The World of Yesterday (6 page)

Such psychological or rather unpsychological pressure on the young can take effect in only one of two ways—it will either paralyse or stimulate them. The case histories in psychoanalysts’ files show us how many inferiority complexes are the result of this absurd method of education; it may be no coincidence that the inferiority complex was revealed by men who had been through our old Austrian schools themselves. Myself, I owe to that pressure a passion for freedom that manifested itself early, one that the youth of today can hardly feel to the same extent, and with it a hatred for all that is authoritarian, all dictums issued from on high, and it has accompanied me all my life. Over the years my aversion to everything dogmatically established has become purely instinctive, and I had almost forgotten where it came from. But one day, when I was on a lecture tour and found out that I was to speak in the great auditorium of a university, standing at a raised lectern while the audience occupied benches below just as we schoolboys used to, I was suddenly overcome by uneasiness. I remembered how I had suffered all through my schooldays from being addressed from on high in that unfriendly, authoritarian, doctrinaire manner, and I was overwhelmed by a fear that speaking from a raised lectern might make me seem
just as impersonal as our teachers did in the past. My sense of inhibition made that lecture the worst I ever gave.

Up to the age of fourteen or fifteen we coped with school reasonably well. We joked about the teachers, we learnt our lessons with cold curiosity. But then came the time when school bored and disturbed us more and more. A strange phenomenon had quietly taken place—after entering grammar school at the age of ten, we boys had intellectually overtaken the curriculum after the first four of our eight years of secondary education. We instinctively felt that there wasn’t much of importance left for us to learn from it, and in many of the subjects that really interested us we even knew more than our poor teachers, who had never opened a book for their own interest since finishing their university studies. And another difference became more and more obvious daily—on the school benches where, in reality, only the seats of our trousers sat, we heard nothing new, or nothing that we felt was worth knowing, while outside there was a city full of thousands of things to stimulate our minds—a city of theatres, museums, bookshops, a university, music, a place where every day brought new surprises. So our pent-up thirst for knowledge, our intellectual, artistic and sensuous curiosity, finding no nourishment at school, ardently concentrated on all that was going on outside it. At first only two or three of us discovered that we had these artistic, literary and musical interests, then a dozen, and finally it was almost everyone.

For enthusiasm is infectious among young people. It passes from one to another in a school class like measles or scarlet fever, and by trying to outdo one another as fast as possible novices, in their childish vanity and ambition, will spur one another on. It is more or less a matter of chance what direction that enthusiasm takes; if there is a stamp-collector in the class he will soon infect a dozen with the same mania; if three boys wax
lyrical about ballerinas then their classmates will be standing at the stage door of the Opera daily. Three years after ours, another whole class at our school was obsessed with football, and before us a class had been enthusiastic fans of socialism and Tolstoy. The fact that I happened to be in a year with other boys whose imagination turned to the arts may have decided my entire career.

In itself this enthusiasm for the theatre, literature and art was perfectly natural in Vienna; the Viennese daily paper devoted a particularly large amount of space to cultural events, and wherever you went you heard adults discussing the Opera or the Burgtheater; you saw the pictures of famous actors on display in all the stationery shops; sport was still considered a rather violent occupation and a grammar-school boy felt he ought to be ashamed of indulging in it; and the cinematograph, with its mass-market ideals, had not yet been invented. There was no opposition to be feared at home either: the theatre and literature were among the ‘innocent’ passions by comparison with playing cards or chasing girls. After all, my father, like all Viennese fathers, had been an enthusiastic theatre-goer himself in his youth, and had attended a performance of
Lohengrin
conducted by Richard Wagner with as much delight as we went to the premieres of works by Richard Strauss and Gerhart Hauptmann. It was only natural for us, as grammar-school boys, to throng to any premiere. How ashamed we would have been, meeting our luckier colleagues, if we couldn’t have described every detail of a first night at school next morning! If our teachers had not been entirely indifferent to us they would surely have noticed that on the afternoon before the premiere of a major work—for which we had to begin queuing at three to get the only available places, standing room only—two-thirds of their pupils were mysteriously away sick. And if they had paid close attention, they would also have realised that the covers of our Latin grammars in fact concealed the poems of Rilke,
and we were using our mathematics exercise books to copy out the best poems from books that we had borrowed. Every day we invented new means of exploiting the tedium of lessons for our own reading. While a master was giving his tired old account of Schiller’s
Naive and Sentimental Poetry
, we read other things under the table, works by Nietzsche and Strindberg, whose names the good old man had never heard. It had come over us all like a fever; we had to know everything, acquire knowledge of all that was going on in every area of the arts and sciences. We crowded in with the university students in the afternoons to hear lectures, we went to all the art exhibitions, we went to the lecture theatres of the Department of Anatomy to watch dissections. Our curious nostrils sniffed at everything and anything. We stole into the rehearsals of the Philharmonic Orchestra, we rummaged around the second-hand bookshops, we looked at the booksellers’ display windows every day for instant information on what had just been published. And most of all, we read; we read everything we could lay hands on. We borrowed books from all the public libraries, and lent anything we could find to one another. But our best cultural source for all novelty was the coffee house.

