Chapter I: In The House Of My Parents
TODAY it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen
Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary
between two German states which we of the younger generation at least have made
it our life work to reunite by every means at our disposal.
German-Austria must return to the great German mother
country, and not because of any economic considerations. No, and again no: even
if such a union were unimportant from an economic point of view; yes, even if
it were harmful, it must nevertheless take place. One blood demands one Reich.
Never will the German nation possess the moral right to engage in colonial
politics until, at least, it embraces its own sons within a single state. Only
when the Reich borders include the very last German, but can no longer
guarantee his daily bread, will the moral right to acquire foreign soil arise
from the distress of our own people. Their sword will become our plow, and from
the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow. And so this
little city on the border seems to me the symbol of a great mission. And in
another respect as well, it looms as an admonition to the present day. More
than a hundred years ago, this insignificant place had the distinction of being
immortalized in the annals at least of German history, for it was the scene of
a tragic catastrophe which gripped the entire German nation. At the time of our
fatherland's deepest humiliation, Johannes Palm of Nuremberg, burgher,
bookseller, uncompromising nationalist and French hater, died there for the
Germany which he loved so passionately even in her misfortune. He had
stubbornly refused to denounce his accomplices who were in fact his superiors.
In thus he resembled Leo Schlageter. And like him, he was denounced to the
French by a representative of his government An Augsburg police chief won this
unenviable fame, thus furnishing an example for our modern German officials in
Herr Severing's Reich.
In this little town on the Inn, gilded by the rays of
German martyrdom, Bavarian by blood, technically Austrian, lived my parents in
the late eighties of the past century; my father a dutiful civil servants my
mother giving all her being to the household, and devoted above all to us
children in eternal, loving care Little remains in my memory of this period,
for after a few years my father had to leave the little border city he had
learned to love, moving down the Inn to take a new position in Passau, that is,
in Germany proper.
In those days constant moving was the lot of an Austrian
customs official. A short time later, my father was sent to Linz, and there he
was finally pensioned. Yet, indeed, this was not to mean "res"' for the old
gentleman. In his younger days, as the son of a poor cottager, he couldn't bear
to stay at home. Before he was even thirteen, the little boy laced his tiny
knapsack and ran away from his home in the Waldviertel. Despite the at tempts
of 'experienced' villagers to dissuade him, he made his way to Vienna, there to
learn a trade. This was in the fifties of the past century. A desperate
decision, to take to the road with only three gulden for travel money, and
plunge into the unknown. By the time the thirteen-year-old grew to be
seventeen, he had passed his apprentice's examination, but he was not yet
content. On the contrary. The long period of hardship, endless misery, and
suffering he had gone through strengthened his determination to give up his
trade and become ' something better. Formerly the poor boy had regarded the
priest as the embodiment of all humanly attainable heights; now in the big
city, which had so greatly widened his perspective, it was the rank of civil
servant. With all the tenacity of a young man whom suffering and care had made
'old' while still half a child, the seventeen-year-old clung to his new
decision-he did enter the civil service. And after nearly twenty-three years, I
believe, he reached his goal. Thus he seemed to have fulfilled a vow which he
had made as a poor boy: that he would not return to his beloved native village
until he had made something of himself.
His goal was achieved; but no one in the village could
remember the little boy of former days, and to him the village had grown
strange.
When finally, at the age of fifty-six, he went into retirement, he
could not bear to spend a single day of his leisure in idleness. Near the Upper
Austrian market village of Lambach he bought a farm, which he worked himself,
and thus, in the circuit of a long and industrious life, returned to the
origins of his forefathers.
It was at this time that the first ideals took shape in
my breast. All my playing about in the open, the long walk to school, and
particularly my association with extremely 'husky' boys, which sometimes caused
my mother bitter anguish, made me the very opposite of a stay-at-home. And
though at that time I scarcely had any serious ideas as to the profession I
should one day pursue, my sympathies were in any case not in the direction of
my father's career. I believe that even then my oratorical talent was being
developed in the form of more or less violent arguments with my schoolmates. I
had become a little ringleader; at school I learned easily and at that time
very well, but was otherwise rather hard to handle. Since in my free time I
received singing lessons in the cloister at Lambach, I had excellent
opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant
church festivals. As was only natural the abbot seemed to me, as the village
priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal. For
a time, at least, this was the case. But since my father, for understandable
reasons, proved unable to appreciate the oratorical talents of his pugnacious
boy, or to draw from them any favorable conclusions regarding the future of his
offspring, he could, it goes without saying, achieve no understanding for such
youthful ideas. With concern he observed this conflict of nature.
As it happened, my temporary aspiration for this
profession was in any case soon to vanish, making place for hopes more stated
to my temperament. Rummaging through my father's library, I had come across
various books of a military nature among them a popular edition of the
Franco-German War of 1870-7I It consisted of two issues of an illustrated
periodical from those years, which now became my favorite reading matter It was
not long before the great heroic struggle had become my greatest inner
experience. From then on I became more and more enthusiastic about everything
that was in any way connected with war or, for that matter, with
soldiering
But in another respect as well, this was to assume
importance for me. For the first time, though as yet in a confused form, the
question was forced upon my consciousness: Was there a difference -and if so
what difference-between the Germans who fought these battles and other Germans?
Why hadn't Austria taken part in this war; why hadn't my father and all the
others fought?
Are we not the same as all other Germans?
Do we not all belong together? This problem began to gnaw
at my little brain for the first time. I asked cautious questions and with
secret envy received the answer that not every German was fortunate enough to
belong to Bismarck's Reich..
This was more than I could understand.
It was decided that I should go to high school.
From my whole nature, and to an even greater degree from my
temperament, my father believed he could draw the inference that the humanistic
Gymnasium would represent a conflict with my talents. A Realschol seemed to him
more suitable. In this opinion he was especially strengthened by my obvious
aptitude for drawing; a subject which in his opinion was neglected in the
Austrian Gymnasiums. Another factor may have been his own laborious career
which made humanistic study seem impractical in his eyes, and therefore less
desirable. It was hus basic opinion and intention that, like himself, his son
would and must become a civil servant. It was only natural that the hardships
of his youth should enhance his subsequent achievement in his eyes,
particularly since it resulted exclusively from his own energy and iron
diligence. It was the pride of the self-made man which made him want his son to
rise to the same position in life, orJ of course, even higher if possible,
especially since, by his own industrious life, he thought he would be able to
facilitate his child's development so greatly.
It was simply inconceivable to him that I might reject
what had become the content of his whole life. Consequently, my father s
decision was simple, definite, and clear; in his own eyes I mean, of course.
Finally, a whole lifetime spent in the bitter struggle for existence had given
him a domineering nature, and it would have seemed intolerable to him to leave
the final decision in such matters to an inexperienced boy, having as yet no
Sense of responsibility. Moreover, this would have seemed a sinful and
reprehensible weakness in the exercise of his proper parental authority and
responsibility for the future life of his child, and as such, absolutely
incompatible with his concept of duty.
And yet things were to turn out differently.
Then barely eleven years old, I was forced into
opposition for the first time in my life. Hard and determined as my father
might be in putting through plans and purposes once conceived his son was just
as persistent and recalcitrant in rejecting an idea which appealed to him not
at all, or in any case very little.
I did not want to become a civil servant.
Neither persuasion nor 'serious' arguments made any
impression on my resistance. I did not want to be a civil servant no, and again
no. All attempts on my father's part to inspire me with love or pleasure in
this profession by stories from his own life accomplished the exact opposite. I
yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office,
deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time and being compelled
to force the content of a whole life into blanks that had to be filled
out.
And what thoughts could this prospect arouse in a boy who in reality
was really anything but 'good' in the usual sense of the word?
School work
was ridiculously easy, leaving me so much free time that the sun saw more of me
than my room. When today my political opponents direct their loving attention
to the examination of my life, following it back to those childhood days and
discover at last to their relief what intolerable pranks this "Hitler" played
even in his youth, I thank Heaven that a portion of the memories of those happy
days still remains with me. Woods and meadows were then the battlefields on
which the 'conflicts' which exist everywhere in life were decided.
In this respect my attendance at the Realschule, which now
commenced, made little difference.
But now, to be sure, there was a new
conflict to be fought out.
As long as my fathers intention of making me a civil
servant encountered only my theoretical distaste for the profession, the
conflict was bearable. Thus far, I had to some extent been able to keep my
private opinions to myself; I did not always have to contradict him
immediately. My own firm determination never to become a civil servant sufficed
to give me complete inner peace. And this decision in me was immutable. The
problem became more difficult when I developed a plan of my own in opposition
to my father's. And this occurred at the early age of twelve. How it happened,
I myself do not know, but one day it became clear to me that I would become a
painter, an artist. There was no doubt as to my talent for drawing; it had been
one of my father's reasons for sending me to the Realschule, but never in all
the world would it have occurred to him to give me professional training in
this direction. On the contrary. When for the first time, after once again
rejecting my father's favorite notion, I was asked what I myself wanted to be,
and I rather abruptly blurted out the decision I had meanwhile made, my father
for the moment was struck speechless.
