The World of Yesterday (49 page)

Then came the historic session of Parliament when Chamberlain told the House of Commons that he had made another attempt to come to an agreement with Hitler, and yet again, for the third time, had proposed visiting him in Germany at any place he chose in the hope of lifting the threat of war. No answer had yet come. But in the middle of the meeting
of Parliament—with timing that was only too dramatic—a telegram arrived to say that Hitler and Mussolini would agree to a conference in Munich. At that moment the Parliament of Britain ran wild—an almost unprecedented event in the country’s history. MPs leapt to their feet, shouting and applauding. The galleries echoed with jubilation. The honourable old House had not been in the grip of such an outburst of elation for years and years as it was at that moment. In human terms, it was a wonderful sight to see how genuine enthusiasm for the thought that peace could be preserved overcame the reserved, stiff-upper-lip attitude generally displayed by the British with such virtuoso skill. Politically, however, that outburst was a serious mistake, for the wild rejoicing in Parliament showed how much the country hated the thought of war, and how ready it was to make any sacrifice for the sake of peace, giving up its own interests and even its own prestige. The result meant that from the first Chamberlain was marked out as a man going to Munich not to fight for peace but to beg for it. But still no one guessed what kind of capitulation lay ahead. Everyone thought—I thought myself—that Chamberlain was going to Munich to negotiate, not to surrender. Then there were another two or three days of waiting on tenterhooks, days when the whole world seemed to hold its breath. Digging went on in the parks, work went on in the munitions factories, anti-aircraft guns were put in place, gas masks were handed out, the evacuation of children from London was considered and mysterious preparations made. No one really understood them, but everyone knew what they were for. Morning, noon, evening and night were passed again in waiting for the newspaper and listening to the radio. That terrible waiting for a Yes or No, with nerves torn to shreds, was like those moments in July 1914 all over again.

And then, suddenly, the oppressive storm clouds cleared as if blown away by a mighty gust of wind, hearts cast off their
burden, minds were easy again. News came that Hitler and Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini had come to a complete understanding, and even better, that Chamberlain had succeeded in concluding an agreement with Germany which guaranteed the peaceful resolution of all possible future conflicts between the two countries. It seemed like a decisive victory for the persistent desire for peace shown by a Prime Minister who, in himself, was a dry-as-dust, insignificant statesman, and all hearts beat in gratitude to him at that first moment. The message of “peace for our time”
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was first heard on the radio, and it told our much-tried generation that we could live in peace and free of care once more and go on helping to construct a new and better world. Anyone who tries to deny in retrospect that he was bewitched by those magic words is a liar. Who could believe that a man coming home defeated would stage a triumphal procession? That morning, if the vast majority of Londoners had known precisely when Chamberlain would be arriving back from Munich, hundreds of thousands would have been waiting at the airfield in Croydon to welcome and applaud him as the man who, so we all thought at the time, had saved the peace of Europe and the honour of Britain. Then came the newspapers. They showed the photograph of Chamberlain, whose harsh-featured face usually bore an unfortunate similarity to the head of an angry bird, standing in the doorway of the aeroplane, proud and laughing, waving that historic piece of paper announcing “peace for our time”, bringing it home to his people like the most precious of gifts. By evening the cinemas were already showing the scene on newsreels. Audiences jumped up from their seats, shouting and cheering—almost embracing in the spirit of the new fraternity now expected to spread all over the world. Everyone in Britain and particularly London at the time found that an unforgettable day, a day to lift the heart.

I like to walk about the streets on such historic days so as to get an even stronger and more immediate idea of the atmosphere,
literally breathing the air of the time. The workmen had stopped digging in the parks, and people stood around them laughing and talking, because the message of “peace for our time” had rendered the air-raid shelters superfluous. I heard two young men making fun of the shelters in the purest cockney, expressing a hope that they could be converted into underground public conveniences, since London didn’t have nearly enough of those. Everyone joined in the laughter, all the people there seemed refreshed, livelier, like plants after a heavy storm. They walked more erect than the day before, their shoulders were straight again, and there was a cheerful light in those usually cool English eyes. The buildings seemed less dismal now that the threat of bombs was gone, the buses looked smarter, the sun brighter, the spirits of thousands upon thousands were raised and strengthened by that one intoxicating phrase. I felt elated myself. I walked on without tiring, faster and faster, more relaxed. I too was borne up more strongly and cheerfully by the new wave of confidence. On the corner of Piccadilly I suddenly saw someone hastily coming towards me. He was a British civil servant whom I knew, but only slightly, and he was naturally a reserved and unemotional man. In normal circumstances we would just have passed the time of day politely, and it would never have occurred to him to accost me. Now, however, he came right up to me, eyes shining. “Well, what about Chamberlain, then?” he said, beaming with delight. “Nobody believed him, but he was right all along. He never gave way, and he’s saved peace.”