To understand this, you have to know that the Viennese coffee house is an institution of a peculiar kind, not comparable to any other in the world. It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee. Every guest, in return for that small expenditure, can sit there for hours on end, talking, writing, playing cards, receiving post, and above all reading an unlimited number of newspapers and journals. A Viennese coffee house of the better sort took all the Viennese newspapers available, and not only those but the newspapers of the entire German Reich, as well as the French, British, Italian and American papers, and all the major literary and artistic international magazines, the
Mercure de France
as well as the
Neue Rundschau
, the
Studio,
and the
Burlington Magazine.
So
we knew everything that was going on in the world at first hand, we heard about every book that came out, every theatrical performance wherever it took place, and we compared the reviews in all the newspapers. Perhaps nothing contributed so much to the intellectual mobility and international orientation of Austrians as the fact that they could inform themselves so extensively at the coffee house of all that was going on in the world, and at the same time could discuss it with a circle of friends. We sat there for hours every day, and nothing escaped us, for thanks to our collective interests we pursued the
orbis pictus
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of artistic events not with just with one pair of eyes but with twenty or so; if one of us missed something, another would point it out to him, since, with a childish wish to show off, we were always vying with each other, showing an almost sporting ambition to know the newest, very latest thing. We were engaged in constant competition for new sensations. For instance, if we were discussing the works of Nietzsche, who was still frowned upon at the time, one of us might suddenly remark, assuming a superior air: “But Kierkegaard is better on the subject of egotism,” and at once we would all be jittery. “X knows about Kierkegaard and we don’t, who is he?” Next day we would all be racing off to the library to find the works of the dead Danish philosopher, for we felt it was a slur on us not to know something new when another boy did. Discovering and being right up to date with the very latest, most recent, most extravagant and unusual subject, one that had not yet been flogged to death—in particular not by the official literary critics of our worthy daily papers—was our passion, and I myself have indulged it for very many years. We were particularly keen to know all about what was not yet generally acknowledged, was difficult to get hold of, extravagant, new and radical; nothing was so abstruse and remote that our collective and avidly competitive curiosity did not want to entice it out of hiding. During our schooldays Stefan George and Rilke, for
instance, had been published in editions of only two or three hundred copies in all, and at most three or four of those copies had found their way to Vienna; no bookseller stocked them, no official critic had ever mentioned the name of Rilke. But through a miracle of the will, our little band knew every verse and every line of those poets. We beardless boys, not yet fully grown, who had to spend our days on the school bench, were the ideal readers for a young poet: curious, with enquiring and critical minds, and enthusiastic about enthusiasm itself. In fact we had a boundless capacity for enthusiasm. For years, we adolescents did nothing during our lessons, on the way to and from school, in the coffee house, at the theatre and on walks but discuss books, pictures, music, philosophy. Anyone who performed in public as an actor or conductor, anyone who had published a book or wrote in a newspaper, was a star in our firmament. I was almost alarmed when, years later, I found in Balzac’s account of his youth the sentence: “
Les gens célèbres étaient pour moi comme des dieux qui ne parlaient pas, ne marchaient pas, ne mangeaient pas comme les autres hommes
.”
2
That was exactly what we used to feel—to have seen Gustav Mahler in the street was an event to be reported to your friends next morning like a personal triumph, and when once, as a boy, I was introduced to Johannes Brahms and he gave me a kindly pat on the shoulder, I was in a state of total confusion for days over this extraordinary event. It is true that, aged twelve, I had only a very vague idea of exactly what Brahms had done, but the mere fact of his fame and his aura of creativity exerted astonishing power over me. A premiere of a work by Gerhart Hauptmann intrigued our entire class for weeks before rehearsals began; we approached actors and the players of bit parts to find out—ahead of anyone else!—the course of the plot and the exact cast; we had our hair cut by the theatre barber (I do not shrink even from describing our absurdities), just to glean some secret piece of information about Wolter or Sonnenthal, and we particularly
cultivated the company of a boy in a lower class, showing him all kinds of attentions, just because he was the nephew of a lighting inspector at the Opera and sometimes smuggled us in during rehearsals, and to tread that stage exceeded the awe felt by Dante when he climbed to the sacred circle of Paradise. So strongly did we feel the radiance of fame that even if it came at seventh hand, it still awed us; a poor old lady who was a great-niece of Franz Schubert appeared to us a supernatural being, and we looked respectfully at even Joseph Kainz’s valet in the street because he was lucky enough to be personally close to that most popular and brilliant of actors.

