The Society of the Crossed Keys (6 page)

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,
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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.

For I was not born into a century of passion. It was a well-ordered world with a clear social structure and easy transitions between the parts of that structure, a world without haste. The rhythm of the new speed had not yet transferred itself from machinery, the motor car, the telephone and the aeroplane to humanity. Time and age were judged by
different
criteria. People lived a more leisurely life, and when I try to picture the figures of the adults who played a large part in my childhood it strikes me how many of them grew stout before their time. My father, my uncle, my teacher, the salesmen in shops, the musicians in the Philharmonic at their music desks were all portly, ‘dignified’ men at the age of forty. They walked slowly, they spoke in measured tones, and in conversation they stroked their well-groomed beards, which were often already grey. But grey hair was only another mark of dignity, and a ‘man of mature years’ deliberately avoided the gestures and high sprits of youth as something unseemly. Even in my earliest childhood, when my father was not yet forty, I cannot remember ever seeing him run up or down a staircase, or indeed do anything in visible haste. Haste was not only regarded as bad form, it was in fact superfluous, since in that stable bourgeois world with its countless little safeguards nothing sudden ever happened. Those disasters
that did take place on the periphery of our world did not penetrate the well-lined walls of our secure life. The Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, even the Balkan Wars did not make any deep impression on my parents’ lives. They skimmed all the war reporting in the paper as indifferently as they looked at the sports headlines. And what, indeed, did anything that happened outside Austria have to do with them, what change did it bring to their lives? In the serene epoch of their Austria, there was no upheaval in the state, no abrupt destruction of their values. Once, when securities fell by four or five points on the stock exchange, it was called a ‘crash’ and discussed with furrowed brow as a catastrophe. People complained of high taxes more out of habit that from any real conviction, and by comparison with those of the post-war period the taxes then were only a kind of little tip you gave the state. The most precise stipulations were laid down in wills for ways to protect grandsons and great-grandsons from any loss of property, as if some kind of invisible IOU guaranteed safety from the eternal powers, and meanwhile people lived comfortably and tended their small worries like obedient domestic pets who were not really to be feared. When an old newspaper from those days happens to fall into my hands, and I read the excitable reports of some small local council election, when I try to remember the plays at the Burgtheater with their tiny problems, or think of the disproportionate agitation of our youthful debates on fundamentally unimportant matters, I cannot help smiling. How Lilliputian all those anxieties were, how serene that time! The generation of my parents and grandparents was better off, they lived their lives from one end to the other quietly in a
straight, clear line. All the same, I do not know whether I envy them. For they drowsed their lives away remote from all true bitterness, from the malice and force of destiny; they knew nothing about all those crises and problems that oppress the heart but at the same time greatly enlarge it. How little they knew, stumbling along in security and prosperity and comfort, that life can also mean excess and tension, constant surprise, can be turned upside down; how little they guessed in their touching liberal optimism that every new day dawning outside the window could shatter human lives. Even in their darkest nights they never dreamt how dangerous human beings can be, or then again how much power they can have to survive dangers and surmount trials. We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.

D
URING THOSE EIGHT
YEARS
at grammar school, one very personal fact affected us all—starting as children of ten, we gradually became sexually mature young people of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Nature began to assert its rights. These days, the awakening of puberty seems to be an entirely private matter, to be dealt with for themselves by all young people as they grow up, and it does not at first glance appear at all suitable for public discussion. For our generation, however, the crisis of puberty reached beyond its own real sphere. At the same time, it brought an awakening in another sense—it taught us to look more critically, for the first time, at the world of the society in which we had grown up and its conventions. Children and even adolescents are generally inclined to conform respectfully to the laws of their
environment
at first. But they submit to the conventions enjoined upon them only as long as they see everyone else genuinely observing them. A single instance of mendacity in teachers or parents will inevitably make the young turn a distrustful and thus a sharper eye on their surroundings as a whole. And it did not take us long to discover that all those authorities whom we had so far trusted—school, the family, public morality—were
remarkably insincere on one point—the subject of sexuality. Worse than that, they wanted us, too, to dissimulate and cover up anything we did in that respect.