' Painter? Artist? '
He doubted my sanity, or perhaps he thought he had heard
wrong or misunderstood me. But when he was clear on the subject, and
particularly after he felt-the seriousness of my intention, he opposed it with
all the determination of his nature. His decision was extremely simple, for any
consideration of w at abilities I might really have was simply out of the
question.
'Artist, no, never as long as I live!' But since his son,
among various other qualities, had apparently inherited his father' s
stubbornness, the same answer came back at him. Except, of course, that it was
in the opposite sense.
And thus the situation remained on both sides. My father
did not depart from his 'Never!' And I intensified my 'Oh, yes!'
The consequences, indeed, were none too pleasant. The old
man grew embittered, and, much as I loved him, so did I. Ally father forbade me
to nourish the slightest hope of ever being allowed to study art. I went one
step further and declared that if that was the case I would stop studying
altogether. As a result of such 'pronouncements,' of course, I drew the short
end; the old man began the relentless enforcement of his authority. In the
future, therefore, I was silent, but transformed my threat into reality. I
thought that once my father saw how little progress I was making at the
Realschule, he would let me devote myself to my dream, whether he liked it or
not.
I do not know whether this calculation was correct. For the moment
only one thing was certain: my obvious lack of success at school. What gave me
pleasure I learned, especially everything which, in my opinion, I should later
need as a painter. What seemed to me unimportant in this respect or was
otherwise unattractive to me, I sabotaged completely. My report cards at this
time, depending on the subject and my estimation of it, showed nothing but
extremes. Side by side with 'laudable' and 'excellent,' stood 'adequate' or
even 'inadequate.' By far my best accomplishments were in geography and even
more so in history. These were my favorite subjects, in which I led the;
class.
If now, after so many years, I examine the results of this period, I
regard two outstanding facts as particularly significant:
First: I became a nationalist
Second: I learned to understand and grasp the meaning of
history.
Old Austria was a 'state of nationalities.'
By and large, a subject of the German Reich, at that time
at least, was absolutely unable to grasp the significance of this fact for the
life of the individual in such a state. After the great victorious campaign of
the heroic armies in the Franco-German War, people had gradually lost interest
in the Germans living abroad; some could not, while others were unable to
appreciate their importances Especially with regard to the GermanAustrians, the
degenerate dynasty was only too frequently confused with the people, which at
the core was robust and healthy.
What they failed to appreciate was that, unless the
German in Austria had really been of the best blood, he would never have had
the power to set his stamp on a nation of fifty-two million souls to such a
degree that, even in Germany, the erroneous opinion could arise that Austria
was a German state. This was an absurdity fraught with the direst consequences,
and yet a glowing testimonial to the ten million Germans in the Ostmark. Only a
handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and
merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of
life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of
Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland
and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their
mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight
for one's nationality. Today perhaps some can appreciate the greatness of the
Germans in the Reich's old Ostmark, who, with no one but themselves to depend
on, for centuries protected the Reich against incursions from the East, and
finally carried on an exhausting guerrilla warfare to maintain the German
language frontier, at a time when the Reich was highly interested in colonies,
but not in its own flesh and blood at its very doorstep.
As everywhere and always, in every struggle, there were,
in this fight for the language in old Austria, three strata:
The fighters, the lukewarm and the traitors.
This sifting process began at school. For the remarkable
fact about the language struggle is that its waves strike hardest perhaps in
the school, since it is the seed-bed of the coming generation. It is a struggle
for the soul of the child, and to the child its first appeal is
addressed:
'German boy, do not forget you are a German,' and,
'Little girl, remember that you are to become a German mother.'
Anyone who knows the soul of youth will be able to
understand that it is they who lend ear most joyfully to such a battle-cry.
They carry on this struggle in hundreds of forms, in their own way and with
their own weapons. They refuse to sing unGerman songs. The more anyone tries to
alienate them from German heroic grandeur, the wilder becomes their enthusiasm:
they go hungry to save pennies for the grown-ups' battle fund their ears are
amazingly sensitive to un-German teachers, and at the same time they are
incredibly resistant; they wear the forbidden insignia of their own nationality
and are happy to be punished or even beaten for it. Thus, on a small scale they
are a faithful reflection of the adults, except that often their convictions
are better and more honest.
I, too, while still comparatively young, had an
opportunity to take part in the struggle of nationalities in old Austria.
Collections were taken for the Sudmark I and the school association; we
emphasized our convictions by wearing corn-flowers and red lack, and gold
colors; 'Heil ' was our greeting, and instead of the imperial anthem we sang
'Deutschland uber Alles,' despite warnings and punishments. In this way the
child received political training in a period when as a rule the subject of a
so-called national state knew little more of his nationality than its language.
It goes without saying that even then I was not among the lukewarm. In a short
time I had become a fanatical 'German Nationalist,' though the term was not
identical with our present party concept.
This development in me made rapid progress; by the time I
was fifteen I understood the difference between dynastic ' patriotism' and
folkish "nationalism'; and even then I was interested only in the
latter.
For anyone who has never taken the trouble to study the inner
conditions of the Habsburg monarchy, such a process may not be entirely
understandable. In this country the instruction in world history had to provide
the germ for this development, since to all intents and purposes there is no
such thing as a specifically Austrian history. The destiny of this state is so
much bound up with the life and development of all the Germans that a
separation of history into German and Austrian does not seem conceivable.
Indeed, when at length Germany began to divide into two spheres of power, this
division itself became German history.
The insignia of former imperial glory, preserved in
Vienna, still seem to cast a magic spell; they stand as a pledge that these
twofold destinies are eternally one.
The elemental cry of the German-Austrian people for union
with the German mother country, that arose in the days when the Habsburg state
was collapsing, was the result of a longing that slumbered in the heart of the
entire people-a longing to return to the never-forgotten ancestral home. But
this would be in explicable if the historical education of the individual
GermanAustrian had not given rise to so general a longing. In it lies a well
which never grows dry; which, especially in times of forgetfulness, transcends
all momentary prosperity and by constant reminders of the past whispers softly
of a new future
Instruction in world history in the so-called high schools
is even today in a very sorry condition. Few teachers understand that the aim
of studying history can never be to learn historical dates and events by heart
and recite them by rote; that what matters is not whether the child knows
exactly when this or that battle was fought, when a general was born, or even
when a monarch (usually a very insignificant one) came into the crown of his
forefathers. No, by the living God, this is very unimportant.
To 'learn' history means to seek and find the forces
which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as
historical events.
The art of reading as of learning is this: to retain the
essential to forget the non-essential.
Perhaps it affected my whole later life that good fortune
sent me a history teacher who was one of the few to observe this principle in
teaching and examining. Dr. Leopold Potsch, my professor at the Realschule in
Linz, embodied this requirement to an ideal degree. This old gentleman's manner
was as kind as it was determined, his dazzling eloquence not only held us
spellbound but actually carried us away. Even today I think back with gentle
emotion on this gray-haired man who, by the fire of his narratives, sometimes
made us forget the present; who, as if by enchantment, carried us into past
times and, out of the millennial veils of mist, molded dry historical memories
into living reality. On such occasions we sat there, often aflame with
enthusiasm, and sometimes even moved to tears.
What made our good fortune all the greater was that this
teacher knew how to illuminate the past by examples from the present, and how
from the past to draw inferences for the present. As a result he had more
understanding than anyone else for all the daily problems which then held us
breathless. He used our budding nationalistic fanaticism as a means of
educating use frequently appealing to our sense of national honor. By this
alone he was able to discipline us little ruffians more easily than would have
been possible by any other means.
This teacher made history my favorite subject.
And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I
became a little revolutionary.
For who could have studied German history under such a
teacher without becoming an enemy of the state which, through its ruling house,
exerted so disastrous an influence on the destinies of the nation?
And who could retain his loyalty to a dynasty which in
past and present betrayed the needs of the German people again and again for
shameless private advantage?
Did we not know, even as little boys, that this Austrian
state had and could have no love for us Germans?
Our historical knowledge of the works of the House of
Habsburg was reinforced by our daily experience. In the north and south the
poison of foreign nations gnawed at the body of our nationality, and even
Vienna was visibly becoming more and more of an un-German city. The Royal House
Czechized wherever possible, and it was the hand of the goddess of eternal
justice and inexorable retribution which caused Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the
most mortal enemy of Austrian-Germanism, to fall by the bullets which he
himself had helped to mold. For had he not been the patron of Austria's
Slavization from above !
Immense were the burdens which the German people were
expected to bear, inconceivable their sacrifices in taxes and blood, and yet
anyone who was not totally blind was bound to recognize that all this would be
in vain. What pained us most was the fact that this entire system was morally
whitewashed by the alliance with Germany, with the result that the slow
extermination of Germanism in the old monarchy was in a certain sense
sanctioned by Germany itself. The Habsburg hypocrisy, which enabled the
Austrian rulers to create the outward appearance that Austria was a German
state, raised the hatred toward this house to flaming indignation and at the
same time -contempt.
