The World of Yesterday

  I promised to try. And as Goethe said, poetry sometimes lets the will command it—I sketched out a one-act play entitled Der verwandelte Komödiant—The Actor Transformed—a light, rococo piece with two big lyrical and dramatic monologues built into it. Instinctively, I had gone along with precisely what Kainz wanted by feeling my way into his mind and even his manner of speech with all the passion of which I was capable, and this occasional piece was one of those lucky chances that only enthusiasm can create, not mere dexterity. After three weeks I was able to show Kainz the half-finished sketch with one of the aria-like monologues already incorporated. Kainz was genuinely enthusiastic. He immediately recited that cascading monologue from the manuscript twice, the second time with unforgettable perfection. Visibly impatient, he asked how much longer I would need. A month, I said. Excellent! That would suit him very well! He was going away now for several weeks on tour in Germany, and when he came back the rehearsals for this play, to be staged at the Burgtheater, must begin at once. And then, he promised me, wherever he travelled he would take it with him in his repertory; it fitted him like a glove. “Like a glove!” He kept repeating the phrase, shaking hands with me warmly three times.

  Obviously he had imposed his will on the Burgtheater before he went away, because the director in person telephoned me asking to see the one-act play, even though it was still in draft form, and he accepted it at once in advance. The supporting parts had already been sent to the theatre’s actors for reading. Once again I seemed to have won the highest prize without staking anything much on it—a work of mine was to be produced at the Burgtheater, the pride of our city, and what was more, the man who shared with Eleonora Duse the reputation of being the greatest actor of the time was to appear in it at that same theatre. It was almost too much for a beginner. There was only one danger left—suppose Kainz changed his mind about the play when it was finished? But that was very unlikely! The impatience was all on my side now. At last I read in the newspaper that Josef Kainz had come back from touring. Out of civility, I waited two days so as not pester him the moment he had arrived. But on the third day I summoned up my courage, went to the Hotel Sacher, where Kainz was staying, and handed my card to the old clerk at the reception desk, whom I knew well. “For Herr Kainz, the actor at the court theatre!” I said. The old man looked at me over the top of his pince-nez in surprise. “Oh, don’t you know, Doctor?” No, I knew nothing. “They took him away to the sanatorium this morning.” This was the first I had heard of it—Kainz had come back severely ill from his tour in Germany, where he had performed his great roles for the last time, heroically overcoming terrible pain in front of audiences that had no idea of it. Next day he had an operation for cancer. Reading the bulletins in the newspaper, we still dared to hope he would recover, and I visited him. He lay there looking exhausted and emaciated, the dark eyes in his gaunt face looking even larger than usual, and I was horrified. For the first time, a moustache as grey as ice showed above the eternally young lips that spoke so eloquently. I was looking at an old man on his deathbed. He gave me a melancholy smile. “Will the good Lord allow me to act our play? That might yet cure me.” But a few weeks later we were standing beside his coffin.

