew that their hour would come. Counter-revolutionaries were already openly gathering around Ludendorff—not Hitler yet; he had little power at the time. The officers whose epaulettes had been torn off organised themselves into secret societies, members of the lower middle class, seeing themselves cheated of their savings, quietly closed ranks and placed themselves in advance at the disposal of any regime ready to promise law and order. Nothing was so disastrous for the German Republic as its idealistic attempt to leave the people and even its enemies their liberty. The orderly German nation did not know what to do with its liberty, and was already looking impatiently for someone to take it away again.

The day in 1923 that marked the end of German inflation could have been a turning-point in history. When the bell tolled for every crazy, dizzying million marks, now to be redeemed by a single new mark, a norm had been set. And indeed, the murky tide soon ebbed, taking all its dirt and debris with it. The bars and dives disappeared, conditions reverted to normality. Now everyone could calculate what he had won and what he had lost. Most people, the great majority, were losers. But the men who were to blame for the war were not held responsible; instead, feeling turned against those who, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, had taken on the thankless burden of reconstruction.
Nothing, as we have to keep reminding ourselves, made the German people so bitter, so mad with hatred, so ripe for Hitler as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it had turned out, had provided hours of jubilation at the start, with the ringing of bells and victorious fanfares. And as an incurably militaristic nation, Germany considered that its pride had been bolstered by the occasional victory in the war, while it felt only soiled, deceived and humiliated by inflation. A whole generation never forgot or forgave the German Republic for those years, preferring to summon their own murderers again. But that was still in the distant future. To all outward appearance, the whole wild phantasmagoria seemed to be over like a dance of will-o’-the-wisps. Day had dawned again, you could see the way ahead. And already we saw and welcomed the return of order as the beginning of a lasting period of peace and quiet. Hopeless fools that we had always been, we thought yet again that war was defeated. However, that fatal delusion at least gave us a decade of work, of hope, even of security.

Seen from today’s viewpoint, in spite of everything, those years from 1924 to 1933—in fact just short of a decade—from the end of German inflation to the moment when Hitler came to power, represent a pause in the succession of catastrophes that our generation had witnessed and suffered since 1914. Not that there was any shortage of individual instances of tension, agitation and crisis—more particularly the economic crisis of 1929—but within that decade peace seemed to prevail in Europe, and that in itself meant a great deal. Germany had been received into the League of Nations on honourable terms, and loans had encouraged its economic reconstruction, although in point of fact that really meant secret rearmament. Britain had disarmed. In Italy, Mussolini had undertaken to protect Austria. The world seemed to want to rebuild itself. Paris, Vienna,
Berlin, New York, Rome—the victorious and the defeated cities alike were more attractive than ever; aeroplanes speeded up travel, passport restrictions were relaxed. Fluctuation between currencies was over; you knew how much you had coming in and how much you could spend. Your attention was no longer so anxiously fixed on outside problems. You could work again, collect your thoughts, think of intellectual matters. You could even dream again and hope for a united Europe. For those ten years—for a brief moment in the history of the world—it seemed as if our sorely tried generation could live a normal life once more.

The most notable event in my personal life during those years was the arrival in my house of a guest who settled benevolently in, a guest I had never expected—success. Understandably, I feel uncomfortable about mentioning the success my books enjoyed in the outside world, and in a normal situation I would have left out even a fleeting mention that might be interpreted as self-satisfaction or boastfulness. But I have a particular right, even a duty, not to hush up this part of the story of my life, for that success has become a thing of the past in the last seven years, since the advent of Hitler. Not one of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of my works, books that had secured their place in bookshops and countless private houses, can be bought in Germany today. Anyone who still has a copy of one of them keeps it carefully concealed. They are consigned to the ‘poison cupboard’ of public libraries, kept there for the few who want to study them, by special permission of the authorities, for research purposes, meaning mainly for the purpose of denunciation. It is a long time since the readers and friends who write to me have dared to put my reprehensible name on an envelope. And as if that were not enough, in France, Italy, and all the countries now reduced to servitude, where my books used to be widely read in translation, they are also banned today by Hitler’s orders. I am now a writer
who, as Grillparzer
7
said, “walks behind his corpse in his own lifetime”. Everything, or almost everything, that I built up over forty years in the international arena has been smashed by that one fist. So in mentioning my own ‘success’ I am not speaking of something that is really mine, but something that once was mine, like my house, my native land, my self-confidence, my freedom, my lack of inhibition. I cannot illustrate the depths to which I and countless other innocent people sank later in all their depth and their full extent without mentioning, first, the height from which we fell, or the unique consequences of this elimination of our entire literary generation. I really cannot think of any similar example in history.