Only in the Reich itself, the men who even then were
called to power saw nothing of all this. As though stricken with blindness,
they lived by the side of a corpse, and in the symptoms of rotten-
ness saw
only the signs of 'new' life.
The unholy alliance of the young Reich and the Austrian
sham state contained the germ of the subsequent World War and of the collapse
as well.
In the course of this book I shall have occasion to take up this
problem at length. Here it suffices to state that even in my earliest youth I
came to the basic insight which never left me, but Only became more
profound:
That Germanism could be safeguarded only by the
destruction of Austria, and, furthermore, that national sentiment is in no
sense Identical with dynastic patriotism; that above all the House of Habsburg
was destined to be the misfortune of the German nation.
Even then I had drawn the consequences from this
realization ardent love for my German-Austrian homeland state.
The habit of historical thinking which I thus learned in
school has never left me in the intervening years. To an ever-increasing extent
world history became for me an inexhaustible source of understanding for the
historical events of the present, in other words, for politics. I do not want
to 'learn' it, I want it to in instruct me.
Thus, at an early age, I had become a political '
revolutionary,' and I became an artistic revolutionary at an equally early
age.
The provincial capital of Upper Austria had at that time a theater
which was, relatively speaking, not bad. Pretty much of everything was
produced. At the age of twelve I saw Wilhelm Tell for the first time, and a few
months later my first opera, Lohengrin. I was captivated at once. My youthful
enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds. Again and again I was
drawn to his works, and it still seems to me especially fortunate that the
modest provincial performance left me open to an intensified experience later
on.
All this, particularly after I had outgrown my adolescence (which in
my case was an especially painful process), reinforced my profound distaste for
the profession which my father had chosen for me. My conviction grew stronger
and stronger that I would never be happy as a civil servant. The fact that by
this time my gift for drawing had been recognized at the Realschule made my
determination all the firmer.
Neither pleas nor threats could change it one
bit.
I wanted to become a painter and no power in the world could make me
a civil servant.
Yet, strange as it may seem, with the passing years I
became more and more interested in architecture.
At that time I regarded this as a natural complement to
my gift as a painter, and only rejoiced inwardly at the extension of my
artistic scope.
I did not suspect that things would turn out
differently.
The question of my profession was to be decided more
quickly than I had previously expected.
In my thirteenth year I suddenly
lost my father. A stroke of apoplexy felled the old gentleman who was otherwise
so hale, thus painlessly ending his earthly pilgrimage, plunging us all into
the depths of grief His most ardent desire had been to help his son forge his
career, thus preserving him from his own bitter experience. In this, to all
appearances, he had not succeeded. But, though unwittingly, he had sown the
seed for a future which at that time neither he nor I would have
comprehended.
For the moment there was no outward change.
My mother, to be sure, felt obliged to continue my
education in accordance with my father's wish; in other words, to have me study
for the civil servant's career. I, for my part, was more than ever determined
absolutely not to undertake this career. In proportion as my schooling departed
from my ideal in subject matter and curriculum, I became more indifferent at
heart. Then suddenly an illness came to my help and in a few weeks decided my
future and the eternal domestic quarrel. As a result of my serious lung
ailment, a physician advised my mother in most urgent terms never to send me
into an office. My attendance at the Realschule had furthermore to be
interrupted for at least a year. The goal for which I had so long silently
yearned, for which I had always fought, had through this event suddenly become
reality almost of its own accord.
Concerned over my illness, my mother finally consented to
take me out of the Realschule and let- me attend the Academy.
These were the happiest days of my life and seemed to me
almost a dream; and a mere dream it was to remain. Two years later, the death
of my mother put a sudden end to all my highflown plans.
It was the conclusion of a long and painful illness which
from the beginning left little hope of recovery. Yet it was a dreadful blow,
particularly for me. I had honored my father, but my mother I had
loved.
Poverty and hard reality now compelled me to take a quick decision.
What little my father had left had been largely exhausted by my mother's grave
illness; the orphan's pension to which I was entitled was not enough for me
even to live on, and so I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own
living.
In my hand a suitcase full of clothes and underwear; in my heart an
indomitable will, I journeyed to Vienna. I, too, hoped to wrest from Fate what
my father had accomplished fifty years before; I, too, wanted to become
'something'-but on no account a civil servant.
Chapter II: Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna
WHEN my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect, had made its
decisions.
In the last months of her sickness, I had gone to Vienna
to take the entrance examination for the Academy. I had set out with a pile of
drawings, convinced that it would be child's play to pass the examination. At
the Realschule I had been by far the best in my class at drawing, and
since then my ability had developed amazingly; my own satisfaction caused me to
take a joyful pride in hoping for the best.
Yet sometimes a drop of bitterness put in its appearance:
my talent for painting seemed to be excelled by my talent for drawing,
especially in almost all fields of architecture. At the same time my interest
in architecture as such increased steadily, and this development was
accelerated after a two weeks' trip to Vienna which I took when not yet
sixteen. The purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court
Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself. From
morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to another, but
it was always the buildings which held my primary interest. For hours I could
stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the
whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of -The
Thousand-and-One-Nights.
Now I was in the fair city for the second time, waiting
with burning impatience, but also with confident self-assurance, for the result
of my entrance examination. I was so convinced that I would be successful that
when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue. Yet that is
what happened. When I presented myself to the rector, requesting an explanation
for my non-acceptance at the Academy's school of painting, that gentleman
assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my
unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously lay in the field of
architecture; for me, he said, the Academy's school of painting was out of the
question, the place for me was the School of Architecture. It was
incomprehensible to him that I had never attended an architectural school or
received any other training in architecture. Downcast, I left von Hansen's
magnificent building on the Schillerplatz, for the first time in my young life
at odds with myself. For what I had just heard about my abilities seemed like a
lightning flash, suddenly revealing a conflict with which I had long been
afflicted, although until then I had no clear conception of its why and
wherefore.
In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become
an architect.
To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the
studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely
needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having
attended the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a
high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfill- ment of my artistic
dream seemed physically impossible.
When after the death of my mother I went to Vienna for the
third time, to remain for many years, the time which had mean-while elapsed had
restored my calm and determination. My old defiance had come back to me and my
goal was now clear and definite before my eyes. I wanted to become an
architect, and obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be
broken. I was determined to overcome these obstacles, keeping before my eyes
the image of my father, who had started out as the child of a village
shoemaker, and risen by his own efforts to be a government official. I had a
better foundation to build on, and hence my possibilities in the struggle were
easier, and what then seemed to be the harshness of Fate, I praise today as
wisdom and Providence. While the Goddess of Suffering took me in her arms,
often threatening to crush me, my will to resistance grew, and in the end this
will was victorious.
I owe it to that period that I grew hard and am still
capable of being hard. And even more, I exalt it for tearing me away from the
hollowness of comfortable life; for drawing the mother's darling out of his
soft downy bed and giving him 'Dame Care' for a new mother; for hurling me,
despite all resistance, into a world of misery and poverty, thus making me
acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.
In this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of
which I had previously scarcely known the names, and whose terrible importance
for the existence of the German people I certainly did not understand: Marxism
and Jewry.
To me Vienna, the city which, to so many, is the epitome
of innocent pleasure, a festive playground for merrymakers, represents, I am
sorry to say, merely the living memory of the saddest period of my
life.
Even today this city can arouse in me nothing but the most dismal
thoughts. For me the name of this Phaeacian city I represents five years of
hardship and misery. Five years in which I was forced to earn a living, first
as a day laborer, then as a small painter; a truly meager living which never
sufficed to appease even my daily hunger. Hunger was then my faithful
bodyguard; he never left me for a moment and partook of all I had, share and
share alike. Every book I acquired aroused his interest; a visit to the Opera
prompted his attentions for days at a time; my life was a continuous struggle
with this pitiless friend. And yet during this time I studied as never before.
Aside from my architecture and my rare visits to the Opera, paid-for in hunger,
I had but one pleasure: my books.
At that time I read enormously and thoroughly. All the
free time my work left me was employed in my studies. In this way I forged in a
few years' time the foundations of a knowledge from which I still draw
nourishment today.
And even more than this:
In this period there took shape within me a world picture
and a philosophy which became the granite foundation of all my acts. In
addition to what I then created, I have had to learn little; and I have had to
alter nothing.
On the contrary.
Today I am firmly convinced that basically and on the
whole all creative ideas appear in our youth, in so far as any such are
present. I distinguish between the wisdom of age, consisting solely in greater
thoroughness and caution due to the experience of a long life, and the genius
of youth, which pours out thoughts and ideas with inexhaustible fertility, but
cannot for the moment develop them because of their very abundance. It is this
youthful genius which provides the building materials and plans for the future,
from which a wiser age takes the stones, carves them and completes the edifice,
in so far as the so-called wisdom of age has not stifled the genius of
youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home differed little
or not at all from the life of other people. Carefree, I could await the new
day, and there was no social problem for me. The environment of my youth
consisted of petty-bourgeois circles, hence of a world having very little
relation to the purely manual worker. For, strange as it may seem at first
glance, the cleft between this class, which in an economic sense is by no means
so brilliantly situated, and the manual worker is often deeper than we imagine.