  My uneasiness about persisting in the dramatic vein will be easily understood, and so will the anxiety I now felt as soon as I had delivered a new play to a theatre. I am not ashamed to say that the deaths of the two greatest actors in the German-speaking countries, when the last parts they had been rehearsing were written by me, made me superstitious. It was not until a few years later that I could bring myself to try writing another dramatic work, and when the new artistic director of the Burgtheater, Alfred Baron Berger, an eminent man of the theatre and a master of eloquent oratory himself, immediately accepted my play I looked almost anxiously at the list of actors he had selected. Paradoxically, I breathed a sigh of relief: “Thank God, no famous name among them!” There was no one to be the victim of disaster. Yet the improbable happened all the same; close one door to misfortune and it will come in by another. I had been thinking only of the actors, not the director of the play. Berger was planning to direct my tragedy Das Haus am Meer—The House by the Sea—himself, and had already been working on the prompt copy. Sure enough, fourteen days before the first rehearsals were to begin he died. So it seemed that the curse on my dramatic works was still in force. Even when my Jeremiah and Volpone were staged in many different languages after the Great War, more than a decade later, I did not feel secure. And in 1931 I deliberately acted against my own interests when I had finished a new play, Das Lamm des Armen—The Poor Man’s Ewe Lamb. I had sent it to my friend Alexander Moissi, and I received a telegram from him asking me to reserve the lead part in the first production for him. Moissi, who had brought with him from his native Italy a feeling for sensuous, melodious language previously unknown on the German stage, was the sole successor to Josef Kainz’s crown at this time. A man of captivating appearance, clever, lively, and in addition kindly and inspiring, he imbued every play with some of his personal magic; I could not have wished for a better actor in the part. All the same, when he put the proposition to me, I remembered Matkowsky and Kainz, and made an excuse for declining Moissi’s request without telling him the real reason. I knew that he had inherited the ring known as the Iffland2 ring from Kainz; it was always passed on by the greatest German actor of his time to his greatest successor. Was he to inherit Kainz’s fate as well? I for one did not want to bring disaster down on the greatest German actor of the day for the third time. So out of superstition and friendship, I sacrificed what would almost certainly have been an ideal performance of my play. Yet although I would not let him take the part, and although I wrote no more plays after that, even this sacrifice of mine could not protect him. I was still, through no fault of my own, to be involved in bringing misfortune on others.

  I realise that at this point I shall be suspected of telling a ghost story. Matkowsky and Kainz can be explained away as mere coincidence. But what about Moissi after them, when I had not let him take the part he wanted and I had not written any more plays? It happened like this: years later—I am anticipating events here—in the summer of 1935, I was in Zurich, with no idea of any looming threat, when I suddenly had a telegram from Alexander Moissi in Milan. He said he was coming to Zurich that evening on purpose to see me, and he asked me to be sure to meet him at the railway station. Strange, I thought, what could be so urgent? I had no new play, and had felt no great interest in the theatre for years. But of course I happily went to meet him; I loved that warm-hearted man like a brother. He got out of his carriage and rushed towards me; we embraced in the Italian way, and even in the car driving away from the station he was pouring out, with his usual wonderful verve, the gist of what I could do for him. He had a favour to ask me, a great favour, he said. Pirandello had honoured him by giving him rights for the first production of his new play, Non si sa mai3. This was to be not just the Italian premiere but the world premiere—and it was to be in Vienna and performed in German. This was the first time, said Moissi, that such an Italian master had given precedence to a foreign country for the premiere of one of his works. He had never even brought himself to allow a world premiere in Paris. And Pirandello, fearing that the musicality and nuances of his prose might be lost in translation, had one wish very much at heart; he did not want just any translator to produce the German version of his play, he had long admired my linguistic skill and would very much like me to do it. Pirandello had of course had scruples about wasting my time on translations, and so, said Moissi, he had taken it upon himself to deliver the playwright’s request. In fact at this time I had done no translation for years. But I revered Pirandello, whom I had met on several pleasant occasions, too much to disappoint him, and most of all I was delighted to be able to give such a close friend as Moissi proof of my comradely feeling. I dropped my own work for one or two weeks, and a few weeks after that Pirandello’s play had its international premiere in Vienna, in my transla
tion. The political background of the time meant that it was to be staged on a particularly grand scale. Pirandello had said that he would come in person, and since Mussolini was still regarded as the friend of Austria that he declared himself to be, members of many official circles, headed by the Chancellor, had said they would attend. The evening was to be a political demonstration of Austro-Italian friendship (in reality, it marked Austria’s new status as an Italian protectorate).

