The Society of the Crossed Keys Page 9

  That first moment, when the idea was still taking dreamlike but uncertain shape, was to be the happiest in Herzl’s short life. As soon as he began to define the aims of the movement in real terms, trying to combine its forces, he could not help seeing how different these people had become under various different nationalities, with their different histories, sometimes religious, sometimes free-thinking, some of them socialist and others capitalist Jews, stirring themselves up against each other in a wide variety of languages, and none of them willing to fall into line with a single unified authority. In the year 1901, when I first met him, he was in mid-struggle, and was perhaps at odds with himself as well; he did not yet believe in ultimate success enough to give up the post that earned him and his family a living. He had to divide himself between his lesser work of journalism and the mission that was his real life. It was as feuilleton editor that Theodor Herzl received me that day.

  *

  Theodor Herzl rose to greet me, and instinctively I felt there was a grain of truth in the ill-intentioned joke about the King of Zion—he really did look regal with his high forehead, his clear-cut features, his long and almost blue-black beard and his deep-blue, melancholy eyes. His sweeping, rather theatrical gestures did not seem affected, because they arose from a natural dignity, and it would not have taken this particular occasion to make him look imposing to me. Even standing in front of the shabby desk heaped high with papers in that miserably cramped editorial office with its single window, he was like a Bedouin desert sheikh; a billowing white burnous would have looked as natural on him as his black morning coat, well-cut in an obviously Parisian style. After a brief and deliberately inserted pause—as I often noticed later, he liked such small effects, and had probably studied them at the Burgtheater—he deigned to give me his hand, though in a very friendly way. Indicating the chair beside him, he asked, “I think I’ve heard or read your name somewhere before. You write poetry, don’t you?” I said that I did. “Well,” he said leaning back, “so what have you brought me?”

  I told him I would very much like to submit a little prose essay to him, and handed him my manuscript. He looked at the title page, turned to the end to assess its extent, and then leant back further in his chair. And to my surprise (I had not expected it) I saw that he had already begun to read the manuscript. He read slowly, turning the page without looking up. When he had finished the final page, he slowly folded the manuscript, then ceremoniously and still without looking at me put it into an envelope, and wrote something on the envelope in pencil. Only then, after keeping me in suspense for some time with these mysterious moves, did he raise his dark, weighty glance to me, saying with deliberate and slow solemnity, “I am glad to tell you that your fine piece is accepted for publication in the feuilleton of the Neue Freie Presse.” It was like Napoleon presenting a young sergeant with the cross of the Légion d’Honneur on the battlefield.

  This may seem a minor, unimportant episode in itself. But you would have to be Viennese, and Viennese of my generation, to understand what a meteoric rise this encouragement meant. In my nineteenth year, I had risen to a position of prominence overnight, and Theodor Herzl, who was kind to me from that first moment, used the occasion of our meeting to say, in one of his next essays, that no one should believe the arts were in decline in Vienna. On the contrary, he wrote, as well as Hofmannsthal there were now a number of gifted young writers around who might be expected to do great things, and he mentioned my name first. I have always felt it a particular distinction that a man of the towering importance of Theodor Herzl, in his highly visible and thus very responsible position, was the first to express support for me.

  It was a difficult decision for me to make when I said later, with apparent ingratitude, that I felt I could not join his Zionist movement actively and even help him to lead it, as he had asked. However, I could never have made a real success of such a connection; I was alienated most of all by the lack of respect, hardly imaginable today, that his real comrades expressed towards Herzl himself. The Eastern Jews complained that he understood nothing about the Jewish way of life and wasn’t even conversant with Jewish customs, while the economists among them regarded him as a mere journalist and feuilletonist. Everyone had his own objection, and did not always express it respectfully. I knew how much goodwill, particularly just then, those truly attuned to Herz’s ideas, particularly the young, could and should owe him, and the quarrelsome, opinionated spirit of constant opposition, the lack of honest, heartfelt acceptance in the Zionist circle, estranged me from a movement that I would willingly have approached with curiosity, if only for Herzl’s sake. Once, when we were discussing the subject, I openly confessed my dislike of the indiscipline in his ranks. He smiled rather bitterly and said, “Don’t forget, we’ve been used to dealing with problems and arguing over ideas for centuries. After all, historically speaking, we Jews have gone two thousand years without any experience of bringing something real into the world. Unconditional commitment has to be learnt, and I still haven’t learnt it myself. I still write for feuilletons now and then, I am still Feuilleton Editor of the Neue Freie Presse, when it should really be my duty to have only one thought in the world and never write a line about anything else. But I’m on my way to rectifying that; I’ll have to learn unconditional commitment myself first, and then maybe the rest of them will learn with me.” I still remember the deep impression these remarks made on me, for none of us could understand why it took Herzl so long to give up his position with the Neue Freie Presse—we thought it was for his family’s sake. But the world did not know until much later that such was not the case, and he had even sacrificed his own private fortune to the cause. This conversation showed me how much Herzl suffered personally in this dilemma, and many accounts in his diaries confirm it.

