The World of Yesterday (28 page)

A few weeks later, determined to get away from the dangerous crowd psychosis of the time, I moved to a countrified little suburb to begin waging my personal war against the betrayal of reason by the mass hysteria of the time.

W
ITHDRAWING INTO SECLUSION
was no help in itself. The atmosphere remained oppressive. For that very reason, I was well aware that such merely passive conduct as refraining from joining in furious abuse of the enemy was not enough. After all, I was a writer, I had words at my disposal, and I therefore had a duty to express my convictions in so far as I could at a time of censorship. I tried to do that. I wrote an essay entitled
To Friends Abroad
, in which, rejecting outright the hatred for the enemy being trumpeted here at home; I addressed all my friends in other countries, saying that I would be loyal to them even if closer links were impossible at the moment, so that at the first opportunity I could go on working with them to encourage the construction of a common European culture. I sent it to the most widely read German newspaper. To my surprise, the
Berliner Tageblatt
did not hesitate to print it almost as I had written it, without savage cuts. Only one sentence—“if and when someone emerges victorious”—fell victim to the censor, because at the time no one was allowed to imply the faintest doubt that Germany would emerge from this World War as the natural victor. Even without that reservation of mine, the article brought me indignant letters from the ultra-patriotic, protesting that they did not understand how I could have anything to do with our villainous enemies at such a time as this. They did not hurt my feelings very much. I had never in my life wanted to convert anyone else to my own beliefs. It was enough for me to make them known and be able to do so in public.

Fourteen days later, when I had almost forgotten the article, I received a letter with a Swiss stamp and the censor’s imprint on it, and the familiar handwriting told me that it was from Romain Rolland. He must have read the article, for he wrote: “I for one will never forsake my friends.” I realised at once that his few lines were designed to find out whether it was possible to exchange letters with an Austrian friend during the war. I replied to him at once. From then on we wrote regularly, and our correspondence continued for more than twenty-five years, until the Second World War, which turned out to be even more brutal than the First, cut off all communication between the countries of Europe.

The moment when that letter arrived was one of the happiest in my life. It was like a white dove flying to me out of an ark full of roaring, trampling, raging animals. I felt that I was not alone any more; at last I was in touch with a like-minded friend. I was fortified by Rolland’s great strength of mind, for I knew how wonderfully well he maintained a humanity transcending all borders. He had found the one appropriate path for a writer to tread at such a time, one that meant taking no part in destruction and killing but instead—following the great example of Walt Whitman, who had served as a nursing orderly in the American Civil War—actively bringing humane help to others. Living in Switzerland, and exempted from any kind of war service by his frail health, he had immediately made himself available to the Red Cross in Geneva, where he happened to be when war broke out, and he was employed day after day, in crowded rooms, in the fine work of that organisation. I did my best to pay public tribute to it in an article entitled
The Heart of Europe
. After the fierce fighting of the first few weeks, every kind of contact with the front had been lost. Soldiers’ families in all the European countries involved did not know whether their sons, brothers and fathers had fallen, were merely missing, or had been taken prisoner, and they had no idea where to turn for information,
because none was to be expected from the ‘enemy’. In the midst of all the horror and cruelty, the Red Cross took on the task of relieving people at least of the agony of not knowing what had happened to their dear ones, which was the worst of their torments, by forwarding letters from prisoners now in enemy countries to their native lands. Of course the organisation, although set up decades before, had never expected to deal with a demand of such huge dimensions for its services, with the numbers of letters running into millions. More and more volunteer workers had to be taken on daily, even hourly, for every hour of waiting in torment was an eternity to the families at home. At the end of December 1914 the Red Cross had already handled thirty thousand letters, and more kept coming. In the end, twelve hundred people were crowded into the cramped premises of the Musée Rath, handling and answering the post that arrived every day. And working among them, instead of selfishly devoting himself to his own compositions, was the most humane of all writers, Romain Rolland.

But he had not forgotten his other duty, the artist’s duty to express his convictions even in the face of opposition from his own country and the disapproval of the entire world now waging war. As early as autumn 1914, when most writers were competing to outdo each other in their diatribes of hatred, yapping and discharging their venom at one another, he had written that remarkable confession
Au-dessus de la mêlée
—Above the Turmoil—in which he opposed intellectual hostility between nations, and called for artists to be just and humane even in the middle of war. It was an essay that stirred up more controversial feeling than anything else written at the time, and gave rise to a whole series of articles supporting or attacking his propositions.