That was how everyone felt, and so did I that day. The next day too was a happy one. The newspapers all rejoiced, rates shot up on the Stock Exchange, friendly messages came from Germany for the first time in years. There was some idea in France of putting up a monument to Chamberlain. But that was only the flame flaring brightly for the last time before it finally went out. Over the next few days, the depressing details seeped
through—how complete capitulation to Hitler had been, how shamefully Czechoslovakia, which had been promised help and support, had been abandoned to its fate, and in the next week it was already obvious that capitulation to Hitler had not been enough. Even before the ink of the signatures on the agreement was dry, it was being breached in every point. Goebbels was shouting it to the rooftops that Britain had been up against the wall in Munich. The bright light of hope had gone out. But it had shone for a day or so, warming our hearts. I cannot forget those days, and would not wish to.

Although I was in England, paradoxically enough, from the moment when we realised what had actually happened in Munich I mingled with few of my English acquaintances. It was my fault for avoiding them, or rather avoiding conversation with them, although I found myself admiring them more than ever. They were generous to the refugees who came flooding over now, and gave evidence of great helpfulness and sympathy. But a kind of wall grew up between them and us, keeping us on separate sides. We had been through what was coming on an earlier occasion, and they had not. We understood what had happened and would happen—but they refused to understand it, to some extent against their better judgement. In spite of everything they tried to persist in the delusion that a man’s word was his bond, a treaty was a treaty, and they could negotiate with Hitler if they were only reasonable and talked to him on a human level. Pledged to keep the law by hundreds of years of their democratic tradition, leading circles in British society could not or would not see that a new technique of deliberate and cynical amorality was being built up next door, and the new Germany was breaking all the rules of the game usual in dialogue between law-fearing nations as soon as those rules got in their way. To the clear-thinking and far-sighted British, who
had given up ideas of adventure long ago, it seemed unlikely that a man like Hitler who had risen to such a high position so fast would go to extremes. They persisted in hoping and thinking that he would turn against other enemies first, preferably Russia, and in the interim period some kind of agreement with him could be reached. We, on the other hand, knew that terrible things were to be expected as a matter of course. We all had the image of a murdered friend or a tortured comrade in our minds, and so our eyes were colder, sharper, more unsparing. We had been cast out, hunted, deprived of our rights; we knew that no pretext was too ridiculous or mendacious when it came to robbery and violence. So we spoke different languages, those who had gone through trials and those who had been spared them, the emigrants and the British. I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that apart from a vanishingly small number of English people, we were alone in the country at that time in cherishing no illusions about the extent of the danger. As in Austria in the past, in England now I was fated to look ahead with painful clarity, torment in my heart, and see the inevitable approaching, except that here it was not for me, as a foreigner and a guest suffered to stay in the country, to issue warnings.

So those of us already branded with the mark of war had only ourselves to talk to when the bitter foretaste of what was coming seared our lips, and our hearts were tormented by anxiety for the country that had taken us in like brothers. However, the friendly hours I spent with Sigmund Freud in those last months before the catastrophe showed me, memorably, how even in the darkest days a conversation with an intellectual man of the highest moral standards can bring immeasurable comfort and strength to the mind. For months the idea that Freud, then eighty-three years old and unwell, was still in Hitler’s Vienna weighed on me, until that wonderful woman Princess Maria Bonaparte,
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his most faithful pupil, managed to get him out of the city now reduced to servitude and bring him to London. It was a happy day in my
life when I read in the newspaper that he was in the British Isles, and I saw the most revered of my friends, whom I had already thought lost, return from the realm of Hades.

