The World of Yesterday

  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 looked 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.

  The aura of childlike truthfulness emanating from this naive poet, who is almost forgotten today even in Germany, may perhaps have distracted my attention from the chosen chairman of the Coming Generation, yet this was a man whose ideas and remarks were to have a crucial influence on the lives of countless people. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, in whose honour his adherents built the most magnificent schools and academies to put his ideas into practice, was the first man I met after Theodor Herzl who was destined to show millions of human beings the way to go. In person he did not suggest a leader as strongly as Herzl, but his manner was more persuasive. There was hypnotic force in his dark eyes, and I could listen to him better and more critically if I did not look at him, for his ascetically lean face, marked by intellectual passion, was inclined to influence people by itself, men as well as women. At this time Rudolf Steiner had not yet worked out his own doctrines, but was still seeking and learning. He sometimes spoke to us about Goethe’s theory of colour, and in Steiner’s account of him the poet became more Faustian and Paracelsian. It was exciting to listen to him, for his learning was vast, and in particular it was magnificently wide and diverse by comparison with ours, which was confined to literature. After his lectures and many enjoyable private conversations I always went home both full of enthusiasm and slightly depressed. All the same—when I wonder now whether, at the time, I could have foretold that this young man would have such strong philosophical and ethical influence on so many people, I have to confess, to my shame, that I would not. I expected his questing spirit to do great things in science, and it would not have surprised me at all to hear of some great biological discovery made by his intuitive mind, but when many years later I saw the great Goetheanum in Dornach, the ‘school of wisdom’ that his followers founded for him as the Platonic academy of anthroposophy, I was rather disappointed that his influence had declined so far into the ordinary and sometimes even banal. I will not presume to pronounce judgement on anthroposophy itself, for to this day it is not perfectly clear to me what it aims for and what it means; I am inclined to think that in essence its seductive force came not from an idea but from the fascinating person of Rudolf Steiner himself. But in any case, to meet a man of such magnetic power at that early stage, when he was still imparting his ideas to younger men in a friendly manner and without dogmatism, was an inestimable benefit to me. His astonishing and at the same time profound knowledge showed me that true universality, which with schoolboy arrogance the rest of us thought we had already mastered, cannot be achieved by superficial reading and discussion,
but calls for many years of ardent effort.

  However, at that receptive time of life when friendships are easily made, and social and political differences have not yet become entrenched, a young man really learns better from his contemporaries in the same line of business than from his superiors. Once again I felt—although now on a higher and more international level than at school—how fruitful collective enthusiasm is. While my Viennese friends almost all came from the bourgeoisie, and indeed nine-tenths of them from the Jewish bourgeoisie, so that we were merely duplicating and multiplying our own inclinations, the young people of this new world came from very different social classes both upper and lower. One might be a Prussian aristocrat, another the son of a Hamburg shipowner, a third from a Westphalian farming family. Suddenly I was living in a circle where there was also real poverty, people in ragged clothes and worn-out shoes; I had never been near anything like it in Vienna. I sat at the same table as heavy drinkers, homosexuals and morphine addicts, I shook hands—proudly—with a well-known con man who had served a jail sentence (and later published his memoirs, thus joining our company as a writer). What I had hardly credited in realist novels was present here, teeming with life, in the little bars and cafés that I frequented, and the worse someone’s reputation was the more I wanted to know him personally. This particular liking for or curiosity about people living on the edge of danger has, incidentally, stayed with me all my life; even at times when more discrimination would have been seemly, my friends used to point out that I seemed to like mingling with amoral and unreliable people whose company might be compromising. Perhaps the very fact that I came from a solidly established background, and felt to some extent that this ‘security’ complex weighed me down, made me more likely to be fascinated by those who almost recklessly squandered their lives, their time, their money, their health and reputation—passionate monomaniacs obsessed by aimless existence for its own sake—and perhaps readers may notice this preference of mine for intense, intemperate characters in my novels and novellas. And then there was the charm of the exotic and outlandish; almost everyone presented my questing mind with a gift from a strange new world. For the first time I met a genuine Eastern Jew, the graphic artist E M Lilien, son of a poor Orthodox master turner from Drohobycz, and so I encountered an aspect of Jewishness previously unknown to me in its force and tough fanaticism. A young Russian translated for my benefit the finest passages from the Brothers Karamazov, unknown in Germany at the time; a young Swedish woman first introduced me to the pictures of Munch; I visited painters’ studios to observe their technique (admittedly they were not very good painters), a believer in spiritualism took me to seances—I sensed the diversity of a thousand forms of life, and never tired of it. The intense interest which at school I had shown only in literary form, in rhymes, verses and words, was now bent on human beings. From morning to night, I was always with new and different acquaintances in Berlin, fascinated, disappointed, even sometimes cheated by them. I think that in ten years elsewhere I never have enjoyed such a variety of intellectual company as I did in that one short semester in Berlin, the first of my total freedom.