For this was something on the credit side that distinguished the First World War from the Second—words were still powerful then. They had not yet been devalued by the systematic lies of propaganda. People still took notice of the written word and
looked forward to reading it. In 1939 no writer’s expression of opinion had any effect at all, either for better or worse, nor has a single book, pamphlet, essay or poem touched the hearts of the public at large to this day, let alone influenced its thinking, but in 1914 a fourteen-line poem such as Lissauer’s
Hymn of Hate
was an event in itself. The same was true of the foolish
Manifesto of Ninety-three German Intellectuals
, and on the other side of Romain Rolland’s eight-page essay and Barbusse’s novel
Le Feu
—Fire. The moral conscience of the world was not yet as exhausted and drained as it is today; it reacted vehemently, with all the force of centuries of conviction, to every obvious lie, every transgression against international law and common humanity. A breach of law such as Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium which today, now that Hitler has made lying perfectly natural and disregard for humanity a law, would be unlikely to be seriously condemned, had the world in uproar from end to end at that time. Thanks to an outburst of universal moral indignation, the execution by firing squad of Nurse Cavell and the torpedoing of the
Lusitania
did Germany more harm than losing a battle. It was therefore not a hopeless prospect for my French friend to speak out at a time when the ear and mind were not yet flooded by the constant chatter of radio waves. On the contrary, the spontaneous manifesto of a great writer had an effect a thousand times greater than all the statesmen’s official speeches, which everyone knew were tactically and politically adapted to the expediency of the moment and at best contained only half the truth. The sense that a writer could be trusted as the best guarantor of independent opinion inspired far greater faith in the minds of that generation, even if they were to be severely disappointed. But as the military men also knew that writers were figures of authority, they themselves tried to recruit men of high moral and intellectual prestige for their own ends, to stir up feeling. Writers were expected to provide explanations of what was going on, evidence of it, affirmation,
and eloquent appeals to the effect that all the wrong and evil was on the enemy side, and all the justice and truth on the side of their own nation. Rolland was not lending himself to such purposes. He did not see it as any task of his to heat the already sultry and overcharged atmosphere any further, but instead to cleanse it.

Anyone reading that famous essay
Au-dessus de la mêlée
now will probably be unable to understand its immense influence at the time, for if it is read with a clear, cool mind, it will seem that everything Rolland proposed in it is to be taken for granted as the most natural thing in the world. But those words of his were written at a time of mass intellectual insanity which we can hardly imagine today. When that article appeared, the French ultra-patriots set up such an outcry that you might have thought they had accidentally picked up a piece of red-hot iron. Overnight, Rolland’s oldest friends boycotted him, booksellers dared not display the
Jean-Christophe
novels in their windows, the military authorities, who needed hate to motivate their forces, were already contemplating measures against him, pamphlet after pamphlet was published, arguing that: “What a man gives to humanity during war is stolen from his native land.” But as usual the outcry proved that the full weight of the blow had gone home. There was no stopping discussion about the proper attitude for intellectuals to adopt in war now. Every one of them was unavoidably confronted by the question.