The reason for this hostility, as we might almost call it, lies in the fear of
a social group, which has but recently raised itself above the level of the
manual worker, that it will sink back into the old despised class, or at least
become identified with it. To this, in many cases, we must add the repugnant
memory of the cultural poverty of this lower class, the frequent vulgarity of
its social intercourse; the petty bourgeois' own position in society, however
insignificant it may be, makes any contact with this outgrown stage of life and
culture intolerable.
Consequently, the higher classes feel less constraint in
their dealings with the lowest of their fellow men than seems possible to the
'upstart.'
For anyone is an upstart who rises by his own efforts from
his previous position in life to a higher one.
Ultimately this struggle, which is often so hard, kills
all pity. Our own painful struggle for existence destroys our feeling for the
misery of those who have remained behind.
In this respect Fate was kind to me. By forcing me to
return to this world of poverty and insecurity, from which my father had risen
in the course of his life, it removed the blinders of a narrow petty-bourgeois
upbringing from my eyes. Only now did I learn to know humanity, learning to
distinguish between empty appearances or brutal externals and the inner
being.
After the turn of the century, Vienna was, socially
speaking, one of the most backward cities in Europe.
Dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply.
In the center and in the inner districts you could really feel the pulse of
this realm of fifty-two millions, with all the dubious magic of the national
melting pot. The Court with its dazzling glamour attracted wealth and
intelligence from the rest of the country like a magnet. Added to this was the
strong centralization of the Habsburg monarchy in itself.
It offered the sole possibility of holding this medley of
nations together in any set form. But the consequence was an extraordinary
concentration of high authorities in the imperial capital
Yet not only in the political and intellectual sense was
Vienna the center of the old Danube monarchy, but economically as well. The
host of high of officers, government officials, artists, and scholars was
confronted by an even greater army of workers, and side by side with
aristocratic and commercial wealth dwelt dire poverty. Outside the palaces on
the Ring loitered thousands of unemployed, and beneath this Via Triumphalis of
old Austria dwelt the homeless in the gloom and mud of the canals.
In hardly any German city could the social question have
been studied better than in Vienna. But make no mistake. This 'studying' cannot
be done from lofty heights. No one who has not been seized in the jaws of this
murderous viper can know its poison fangs. Otherwise nothing results but
superficial chatter and false sentimentality. Both are harmful. The former
because it can never penetrate to the core of the problem, the latter because
it passes it by. I do not know which is more terrible: inattention to social
misery such as we see every day among the majority of those who have been
favored by fortune or who have risen by their own efforts, or else the
snobbish, or at times tactless and obtrusive, condescension of certain women of
fashion in skirts or in trousers, who ' feel for the people.' In any event,
these gentry sin far more than their minds, devoid of all instinct, are capable
of realizing. Consequently, and much to their own amazement, the result of
their social 'efforts' is always nil, frequently, in fact, an indignant rebuff,
though this, of course, is passed off as a proof of the people's
ingratitude.
Such minds are most reluctant to realize that social
endeavor has nothing in common with this sort of thing; that above all it can
raise no claim to gratitude, since its function is not to distribute favors but
to restore rights.
I was preserved from studying the social question in such
a way. By drawing me within its sphere of suffering, it did not seem to invite
me to 'study,' but to experience it in my own skin. It was none of its doing
that the guinea pig came through the operation safe and sound.
An attempt to enumerate the sentiments I experienced in
that period could never be even approximately complete; I shall describe here
only the most essential impressions, those which often moved me most deeply,
and the few lessons which I derived from them at the time.
The actual business of finding work was, as a rule, not
hard for me, since I was not a skilled craftsman, but was obliged to seek my
daily bread as a so-called helper and sometimes as a casual laborer.
I
adopted the attitude of all those who shake the dust of Europe from their feet
with the irrevocable intention of founding a new existence in the New World and
conquering a new home. Released from all the old, paralyzing ideas of
profession and position, environment and tradition, they snatch at every
livelihood that offers itself, grasp at every sort of work, progressing step by
step to the realization that honest labor, no matter of what sort, disgraces no
one. I, too, was determined to leap into this new world, with both feet, and
fight my way through.
I soon learned that there was always some kind of work
to be had, but equally soon I found out how easy it was to lose it.
The
uncertainty of earning my daily bread soon seemed to me one of the darkest
sides of my new life.
The ' skilled' worker does not find himself out on the
street as frequently as the unskilled; but he is not entirely immune to this
fate either. And in his case the loss of livelihood owing to lack of work is
replaced by the lock-out, or by going on strike himself.
In this respect the
entire economy suffers bitterly from the individual's insecurity in earning his
daily bread.
The peasant boy who goes to the big city, attracted by
the easier nature of the work (real or imaginary), by shorter hours, but most
of all by the dazzling light emanating from the metropolis, is accustomed to a
certain security in the matter of livelihood. He leaves his old job only when
there is at least some prospect of a new one. For there is a great lack of
agricultural workers, hence the probability of any long period of unemployment
is in itself small. It is a mistake to believe that the young fellow who goes
to the big city is made of poorer stuff than his brother who continues to make
an honest living from the peasant sod. No, on the contrary: experience shows
that all those elements which emigrate consist of the healthiest and most
energetic natures, rather than conversely. Yet among these 'emigrants' we must
count, not only those who go to America, but to an equal degree the young
farmhand who resolves to leave his native village for the strange city. He,
too, is prepared to face an uncertain fate. As a rule he arrives in the big
city with a certain amount of money; he has no need to lose heart on the very
first day if he has the ill fortune to find no work for any length of time. But
it is worse if, after finding a job, he soon loses it. To find a new one,
especially in winter, is often difficult if not impossible. Even so, the first
weeks are tolerable. He receives an unemployment benefit from his union funds
and manages as well as possible. But when his last cent is gone and the union,
due to the long duration of his unemployment, discontinues its payments, great
hardships
begin. Now he walks the streets, hungry; often he pawns and sells
his last possessions; his clothing becomes more and more wretched; and thus he
sinks into external surroundings which, on top of his physical misfortune, also
poison his soul. If he is evicted and if (as is so often the case) this occurs
in winter, his misery is very great. At length he finds some sort of job again.
But the old story is repeated. The same thing happens a second time, the third
time perhaps it is even worse, and little by little he learns to bear the
eternal insecurity with greater and greater indifference. At last the
repetition becomes a habit.
And so this man, who was formerly so hard-working, grows
lax in his whole view of life and gradually becomes the instrument of those who
use him only for their own base advantage. He has so often been unemployed
through no fault of his own that one time more or less ceases to matter, even
when the aim is no longer to fight for economic rights, but to destroy
political, social, or culturaL values in general. He may not be exactly
enthusiastic about strikes, but at any rate he has become indifferent.
With open eyes I was able to follow this process in a thousand
examples. The more I witnessed it, the greater grew my revulsion for the big
city which first avidly sucked men in and then so cruelly crushed them.
When they arrived, they belonged to their people; after remaining
for a few years, they were lost to it.
I, too, had been tossed around by life in the metropolis-
in my own skin I could feel the effects of this fate and taste them with my
soul. One more thing I saw: the rapid change from work to unemployment and vice
versa, plus the resultant fluctuation of income, end by destroying in many all
feeling for thrift, or any understanding for a prudent ordering of their lives.
It would seem that the body gradually becomes accustomed to living on the fat
of the land in good times and going hungry in bad times. Indeed, hunger
destroys any resolution for reasonable budgeting in better times to come by
holding up to the eyes of its tormented victim an eternal mirage of good living
and raising this dream to such a pitch of longing that a pathological desire
puts an end to all restraint as soon as wages and earnings make it at all
possible. The consequence is that once the man obtains work he irresponsibly
forgets all ideas of order and discipline, and begins to live luxuriously for
the pleasures of the moment. This upsets even the small weekly budget, as even
here any intelligent apportionment is lacking; in the beginning it suffices for
five days instead of seven, later only for three, finally scarcely for one day,
and in the end it is drunk up in the very first night.
Often he has a wife
and children at home. Sometimes they, too, are infected by this life,
especially when the man is good to them on the whole and actually loves them in
his own way. Then the weekly wage is used up by the whole family in two or
three days; they eat and drink as long as the money holds out and the last days
they go hungry. Then the wife drags herself out into the neighborhood, borrows
a little, runs up little debts at the food store, and in this way strives to
get through the hard last days of the week. At noon they all sit together
before their meager and sometimes empty bowls, waiting for the next payday,
speaking of it, making plans, and, in their hunger, dreaming of the happiness
to come.
And so the little children, in their earliest beginnings, are made
familiar with this misery.