  It would seem only logical for my creative impulse to have been enhanced to a high degree by all this stimulation. In fact exactly the opposite happened—much of my self-confidence, greatly boosted at first by the intellectual exhilaration of my schooldays, was now draining away. Four months after the appearance of that immature volume of poetry I couldn’t understand how I had ever summoned up the courage to publish it. I still thought the verses good in themselves, skilful, some of them even remarkably craftsmanlike, the end result of my ambitious enjoyment of playing about with form, but there was a false ring to their sentimentality. In the same way, after this encounter with reality I felt there was a whiff of scented notepaper about my first novellas. Written in total ignorance of real life, they employed other people’s techniques at second hand. A novel that I had brought to Berlin with me, finished except for the last chapter, was soon heating my stove, for my faith in my powers and those of my class at school in Vienna had suffered a severe setback after this first look at real life. I felt as if I were still a schoolboy and had been told to move two classes lower down. After that first volume of poems there was a gap of six years before I published a second, and only after three or four years did I publish my first prose work. Following the advice of Dehmel, to whom I am still grateful, I used my time translating from foreign languages, which I still regard as the best way for a young writer to gain a deeper, more creative understanding of the spirit of his own mother tongue. I translated Baudelaire, some poems by Verlaine, Keats, William Morris, a short play by Charles Van Lerberghe, and a novel by Camille Lemonnier3 to get my hand in. The more personal turns of phrase in every foreign language initially present a translator with difficulties, and that in itself is a challenge to a young writer’s powers of expression which will not come into play unsought, and this struggle to persist in wresting its essence from the foreign language and making your own equally expressive has always given me a special kind of artistic pleasure. Since this quiet and rather unappreciated work calls for patience and stamina, virtues that I had tended to ignore out of a sense of daring ease while I was at school, it became particularly dear to me, because in this modest activity of interpreting illustrious works of art I felt certain, for the first time, that I was doing something really meaningful which justified my existence.

  I was now clear in my mind about the path I would tread for the next few years; I would see and learn a great deal, and only then would I really begin. I did not plan to present myself to the world with rashly premature publications—first I wanted to know what the world was all about! The astringency of Berlin had only increased my thirst for such knowledge. And I wondered what country to visit that summer. I opted for Belgium, which had seen a great artistic upturn around the turn of the century, in some ways even outshining France.

  Khnopff and Rops in painting, Constantin Meunier and Minne in sculpture, van der Velde in arts and crafts, Maeterlinck, Eekhoud and Lemonnier in literature set high standards for modern Europe. But above all I was fascinated by Emile Verhaeren, because he showed an entirely new way ahead in poetry. He was still unknown in Germany—where for a long time the established critics confused him with Verlaine, just as they got Rolland mixed up with Rostand—and it could be said that I discovered him for myself. And to come to love someone in that way always redoubles one’s affection.