In writing these memoirs of mine, there is nothing I regret more than no longer having access to Rolland’s letters to me in those years. The idea that they may be destroyed or lost in this new Deluge weighs on my mind, a heavy responsibility. For much as I love his published works, I think it is possible that later his letters will be considered the finest and most humane utterances of his great heart and passionate intellect. Written to a friend on the
other side of the frontier—and thus officially an enemy—in the deep distress of a compassionate mind, and with the full, bitter force of impotence, they represent perhaps the most powerful moral documents of a time when it was a massive achievement to understand what was going on, and keeping faith with your own convictions called in itself for great courage. Soon our friendly correspondence led to a positive suggestion—Rolland thought we might try inviting the major intellectual figures of all nations to a joint conference in Switzerland, to agree on the adoption of a common and more dignified attitude, perhaps even, in a spirit of solidarity, to draw up an appeal to the world for mutual reconciliation. Based as he was in Switzerland, Rolland would invite French and other foreign intellectuals to take part, while I, living in Austria, was to sound out German and Austrian writers and scholars, or rather those of them who had not yet compromised themselves by publicly disseminating the propaganda of hate. I set to work at once. The most outstanding and highly regarded German writer of the time was Gerhart Hauptmann. With a view to making it easier for him to agree—or disagree—I did not want to write to him directly. So I wrote to our mutual friend Walther Rathenau asking him to approach Hauptmann in confidence. Rathenau declined, whether with or without Hauptmann’s agreement I never found out, saying it was not yet time to talk about peace between intellectuals. That really put an end to the idea, for at the time Thomas Mann was in the opposite camp, and in an essay on Frederick the Great had just put forward the German legal standpoint. Rilke, who I knew was on our side, said that on principle he would not participate in any joint public action. Dehmel, once a socialist, was now signing his letters with childishly patriotic pride as ‘Lieutenant Dehmel’, and private conversations had shown me that I could not count on Hofmannsthal and Jakob Wassermann. So there was not much to hope for on the German side, and Rolland fared little better in France. In 1914 and 1915 it was still too
soon, and for those not at the front the war still seemed too far away. We were alone.

But not entirely alone. We had gained something from our correspondence—an initial idea of the few dozen people who, in their hearts, could be counted on and thought along the same lines as we did, whether they lived in neutral countries or those at war. We could draw each other’s attention to books, articles and pamphlets on both sides of the front, and we could be sure that where ideas had crystallised, new support might be attracted to them, hesitantly at first, but then more strongly as the pressure grew greater. This sense that we did not exist entirely in a void encouraged me to write more articles, so that the answers and reactions I received would bring those who felt as we did, in private or in hiding, out into the light of day. After all, I could write for any of the major newspapers of Germany and Austria, which meant reaching a wide circle of readers, and as I never wrote on the political subjects of the day I need not fear opposition on principle from the authorities. The influence of the liberal spirit of respect for literature was still very strong, and when I look now at the articles I managed to smuggle out to a wide public at the time, I have to say that I respect the magnanimity of the Austrian military powers. In the middle of the Great War, I was able to write enthusiastic praise of Bertha von Suttner, the founder of the pacifist movement, who denounced war as the worst of all crimes, and I also published an extensive study of Barbusse’s
Le Feu
in an Austrian newspaper. Of course we had to invent a certain technique for conveying these unfashionable views of ours to a wide audience in wartime. If I, writing in Austria, wanted to describe the horrors of war, and the indifference to them of those not at the front, I did it by dwelling on the suffering of a ‘French infantryman’ in an article on
Le Feu
, but hundreds of letters from the Austrian front showed me how clearly the Austrians themselves recognised their own
plight. Or we might choose the device of appearing to disagree with each other in order to express our convictions. For instance, one of my French friends, writing in the
Mercure de France
, attacked my essay
To Friends Abroad
, but in what was supposed to be a denunciation he had printed the whole of it in French translation, down to the very last word, so he had successfully smuggled it into France, where anyone could now read it, which had been our real intention all along. These signals of understanding flashed from one side of the border to the other. Later, a little incident showed how well those for whom they were meant understood them. In 1915, when Italy declared war on its former ally Austria, a wave of hatred swept through our country. No one had a good word to say for any Italian. As it happened, the memoirs of a young Italian called Carlo Poerio of the time of the Risorgimento had just been published, and in them he described a visit to Goethe. I deliberately wrote an article entitled
An Italian Calls on Goethe
, to make the point, in the midst of all this outcry, that the Italians had always been on the best of terms with our own culture, and as Poerio’s memoirs had a foreword by Benedetto Croce I took my chance of writing a few words expressing my profound respect for Croce. At a time when, in Austria, no tribute was supposed to be paid to a writer or scholar from any enemy country, this was of course an obvious statement of intent, and it was understood as such well beyond the borders of the country. Croce, who was a minister in the Italian government at the time,
1
told me later that a man in his ministry who did not himself read German had told him, in some dismay, that there was an article attacking him in the Austrian enemy’s major newspaper—it never entered his head that a mention of his minister could be anything but hostile. Croce got hold of the
Neue Freie Presse,
and was first surprised and then amused to find a tribute to him instead.