The fact is that thirty or forty years ago, thinking on such subjects was not what it is in the world of today. Perhaps there has never been such a total transformation in any area of public life within a single human generation as here, in the relationship between the sexes, and it was brought about by a whole series of factors—the emancipation of women, Freudian psychoanalysis, cultivation of physical fitness through sport, the way in which the young have claimed independence. If we try to pin down the difference between the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century, which was essentially Victorian, and the more liberal uninhibited attitudes of the present, we come closest, perhaps, to the heart of the matter by saying that in the nineteenth century the question of sexuality was anxiously avoided because of a sense of inner insecurity. Previous eras which were still openly religious, in particular the strict puritanical period, had an easier time of it. Imbued by a genuine conviction that the demands of the flesh were the Devil’s work, and physical desire was sinful and licentious, the authorities of the Middle Ages tackled the problem with a stern ban on most sexual activity, and enforced their harsh morality, especially in Calvinist Geneva, by exacting cruel punishments. Our own century, however, a tolerant epoch that long ago stopped believing in the Devil and hardly believed in God any more, could not quite summon up the courage for such outright condemnation, but viewed sexuality as an anarchic and therefore disruptive force, something that could
not be fitted into its ethical system and must not move into the light of day, because any form of extramarital free love offended bourgeois ‘decency’. A curious compromise was found to resolve this dilemma. While not actually forbidding a young man to engage in sexual activity, morality confined itself to insisting that he must deal with that embarrassing business by hushing it up. Perhaps sexuality could not be eradicated from the polite world, but at least it should not be visible. By tacit agreement, therefore, the whole difficult complex of problems was not to be mentioned in public, at school, or at home, and everything that could remind anyone of its existence was to be suppressed.

We, who have known since Freud that those who try to suppress natural instincts from the conscious mind are not eradicating them but only, and dangerously, shifting them into the unconscious, find it easy to smile at the ignorance of that naive policy of keeping mum. But the entire nineteenth century suffered from the delusion that all conflicts could be resolved by reason, and the more you hid your natural instincts the more you tempered your anarchic forces, so that if young people were not enlightened about the existence of their own sexuality they would forget it. In this deluded belief that you could moderate something by ignoring it, all the authorities agreed on a joint boycott imposed by means of hermetic silence. The churches offering pastoral care, schools, salons and the law courts, books and newspapers, fashion and custom all on principle avoided any mention of the matter, and to its discredit even science, which should have taken on the task of confronting all problems directly, also agreed to consider
that what was natural was dirty,
naturalia sunt turpia
.
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Science capitulated on the pretext that it was beneath its dignity to study such indecent subjects. Wherever you look in the books of the period—philosophical, legal, even medical—you find that by common consent every mention of the subject is anxiously avoided. When experts on criminal law met at conferences to discuss the introduction of humane practices to prisons and the moral damage done to inmates by life in jail, they scurried timidly past the real central problem. Although in many cases neurologists were perfectly well acquainted with the causes of a number of hysterical disorders, they were equally
unwilling
to tackle the subject, and we read in Freud how even his revered teacher Charcot admitted to him privately that he knew the real cause of these cases but could never say so publicly. Least of all might any writer of belles-lettres venture to give an honest account of such subjects, because that branch of literature was concerned only with the aesthetically beautiful. While in earlier centuries authors did not shrink from
presenting
an honest and all-inclusive picture of the culture of their time, so that in Defoe, the Abbé Prévost, Fielding and Rétif de la Bretonne we can still read unvarnished descriptions of the true state of affairs, the nineteenth century saw fit only to show the ‘sensitive’ and sublime, nothing embarrassing but true. Consequently you will find scarcely a fleeting mention in the literature of that era of all the perils and dark
confusions
of young city-dwellers of the time. Even when a writer boldly mentioned prostitution, he felt he should refine the subject, presenting a perfumed heroine as the Lady of the Camellias.
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So we are faced with the strange fact that if young
people today, wanting to know how their counterparts of the last couple of generations made their way through life, open the novels of even the great writers of that time, the works of Dickens and Thackeray, Gottfried Keller and Bjørnson,
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they will find—except in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who as Russians stood outside the pseudo-idealism of Europe—accounts of nothing but sublimated, toned-down love affairs because the pressures of the time inhibited that whole generation in its freedom of expression. And nothing more clearly illustrates the almost hysterical over-sensitivity of our forebears’ moral sense and the atmosphere in which they lived, unimaginable today, than the fact that even this literary restraint was not enough. Can anyone now understand how such a down-to-earth novel as
Madame Bovary
could be banned by a French court on the grounds of indecency? Or how Zola’s novels, in my own youth, could be considered pornographic, or so well-balanced a writer of neoclassical epic works as Thomas Hardy could arouse indignation in England and America? Reserved as they were on the subject, these books had given away too much of the truth.

