The Society of the Crossed Keys Read online

  In my own day, we acted no more rationally when the so-called Bösendorfer Saal was torn down. In itself that little concert hall, which was reserved exclusively for chamber music, was a modest building, not suggesting any great artistic distinction. It had been Prince Liechtenstein’s riding school, and was adapted for musical purposes only by the addition of interior boarding, without any ostentation. But it had the resonance of an old violin, and it was a sacred place to music-lovers because Chopin and Brahms, Liszt and Rubinstein had given recitals there, and many of the famous quartets had first performed in this hall. And now it was to make way for a new purpose-built concert hall; such a thing was beyond the understanding of those of us who had spent many memorable hours there. When the last bars of Beethoven died away, played better than ever by the Rosé Quartet, none of the audience left their seats. We shouted and applauded, some of the women were sobbing with emotion, no one was willing to admit that this was goodbye. The lights in the hall were extinguished to clear us out of the place. Still none of the four or five hundred people present left their seats. We stayed for half-an-hour, an hour, as if our presence could save the sacred hall by force. And as students, how we campaigned, with petitions and demonstrations and articles, to keep the house where Beethoven died from demolition! Whenever one of these historic Viennese buildings went, it was as if a part of our souls were being torn from our bodies.

  This fanatical love of art, in particular the art of the theatre, was common to all classes of society in Vienna. Its hundreds of years of tradition had made the city itself a place with a clearly ordered and also—as I once wrote myself—a wonderfully orchestrated structure. The imperial house still set the tone, while the imperial palace represented not only the spatial centre of the city but also the supranational nature of the monarchy. Around that palace lay the grand residences of the Austrian, Polish, Czech and Hungarian nobility, forming what might be called a second rampart. Then came the houses of the members of ‘good society’—the minor nobility, higher civil servants, captains of industry and the ‘old families’. Below them came the lower middle class and the proletariat. All these social classes lived in their own circles and even in their own districts of the city: at the centre the great noblemen in their palaces, the diplomats in District Three, businessmen and industrialists near the Ringstrasse, the lower middle class in the inner districts, Districts Two to Nine, the proletariat on the periphery. However, they all came into contact with each other at the theatre and for major festivities such as the Floral Parade, when three hundred thousand spectators enthusiastically greeted the ‘upper ten thousand’ in their beautifully decorated carriages. Everything in Vienna that expressed itself in colour or music became an occasion for festivities: religious spectacles like the Corpus Christi procession, the military parades, performances by the outdoor musicians of the Burgmusik, even funerals attracted enthusiastic audiences, and it was the ambition of every true Viennese to end up as ‘a handsome corpse’ with a fine funeral procession and many companions escorting him on his last journey. A genuine Viennese turned even his death into a fine show for others to enjoy. The entire city was united in this sensitivity to everything colourful, musical and festive, in this delight in theatrical spectacle as a playful reflection of life, whether on the stage or in real space and time.