  I met him many more times, but of all our encounters only one other seems to me really worth remembering, indeed unforgettable, because it was the last. I had been abroad, keeping in touch with Vienna only by letter, and met him one day in the city park. He was obviously coming away from the editorial offices, walking very slowly and not with his old, swinging step, but stooping slightly. I greeted him politely and was going to pass on, but he quickly came towards me, straightening his posture, and gave me his hand. “Now, why are you hiding away? There’s no need for that.” He approved of my frequent trips abroad. “It’s our only way,” he said. “All I know I learnt abroad. Only there do you get used to thinking on a wide scale. I’m sure that I would never have had the courage to form my first concept here, it would have been nipped in the bud. But thank God, when I came up with it, it was all ready, and they couldn’t do anything but try tripping me up.” He then spoke very bitterly about Vienna where, he said, he had found most opposition, and if new initiatives had not come from outside, particularly from the East and now from America too, he would have grown weary. “What’s more,” he said, “my mistake was to begin too late. Victor Adler was leader of the Social Democratic party at the age of thirty, the age when he was best fitted for the struggle, and I won’t even speak of the great figures of history. If you knew how I suffer mentally, thinking of the lost years—regretting that I didn’t find my vocation earlier. If my health were as strong as my will, then all would still be well, but you can’t buy back the past.” I went back to his house with him. Arriving there, he stopped, shook hands with me, and said, “Why do you never come to see me? You’ve never visited me at home. Telephone first and I’ll make sure I am free.” I promised him, firmly determined not to keep that promise, for the more I love someone the more I respect his time.

  But I did join him after all, only a few months later. The illness that was beginning to make him stoop at that last meeting of ours had suddenly felled him, and now I could accompany him only to the cemetery. It was a strange day, a day in July, and no one who was there will ever forget it. For suddenly people arrived at all the Viennese railway stations, coming with every train by day and night, from all lands and countries; Weste
rn, Eastern, Russian, Turkish Jews—from all the provinces and small towns they suddenly stormed in, the shock of the news of his death still showing on their faces. You never felt more clearly what their quarrels and talking had veiled over—the leader of a great movement was being carried to his grave. It was an endless procession. Suddenly Vienna realised that it was not only a writer, an author of moderate importance, who had died, but one of those original thinkers who rise victorious in a country and among its people only at rare intervals. There was uproar in the cemetery itself; too many mourners suddenly poured like a torrent up to his coffin, weeping, howling and screaming in a wild explosion of despair. There was an almost raging turmoil; all order failed in the face of a kind of elemental, ecstatic grief. I have never seen anything like it at a funeral before or since. And I could tell for the first time from all this pain, rising in sudden great outbursts from the hearts of a crowd a million strong, how much passion and hope this one lonely man had brought into the world by the force of his ideas.

