The World of Yesterday (44 page)

The Nazi Party hummed and hawed over its decision as long as it possibly could. But early in 1934 it finally had to decide whether it was going to break its own law or oppose the greatest musician of the time. The day of decision could not be put off any longer. The score, the piano score, the libretto had all been printed long ago. In the Dresden Court Theatre, costumes had been ordered, the cast list decided, and the singers had even begun learning their parts. And still the various authorities, Goering and Goebbels, the Reich Chamber of Literature and the Cultural Council, the Ministry of Education and Streicher’s associates could not agree. Idiotic as all this may seem, the production of
Die schweigsame Frau
finally became a hotly debated affair of state. None of those authorities would venture to take full responsibility for giving the go-ahead to the straight Yes or No that would resolve the dilemma. So there was nothing for it but to leave the matter to the personal decision of the master of Germany and the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler. My books had now had the honour of being read at length by National Socialists, and it was
Fouché
in particular that they had studied and discussed because its subject was a man without political scruples. But I really had never expected that, after Goebbels and Goering had read it, Adolf Hitler himself would have to go to the trouble of studying the three acts of my verse libretto
ex officio
. He evidently did not find the decision easy. As I found out later, from accounts reaching me by devious ways, there was then another endless series of conferences. Finally Richard Strauss was called before these almighty powers, and Hitler in person told him that in this exceptional case he would allow the performance of his opera, although it was an offence against all
the laws of the new German Reich. It was a decision that he probably made as unwillingly—and dishonestly—as when he decided to sign his treaty with Stalin and Molotov.

It was a dark day for Nazi Germany when an opera was produced, once again, with the unmentionable name of Stefan Zweig displayed on all the programmes. I was not at the first night myself, of course, knowing that the auditorium would be bristling with brown uniforms. Even Hitler himself was expected to attend a later performance. The opera was a great success, and I must mention that, much to the credit of the music critics, nine out of ten of them seized with enthusiasm on this chance to show their private opposition to the racist Nazi stance by praising my libretto in the kindest of terms. All the German opera houses—Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich—immediately announced that they would be including productions of the work in their next season.

Then, after the second performance, a lightning bolt suddenly descended from the blue. Everything was cancelled, the opera was banned in Dresden and the whole of Germany overnight. Even more astonishing, the papers said that Richard Strauss had resigned as President of the Reich Chamber of Music. Everyone knew that something extraordinary must have happened. But it was some time before I discovered the whole truth. Strauss had written me another letter urging me to start on the libretto of his next opera soon, and expressing his personal opinions rather too freely. His letter had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. It was placed before Strauss, who consequently had to resign from his position, and the opera was banned. Since then it has been staged in German only in neutral Switzerland and in Prague, later in Italian at La Scala, Milan, by special agreement with Mussolini, who had not yet fallen in line with the racist standpoint. But the German people have never again been allowed to hear a note of this sometimes enchanting opera of their greatest musician’s old age.

While this affair was going on, attended by a considerable amount of uproar, I was living abroad. I could tell that the unrest in Austria was going to make it impossible for me to work in peace. My house in Salzburg was close enough to the border for me to see, with the naked eye, the mountain where Adolf Hitler’s own Berchtesgaden house stood. Having Hitler as a neighbour was an unedifying and extremely disturbing situation. My proximity to the border with the German Reich, however, meant that I could assess the threat to Austria better than my friends in Vienna. The Viennese who frequented the cafés, even the men in the Ministries, thought of National Socialism as something that was going on ‘over there’, and couldn’t have anything to do with Austria. The well-organised Social Democratic party was in power here, after all, with almost half the population backing it. Even the Clerical party, with strong Catholic support, went along with it in passionate opposition to Hitler’s “German Christians”, who were now openly persecuting the Christian religion and calling their Führer literally “greater than Christ himself” in public. Surely France, Britain and the League of Nations were our friends and would look after us? Hadn’t Mussolini expressly undertaken to protect Austria, going so far as to guarantee the country’s independence? Even the Jews were not anxious, and behaved as if Jewish doctors, lawyers, scholars and actors were being deprived of their civil liberties in China, instead of just three hours’ journey away in the same German-speaking part of the world. They took their ease at home and drove around in their cars. And the comforting phrase, “This can’t last long” was on all lips. But I remembered a conversation with my former publisher in Leningrad during my brief visit to Russia. He told me how he had once been a rich man; he told me about the beautiful pictures he had owned, and I had asked why, in that case, he didn’t do as so many others had done and emigrate as soon as the Revolution broke out. “Oh, well,” he said, “who’d have thought at the time that a republic consisting
of workers’ councils and the army would last more than two weeks?” Here we had the same delusion, arising from the same propensity for self-deception.