But we grew up in this unhealthily musty air, drenched with sultry perfumes. The dishonest and psychologically unrealistic morality of covering up sexuality and keeping it quiet weighed down on us in our youth, and as, thanks to the solidarity maintained in this policy of hushing things up, there were no proper accounts available in literature and cultural history, it may not be easy for my readers to reconstruct what had
actually
happened, incredible as it might seem. However, there is one good point of reference; we need only look at fashion,
because the fashions of a period, visibly expressing its tastes, betray its morality. It can be no coincidence that as I write now, in 1940, the entire audience in every town and village all over Europe or America bursts into wholehearted
merriment
when society men and women of 1900 appear on the cinema screen in the costumes of the time. The most naive of us today will smile at those strange figures of the past, seeing them as caricatures, idiots decked out in unnatural,
uncomfortable
, unhygienic and impractical clothing. Even we, who saw our mothers, aunts and girlfriends wearing those absurd gowns and thought them equally ridiculous when we were boys, feel it is like a strange dream for a whole generation to have submitted to such stupid costumes without protest. The men’s fashions of the time—high, stiff collars, one of them known as the ‘patricide’, so stiff that they ruled out any ease of movement, the black frock coats with their flowing tails, top hats resembling chimney pipes, also provoke laughter. But most ridiculous of all is a lady of the past in her dress, difficult to put on and hard to wear, every detail of it doing violence to nature. Her body is cut in two at a wasp-waist obtained by a whalebone corset, her skirts billow out in an enormous bell, her throat is enclosed right up to the chin, her feet covered to the toes, her hair piled up into countless little curls and rolls and braids, worn under a majestically swaying monster of a hat, her hands carefully gloved even in the hottest summer—this creature, long ago consigned to history, gives the impression of pitiable helplessness, despite the perfume wafting around her, the jewellery weighing her down and all the costly lace, frills and trimmings. You see at first glance that once inside
such garments and invulnerable as a knight in his armour, a woman was no longer free, could not move fast and gracefully, but every movement, every gesture and indeed her whole
bearing
in such a costume was bound to be artificial and literally unnatural. Merely dressing to look like a lady—never mind all the etiquette of high society—just putting on such gowns and taking them off was a complicated procedure, and impossible without someone else’s help. First there were countless little hooks and eyes to be done up behind a lady’s back from waist to neck, a maid had to exert all her strength to tight-lace her mistress’s corset, her long hair—and let me remind the young that thirty years ago all European women, with the exception of a handful of Russian women students, had hair that fell to their waists when they unpinned it—had to be curled, set, brushed and combed and piled up by a hairdresser called in daily and using a large quantity of hairpins, combs and slides, curling tongs and hair curlers, all this before she could put on her petticoats, camisoles, little bodices and jackets like a set of onion skins, turning and adjusting until the last remnant of her own female form had entirely disappeared. But there was a secret sense in this nonsense. A woman’s real figure was to be so entirely concealed by all this manipulation that even at the wedding breakfast her bridegroom had not the faintest idea whether his future companion for life was straight or crooked, plump or thin, had short legs or long legs. That ‘moral’ age thought it perfectly permissible to add artificial reinforcements to the hair, the bosom and other parts of the body, for the purposes of deception and to conform to the general ideal of female beauty. The more a woman was expected to look
like a lady, the less of her natural shape might be shown; in reality the guiding principle behind this fashion was only to obey the general moral tendency of the time, which was chiefly concerned with concealment and covering up.