It ends badly if the man goes his own way from the very
beginning and the woman, for the children's sake, opposes him. Then there is
fighting and quarreling, and, as the man grows estranged from his wife, he
becomes more intimate with alcohol. He is drunk every Saturday, and, with her
instinct of selfpreservation for herself and her children, the woman has to
fight to get even a few pennies out of him; and, to make matters worse, this
usually occurs on his way from the factory to the barroom. When at length he
comes home on Sunday or even Monday night, drunk and brutal, but always parted
from his last cent, such scenes often occur that God have mercy!
I have seen this in hundreds of instances. At first I was
repelled or even outraged, but later I understood the whole tragedy of this
misery and its deeper causes. These people are the unfortunate victims of bad
conditions!
Even more dismal in those days were the housing conditions. The
misery in which the Viennese day laborer lived was frightful to behold. Even
today it fills me with horror when I think of these wretched caverns, the
lodging houses and tenements, sordid scenes of garbage, repulsive filth, and
worse.
What was-and still is-bound to happen some day, when the stream of
unleashed slaves pours forth from these miserable dens to avenge themselves on
their thoughtless fellow men F
For thoughtless they are!
Thoughtlessly they let things slide along, and with their
utter lack of intuition fail even to suspect that sooner or later Fate must
bring retribution, unless men conciliate Fate while there is still time.
How
thankful I am today to the Providence which sent me to that school! In it I
could no longer sabotage the subjects I did not like. It educated me quickly
and thoroughly.
If I did not wish to despair of the men who constituted
my environment at that time, I had to learn to distinguish between their
external characters and lives and the foundations of their development. Only
then could all this be borne without losing heart. Then, from all the misery
and despair, from all the filth and outward degeneration, it was no longer
human beings that emerged, but the deplorable results of deplorable laws; and
the hardship of my own life, no easier than the others, preserved me from
capitulating in tearful sentimentality to the degenerate products of this
process of development.
No, this is not the way to understand all these
things!
Even then I saw that only a twofold road could lead to the goal of
improving these conditions:
The deepest sense of social responsibility for the
creation of better foundations for our development, coupled with brutal
determination on breaking down incurable tenors.
Just as Nature does not concentrate her greatest
attention in preserving what exists, but in breeding offspring to carry on the
species, likewise, in human life, it is less important artificially to
alleviate existing evil, which, in view of human nature, is ninety-nine per
cent impossible, than to ensure
from the start healthier channels for a
future development.
During my struggle for existence in Vienna, it had become
clear to me that
Social activity must never and on no account be directed
toward philanthropic flim-flam, but rather toward the elimination of the basic
deficiencies in the organization of our economic and cultural life that must-or
at all events can-lead to the degeneration of the individual .
The difficulty of applying the most extreme and brutal
methods against the criminals who endanger the state lies not least in the
uncertainty of our judgment of the inner motives or causes of such contemporary
phenomena.
This uncertainty is only too well founded in our own
sense of guilt regarding such tragedies of degeneration; be that as it may, it
paralyzes any serious and firm decision and is thus partly responsible for the
weak and half-hearted, because hesitant, execution of even the most necessary
measures of selfpreservation.
Only when an epoch ceases to be haunted by the shadow of
its own consciousness of guilt will it achieve the inner calm and outward
strength brutally and ruthlessly to prune off the wild shoots and tear out the
weeds.
Since the Austrian state had practically no social legislation or
jurisprudence, its weakness in combating even malignant tumors was
glaring.
I do not know what horrified me most at that time: the
economic misery of my companions, their moral and ethical coarseness, or the
low level of their intellectual development.
How often does our bourgeoisie rise in high moral
indignation when they hear some miserable tramp declare that it is all the same
to him whether he is a German or not, that he feels equally happy wherever he
is, as long as he has enough to live on!
This lack of 'national pride' is most profoundly
deplored, and horror at such an attitude is expressed in no uncertain
terms.
How many people have asked themselves what was the real reason for
the superiority of their own sentiments?
How many are aware of the infinite number of separate
memories of the greatness of our national fatherland in all the fields of
cultural and artistic life, whose total result is to inspire them with just
pride at being members of a nation so blessed?
How many suspect to how great an extent pride in the
fatherland depends on knowledge of its greatness in all these fields?
Do
our bourgeois circles ever stop to consider to what an absurdly small extent
this prerequisite of pride in the fatherland is transmitted to the
'people'?
Let us not try to condone this by saying that ' it is no better in
other countries,' and that in those countries the worker avows his nationality
'notwithstanding.' Even if this were so, it could serve as no excuse for our
own omissions. But it is not so; for the thing that we constantly designate as
'chauvinistic' education; for example among the French people, is nothing other
than extreme emphasis on the greatness of France in all the fields of culture,
or, as the Frenchman puts it, of 'civilization The fact is that the young
Frenchman is not brought up to be objective, but is instilled with the most
subjective conceivable view, in so far as the importance of the political or
cultural greatness of his fatherland is concerned.
This education will always have to be limited to general
and extremely broad values which, if necessary, must be engraved in the memory
and feeling of the people by eternal repetition.
But to the negative sin of omission is added in our
country the positive destruction of the little which the individual has the
good fortune to learn in school. The rats that politically poison our nation
gnaw even this little from the heart and memory of the broad masses, in so far
as this has not been previously accomplished by poverty and suffering.
Imagine, for instance, the following scene:
In a basement apartment, consisting of two stuffy rooms,
dwells a worker's family of seven. Among the five children there is a boy of,
let us assume, three years. This is the age in which the first impressions are
made on the consciousness of the child Talented persons retain traces of memory
from this period down to advanced old age. The very narrowness and overcrowding
of the room does not lead to favorable conditions. Quarreling and wrangling
will very frequently arise as a result. In these circumstances, people do not
live with one another, they press against one another. Every argument, even the
most trifling, which in a spacious apartment can be reconciled by a mild
segregation, thus solving itself, here leads to loathsome wrangling without
end. Among the children, of course, this is still bearable; they always fight
under such circumstances, and among themselves they quickly and thoroughly
forget about it. But if this battle is carried on between the parents
themselves, and almost every day in forms which for vulgarity often leave
nothing to be desired, then, if only very gradually, the results of such visual
instruction must ultimately become apparent in the children. The character the)
will inevitably assume if this mutual quarrel takes the form of brutal attacks
of the father against the mother, of drunken beatings, is hard for anyone who
does not know this milieu to imagine. At the age of six the pitiable little boy
suspects the existence of things which can inspire even an adult with nothing
but horror. Morally poisoned, physically undernourished, his poor little head
full of lice, the young 'citizen' goes off to public school. After a great
struggle he may learn to read and write, but that is about all. His doing any
homework is out of the question. On the contrary, the very mother and father,
even in the presence of the children, talk about his teacher and school in
terms which are not fit to be repeated, and are more inclined to curse the
latter to their face than to take their little offspring across their knees and
teach them some sense. All the other things that the little fellow hears at
home do not tend to increase his respect for his dear fellow men. Nothing good
remains of humanity, no institution remains unassailed; beginning with his
teacher and up to the head of the government, whether it is a question of
religion or of morality as such, of the state or society, it is all the same,
everything is reviled in the most obscene terms and dragged into the filth of
the basest possible outlook. When at the age of fourteen the young man is
discharged from school, it is hard to decide what is stronger in him: his
incredible stupidity as far as
any real knowledge and ability are concerned,
or the corrosive insolence of his behavior, combined with an immorality, even
at this age, which would make your hair stand on end
What position can this man-to whom even now hardly
anything is holy, who, just as he has encountered no greatness conversely
suspects and knows all the sordidness of life- occupy in the life into which he
is now preparing to emerge?
The three-year-old child has become a fifteen-year-old
despiser of all authority. Thus far, aside from dirt and filth, this young man
has seen nothing which might inspire him to any higher enthusiasm.
But only now does he enter the real university of this
existence.
Now he begins the same life which all along his childhood
years he has seen his father living. He hangs around the street corners and
bars, coming home God knows when; and for a change now and then he beats the
broken-down being which was once his mother, curses God and the world, and at
length is convicted of some particular offense and sent to a house of
correction.
There he receives his last polish.
And his dear bourgeois fellow men are utterly amazed at
the lack of 'national enthusiasm' in this young 'citizen.'
Day by day, in the theater and in the movies, in
backstairs literature and the yellow press, they see the poison poured into the
people by bucketfuls, and then they are amazed at the low 'moral content,' the
'national indifference,' of the masses of the people.
As though trashy films, yellow press, and such-like dung
could. furnish the foundations of a knowledge of the greatness of our
fatherland!-quite aside from the early education of the individual.
What I had never suspected before, I quickly and thoroughly learned
in those years:
The question of the 'nationalization' of a people is,
among other things, primarily a question of creating healthy social conditions
as a foundation for the possibility of educating the individual. For only those
who through school and upbringing learn to know the cultural, economic, but
above all the political, greatness of their own fatherland can and unit achieve
the inner pride in the privilege of being a member of such a people. And I can
fight only for something that I love, love only what I respect, and respect
only what I at least know.
Once my interest in the social question was aroused, I
began to study it with all thoroughness. It was a new and hitherto unknown
world which opened before me.