In Salzburg, of course, close to the border, you saw things more clearly. For a start, there was constant coming and going over the narrow river that marked the border. Young people slipped across it by night and were given training; agitators crossed the border in cars or with their alpenstocks looking like ordinary tourists and organised themselves into cells in all classes of society. They began recruiting supporters, while threatening that those who did not accept the one true faith at the right time would be sorry for it later. The police and the civil servants were intimidated. More and more clearly, I began to detect a certain insecurity in people’s behaviour as they started to waver. Your own small personal experiences of life are always more persuasive than anything else. A friend of my youth lived in Salzburg, a very well-known writer with whom I had been in close and cordial contact for thirty years. We were on first-name terms, we had dedicated books to each other, we met every week. One day I saw my old friend walking along the street with a gentleman I didn’t know, and noticed that he immediately stopped in front of a display window that could hardly mean much to him, pointing something in it out to this gentleman with an air of uncommon interest, while he kept his back turned to me. How odd, I thought; he must have seen me. But it could be just coincidence. Next day he suddenly phoned me—could he come round to my home for a chat that afternoon? I said yes, rather surprised, for in the usual way we always met at the coffee house. It turned out that he had nothing particular to say, in spite of this hasty arrangement to visit me. I immediately realised that although he wanted to keep up his friendship with me, in future he would rather not appear too familiar with me in this small city, in case he was suspected of being a friend to Jews. That put me on my guard, and I soon noticed that a number of acquaintances who
often used to visit me had stayed away lately. They were in a dangerous position.

I was not thinking of leaving Salzburg for ever at this time, but I did make up my mind more readily than usual to spend the winter abroad, so that I could avoid all these little tensions. But I had no idea that when I left my pleasant house in October 1933 that I was already, in a way, saying goodbye to it.

I had meant to spend the next January and February working in France. I loved that beautiful and intellectual country as a home from home, and I never felt like a foreigner there. Valéry, Romain Rolland, Jules Romains, André Gide, Roger Martin du Gard, Duhamel, Vildrac, Jean-Richard Bloch—these leading lights of literature were my old friends. My books had almost as many readers in France as in Germany; no one thought of me as a foreign writer, a stranger. I loved the people, I loved the country, I loved the city of Paris and was so familiar with it that every time my train came into the Gare du Nord I felt I was coming home. This time, however, I had travelled earlier than usual because of the special circumstances, and I did not really want to be in Paris until after Christmas. Where should I go in the meantime? Then it occurred to me that I had not been in England for almost quarter-of-a-century, not since my student days. Why always Paris, I asked myself? Why not ten days to two weeks in London, seeing the museums, the city, the country again with new eyes? So I took the express train to Calais instead of Paris, and got out at Victoria Station on an appropriately foggy November day, thirty years after my last visit, and was quite surprised, on my arrival, to be driving to my hotel in a car instead of a horse-drawn cab. The cool, soft grey fog was the same as ever. I hadn’t set eyes on the city itself yet, but even over three decades my sense of smell had recognised that curiously acrid, dense, damp atmosphere that wraps itself around you when you come close.