But that wise morality quite forgot that when you bar the door to the Devil, he usually forces his way in down the
chimney
or through a back entrance. What strikes our uninhibited gaze today about those costumes, garments so desperately trying to cover every inch of bare skin and hide the natural figure, is not their moral propriety but its opposite, the way that those fashions, provocative to the point of
embarrassment
, emphasised the polarity of the sexes. While the modern young man and young woman, both of them tall and slim, both beardless and short-haired, conform to each other in easy comradeship even in their outward appearance, in that earlier epoch the sexes distanced themselves from each other as far as possible. The men sported long beards, or at least twirled the ends of a mighty moustache, a clearly recognisable sign of their masculinity, while a woman’s breasts, essentially feminine sexual attributes, were made ostentatiously visible by her corset. The extreme emphasis on difference between the so-called stronger sex and the weaker sex was also evident in the attitudes expected of them—a man was supposed to be forthright, chivalrous and aggressive, a woman shy, timid and defensive. They were not equals but hunters and prey. This unnatural tension separating them in their outward behaviour was bound to heighten the inner tension between the two poles, the factor of eroticism, and so thanks to its technique—which knew nothing of psychology, of concealing
sexuality and hushing it up—the society of the time achieved exactly the opposite. In its constant prudish anxiety, it was always sniffing out immorality in all aspects of life—literature, art and fashion—with a view to preventing any stimulation, with the result that it was in fact forced to keep dwelling on the immoral. As it was always studying what might be unsuitable, it found itself constantly on the alert; to the world of that time, ‘decency’ always appeared to be in deadly danger from every gesture, every word. Perhaps we can understand how it still seemed criminal, at that time, for a woman to wear any form of trousers for games or sports. But how can we explain the hysterical prudery that made it improper for a lady even to utter the word ‘trousers’? If she mentioned such a sensually dangerous object as a man’s trousers at all, she had to resort to the coy euphemism of ‘his unmentionables’. It would have been absolutely out of the question for a couple of young people, from the same social class but of different sexes, to go out together by themselves—or rather, everyone’s first thought at the mere idea would have been that ‘something might happen’. Such an encounter was permissible only if some supervising person, a mother or a governess, accompanied every step that the young people took. Even in the hottest summer, it would have been considered scandalous for young girls to play tennis in ankle-length skirts or even with bare arms, and it was terribly improper for a well-brought-up woman to cross one foot over the other in public, because she might reveal a glimpse of her ankles under the hem of her dress. The natural elements of sunlight, water and air were not permitted to touch a woman’s bare skin. At the seaside, women made their laborious way
through the water in heavy bathing costumes, covered from neck to ankles. Young girls in boarding schools and convents even had to take baths in long white garments, forgetting that they had bodies at all. It is no legend or exaggeration to say that when women died in old age, their bodies had sometimes never been seen, not even their shoulders or their knees, by anyone except the midwife, their husbands, and the woman who came to lay out the corpse. Today, forty years on, all that seems like a fairy tale or humorous exaggeration. But this fear of the physical and natural really did permeate society, from the upper classes down, with the force of a true neurosis. It is hard to imagine today that at the turn of the century, when the first women rode bicycles or actually ventured to sit astride a horse instead of riding side-saddle, people would throw stones at those bold hussies. Or that, when I was still at school, the Viennese newspapers filled columns with discussions of the shocking innovation proposed at the Opera for the ballerinas to dance without wearing tights. Or that it was an
unparalleled
sensation when Isadora Duncan, although her style of dancing was extremely classical, was the first to dance barefoot instead of wearing the usual silk shoes under her tunic—which fortunately was long and full. And now think of young people growing up in such an age of watchfulness, and imagine how ridiculous these fears of the constant threat to decency must have appeared to them as soon as they realised that the cloak of morality mysteriously draped over these things was in fact very threadbare, torn and full of holes. After all, there was no getting around the fact that out of fifty grammar school boys, one would come upon his teacher lurking in a dark
alley some day, or you heard in the family circle of someone who appeared particularly respectable in front of us, but had various little falls from grace to his account. The fact was that nothing increased and heightened our curiosity so much as this clumsy technique of concealment, and as it was undesirable for natural inclinations to run their course freely and openly, curiosity in a big city created its underground and usually not very salubrious outlets. In all classes of society, this suppression of sexuality led to the stealthy overstimulation of young people, and it was expressed in a childish, inexpert way. There was hardly a fence or a remote shed that was not scrawled with indecent words and graffiti, hardly a swimming pool where the wooden partition marking off the ladies’ pool was not full of so-called knotholes through which a peeping Tom might look. Whole industries flourished in secret—industries that have now disappeared because morals and manners are more natural—in particular the trade in nude photographs offered for sale under the counter in bars to adolescent boys. Or the pornographic literature
sous le manteau
—since serious literature was bound to be idealistic and cautious—which consisted of books of the very worst sort, printed on poor-quality paper, badly written, and yet sure to sell well, like the ‘titillating’ magazines of a kind no longer available today, or not in such a repulsive and lecherous form. As well as the court theatre, which paid homage to the ideals of the time with its noble sentiments and snow-white purity, there were theatres and cabarets with programmes entirely comprising the smuttiest of dirty jokes. What was suppressed found outlets
everywhere
, found ways around obstacles, ways out of difficulties.
So ultimately the generation that was prudishly denied any sexual enlightenment, any form of easy social encounter with the opposite sex, was a thousand times more erotically obsessed than young people today, who have so much more freedom in love. Forbidden fruit excites a craving, only what is forbidden stimulates desire, and the less the eyes saw and the ears heard the more minds dreamt. The less air, light and sun was allowed to fall on the body, the more heated did the senses become. To sum up, the social pressure put on us as young people, instead of improving our morals, merely made us embittered and distrustful of those in authority. From the first day of our sexual awakening we instinctively felt that this dishonest morality, with its silence and concealment, wanted to take from us something that was rightfully ours in our youth, and was sacrificing our desire for honesty to a convention that had long ago ceased to have any real meaning.