Of course I am well aware now of all the absurdity in our undiscriminating enthusiasm, of how much of it was merely mutual mimicry, how much no more than a sportsman’s instinct to come first, how much childish vanity there was in feeling arrogantly superior to the philistine environment of our families and our teachers in our high regard for the arts. But it still surprises me to think how much this close attention to our literary passions taught us boys at the time, how early our constant discussion and unravelling of the details of texts brought us the critical ability to discriminate. At seventeen, I had not only read all the poems of Baudelaire and Walt Whitman, I knew most of them by heart, and I think that in my entire later life I never read as intensively as I did in those years at school and university. It was taken for granted that names not honoured by the general public until a decade later were current among us, even the most ephemeral stayed in our minds because we fixed upon them so eagerly. Once I was telling my revered friend Paul Valéry how old my literary acquaintance with him really was. Thirty years ago, I said, I had already been reading his poems and loved them. The good-humoured Valéry merely smiled. “No pretence, please,
my friend! My poems weren’t published until 1916.” He was astonished when I described in detail the colour and format of the small literary journal where, in 1898, we had found his first verses in Vienna. “But hardly anyone knew them even in Paris,” he said in amazement. “How can you have got hold of them in Vienna?” I replied: “In just the same way as when you were a schoolboy yourself, in your provincial town, you got hold of the poems of Mallarmé, who was no better known at the time, nor part of the accepted literary canon.” And he agreed with me: “Young people discover poets for themselves because they want to discover them.” And it is a fact that we could scent what was in the wind even before it crossed the border, because we lived with our nostrils always distended to catch it. We found what was new because that was what we wanted, because we were hungry for something that belonged to us alone—not to the world of our fathers, not our environment. Young people, like certain animals, have an excellent instinct for changes in the weather, and so our generation felt, before our teachers and the universities knew it, that with the old century some of the old artistic ideas were also coming to an end, that a revolution or at least a change of values was in preparation. The good, solid masters of our fathers’ time—in literature Gottfried Keller, in drama Ibsen, in music Johannes Brahms, in painting Leibl, in philosophy Eduard von Hartmann—had in them, as we saw it, all the measured deliberation of the world of security. In spite of their technical and intellectual mastery, they no longer interested us. Instinctively, we felt that their cold, temperate rhythm was not that of our own restless blood, was no longer in tune with the accelerating tempo of modernity. The most vigilant mind of the later German generation, Hermann Bahr, lived in Vienna. He struck out furiously, an intellectual marauder championing all that was on its way, all that was new, and with his aid the Secession movement‘s building was opened in Vienna, exhibiting, to the horror of the old school in Paris,
the Impressionists and Pointillists, Munch from Norway, Rops from Belgium, all manner of extreme artists pointing to their predecessors Grünewald, Greco and Goya, who were out of favour at the time. We suddenly learnt to see with new eyes, and at the same time we learnt new rhythms and tonal colours in music through the works of Mussorgsky, Debussy, Strauss and Schönberg. In literature, realism dawned with Zola, Strindberg and Hauptmann, the daemonic Slav spirit with Dostoevsky, and a previously unknown sublimation and refinement of lyrical art in the works of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Nietzsche revolutionised philosophy; in architecture plain, functional buildings were introduced instead of the overloaded style of neoclassicism. Suddenly the old, comfortable order had been disrupted, its norms of the “aesthetically beautiful” (as Hanslick
3
would have put it) were questioned, and while the official critics of our solid bourgeois age often expressed horror at the experiments now being made, which were often bold, and sought to hold back the inexorable current by condemning such trends as ‘decadent’ or ‘anarchic’, we young people flung ourselves with gusto into the turbulent waves wherever they broke and foamed most wildly, We had a feeling that a time for us, our own time, was beginning, a time when youth would at last come into its own. So all at once our restlessly questing, enquiring passion had a point; we young people, still at school, could join the fray in these wild and often ferocious battles for the new art. Where an experiment was tried, perhaps a performance of a Wedekind play or a reading of modern poetry, we were sure to be there, lending our aid with the full force not only of our minds but also of our hands. I was a witness when, at the first performance of one of the atonal works of Arnold Schönberg’s youth, one gentleman began hissing and whistling vigorously, whereupon my friend Buschbeck dealt him an equally vigorous blow. We were the vanguard, the shock troops promoting every kind of new art just because it
was
new, just because it would
change the world for us, and it was our turn to live our own lives in the world now.
Nostra res agitur
4
, we felt.