Soul of the Age (37 page)

TO FRIEDRICH EMIL WELTI

[
September 1936
]

A very beautiful book has just come out, which I would like to recommend to you, if you haven't seen it already:
The Letters of Jacob Burckhardt
in a Kröner paperback edition. I have already read the editor's biographical foreword,
288
which is affectionate but poorly written, and a good portion of the letters. I had seen some of them before, but when arranged chronologically in this manner, they serve as a substitute for a biography, and what an exquisite substitute it is! As I read, I realize once again just how pervasive the spirit of Burckhardt was in Basel around 1900, while I was living there; I used to socialize with many of his disciples, Wölfflin, R. Wackernagel, Haller, and others.

Even though I was more strongly influenced by Nietzsche at that stage, I had already read
The Civilization of the Renaissance
with great enthusiasm in Tübingen, and then, gradually, with the appearance of
Meditations
and the cultural history of Greece, I realized how much I had profited from Burckhardt's mind and vision. I have learned more from him than from any other historian.

May things go well for you, despite the evil times!

TO VICTOR WITTKOWSKI

[
January 16, 1937
]

Thanks for your letter. I enjoyed some of your poems (the “dedications” are the only things I might have advised you to leave out), and I'm sorry I no longer have the opportunity to write a few favorable lines about it anywhere. For years, I have been doing these “summarizing reviews,” as you call them, and the young writers used to court me, then boo if I didn't find their books altogether delightful. The years since 1933 have been difficult, and that kind of work has completely ruined my eyes and made me neglect my own writing. On average, I earned around one franc for a full day's work, only to be branded in Germany as a “traitor to the
Volk
” who had accepted “Jewish pay”—not an unexpected charge—and I have also been libeled by the émigrés and the Jews, even though I risked my neck for their authors and publishers. At the top of the list were people like Bernhard in Paris and Schwarzschild in Prague. The experience has taught me a lot, and I don't have any regrets. But it would have been suicidal of me to keep up that activity.

Yes, my experience with German reviews is similar to yours. Previously, when a book of mine appeared, there would be reviews in over a hundred German papers, nowadays only in three or four.

I shall try to devote my remaining energy to
The Glass Bead Game.
It gets a bit longer each year.

For me, the most attractive poems were those in which you conjure up your home territory, the cathedral, Clerics' Pond, etc.

That's enough, Christmas and the New Year have put me hundreds of letters in arrears.

TO OTTO KORRADI

[
December 24, 1937
]

I was glad to get the books,
289
once again many thanks. The first book we are going to read in the new year is Buchwald's
Schiller.
At the moment we are reading the beautiful volume by Strowski on the “French mind.”
290

In your recent letter, you inquired about my interest in Chinese culture. That goes back quite far. But before Wilhelm's first Chinese editions started appearing, I was far more interested in India than in China. Since then—i.e., 1911 or 1912—I have often sought out the ancient Chinese (just in translation, of course). You can spot traces of that preoccupation in many of my earlier essays and books—e.g., in “The Way to Art,”
291
the fairy tales, and elsewhere. I am thinking about devising a Chinese “Life,” which would appear after the Indian one (I mean the fictional “Lives” of Josef Knecht).
292
China enters into
The Glass Bead Game
(
Die Neue Rundschau,
December 1933)
293
through the long quotation from Lü Bu We.
294
Moreover, there is a remarkably worthwhile and insightful book by a contemporary Chinese woman about the essence and distinctiveness of Chinese culture; the author is Lin Yutang, and it was published by the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart.

Do you know Ernst Wiechert's moving essay “Building a Wall Around Us”? It has just been published in a limited de luxe edition by the Werkstatt für Buchdruck in Mainz. Wiechert spent a couple of hours with me in the fall, along with the physiognomist Picard, with whom I am on friendly terms. We are having beautiful sunny days, thanks be to God. The only snow to be seen is at around 1,400 meters and above, apart from a few shady slopes. We are celebrating Christmas this evening. A friend from Berlin
295
is here with us for a visit. She is very young, and has completed a good dissertation on Novalis this year; some time ago she wrote the supplementary pages for the second edition of Ball's book about me. Gunter Böhmer, the artist, is coming tomorrow with his mother; and then, the day after tomorrow, Emmy, the widow of Hugo Ball. With very best wishes for the New Year

TO MARTIN BUBER

[
Early February 1938
]

I have been told you're probably in Jerusalem already, so that is where I shall send best wishes for your sixtieth birthday.
296
My first wish is that you, and also your wife, have managed to retain the flexibility and energy that I so often admired. My second wish is that you are enjoying your work and that your appetite for life and work is being whetted anew. I imagine that the existence there of a community and the need for hands-on, constructive work must be a source of strength and support, regardless of what you have had to endure. Whereas I often feel that I lack a sense of community and have nothing on which to lavish my efforts, worries, and love. All I have is a vague, far-flung diaspora, consisting of people who, like me, have no fixed abode amid the present upheavals; we have only a dim feeling that we are here to transmit at least some portion of the tradition to a future which is not yet visible.

Although I can only form a very incomplete picture of your present surroundings and current work, my thoughts and wishes are with you; my wife and I often think of you.

TO OTTO BASLER

March 11, 1938

Thanks for your letter. I read about the new attack on Thomas Mann by Krieck
297
in the newspaper; I am not prepared to read the essay, life is too short for that. I am quite sure that it's awful. Something happened recently which I found far worse: Wilhelm Schäfer, who is now seventy, couldn't resist putting some nasty comments about Mann and the Nobel Prize into a speech of his, which was actually very beautiful otherwise. When one sees a decent writer—a decent and responsible seventy-year-old like Schäfer—making a gaffe like that, one realizes the impact that a diabolical leadership can have on the morality of an entire people.