Success did not arrive suddenly, storming into my house; it came slowly and discreetly, but it proved a faithful friend, and stayed with me until Hitler drove it away with the lash of his decrees. It grew year by year. The very first work I published after
Jeremiah
, the first volume in my
Master Builders
series, a study of three writers,
8
paved the way for me. The Expressionists, the activists and other experimental writers had had their day, and other writers who had waited patiently had access to readers again. My novellas
Amok
and
Letter from an Unknown Woman
enjoyed the popularity usually reserved for novels, and were dramatised, read in public and filmed. A small book of historical miniatures,
Sternstunden der Menschheit
9
—read in every school, and published in the Insel-Bücherei series—sold 250,000 copies in a very short time. Within a few years I had acquired what, to my mind, is the most valuable kind of success a writer can have—a faithful following, a reliable group of readers who looked forward to every new book and bought it, who trusted me, and whose trust I must not disappoint. My success grew slowly greater, until every time I published a book twenty thousand copies were sold in Germany in the first few days after it came out, even before any advertisement had appeared in the papers. Sometimes I deliberately tried to keep
out of the way of my own success, but it followed me around with remarkable persistence. For instance, I had written a book for my own personal pleasure, my biography of Fouché, and when I sent it to my publisher he wrote to say he was going to print ten thousand copies immediately. I urged him, by return of post, not to print so many of this particular title. Fouché was not an attractive character, the book contained not a hint of any love interest, and was never going to appeal to a wide circle of readers. I said I thought he had better print just five thousand for a start. After a year fifty thousand copies had been sold in Germany alone—the same Germany where no one is allowed to read a line of my work today. My almost pathological self-distrust made me doubtful of my version of Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
. I intended to produce a verse adaptation, and in nine days I sketched out the course of the action quickly and freely in prose. It so happened that the Dresden Court Theatre, to which I felt a moral obligation because it had staged the premiere of my first play
Thersites
, had just been asking whether I had any plans to write another drama, and I sent them the prose version, saying apologetically that it was only a sketch for my planned adaptation in verse. However, the theatre telegraphed back at once, telling me for Heaven’s sake not to change anything. And sure enough, the play was produced all over the world in that form (in New York by the Theatre Guild, with Alfred Lunt starring). Whatever I did in those years, my success and an ever-growing number of German readers remained faithful to me.

When I was writing biographies or essays, I always felt an urge to explore the motives, or lack of motives, that made my subjects act as they did in the context of their own time. So sometimes, when I was in a thoughtful mood, I could not help wondering what exactly it was that made my books so unexpectedly popular. In the last resort, I think it arose from a personal flaw in me—I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is
vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument. A book really satisfies me only if it maintains its pace page after page, carrying readers breathlessly along to the end. Nine-tenths of the books that come my way seem to be padded out with unnecessary descriptions, too much loquacious dialogue and superfluous minor characters; they are just not dynamic and exciting enough. I get impatient with many arid, slow-moving passages even in the most famous classic masterpieces, and I have often suggested a bold idea of mine to publishers—why not bring out a series of the great works of international literature, from Homer through Balzac and Dostoevsky to Mann’s
The Magic Mountain
, with the unnecessary parts cut? Then all those undoubtedly immortal works would gain a new lease of life in our own time.