I brought no great amount of luggage with me, and no great expectations either. I had hardly any close friends in London, and
in literary terms there was little contact between us Continental writers and our British counterparts. They led a rather carefully demarcated life of their own, having its own sphere of influence within a tradition not accessible to the rest of us—of all the many books from all over the world that found their way to my desk at home, I cannot remember ever feeling that a book by an English author was like a present from a colleague. I had once met Shaw at Hellerau, Wells had visited my house in Salzburg, and my own books had all been translated into English but were little known there. Britain had always been the country where they made the least impression. And while I was on terms of personal friendship with my American, French, Italian and Russian publishers, I had never met anyone from the firm that published my books in Britain. So I was prepared to feel as much a stranger there as thirty years ago.

But I was wrong. After a few days I felt extraordinarily well at ease in London. Not that the city itself had changed very much, but I myself had changed. I was thirty years older, and after the years of the Great War, and then the post-war years of ever-increasing tension, I longed to live a quiet life again and hear nothing about politics. Of course there were political parties in Britain too. As successors to the old Whigs and Tories, there were the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties, but their discussions were nothing to do with me. I am sure various groups and trends also existed in literary life, controversies and covert rivalries, but I was outside all that. The real advantage was that at last I felt I was in a civil, courteous, calm and friendly society again. Nothing had poisoned my life in recent years so much as the sense of hostility and tension around me at home, in country and city alike, feeling forced to defend myself all the time, constantly drawn into arguments. The British were not in the same state of agitation, there was a greater degree of decent, law-abiding behaviour in public life than in our Continental countries, where morality itself had been impaired
by the great fraud practised on us by inflation. The British lived more quietly, were more content, thought more about their gardens and their little hobbies than about their neighbours. You could breathe, think and reflect here. But what really kept me going was a new book.

It came about like this. My
Marie Antoinette
had just been published, and I was reading the proofs of my book on Erasmus, in which I tried to paint an intellectual portrait of the humanist who, although he understood the absurdity of his times more clearly than those who made it their business to set the world to rights, was tragically unable to do anything about it in spite of his fine mind. After finishing this book, which presented my own views in veiled form through the person of Erasmus, I meant to write a novel that I had been planning for a long time. I had had enough of biographies. But then, on only my third day in London, I was in the British Museum, attracted to the place by my old passion for autograph manuscripts and looking at those on public display. They included the handwritten account of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Instinctively I found myself wondering what Mary Stuart was really like. Had she or had she not been implicated in the murder of her second husband? As I had nothing to read in the evening, I bought a book about her. It was a paean of praise, defending her as a saint. The book was shallow and foolish. Next day my incurable curiosity led me to buy another book, which claimed almost exactly the opposite. The case was beginning to interest me. I asked for the title of a really authoritative work on Mary. No one could recommend one, and so by diligent searching and making my own enquiries I was involuntarily drawn into making comparisons. Without really knowing it, I had begun a book about Mary Stuart that kept me in libraries for weeks on end. When I returned to Austria early in 1934, I had decided to go back to London, a city that I had grown to love, to finish the book in peace and quiet there.

Back in Austria, it took me only two or three days to see how the situation had deteriorated in my few months away. Returning from the quiet, secure atmosphere of England to a country shaken by fevered conflicts was like being in New York on a hot July day, and suddenly stepping out of an air-conditioned room into the sultry heat. National Socialist pressure was beginning to wear down the nerves of those in religious and bourgeois circles. They felt the economic thumbscrews turn, while subversive German influence was exerted more and more harshly. The Dollfuss government, trying to keep Austria independent and preserve the country from Hitler, sought with increasing desperation for some last kind of support. France and Britain were too far away, and at heart too indifferent to Austria; Czechoslovakia was still full of old rancour and rivalries with Vienna—only Italy was left. At the time Italy was trying to establish an economic and political protectorate over Austria, so as to secure itself the Alpine passes and Trieste. But Mussolini asked a high price for that protection. Austria was to accept the Fascist line, there must be an end of the Austrian parliament, and with it Austrian democracy. That was going to be impossible without the elimination or disenfranchisement of the Social Democrats, the strongest and best-organised political party in Austria. The only way to break it was by brutal violence.