In the years 1909 and 1910, my own situation had changed
somewhat in so far as I no longer had to earn my daily bread as a common
laborer. By this time I was working independently as a small draftsman and
painter of watercolors. Hard as this was with regard to earnings-it was barely
enough to live on- it was good for my chosen profession. Now I was no longer
dead tired in the evening when I came home from work, unable to look at a book
without soon dozing off. My present work ran parallel to my future profession.
Moreover, I was master of my own time and could apportion it better than had
previously been possible.
I painted to make a living and studied for
pleasure.
Thus I was able to supplement my visual instruction in the social
problem by theoretical study. I studied more or less all of the books I was
able to obtain regarding this whole field, and for the rest immersed myself in
my own thoughts.
I believe that those who knew me in those days took me for
an eccentric.
Amid all this, as was only natural, I served my love of
architecture with ardent zeal. Along with music, it seemed to me the queen of
the arts: under such circumstances my concern with it was not 'work.' but the
greatest pleasure. I could read and draw until late into the night, and never
grow tired. Thus my faith grew that my beautiful dream for the future would
become reality after all, even though this might require long years. I was
firmly convinced that I should some day make a name for myself as an
architect.
In addition, I had the greatest interest in everything
connected with politics, but this did not seem to me very significant. On the
contrary: in my eyes this was the self-evident duty of every thinking man.
Anyone who failed to understand this lost the right to any criticism or
complaint.
In this field, too, I read and studied much.
By 'reading,' to be sure, I mean perhaps something
different than the average member of our so-called 'intelligentsia.'
I
know people who 'read' enormously, book for book, letter for letter, yet whom I
would not describe as 'well-read.' True they possess a mass of 'knowledge,' but
their brain is unable to organize and register the material they have taken in.
They lack the art of sifting what is valuable for them in a book from that
which is without value, of retaining the one forever, and, if possible, not
even seeing the rest, but in any case not dragging it around with them as
useless ballast. For reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end. It
should primarily help to fill the framework constituted by every man's talents
and abilities; in addition, it should provide the tools and building materials
which the individual needs for his life's work, regardless whether this
consists in a primitive struggle for sustenance or the satisfaction of a high
calling; secondly, it should transmit a general world view. In both cases,
however, it is essential that the con tent of what one reads at any time should
not be transmitted to the memory in the sequence of the book or books, but like
the stone of a mosaic should fit into the general world picture in its proper
place, and thus help to form this picture in the mind of the reader. Otherwise
there arises a confused muddle of memorized facts which not only are worthless,
but also make their unto fortunate possessor conceited. For such a reader now
believes himself in all seriousness to be {educated,' to understand something
of life, to have knowledge, while in reality, with every new acquisition of
this kind of 'education,' he is growing more and more removed from the world
until, not infrequently, he ends up in a sanitarium or in parliament.
Never
will such a mind succeed in culling from the confusion of his ' knowledge '
anything that suits the demands of the hour, for his intellectual ballast is
not organized along the lines of life, but in the sequence of the books as he
read them and as their content has piled up in his brain If Fate, in the
requirements of his daily life, desired to remind him to make a correct
application of what he had read, it would have to indicate title and page
number, since the poor fool would otherwise never in all his life find the
correct place. But since Fate does not do this, these bright boys in any
critical situation come into the most terrible embarrassment, cast about
convulsively for analogous cases, and with mortal certainty naturally find the
wrong formulas.
If this were not true, it would be impossible for us to
understand the political behavior of our learned and highly placed government
heroes, unless we decided to assume outright villainy instead of pathological
propensities.
On the other hand, a man who possesses the art of correct
reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and
immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently
remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth
knowing. Once the knowledge he has achieved in this fashion is correctly
coordinated within the somehow existing picture of this or that subject created
by the imaginations it will function either as a corrective or a complement,
thus enhancing either the correctness or the clarity of the picture. Then, if
life suddenly sets some question before us for examination or answer, the
memory, if this method of reading is observed, will immediately take the
existing picture as a norm, and from it will derive all the individual items
regarding these questions, assembled in the course of decades, submit them to
the mind for examination and reconsideration, until the question is clarified
or answered.
Only this kind of reading has meaning and
purpose.
An orator, for example, who does not thus provide his intelligence
with the necessary foundation will never be in a position cogently to defend
his view in the face of opposition, though it may be a thousand times true or
real. In every discussion his memory will treacherously leave him in the lurch;
he will find neither grounds for reinforcing his own contentions nor any for
confuting those of his adversary. If, as in the case of a speaker, it is only a
question of making a fool of himself personally, it may not be so bad, but not
so when Fate predestines such a know-it-all incompetent to be the leader of a
state.
Since my earliest youth I have endeavored to read in the correct
way, and in this endeavor I have been most happily supported by my memory and
intelligence. Viewed in this light, my Vienna period was especially fertile and
valuable. The experiences of daily life provided stimulation for a constantly
renewed study of the most varied problems. Thus at last I was in a position to
bolster up reality by theory and test theory by reality, and was preserved from
being stifled by theory or growing banal through reality.
In this period the experience of daily life directed and
stimulated me to the most thorough theoretical study of two questions in
addition to the social question.
Who knows when I would have immersed myself in the
doctrines and essence of Marxism if that period had not literally thrust my
nose into the problem!
What I knew of Social Democracy in my youth was
exceedingly little and very inaccurate.
I was profoundly pleased that it should carry on the
struggle for universal suffrage and the secret ballot. For even then my
intelligence told me that this must help to weaken the Habsburg regime which I
so hated. In the conviction that the Austrian Empire could never be preserved
except by victimizing its Germans, but that even the price of a gradual
Slavization of the German element by no means provided a guaranty of an empire
really capable of survival, since the power of the Slavs to uphold the state
must be estimated as exceedingly dubious, I welcomed every development which in
my opinion would inevitably lead to the collapse of this impossible state which
condemned ten million Germans to death. The more the linguistic Babel corroded
and disorganized parliament, the closer drew the inevitable hour of the
disintegration of this Babylonian Empire, and with it the hour of freedom for
my German-Austrian people. Only in this way could the Anschluss with the old
mother country be restored.
Consequently, this activity of the Social Democracy was
not displeasing to me. And the fact that it strove to improve the living
conditions of the worker, as, in my innocence, I was still stupid enough to
believe, likewise seemed to speak rather for it than against it. What most
repelled me was its hostile attitude toward the struggle for the preservation
of Germanism, its disgraceful courting of the Slavic 'comrade,' who accepted
this declaration of love in so far as it was bound up with practical
concessions, but otherwise maintained a lofty and arrogant reserve, thus giving
the obtrusive beggars their deserved reward.
Thus, at the age of seventeen the word 'Marxism' was as
yet little known to me, while ' Social Democracy ' and socialism seemed to me
identical concepts. Here again it required the fist of Fate to open my eyes to
this unprecedented betrayal of the peoples.
Up to that time I had known the Social Democratic Party
only as an onlooker at a few mass demonstrations, without possessing even the
slightest insight into the mentality of its adherents or the nature of its
doctrine; but now, at one stroke, I came into contact with the products of its
education and 'philosophy.' And in a few months I obtained what might otherwise
have required decades: an understanding of a pestilential whore,l cloaking
herself as social virtue and brotherly love, from which I hope humanity will
rid this earth with the greatest dispatch, since otherwise the earth might well
become rid of humanity.
My first encounter with the Social Democrats occurred
during my employment as a building worker.
From the very beginning it was none too pleasant. ;My
clothing was still more or less in order, my speech cultivated, and my manner
reserved. I was still so busy with my own destiny that I could not concern
myself much with the people around me. I looked for work only to avoid
starvation, only to obtain an opportunity of continuing my education, though
ever so slowly. Perhaps I would not have concerned myself at all with my new
environment if on the third or fourth day an event had not taken place which
forced me at once to take a position. I was asked to join the
organization.
My knowledge of trade-union organization was at that time
practically non-existent. I could not have proved that its existence was either
beneficial or harmful. When I was told that I had to join, I refused. The
reason I gave was that I did not understand the matter, but that I would not
let myself be forced into anything. Perhaps my first reason accounts for my not
being thrown out at once. They may perhaps have hoped to convert me or break
down my resistance in a few days. In any event, they had made a big mistake. At
the end of two weeks I could no longer have joined, even if I had wanted to. In
these two weeks I came to know the men around me more closely, and no power in
the world could have moved me to join an organization whose members had
meanwhile come to appear to me in so unfavorable a light.
During the first days I was irritable.
At noon some of the workers went to the near-by taverns
while others remained at the building site and ate a lunch which, as a rule was
quite wretched. These were the married men whose wives brought them their
noonday soup in pathetic bowls. Toward the end of the week their number always
increased, why I did not understand until later. On these occasions politics
was discussed.