Robert Walser's
298
sister wrote to me yesterday. He is really in need of help, since there is a danger he might have to enter the poorhouse. If you happen to know of anybody who might be willing to make a donation, tell them about the situation. We would like to ask the Writers' Club for a donation in his honor. Although Switzerland has, for once, produced a writer who could really write German, we have to send the plate around to help him eke out a very frugal existence, in third-class institutions for the most part! The cost of the bombs dropped by a single plane in one sortie in Spain is probably greater than the sum needed here.[ … ]

You're right about Kassner's
299
book. He isn't easy to read (which, by the way, is also true of Picard), but he is not at all a professor. He is one of the few sages of this era who write in German. However, he is esoteric, and his language is platonic.

Addio, please consider the enclosure
300
a belated Easter greeting, yours

TO THE COMMISSIONERS OF THE ALIEN POLICE

April 28, 1938

Please permit me to put in a word for my esteemed colleague Albert Ehrenstein.
301
He was deported from the canton of Ticino, and his only crime is that he has an Austrian passport.

Although I realize that the Alien Police has the task of protecting Switzerland against an influx of foreigners, I cannot understand why the lower echelons often take brutal measures against individuals who have earned a reputation in the arts or sciences, devote themselves quietly to their work, and are not a burden to anybody.

Rather than feeling ashamed or threatened, Switzerland ought to feel honored that it is being sought out as a refuge by a highly gifted artist such as Albert Ehrenstein, at a time when the political world has gone berserk. There is absolutely no reason to think that the further presence in Switzerland of a man such as Ehrenstein can cause the country the slightest harm. We Swiss artists and intellectuals are becoming more and more ashamed of the raw force that our authorities and police forces are employing against colleagues whom we greatly admire.

Herr Ehrenstein, who was an Austrian citizen until the invasion of Austria, is seeking to become a Czech citizen, but the formalities will last another couple of months. I would like to lend my most heartfelt support to his request that he at least be allowed to stay in Switzerland until then.

TO GEORG REINHART

Montagnola, May 28
[
1938
]

Thank you for your letter. I am enclosing Dr. Schäffer's
302
letter, which I found very sad.

Unfortunately, your assumption that there might be charitable institutions for dealing with such cases is mistaken. There are thousands of similar cases, and I know of some that are just as complicated as your protégé's. But there are simply no organizations capable of providing assistance. Occasionally, in desperate cases, somebody manages to rustle up a Nansen passport for some poor unfortunate by, say, getting the League of Nations involved, that's all.

Dr. Schäffer is afraid he might be arrested by the Gestapo while in Vienna, but that's probably an exaggeration. Nobody is entirely safe, of course, but I do know quite a number of authors living in Austria who have greater reason for such fears yet can move around without hindrance.

But the other complaints of my poor colleague are entirely justified. I know some people living under similar conditions—a lot worse, actually, since they have nobody to support them; people who have been living in a country for months without any papers or indeed anything much to eat, then are deported and have to start the whole process all over again on the far side of the border; emigrants who have been moving back and forth between Prague and Barcelona since 1933, with long intervals in prison—but those are all younger people, who can if necessary endure such an adventurous and dangerous life. For older people like Schäffer, the situation is almost hopeless. If he were a friend of mine, I could only say something along these lines: “Like so many others, you'll have to reconcile yourself to the hopelessness of your situation; just wait stoically and see what happens when your passport expires; let yourself be shoved across the border, then sent back by the police over there. Entrust your fate to states that have gone crazy, and be happy that, for the moment at least, there is a good spirit, a patron, who is keeping you from starving. Resist suicide until the situation has become absolutely unbearable; there will always be time enough for that.”

Although that's an abominable thing to have to say, it's absolutely true. Somebody who has good connections with the Swiss or some other embassy in Hungary could mention Herr Schäffer to them, so that they might give him some advice and help him out in an emergency. But there is no normal, legal channel for providing help.

There are dozens of people like that living in Switzerland at the moment. Many are fellow writers, some quite famous, who have been notified that they have to leave Switzerland within a brief period. Their only crime is that they were Austrians, with good reasons for not wanting—or not being in a position—to exchange their Austrian passports for a passport of the German Reich. Our Alien Police don't need to swear an oath to Hitler; they could hardly serve his interests more diligently than they do now. I have been able to ease this particular burden for a number of people by making representations to the Alien Police and by vouching for the political and moral reliability of the endangered refugees. Unfortunately, I don't have any contacts in those countries whose laws and bureaucracy your protege is subject to. In Vienna, for instance, there is a recent book of mine lying in a publishing house which has been expropriated by the Nazis, and so I no longer own the book. The same thing has happened to all of my German (Berlin) income from previous books; it's now in the hands of the Third Reich or some other gang of thieves. That's what government and politics amount to nowadays.

And everything one says about the Nazis and the fascists applies just as much to Stalin and his empire. Recently, I had to ask Romain Rolland to try to approach Stalin about a group of people, some are very well known, who were hauled off a year ago by the secret police. He said in a resigned tone that he himself had close friends living in Russia who had disappeared in that manner, and that he had sent Stalin numerous letters and telegrams, but never received a single reply. There are no longer any contacts between the state and the intellectuals, in every camp.[ … ]

At the moment, when not completely preoccupied with my own worries, I am trying to get some close friends of ours out of Austria; some of them are in real danger. It's slow and tough going, a bit like wading in lime, because we have to talk to one another in a roundabout way, using recondite allusions. However, we are expecting a visit from one of those people and hope to help her some more. A wonderful young woman friend of mine, whose passport is about to run out, is in Sweden looking desperately for a man willing to go through with a fictitious marriage, in exchange for a financial consideration, to enable her to become a Swede; of course, all the applicants are swindlers. What a crazy world our Christian West has become!