  The real significance to me of my ceremonial admission to the rank of feuilletonist on the Neue Freie Presse was in my private life. It gave me unexpected confidence within the family. My parents had little to do with literature, and did not presume to make literary judgements; to them, and to the entire Viennese bourgeoisie, important works were those that won praise in the Neue Freie Presse, and works ignored or condemned there didn’t matter. They felt that anything published in the feuilleton was vouched for by the highest authority, and a writer who pronounced judgement there demanded respect merely by virtue of that fact. And now, imagine such a family glancing daily at the front page of their newspaper with reverent awe and one morning, incredibly, finding that the rather unkempt nineteen-year-old sitting at their table, who had been far from a high-flyer at school and whose writing they accepted with kindly tolerance as a harmless diversion (better than playing cards or flirting with disreputable girls, anyway), has been giving his opinions, not much valued previously at home, in that highly responsible journal among famous and experienced men. If I had written the finest poems of Keats, Hölderlin or Shelley, it would not have caused such a total change of attitude in my entire family circle. When I came into the theatre, they pointed this puzzling Benjamin of theirs out to each other, a lad who in some mysterious way had entered the sacred precincts of the old and dignified. And since I was published quite often in the feuilleton, almost on a regular basis, I soon risked winning high esteem and respect locally. But fortunately I avoided that danger in good time by telling my parents one morning, to their surprise, that I would like to spend the next semester studying in Berlin. My family respected me, or rather the Neue Freie Presse in whose golden aura I stood, too much not to grant my wish.

  Of course I had no intention of ‘studying’ in Berlin. I called in at the university there, just as I had in Vienna, only twice in the course of a semester—once to register for lectures, the second time for certification of my alleged attendance at them. I was not looking for colleges or professors in Berlin, I wanted a greater and even more complete form of freedom. In Vienna, I still felt tied to my environment. The literary colleagues with whom I mingled almost all came from the same middle-class Jewish background as I did; in a small city where everyone knew everyone else, I was inevitably the son of a ‘good’ family, and I was tired of what was considered ‘good’ society’; I even liked the idea of decidedly bad society, an unconstrained way of life with no one checking up on me. I hadn’t even looked in the university register to see who lectured on philosophy in Berlin. It was enough for me to know that modern literature was cultivated more actively and eagerly there than at home, that Dehmel and other writers of the younger generation could be met in Berlin, that new journals, cabarets and theatres were being opened, and in short, that the whole place was in a buzz.

  In fact I arrived in Berlin at a very interesting moment in its history. Since 1870, when it had ceased to be the modest and by no means rich little capital of the Kingdom of Prussia and became the residence of the German Kaiser, this unassuming city on the river Spree had seen its fortunes soar to great heights. However, Berlin had not yet assumed leadership in culture and the arts. Munich, with its painters and writers, was still considered the real artistic centre; the Dresden Opera dominated music; the smaller capital cities of former princely states attracted notable artistic figures, but Vienna above all, with its centuries of tradition, concentrated cultural force, and wealth of natural talent had still, until this point, been considered greatly superior. In the last few years, however, with the rapid economic rise of Germany, all that had begun to change. Great industrial companies and prosperous families moved to Berlin, and new wealth accompanied by daring audacity opened up greater opportunities in architecture and the theatre there than in any other large German city. Under the patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm museums began to expand, the theatre found an excellent director in Otto Brahm, and the very fact that there was no real cultural tradition going back for centuries encouraged young artists to try something new. For tradition also and always means inhibition. Vienna, bound to the old ways and idolising its own past, was cautious when faced with young people and bold experiments, waiting to see what came of them. In Berlin, on the other hand, a city seeking to mould itself quickly and in its own individual form, innovation was much in demand. It was only natural, then, for young people to come thronging to Berlin from all over the Reich and even from Austria, and the talented among them were proved right by the success they achieved. Max Reinhardt of Vienna, for instance, would have had to wait patiently for a couple of decades in his native city to reach the position that he was holding in Berlin within two years.