I drank my bottle of milk and ate my piece of bread
somewhere off to one side, and cautiously studied my new associates or
reflected on my miserable lot. Nevertheless, I heard more than enough; and
often it seemed to me that they purposely moved closer to me, perhaps in order
to make me take a position. In any case, what I heard was of such a nature as
to infuriate me in the extreme. These men rejected everything: the nation as an
invention of the ' capitalistic ' (how often was I forced to hear this single
word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the
exploitation of the working class; the authority of law as a means for
oppressing the proletariat; the school as an institution for breeding slaves
and slaveholders; religion as a means for stultifying the people and making
them easier to exploit; morality as a symptom of stupid, sheeplike patience,
etc. There was absolutely nothing which was not drawn through the mud of a
terrifying depths
At first I tried to keep silent. But at length it became
impossible. I began to take a position and to oppose them. But I was forced to
recognize that this was utterly hopeless until I possessed certain definite
knowledge of the controversial points. And so I began to examine the sources
from which they drew this supposed wisdom. I studied book after book, pamphlet
after pamphlet.
From then on our discussions at work were often very
heated. I argued back, from day to day better informed than my antagonists
concerning their own knowledge, until one day they made use of the weapon which
most readily conquers reason: terror and violence. A few of the spokesmen on
the opposing side forced me either to leave the building at once or be thrown
off the scaffolding. Since I was alone and resistance seemed hopeless, I
preferred, richer by one experience, to follow the former counsel.
I went away filled with disgust, but at the same time so
agitated that it would have been utterly impossible for me to turn my back on
the whole business. No, after the first surge of indignation, my stubbornness
regained the upper hand. I was determined to go to work on another building in
spite of my experience. In this decision I was reinforced by Poverty which, a
few weeks later, after I had spent what little I had saved from my wages.
enfolded me in her heartless arms. I had to go back whether I wanted to or not.
The same old story began anew and ended very much the same as the first
time.
I wrestled with my innermost soul: are these people human, worthy to
belong to a great nation?
A painful question; for if it is answered in the
affirmative, the struggle for my nationality really ceases to be worth the
hardships and sacrifices which the best of us have to make for the sake of such
scum; and if it is answered in the negative, our nation is pitifully poor in
human beings.
On such days of reflection and cogitation, I pondered
with anxious concern on the masses of those no longer belonging to their people
and saw them swelling to the proportions of a menacing army.
With what changed feeling I now gazed at the endless
columns of a mass demonstration of Viennese workers that took place one day as
they marched past four abreast! For neatly two hours I stood there watching
with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by. In oppressed
anxiety, I finally left the place and sauntered homeward. In a tobacco shop on
the way I saw the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the central organ of the old Austrian
Social Democracy. It was available in a cheap people's cafe, to which I often
went to read newspapers; but up to that time I had not been able to bring
myself to spend more than two minutes on the miserable sheet, whose whole tone
affected me like moral vitriol. Depressed by the demonstration, I was driven on
by an inner voice to buy the sheet and read it carefully. That evening I did
so, fighting down the fury that rose up in me from time to time at this
concentrated solution of lies.
More than any theoretical literature, my daily reading of
the Social Democratic press enabled me to study the inner nature of these
thought-processes.
For what a difference between the glittering phrases
about freedom, beauty, and dignity in the theoretical literature, the delusive
welter of words seemingly expressing the most profound and laborious wisdom,
the loathsome humanitarian morality- all this written with the incredible gall
that comes with prophetic certainty-and the brutal daily press, shunning no
villainy, employing every means of slander, lying with a virtuosity that would
bend iron beams, all in the name of this gospel of a new humanity. The one is
addressed to the simpletons of the middle, not to mention the upper, educated,
'classes,' the other to the masses.
For me immersion in the literature and press of this
doctrine and organization meant finding my way back to my own people.
What
had seemed to me an unbridgable gulf became the source of a greater love than
ever before.
Only a fool can behold the work of this villainous
poisoner and still condemn the victim. The more independent I made myself in
the next few years the clearer grew my perspective, hence my insight into the
inner causes of the Social Democratic successes. I now understood the
significance of the brutal demand that I read only Red papers, attend only Red
meetings, read only Red books, etc. With plastic clarity I saw before my eyes
the inevitable result of this doctrine of intolerance.
The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to
anything that is half-hearted and weak.
Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by
grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force
which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a
strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more
than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine, tolerating no
other beside itself, than by the granting of liberalistic freedom with which,
as a rule, they can do little, and are prone to feel that they have been
abandoned. They are equally unaware of their shameless spiritual terrorization
and the hideous abuse of their human freedom, for they absolutely fail to
suspect the inner insanity of the whole doctrine. All they see is the ruthless
force and brutality of its calculated manifestations, to which they always
submit in the end.
If Social Democracy is opposed by a doctrine of greater
truth, but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer, though this may
require the bitterest struggle.
Before two years had passed, the theory as well as the
technical methods of Social Democracy were clear to me.
I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this
movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor
mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable
barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous,
until the nerves of the attacked persons break down and, just to have peace
again, they sacrifice the hated individual.
However, the fools obtain no peace.
The game begins again and is repeated over and over until
fear of the mad dog results in suggestive paralysis.
Since the Social Democrats best know the value of force
from their own experience, they most violently attack those in whose nature
they detect any of this substance which is so rare. Conversely, they praise
every weakling on the opposing side, sometimes cautiously, sometimes loudly,
depending on the real or supposed quality of his intelligence.
They fear an irnpotent, spineless genius less than a
forceful nature of moderate intelligence.
But with the greatest enthusiasm they commend weaklings
in both mind and force.
They know how to create the illusion that this is the
only way of preserving the peace, and at the same time, stealthily but
steadily, they conquer one position after another, sometimes by silent
blackmail, sometimes by actual theft, at moments when the general attention is
directed toward other matters, and either does not want to be disturbed or
considers the matter too small to raise a stir about, thus again irritating the
vicious antagonist.
This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all
human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical
certainty unless the opposing side learns to combat poison gas with poison
gas.
It is our duty to inform all weaklings that this is a question of to
be or not to be.
I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of
physical terror toward the individual and the masses.
Here, too, the psychological effect can be calculated with
precision.
Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the
meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be
successful unless opposed by equal terror.
In this case, to be sure, the party will cry bloody
murder; though it has long despised all state authority, it will set up a
howling cry for that same authority and in most cases will actually attain its
goal amid the general confusion: it will find some idiot of a higher official
who, in the imbecilic hope of propitiating the feared adversary for later
eventualities, will help this world plague to break its opponent.
The impression made by such a success on the minds of the
great masses of supporters as well as opponents can only be measured by those
who know the soul of a people, not from books, but from life. For while in the
ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice
of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the
success of any further resistance.
The more familiar I became, principally with the methods
of physical terror, the more indulgent I grew toward all the hundreds of
thousands who succumbed to it.
What makes me most indebted to that period of suffering
is that it alone gave back to me my people, taught me to distinguish the
victims from their seducers.
The results of this seduction can be designated only as
victims. For if I attempted to draw a few pictures from life, depicting the
essence of these 'lowest' classes, my picture would not be complete without the
assurance that in these depths I also found bright spots in the form of a rare
willingness to make sacrifices, of loyal comradeship, astonishing frugality,
and modest reserve, especially among the older workers. Even though these
virtues were steadily vanishing in the younger generation, if only through the
general effects of the big city, there were many, even among the young men,
whose healthy blood managed to dominate the foul tricks of life. If in their
political activity, these good, often kind-hearted people nevertheless joined
the mortal enemies of our nationality, thus helping to cement their ranks, the
reason was that they neither understood nor could understand the baseness of
the new doctrine, and that no one else took the trouble to bother about them,
and finally that the social conditions were stronger than any will to the
contrary that may have been present. The poverty to which they sooner or later
succumbed drove them into the camp of the Social Democracy.
Since on innumerable occasions the bourgeoisie has in the
clumsiest and most immoral way opposed demands which were justified from the
universal human point of view, often without obtaining or even justifiably
expecting any profit from such an attitude, even the most self-respecting
worker was driven out of the trade-union organization into political
activity.
Millions of workers, I am sure, started out as enemies of the Social
Democratic Party in their innermost soul, but their resistance was overcome in
a way which was sometimes utterly insane; that is, when the bourgeois parties
adopted a hostile attitude toward every demand of a social character. Their
simple, narrow-minded rejection of all attempts to better working conditions,
to introduce safety devices on machines, to prohibit child labor and protect
the woman, at least in the months when she was bearing the future national
comrade under her heart, contributed to drive the masses into the net of Social
Democracy which gratefully snatched at every case of such a disgraceful
attitude. Never can our political bourgeoisie make good its sins in this
direction, for by resisting all attempts to do away with social abuses, they
sowed hatred and seemed to justify even the assertions of the mortal enemies of
the entire nation, to the effect that only the Social Democratic Party
represented the interests of the working people
Thus, to begin with, they created the moral basis for the
actual existence of the trade unions, the organization which has always been
the most effective pander to the political party.
In my Viennese years I was forced, whether I liked it or
not, to take a position on the trade unions.
Since I regarded them as an inseparable ingredient of the
Social Democratic Party as such, my decision was instantaneous
and-mistaken.
I flatly rejected them without thinking.