  It was not difficult to make fun of the theatrical mania of the Viennese, whose delight in tracking down the tiniest details of the lives of their favourites sometimes became grotesque, and our Austrian political indolence and economic backwardness, by comparison with the determined German Reich next door, may indeed be partly ascribed to our overrating of sensuous pleasure. But in cultural terms the very high value placed on the arts created something unique—a great veneration for all artistic achievement, leading over the centuries to unequalled expertise, and finally, thanks in its own turn to that expertise, to outstandingly high standards in all cultural fields. An artist always feels most at ease and at the same time most inspired in a place where he is valued, even overvalued. Art always reaches its zenith where it is important in the life of an entire nation. And just as Renaissance Florence and Rome attracted painters and trained them to achieve greatness, because every one of them felt bound to keep outdoing others and himself, competing in front of the citizens as a whole, so musicians and actors knew how important they were in Vienna. At the Opera House, in the Burgtheater, nothing was overlooked, every wrong note was instantly detected, every incorrect entry or abridged passage deplored, and this keen surveillance was exercised not only by professional critics at premieres, but day after day by the alert ear of the public at large, honed as it was by constant comparison. While the attitude in politics, the administration and morality was easygoing, and one made allowances for a slipshod piece of work and showed leniency for an offence, no quarter was given in artistic matters. Here the honour of the city was at stake. Every singer, every actor, every musician must constantly give of his best, or his career was finished. It was wonderful to be a darling of the public in Vienna, but it was not easy to maintain that position. No lowering of standards was forgiven. And this awareness of being under constant and pitiless observation forced every artist in Vienna to do his best, bringing the art of the city as a whole to a very high level. All of us who lived there in our youth have brought a stern and implacable standard of artistic performance into our lives from those years. Those who saw discipline exercised down to the smallest detail at the Opera House under Gustav Mahler, and vitality combined with meticulous accuracy taken as the norm in music played by the Philharmonic, are rarely entirely satisfied with theatrical or musical performances today. But we also learnt to criticise our own artistic performance; the example before us was, and still is, a high level of achievement inculcated into rising artists in few other cities in the world. This understanding of the right rhythm and momentum went deep into the people themselves, for even the most unassuming citizen sitting over his Heurige,2 demanded good music from the wind band just as he expected good value from the landlord. Similarly, people knew exactly which military band played with most verve in the Prater, whether it was the German Masters or the Hungarians. Anyone who lived in Vienna absorbed a sense of rhythm as if it were in the air. And just as that musicality expressed itself in writers in the particular attention we paid to writing particularly well-turned prose, in others the sense of delicacy was expressed in social attitudes and daily life. In what was known as ‘high society’, a Viennese with no appreciation of art or pleasure in form was unimaginable, but even among the lower classes the lives of the poorest showed a certain feeling for beauty drawn from the surrounding landscape and genial human attitudes. You were not truly Viennese without a love for culture, a bent for both enjoying and assessing the prodigality of life as something sacred.

  For Jews, adaptation to the human or national environment in which they lived was not only a measure taken for their own protection, but also a deeply felt private need. Their desire for a homeland, for peace, repose and security, a place where they would not be strangers, impelled them to form a passionate attachment to the culture around them. And nowhere else, except for Spain in the fifteenth century, were such bonds more happily and productively forged than in Austria. Here the Jews who had been settled in the imperial city for over two hundred years met people who took life lightly and were naturally easygoing, while under that apparently light-hearted surface they shared the deep Jewish instinct for intellectual and aesthetic values. And the two came together all the more easily in Vienna, where they found a personal task waiting for them, because over the last century Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy. In the eighteenth century Maria Theresia had had her daughters taught the pleasures of music, Joseph II had discussed Mozart’s operas with him as a connoisseur, Leopold II was a composer himself, but the later emperors Franz II and Ferdinand had no kind of interest in art, and Emperor Franz Joseph, who in his eighty years of life neve
r read or even picked up a book other than the Army List, even felt a decided antipathy to music. Similarly, the great noblemen had abandoned their former position as patrons; gone were the glorious days when the Esterházys gave house-room to Haydn, when the Lobkowitzes and Kinskys and Waldsteins competed for the first performance of a work by Beethoven to be given in their palaces, when Countess Thun went on her knees to that great daemonic figure asking him not to withdraw Fidelio from the Opera. Even Wagner, Brahms, Johann Strauss and Hugo Wolf no longer received the slightest support from them; the citizens of Vienna had to step into the breach to keep up the old high standard of the Philharmonic concerts and enable painters and sculptors to make a living, and it was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance. They had always loved the city, taking it to their hearts when they settled there, but it was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese. In fact they exerted little influence otherwise in public life; the lustre of the imperial house left all private wealth in the shade, high positions in the leadership of the state were in hereditary hands, diplomacy was reserved for the aristocracy, the army and the higher reaches of the civil service for the old-established families, and the Jews did not even try to look so high as to force their way into those privileged circles. They tactfully respected such traditional privileges as something to be taken for granted. I remember, for instance, that my father never in his life ate at Sacher’s, not for reasons of economy—the price difference between Sacher and the other great hotels was ridiculously small—but out of a natural instinct for preserving a distance. He would have felt it embarrassing or unseemly to sit at the table next to one occupied by, say, Prince Schwarzenberg or Prince Lobkowitz. It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights, because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone in the city, and the part played by the Jewish bourgeoisie in Viennese culture, through the aid and patronage it offered, was immeasurable. They were the real public, they filled seats at the theatre and in concert halls, they bought books and pictures, visited exhibitions, championed and encouraged new trends everywhere with minds that were more flexible, less weighed down by tradition. They had built up virtually all the great art collections of the nineteenth century, they had made almost all the artistic experiments of the time possible. Without the constant interest of the Jewish bourgeoisie as stimulation, at a time when the court was indolent and the aristocracy and the Christian millionaires preferred to spend money on racing stables and hunts rather than encouraging art, Vienna would have lagged as far behind Berlin artistically as Austria did behind the German Reich in politics. Anyone wishing to introduce a novelty to Vienna, anyone from outside seeking understanding and an audience there, had to rely on the Jewish bourgeoisie. When a single attempt was made in the anti-Semitic period3 to found a so-called National Theatre, there were no playwrights or actors or audiences available; after a few months the ‘National Theatre’ failed miserably, and that example first made it clear that nine-tenths of what the world of the nineteenth century celebrated as Viennese culture was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna.