  I happened to be in Vienna myself when the first rehearsals were to begin. I looked forward to seeing Pirandello again, and I was curious to hear the words of my translation spoken with Moissi’s musicality. But by eerie coincidence, the events of a quarter-of-a-century earlier were repeated. When I opened the newspaper first thing in the morning, I heard that Moissi had arrived from Switzerland with a bad attack of flu. Flu, I thought, that can’t be too serious. But my heart was thudding as I approached his hotel—thank God, I said to myself, not the Hotel Sacher, the Grand Hotel—to visit my sick friend. The memory of that futile visit to Kainz came back to me like a shudder running down my spine. And the events of over twenty-five years ago were repeated, once again affecting the greatest actor of his time. I was not allowed in to see Moissi; he had fallen into a fevered delirium. Two days later I was not at a rehearsal but standing by his coffin, just as I had stood beside the coffin of Kainz.

  I have looked ahead in time by mentioning that final instance of the mysterious curse on my ventures into the theatre. Of course I see nothing but coincidence in that succession of events. But undoubtedly the deaths of Matkowsky and Kainz, so soon after one another, affected the direction my life took at the time. If my first plays, written when I was twenty-six, had been performed by Matkowsky in Berlin and Kainz in Vienna, then thanks to their art, which could make a success even of the weakest play, I would quickly have come to wide public notice, perhaps more quickly than would have been good for me, and would thus have missed my years of slow learning and getting to know the world. At the time, understandably enough, I felt like a victim of Fate, since at the very beginning of my career the theatre offered me opportunities I would never have dared to dream of, temptingly holding them out and then cruelly taking them away again at the last minute. But only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination.

  NOTES

  1 Sebastian Castellio, 1515-63, French Protestant theologian, who was in conflict with Calvin over the latter’s savage persecution of heretics.

  2 August Wilhelm Iffland (1759-1814) was a famous German actor of his time; this ring bore a picture of him.

  3 Zweig means Pirandello’s 1934 play, Non si sa come—No One Knows How.

  BEYOND EUROPE

  DID TIME MOVE FASTER THEN than it does today, when it is crammed with incidents that will change our world utterly for centuries? Or do the last years of my youth, before the first European war, seem blurred to me now only because they were spent steadily working? I was writing, my work was published, my name was known in Germany and Austria and to some extent further afield. There were some who liked my work and—which really says more for its originality—some who did not. I could write for any of the major newspapers of the Reich; I no longer had to submit articles but was asked for them. Inwardly, however, I do not deceive myself into thinking that anything I did and wrote in those years matters today. Our ambitions, anxieties, setbacks and reasons for embitterment of that time now seem to me positively lilliputian. Inevitably, the dimensions of the present day have changed our point of view. If I had begun this book several years ago, I would have mentioned conversations with Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Beer-Hofmann, Dehmel, Pirandello, Wassermann, Shalom Asch and Anatole France. (The last of those would have made an amusing story, for the old gentleman dished us up risqué anecdotes all afternoon, but with distinguished gravity and indescribable grace.) I could have written about great premieres—of Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony1 in Munich, of Der Rosenkavalier in Dresden, of Karsavina and Nijinsky dancing. As a man easily able to travel and full of curiosity, I was present at many artistic events now considered historic. But anything unconnected with the problems of today pales in importance when judged by our sterner criteria. Today, the men who directed my attention to literature in my youth seem to me not nearly as important as those who diverted it to reality.

  First and foremost among them was a man involved with the fate of the German Reich at one of he most tragic epochs of its history, and who suffered the first murderous onslaught of the National Socialists eleven years before Hitler took power. This was Walther Rathenau. Our friendship was warm and of long standing; it had begun in a strange way. One of the first to give me encouragement at the age of nineteen was Maximilian Harden, whose journal Die Zukunft—The Future—played an important part in the last decades of the Imperial Reich of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Harden, personally introduced into politics by Bismarck, who liked to use him as a mouthpiece or lightning conductor, was behind the fall of ministers, brought the Eulenburg affair2 to the point of explosion, and had the Imperial Palace trembling every week for fear of more attacks and revelations. In spite of all that, Harden’s private love was for the theatre and literature. One day Die Zukunft published a series of aphorisms signed by a pseudonymous name that I no longer remember, and I was greatly impressed by the author’s clever mind and powers of linguistic concentration. As a regular contributor, I wrote to Harden asking: “Who is this new writer? I haven’t seen such polished aphorisms for years.”

