The World of Yesterday (13 page)

There was a special holy of holies in this temple of progress, the section known as the ‘feuilleton’ which, like the great daily papers of Paris,
Le Temps
and
Le Journal des Débats
, published the best and soundest essays on poetry, the theatre, music and art under a line at the bottom of the page, keeping it clearly distinct from the ephemera of politics and the news of the day. Only authorities who had proved their worth could write for this section. Nothing but sound judgement, wide experience over many years and perfect artistic form could get an author who had proved himself over the course of time into this sanctuary. Ludwig Speidel, a master essayist, and Eduard Hanslick had the same papal authority in the fields of the theatre and music as Sainte-Beuve in his columns known as
les Lundis
in Paris. The thumbs-up or thumbs-down of these critics determined the success in Vienna of a musical work, a play, a book, and often of its author or composer himself. At the time every one of these feuilleton essays was the talk of the town in educated circles; they were discussed and criticised, they aroused admiration or hostility, and when now and then a new writer’s name appeared among the long-acknowledged feuilletonists, it created a sensation. Of the younger generation, only Hofmannsthal had sometimes found his way into the feuilleton with some of his best essays; other young authors had to be satisfied if they could contrive to get themselves into the separate literary supplement of the paper. As Vienna saw it, an author writing in the feuilleton on the front page had his name carved in marble.

How I found the courage to submit a small essay on poetry to the
Neue Freie Presse
, which my father regarded as an oracle and the abode of the Lord’s anointed, is more than I can understand today. But after all, nothing worse than rejection could happen to me. The editor of the feuilleton interviewed would-be essayists only once a week, between two and three o’clock, since the regular cycle of famous and firmly established contributors very seldom left any room for an outsider’s work.
With my heart racing, I climbed the little spiral staircase to his office and sent in my name. A few minutes later the servant came back—the editor of the feuilleton would see me, and I entered the small, cramped room.

The editor of the feuilleton of the
Neue Freie Presse
was Theodor Herzl, and he was the first man of international stature whom I had met in my life—not that I knew what great changes he would bring to the destiny of the Jewish people and the history of our times. His position at that point was rather contradictory and indeterminate. He had set out to become a writer, had shown dazzling journalistic talents at an early age, and became the darling of the Viennese public first as Paris correspondent of the
Neue Freie Presse
, then as a writer for its feuilleton. His essays are still captivating in their wealth of sharp and often wise observation, their felicity of style and their high-minded tone, which never lost its natural distinction even when he was in cheerful or critical mood. They were the most cultivated imaginable kind of journalism, and delighted a city that had trained itself to appreciate subtlety. He had also had a play successfully produced at the Burgtheater, and now he was a highly esteemed man, idolised by us young people and respected by our fathers, until one day the unexpected happened. Fate can always find a way to track down the man it needs for its secret purposes, even if he tries to hide from it.

Theodor Herzl had had an experience in Paris that shook him badly, one of those moments that change an entire life. As Paris correspondent, he had been present at the official degradation of Alfred Dreyfus. He had seen the epaulettes torn from the pale man’s uniform as he cried out aloud, “I am innocent.” And he had known in his heart at that moment that Dreyfus was indeed innocent, and only the fact that he was Jewish had brought the terrible suspicion of treason down on him. As a student,
Theodor Herzl had already suffered in his straightforward and manly pride from the fate of the Jews—or rather, thanks to his prophetic insight, he had anticipated all its tragic significance at a time when it hardly seemed a serious matter. At that time, with a sense of being a born leader, which was justified by both his extremely imposing physical appearance and the wide scope of his mind and his knowledge of the world, he had formed the fantastic plan of bringing the Jewish problem to an end once and for all by uniting Jews and Christians in voluntary mass-baptism. Always inclined to think in dramatic terms, he had imagined himself leading thousands upon thousands of Austrian Jews in a long procession to St Stephen’s Cathedral, there to liberate his persecuted, homeless people for ever from the curse of segregation and hatred in an exemplary symbolic act. He had soon realised that this plan was impracticable, and years of his own work had distracted him from the problem at the heart of his life, although he saw solving it as his true vocation. However, at the moment when he saw Dreyfus degraded the idea of his own people’s eternal ostracism went to his heart like a dagger. If segregation is inevitable, he said to himself, why not make it complete? If humiliation is always to be our fate, let us meet it with pride. If we suffer from the lack of a home, let us build ourselves one! So he published his pamphlet on
The Jewish State
, in which he pronounced all adaptation through assimilation and all hope of total tolerance impossible for the Jewish people. They would have to found a new home for themselves in their old homeland of Palestine.

When this pamphlet, which was short but had the power and forcefulness of a steel bolt, was published I was still at school, but I remember the general astonishment and annoyance it aroused in bourgeois Jewish circles in Vienna. What on earth, they said angrily, has that usually clever, witty and cultivated writer Herzl taken into his head? What stupid stuff is he saying and writing? Why would we want to go to Palestine? We speak German,
not Hebrew, our home is in beautiful Austria. Aren’t we very well off under good Emperor Franz Joseph? Don’t we make a respectable living and enjoy a secure position? Don’t we have equal rights, aren’t we loyal, established citizens of our beloved Vienna? And don’t we live in a progressive time which will do away with all religious prejudice within a few decades? If he’s a Jew who wants to help other Jews, why does he present our worst enemies with arguments, trying to segregate us from the German-speaking world when every day unites us more closely with it? Rabbis waxed indignant in their pulpits, the managing director of the
Neue Freie Presse
banned even the mention of the word Zionism in his allegedly progressive newspaper. Karl Kraus, the Thersites of Viennese literature and a past master of venomous mockery, wrote a pamphlet entitled
A Crown for Zion
, and when Theodor Herzl entered the theatre sarcastic murmurs ran through the rows of spectators: “Here comes His Majesty!”

At first Herzl could reasonably feel misunderstood—Vienna, where he thought himself most secure after enjoying years of popularity, was abandoning him, even laughing at him. But then the answer came thundering back with such a weight of approval that he was almost alarmed to see what a mighty movement, far greater than his own person, he had called into being with his few dozen pages. Admittedly the answer did not come from the well-situated, middle-class Western Jews with their comfortable lives, but from the great masses in the East, the Galician, Polish and Russian proletariat. Without knowing it, Herzl’s pamphlet had fanned the heart of Judaism into flame. The Messianic dream, two thousand years old, of the return to the Promised Land as affirmed in the holy books, had been smouldering among the ashes of foreign domination. It was a hope and at the same time a religious certainty, the one thing that still gave meaning to life for those downtrodden and oppressed millions. Whenever someone, whether prophet
or impostor, had plucked that string in the millennia of exile, the soul of the people had vibrated in sympathy, but never so powerfully as now, never echoing back with such a clamorous roar. One man, with a few dozen pages, had shaped a scattered and disunited throng into a single entity.

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.