  Perhaps I should add a little parenthesis here. Today we get too much experience, and get it too fast, to remember it well, and I do not know if the name of Emile Verhaeren still means anything. Verhaeren was the first Francophone poet to try doing for Europe what Walt Whitman did for America—declare his belief in the present and the future. He had begun to love the modern world and wanted to conquer it for literature. While other writers regarded machines as evil, cities as ugly, the present as unpoetic, he felt enthusiasm for every new discovery and technical achievement, and his own enthusiasm spurred him on; he took a close interest in science so that he could feel that passion more strongly. The minor poems of his early work led on to great, flowing hymns. “Admirez-vous les uns les autres”, marvel at one another, was his message to the nations of Europe. All the optimism of our generation, incomprehensible today at the time of our terrible relapse, found its first poetic expression in him, and some of his best poems will long bear witness to the Europe of the time and the kind of humanity that we dreamt of then.

  I had really gone to Brussels on purpose to meet Verhaeren, but Camille Lemonnier, the fine and now unjustly forgotten author of Un Mâle, one of whose novels I had myself translated into German, told me regretfully that Verhaeren seldom left the little village where he lived to come to Brussels, and was not in that city now. To make up for my disappointment, he gave me valuable introductions to other Belgian artists. So I saw the old master Constantin Meunier, the greatest sculptor of the time to depict labour and a heroic labourer in his
own field, and after him van der Stappen,4 whose name is now almost forgotten in the history of art. But what a friendly man that small, chubby-cheeked Fleming was, and how warmly he and his tall, broad, cheerful Dutch wife welcomed their young visitor. He showed me his work, and we talked about art and literature for a long time that bright morning. The couple’s kindness soon banished any awkwardness on my part. I told them frankly how disappointed I had been in Brussels to miss seeing the very man for whose sake I had really come to Belgium, Emile Verhaeren.

  Had I said too much? Had I said something silly? I noticed both van der Stappen and his wife smiling slightly and glancing surreptitiously at each other. I felt that my words had set off some secret understanding between them. Feeling embarrassed, I said I must be going, but they wouldn’t hear of it, and insisted on my staying to lunch. Once again that odd smile passed between their eyes. I felt that if there was some kind of secret here, then it was a friendly one, and was happy to abandon my original plan of going on to Waterloo.

  It was soon lunchtime, we were already in the dining room—on the ground floor, as in all Belgian houses—where you looked out on the street through stained-glass panes, when suddenly a shadowy figure stopped, sharply outlined, on the other side of the window. Knuckles tapped on the stained glass, and the doorbell rang a loud peal. “Le voilà,” said Mme van der Stappen, getting to her feet, and in he came with a strong, heavy tread. It was Verhaeren himself. I recognised the face that had long been familiar to me from his pictures at first glance. Verhaeren was their guest to lunch today, as he very often was, and when they heard that I had been looking for him in vain they had agreed, in that quick exchange of glances, not to tell me but to let his arrival take me by surprise. And now there he was before me, smiling at the success of their trick when he heard about it. For the first time I felt the firm grip of his sinewy hand, for the first time I saw his clear and kindly gaze. He came—as always—into the house as if full of vigour and enthusiasm. Even as he ate heartily, he kept talking. He had been to see friends, he told us, they had gone to a gallery, he still felt inspired by that visit. This was his usual manner of arrival, his state of mind intensified by chance experiences anywhere and everywhere, and this enthusiasm was his established habit. Like a flame, it leapt again and again from his lips, and he was master of the art of emphasising his words with graphic gestures. With the first thing he said, he reached into you because he was perfectly open, accessible to every newcomer, rejecting nothing, ready for everyone. He sent his whole being, you might say, out to meet you again and again, and I saw him make that overwhelming, stormy impression on many other people after experiencing it for myself on that first meeting. He knew nothing about me, but he already trusted me just because he had heard that I appreciated his works.