  The answer came not from Harden but from a man signing himself Walther Rathenau who, as I learnt from his letters as well as other sources, was none other than the son of the all-powerful director of the Berlin Electricity Company, a big businessman and industrialist himself, the director of many companies—one of the new breed of German businessmen who, in a phrase of Jean Paul’s, knew what was what in the world. He wrote to me warmly, thanking me and saying that my letter had been the first positive mention he had received for his literary venture. Although at least ten years older than me, he frankly admitted that he was not sure whether he should really try to publish a whole book of his reflections and aphorisms. After all, he said, he was an outsider, and so far he had been active only in the field of economics. I gave him my honest encouragement, and we stayed in touch by correspondence. When I next visited Berlin I called him on the telephone. A hesitant voice answered: “Ah, it’s you. What a pity, I have to set out at six tomorrow morning for South Africa …” I interrupted him: “Then let’s meet some other time.” But the voice went on, slowly thinking aloud: “No, wait a moment … this afternoon is full of meetings … this evening I have to go to the Ministry, and then there’s a dinner at the club … but could you call on me at eleven-fifteen?” I agreed, and we talked until two in the morning. At six he did indeed leave for South West Africa—on a mission from the Kaiser of Germany, as I later discovered.

  I mention this detail because it is so characteristic of Rathenau. Busy as he was, he always had time for a friend. I saw him in the most desperate days of the war, and just before the Conference of Genoa, and a few days before his assassination I drove with him in the very car in which he would be shot taking the same route as he did that day. He always had his day divided up to the minute, yet he could switch from subject to subject without any difficulty because his mind was always alert, an instrument of such precision and speed as I have never known in any other human being. He spoke as fluently as if he were reading aloud from an invisible sheet of paper, yet forming every sentence so clearly and graphically that if anyone had taken down his conversation in shorthand the text could have gone straight into print. He spoke French, English and Italian as well as his native German—his memory never let him down, he never needed special preparation for any subject. When you talked to him you felt simul
taneously stupid, inadequately educated, uncertain and confused in the face of his calm objectivity as he assessed and clearly surveyed the subject of conversation. But there was something in the dazzling brilliance and crystal clarity of his mind that had an uncomfortable effect, just as the finest of furniture and pictures felt not quite right in his apartment. His mind was like a brilliantly constructed mechanism, his apartment like a museum, and you could never really feel at ease in his feudal castle of the time of Queen Luise3 in the March of Brandenburg, it was so neat and tidy and well-ordered. There was something as transparent as glass and thus insubstantial in his thinking; I seldom felt the tragedy of the Jewish identity more strongly than I did in him. In spite of his obvious distinction, he was full of profound uneasiness and uncertainty. My other friends, for instance Verhaeren, Ellen Key and Bazalgette, were not one-tenth as clever nor one-hundredth as knowledgeable and experienced as he was, but they were sure of themselves. With Rathenau, I always felt that for all his extraordinarily clever mind he had no solid ground beneath his feet. His whole life was a conflict of contradictions. He had inherited great power from his father, yet he did not want to be his heir. He was a businessman, and wanted to feel that he was an artist; he owned millions and toyed with socialist ideas; he felt that he was Jewish but flirted with Christianity. His thinking was international, but he idolised the Prussian spirit; he dreamt of a people’s democracy, yet always felt highly honoured to be received and questioned by Kaiser Wilhelm, whose weaknesses and vanities he clearly saw without being able to overcome some vanity of his own. So his constant busy activity may have been just an opiate to dull private nervousness and dispel the solitude of his real nature. Only at his hour of responsibility when in 1919, after the collapse of the German armies, he was given the hardest task in history—the reconstruction of the shattered state from chaos to a point where it was capable of life again—did the great potential forces in him suddenly unite, and he rose to the greatness natural to his genius by devoting his life to the single idea of saving Europe.