  For in recent years the Viennese Jews—like those of Spain before their similarly tragic downfall—had been artistically creative, not in any specifically Jewish style but, with miraculous empathy, giving especially intense expression to all that was Austrian and Viennese. As composers, Goldmark, Gustav Mahler and Schönberg were figures of international stature; Oscar Straus, Leo Fall and Kálmán brought the traditional waltz and operetta to new heights; Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Beer-Hofmann and Peter Altenberg gave Viennese literature new status in Europe, a rank that it had never before reached even at the time of Grillparzer and Stifter. Sonnenthal and Max Reinhardt revived the international reputation of Vienna as a city of the theatre; Freud and the great scientific experts attracted attention to the famous and ancient university—everywhere, as scholars, virtuoso musicians, painters, directors, architects, journalists, they claimed high and sometimes the highest positions in the intellectual life of Vienna. Through their passionate love of the city and their adaptability they had become entirely assimilated, and were happy to serve the reputation of Austria; they felt that the assertion of their Austrian identity was their vocation. In fact, it must be said in all honesty that a good part, if not the greater part, of all that is admired today in Europe and America as the expression of a newly revived Austrian culture in music, literature, the theatre, the art trade, was the work of the Jews of Vienna, whose intellectual drive, dating back for thousands of years, brought them to a peak of achievement. Here intellectual energy that had lost its sense of direction through the centuries found a tradition that was already a little weary, nurtured it, revived and refined it, and with tireless activity injected new strength into it. Only the following decades would show what a crime it was when an attempt was made to force Vienna—a place combining the most heterogeneous elements in its atmosphere and culture, reaching out intellectually beyond national borders—into the new mould of a nationalist and thus a provincial city. For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Anyone who lived and worked there felt free of narrow-minded prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.

  We lived well, we lived with light hearts and minds at ease in old Vienna, and the Germans to the north looked down with some annoyance and scorn at us, their neighbours on the Danube who, instead of being capable and efficient like them and observing strict principles of order, indulged themselves, ate well, enjoyed parties and the theatre, and made excellent music on those occasions. Instead of cultivating German efficiency, which finally embittered and destroyed the lives of all other peoples, instead of the greedy will of Germany to rise supreme and forge a way forward, we Viennese loved to chat at our ease; we liked pleasant social gatherings, and in a kindly and perhaps lax spirit of concord we let all have their share without grudging it. ‘Live and let live’ was famous as a Viennese principle, a principle that still seems to me more humane than any categorical imperative, and it reigned supreme in all social circles. Poor and rich, Czechs and Germans, Christians and Jews lived peacefully together in spite of the occasional needling remark, and even political and social movements did not have that terrible spitefulness that eventually made its way into the bloodstream of the time as a poisonous residue of the First World War. In the old Austria you fought chivalrously; you might complain in the newspapers and parliament, but then the deputies, after delivering their Ciceronian tirades, would sit happily together over coffee or a beer, talking on familiar terms. Even when Lueger, leader of the anti-Semitic party,4 became mayor of the city, nothing changed in private social relationships, and I personally must confess that I never felt the slightest coldness or scorn for me as a Jew either in school, at the university, or in literature. Hatred between country and country, nation and nation, the occupants of one table and those of another, did not yet leap to the eye daily from the newspaper, it did not divide human beings from other human beings, nations from other nations. The herd instinct of the mob was not yet as offensively powerful in public life as it is today; freedom in what you did or did not do in private life was something taken for granted—which is hardly imaginable now—and toleration was not, as it is today, deplored as weakness and debility, but was praised as an ethical force.