  It was at exactly this point of its change from a mere capital city to an international metropolis that I arrived in Berlin. After the rich beauty of Vienna, a legacy of our great forebears, my first impression was rather disappointing; the crucial move towards the Westend district, where a new style of architecture was to replace that of the rather ostentatious buildings of the Tiergarten, had only just begun, and architecturally uninteresting Friedrichstrasse and Leipziger Strasse, with their ponderous splendours, still formed the centre of the city. Suburbs such as Wilmersdorf, Nikolassee and Steglitz could be reached only with some difficulty by tram, and in those days visiting the austerely beautiful lakes of the March of Brandenburg still meant quite an elaborate expedition. Apart from the old Unter den Linden, there was no real centre, no place for showy parades such as the Graben in Vienna, and old Prussian habits of thrift died hard—there was no sign of elegance in general. Women went to the theatre in unfashionable home-made dresses, and wherever you went you never found the light, skilful, prodigal touch that in Vienna and Paris could make something that cost very little look enchantingly extravagant. Every detail showed the miserly economy of the period of Frederick the Great; the coffee was weak and bad because every bean was grudged, food was carelessly prepared and had no zest in it. Cleanliness and a strict, painstaking sense of order ruled here, not the musical verve of Vienna. Nothing seemed to me more typical than the contrast between my Viennese and my Berlin landladies. The woman from whom I rented rooms in Vienna was cheerful and talkative; she did not keep everything sparkling clean, and would carelessly forget things, but she was ready and willing to oblige her tenants. My landlady in Berlin was correct and kept the place immaculate, but on receiving her first monthly bill I found every small service she had done me charged in her neat, upright hand—three pfennigs for sewing on a trouser button, twenty pfennigs for removing a splash of ink from the table top, until finally, under a strong line ruled above, the total sum I owed for such labours, they amounted to sixty-seven pfennigs in all. At first this made me smile, but more telling was the fact that after a few days I myself was infected with this Prussian passion for meticulous order, and for the first and last time in my life found myself keeping precise accounts of my expenditure.

  My friends in Vienna had given me a whole series of letters
of introduction, but I did not use any of them. After all, the real point of my venture was to escape the secure, bourgeois atmosphere of home and instead live free of all ties, cast entirely on my own resources. The only people I wanted to meet were those to whom I found the way through my own literary endeavours—and I wanted them to be as interesting as possible. After all, not for nothing had I read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème,2 and at the age of twenty I was bound to want to try the bohemian life for myself.

  I did not have to search long for a lively and motley assortment of friends. Back in Vienna I had been contributing for some time to the leading journal of the Berlin modernists, which went by the almost ironic title of Das Gesellschaft—Society—and was edited by Ludwig Jacobowski. Shortly before his early death, this young writer had founded a society called ‘Die Kommenden’—The Coming Generation—a name calculated to entice the young, which met once a week on the first floor of a coffee house on Nollendorfplatz. A truly heterogeneous company met in this society, which was created on the model of the Parisian ‘Closerie des Lilas’—writers and architects, snobs and journalists, young women who liked to be regarded as artists or sculptors, Russian students and ash-blonde Scandinavian girls who had come to Berlin to perfect their German. From Germany itself came representatives of all its provinces—strong-boned Westphalians, unsophisticated Bavarians, Silesian Jews, all mingling freely in fervent discussion. Now and then poems or dramas were read aloud, but for all of us our main business was getting to know each other. Amidst these young people who deliberately called themselves bohemians sat one old, grey-bearded man, a figure like Father Christmas—Peter Hille, whom we all loved and respected because he was a real writer and a real bohemian. Hille, then aged seventy, gazed kindly and guilelessly at the curious crowd of children that we were to him. He always wore his grey raincoat, which hid a frayed suit and dirty linen, and would bring badly crumpled manuscripts out of one of his pockets and read his poems aloud. They were poems like no others, more like the improvisations of a poetic genius, but too loosely formed, with too much left to chance. He wrote them in pencil, on trams or in cafés, then forgot them, and had difficulty deciphering the words on the smudged, stained piece of paper when he read them aloud. He never had any money, but he didn’t care about money, sleeping the night now at one friend’s, now at another’s, and there was something touchingly genuine about his total unworldliness and absolute lack of ambition. It was hard to work out when and how this kindly child of nature had made his way to the big city of Berlin, and what he wanted here. However, as in fact he wanted nothing, not even to be famous or celebrated, thanks to his poetically dreamy nature he was more carefree and at ease with himself than anyone else I have ever met. Ambitious disputants shouted each other down in vociferous argument all around him; he listened quietly, did not argue with anyone, sometimes raised his glass to someone in friendly greeting, but he never joined in the conversation. You felt as if, even in the wildest tumult, words and verses were in search of each other in his shaggy and rather weary head, without ever quite touching and finding one another.