This dislike of mine for anything tediously long-winded must have transferred itself from my reading of other authors’ works to the writing of my own, making me train myself to be especially alert for such passages. I naturally write easily and fluently, and in the first draft of a book I let my pen run on as it pleases, setting down anything that comes into my head. Similarly, when I am writing a biography I study all the factual material available. For my biography of Marie-Antoinette, for instance, I looked at all the details of her financial accounts to find out what her personal expenses were, I studied all the contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, I ploughed my way through the case files of her trial to the very last line. But none of that will be found in the final printed version, because I have hardly finished writing the first rough draft of a book before I begin on what to me is the real work, condensing my material and finding the right way to put it. I go on working tirelessly like this from draft to draft. I am constantly throwing ballast overboard, intensifying and clarifying a book’s inner architecture. Most writers cannot bring themselves to leave anything out, and having fallen rather in love with their subject
hope to display a greater breadth and depth of knowledge than they really possess in every well-turned line, whereas my own ambition is always to know more than shows on the outside.

Later, at the proof stages, I then repeat this process of intensifying and thus enhancing the dramatic effect once, twice or three times. In the end I find myself enjoying a kind of hunt for another sentence, or just a word, which can be cut without affecting my precise meaning and at the same time might speed up the tempo. I really get my greatest satisfaction in my work from leaving things out. I remember that once, when I rose from my desk feeling pleased with what I had done, my wife said I seemed to be in a cheerful mood today. “Yes,” I replied proudly, “I’ve managed to cut a whole paragraph and make the action move faster.” So if my books are sometimes praised for sweeping readers along at a swift pace, it does not come from any natural heated or agitated approach to the work of writing, but is entirely the result of my system of always cutting unnecessarily slack passages—anything at all that, like radio interference, might distract the reader’s attention. If I have mastered any kind of art, it is the art of leaving things out. I do not mind throwing eight hundred of a thousand written pages into the waste-paper basket, leaving me with only two hundred to convey what I have sifted out as the essence of the work. So if anything at least partly accounts for the success of my books, it is my strict discipline in preferring to confine myself to short works of literature, concentrating on the heart of the matter. Since my ideas have always been European and not nationalist, it was a great pleasure for me when I heard of publishers from other countries wanting to bring out my works in French, Bulgarian, Armenian, Portuguese, the Spanish of Argentina, Norwegian, Latvian, Finnish and Chinese. Soon I had to buy a large cupboard to house all the different copies of my foreign editions, and one day, in the statistics of the
Co-opération Intellectuelle
published by the League of Nations in Geneva, I saw
that I was the most translated writer in the world—although true to my usual form, I thought this report was probably mistaken. Another day a letter came from my Russian publisher, saying he wanted to bring out a collected edition of all my books in Russian, and asking if I would agree to having an introduction written by Maxim Gorky. Would I agree! As a schoolboy, I had surreptitiously read Gorky’s stories under my desk; I had loved and admired him for years. But I would never have imagined that he had ever heard my name, let alone read anything of mine, and certainly not that my work could seem important enough to such a great master for him to write a foreword to it. On another occasion an American publisher turned up at my house in Salzburg with a recommendation—as if I would have needed that!—proposing to take on my entire work and publish it book by book. This was Benjamin Huebsch of Viking Press, who has been my most reliable friend and adviser ever since. Now that my original homeland has been crushed underfoot by Hitler’s jackboots, he has made sure that I still have a literary home even though my real German and European one is lost to me. Public success of that kind was dangerously likely to confuse a man who, until then, had believed more in his good intentions than his skill and the influence his work might have. In itself all publicity disturbs a man’s natural equilibrium. In normal circumstances your name means no more than the band on a cigar—a means of recognition, an outward object of little importance that is only loosely linked to the real subject, the Self. But in the case of success that name, so to speak, swells to a larger dimension. It frees itself from the man who bears it and becomes a power, a force, something independent, a commodity, capital. And then, with a violent backlash, it turns in on its bearer as a force that begins to influence, dominate and change him. Happy, self-confident natures unconsciously start identifying themselves with the influence they exert. A title, a position, a medal or decoration, and the publicity that
now goes with their names can enhance their self-confidence, tempting them to feel that special recognition is their right in contemporary society and their country, and they instinctively puff themselves up to make themselves personally influential in the outside world. However, a man who naturally distrusts himself tends to feel that outward success of any kind makes it his duty, in what to him is a difficult situation, to change as little as possible.