I had known Sigmund Freud—the great, stern figure who deepened and expanded our knowledge of the human mind like no one else of our time—in Vienna when he was still considered a dogged and awkward loner. Fanatical in his pursuit of truth, but also well aware that every truth has its limitations—he once said: “Nothing is one hundred percent true, just as there’s no one hundred per cent proof alcohol!”—he had alienated himself from the academic caution of the University by his tenacity in venturing into areas of the conscious and unconscious mind hitherto unexplored, indeed avoided fearfully, for the subject was in a sphere that, at the time, was decidedly taboo. The optimistically liberal world somehow sensed that this man of uncompromising intellect, with his theories of depth psychology, was implacably undermining its own belief in the gradual suppression of instinctive drives through reason and progress, and his pitiless technique of revelation would endanger its way of ignoring what was uncomfortable. However, not only did the University and the coterie of old-fashioned neurologists band together against this inconvenient outsider—so did the whole world, or the whole of the old world, the old way of thinking, moral conventions, the entire epoch that feared him as a man who would reveal secrets. Gradually a medical boycott formed against him, he lost his practice, and since it was impossible to provide scientific refutation of his theses and even the boldest of the problems he formulated, attempts were made to deal with his theories of the meaning of dreams in the typical Viennese way by treating them ironically or turning them into a joke, a comical parlour game. Only a small circle of faithful friends and students assembled around the solitary
man for the weekly discussion evenings in which the new science of psychoanalysis first took form. Long before I myself was aware of the extent of the intellectual revolution slowly gathering pace as a result of the first works of Freud, which laid the foundations of psychoanalysis, that extraordinary man’s strong, morally unshakeable attitude had won me over. Here at last was the kind of man of science who was the ideal model for a young man, cautious in every statement he made until he had final proof of it and was absolutely certain, but not to be moved by the opposition of the whole world once he felt that a hypothesis was a valid certainty. He was a modest man himself, but would fight firmly for every point in his doctrines, and faithful until his death to the inherent truth that he defended in his scientific findings. I can think of no man more intellectually fearless. Freud would never shrink from saying what he thought, even if he knew that his clear, implacable approach was going to disturb and upset others. He never tried to make the least concession—even a formal one—to ease his difficult position. I am certain that Freud would have been able to express four-fifths of his theories without encountering any academic resistance if he had been prepared to put them in a more discreetly veiled form, to say ‘eroticism’ instead of ‘sexuality’, ‘Eros’ instead of ‘the libido’, and if he had not always insisted on setting out all his conclusions clearly but had just hinted at them. However, where his ideas and the truth were concerned, he was intransigent; the more resistance he met the more firmly determined he was. If I look around for an example of moral courage—the only form of heroism on earth that does not ask other people to make sacrifices—I always see before me the handsome, virile clarity of Freud’s face, with his calm dark eyes looking straight at you.

The man who had fled to London from his native land, to which he had brought fame all over the world and for all time, was old and had been severely ill for some while. But he was
not a bowed, exhausted figure. I had been secretly a little afraid of finding Freud embittered or with his mind disturbed when I saw him again, after all the terrible trials he must have endured in Vienna, but I found him more at ease and happier than ever. He took me out into the garden of his suburban London house. “Did I ever live better anywhere?” he asked, with a bright smile playing around the corners of his once severe mouth. He showed me his beloved Egyptian statuettes, which Maria Bonaparte had rescued for him. “I’m home again, as you see.” The big folio pages of the manuscript on which he was working lay open on his desk. At eighty-three he still wrote every day in the same clear, round hand, and his mind was as lucid and untiring as in his prime. His strong will had overcome everything—sickness, old age, exile, and for the first time the kindliness stored up in his nature during the long years of conflict flowed freely. Age had only made him milder, and the trials he had undergone more understanding. He sometimes indulged in affectionate gestures in a way I had never seen in him before, because he was a reserved man. He would put an arm around my shoulders, and there was a warmer expression in his eyes behind his flashing glasses. In all those years, a conversation with Freud had always been one of my greatest intellectual pleasures. You were learning from him and admiring him at the same time; you felt, with every word he spoke, that you were understood by that great mind, which never condemned anyone, and could not be shocked by any confession or thrown off balance by anything anyone said. To him, his will to see others clearly and help them to understand their own feelings equally clearly had long ago become the instinctive purpose of his life. But I never felt how irreplaceable those long conversations were, or felt it more gratefully, than in that dark year, the last of his life. As soon as you entered his room, it was as if the lunacy of the outside world had vanished. All that was particularly cruel became abstract, confusions were clarified, the present meekly took its place in the
great cyclical phases of transient time. I truly felt, at last, that I really knew that genuinely wise man who rose above himself, regarding pain and death not as a personal experience but an impersonal subject for study and observation. His death was no less of a great moral achievement than his life. Freud was very ill at the time with the disease that was soon to take him from us. It was obviously hard for him to talk with the plate he wore in his mouth, and you felt ashamed of receiving every word he spoke because articulating it was such a strain. But he never let one word go unspoken. It meant much to his steel-hard mind to show his friends that his will was still stronger than the lesser torments his body gave him. Mouth distorted with pain, he wrote at his desk until the very last few days, and even when his sufferings kept him from sleeping at night—and his wonderfully deep, healthy sleep had been the source of his strength for eighty years—he refused sleeping pills or painkilling injections. He did not want the clarity of his mind to be impaired for a single hour by such palliatives, he prefered to suffer and stay fully conscious, he would rather think while in pain than not think at all. His was a heroic mind to the very last moment. His death was a terrible struggle, and the longer it lasted the more uplifting it was. As time went by, death cast its shadow more and more clearly over his face. Death hollowed his cheek, chiselled the line of his temples beside his brow, twisted his mouth sharply, silenced his lips. But Death the dark strangler could not prevail over his eyes and the impregnable watchtower from which his heroic spirit looked out at the world. Eyes and mind remained clear to the last. Once, on one of my last visits to him, I took Salvador Dalí, in my view the most talented painter of the new generation, who venerated Freud. While I was talking to Freud, Dalí did a sketch of him. I never dared show it to Freud, because Dalí had prophetically shown death in his face.