And in this infinite]y important question, as in so many
others, Fate itself became my instructor.
The result was a reversal of my first judgment.
By
my twentieth year I had learned to distinguish between a union as a means of
defending the general social rights of the wage-earner, and obtaining better
living conditions for him as an individual, and the trade union as an
instrument of the party in the political class struggle.
The fact that Social Democracy understood the enormous
importance of the trade-union movement assured it of this instrument and hence
of success; the fact that the bourgeoisie were not aware of this cost them
their political position. They thought they could stop a logical development by
means of an impertinent 'rejection,' but in reality they only forced it into
illogical channels. For to call the trade-union movement in itself unpatriotic
is nonsense and untrue to boot. Rather the contrary is true. If trade-union
activity strives and succeeds in bettering the lot of a class which is one of
the basic supports of the nation, its work is not only not anti-patriotic or
seditious, but 'national' in the truest sense of the word. For in this way it
helps to create the social premises without which a general national education
is unthinkable. It wins the highest merit by eliminating social cankers,
attacking intellectual as well as physical infections, and thus helping to
contribute to the general health of the body politic.
Consequently, the question of their necessity is really
superfluous.
As long as there are employers with little social
understanding or a deficient sense of justice and propriety, it is not only the
right but the duty of their employees, who certainly constitute a part of our
nationality, to protect the interests of the general public against the greed
and unreason of the individual; for the preservation of loyalty and faith in z
social group is just as much to the interest of a nation as the preservation of
the people's health.
Both of these are seriously menaced by unworthy employers
who do not feel themselves to be members of the national community as a whole.
From the disastrous effects of their greed or ruthlessness grow profound evils
for the future.
To eliminate the causes of such a development is to do a
service to the nation and in no sense the opposite.
Let no one say that every individual is free to draw the
consequences from an actual or supposed injustice; in other words, to leave his
job. No ! This is shadow-boxing and must be regarded as an attempt to divert
attention. Either the elimination of bad, unsocial conditions serves the
interest of the nation or it does not. If it does, the struggle against then
must be carried on with weapons which offer the hope of success. The individual
worker, however, is never in a position to defend himself against the power of
the great industrialist, for in such matters it cannot be superior justice that
conquers (if that were recognized, the whole struggle would stop from lack of
cause)-no, what matters here is superior power. Otherwise the sense of justice
alone would bring the struggle to a fair conclusion, or, more accurately
speaking, the struggle could never arise.
No, if the unsocial or unworthy treatment of men calls
for resistance, this struggle, as long as no legal judicial authorities have
been created for the elimination of these evils, can only be decided by
superior power. And this makes it obvious that the power of the employer
concentrated in a single person can only be countered by the mass of employees
banded into a single person, if the possibility of a victory is not to be
renounced in advance.
Thus, trade-union organization can lead to a
strengthening of the social idea in its practical effects on daily life, and
thereby to an elimination of irritants which are constantly giving cause for
dissatisfaction and complaints.
If this is not the case, it is to a great extent the
fault of those who have been able to place obstacles in the path of any legal
regulation of social evils or thwart them by means of their political
influence.
Proportionately as the political bourgeoisie did not
understand, or rather did not want to understand, the importance of trade-union
organization, and resisted it, the Social Democrats took possession of the
contested movement. Thus, far-sightedly it created a firm foundation which on
several critical occasions has stood up when all other supports failed. In this
way the intrinsic purpose was gradually submerged, making place for new
aims.
It never occurred to the Social Democrats to limit the movement they
had thus captured to its original task.
No, that was far from their intention.
In a few decades the weapon for defending the social
rights of man had, in their experienced hands? become an instrument for the
destruction of the national economy. And they did not let themselves be
hindered in the least by the interests of the workers. For in politics, as in
other fields, the use of economic pressure always permits blackmail, as long as
the necessary unscrupulousness is present on the one side, and sufficient
sheeplike patience on the other.
Something which in this case was true of both
sides
By the turn of the century, the trade-union movement had
ceased to serve its former function. From year to year it had entered more and
more into the sphere of Social Democratic politics and finally had no use
except as a battering-ram in the class struggle. Its purpose was to cause the
collapse of the whole arduously constructed economic edifice by persistent
blows, thus, the more easily, after removing its economic foundations, to
prepare the same lot for the edifice of state. Less and less attention was paid
to defending the real needs of the working class, and finally political
expediency made it seem undesirable to relieve the social or cultural miseries
of the broad masses at all, for otherwise there was a risk that these masses,
satisfied in their desires could no longer be used forever as docile shock
troops.
The leaders of the class struggle looked on this development with
such dark foreboding and dread that in the end they rejected any really
beneficial social betterment out of hand, and actually attacked it with the
greatest determination.
And they were never at a loss for an explanation of a
line of behavior which seemed so inexplicable.
By screwing the demands higher and higher, they made
their possible fulfillment seem so trivial and unimportant that they were able
at all times to tell the masses that they were dealing with nothing but a
diabolical attempt to weaken, if possible in fact to paralyze, the offensive
power of the working class in the cheapest way, by such a ridiculous
satisfaction of the most elementary rights. In view of the great masses' small
capacity for thought, we need not be surprised at the success of these
methods.
The bourgeois camp was indignant at this obvious insincerity of
Social Democratic tactics, but did not draw from it the slightest inference
with regard to their own conduct. The Social Democrats' fear of really raising
the working class out of the depths of their cultural and social misery should
have inspired the greatest exertions in this very direction, thus gradually
wrestling the weapon from the hands of the advocates of the class
struggle.
This, however, was not done.
Instead of attacking and seizing the enemy's position,
the bourgeoisie preferred to let themselves
be pressed to the wall and
finally had recourse to utterly inadequate makeshifts, which remained
ineffectual because they came too late, and, moreover, were easy to reject
because they were too insignificant. Thus. in reality, everything remained as
before, except that the discontent was greater.
Like a menacing storm-cloud, the ' free trade union '
hung, even then, over the political horizon and the existence of the
individual.
It was one of the most frightful instruments of terror
against the security and independence of the national economy, the solidity of
the state, and personal freedom.
And chiefly this was what made the concept of democracy a
sordid and ridiculous phrase, and held up brotherhood to everlasting scorn in
the words: 'And if our comrade you won't be, we'll bash your head in-one, two,
three ! '
And that was how I became acquainted with this friend of humanity.
In the course of the years my view was broadened and deepened, but I have had
no need to change it.
The greater insight I gathered into the external
character of Social Democracy, the greater became my longing to comprehend the
inner core of this doctrine.
The official party literature was not much use
for this purpose. In so far as it deals with economic questions, its assertions
and proofs are false; in so far as it treats of political aims, it lies.
Moreover, I was inwardly repelled by the newfangled pettifogging phraseology
and the style in which it was written. With an enormous expenditure of words,
unclear in content or incomprehensible as to meaning, they stammer an endless
hodgepodge of phrases purportedly as witty as in reality they are meaningless.
Only our decadent metropolitan bohemians can feel at home in this maze of
reasoning and cull an 'inner experience' from this dung-heap of literary
dadaism, supported by the proverbial modesty of a section of our people who
always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them
personally. However, by balancing the theoretical untruth and nonsense of this
doctrine with the reality of the phenomenon, I gradually obtained a clear
picture of its intrinsic will.
At such times I was overcome by gloomy foreboding and
malignant fear. Then I saw before me a doctrine, comprised of egotism and hate,
which can lead to victory pursuant to mathematical laws, but in so doing must
put an end to humanity.
Meanwhile, I had learned to understand the connection
between this doctrine of destruction and the nature of a people of which, up to
that time, I had known next to nothing.
Only a knowledge of the Jews provides the key with which
to comprehend the inner, and consequently real, aims of Social
Democracy.
The erroneous conceptions of the aim and meaning of this
party fall from our eyes like veils, once we come to know this people, and from
the fog and mist of social phrases rises the leering grimace of
Marxism.
Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say
when the word 'Jew ' first gave me ground for special thoughts. At home I do
not remember having heard the word during my father's lifetime. I believe that
the old gentleman would have regarded any special emphasis on this term as
cultural backwardness. In the course of his life he had arrived at more or less
cosmopolitan views which, despite his pronounced national sentiments, not only
remained intact, but also affected me to some extent.
Likewise at school I found no occasion which could have
led me to change this inherited picture.
At the Realschule, to be sure, I did meet one Jewish boy
who was treated by all of us with caution, but only because various experiences
had led us to doubt his discretion and we did not particularly trust him; but
neither I nor the others had any thoughts on the matter.
Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to
come across the word 'Jew,' with any frequency, partly in connection with
political discussions. This filled me with a mild distaste, and I could not rid
myself of an unpleasant feeling that always came over me whenever religious
quarrels occurred in my presence.
At that time I did not think anything else of the
question.
There were few Jews in Linz. In the course of the centuries their
outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look; in
fact, I even took them for Germans. The absurdity of this idea did not dawn on
me because I saw no distinguishing feature but the strange religion. The fact
that they had, as I believed, been persecuted on this account sometimes almost
turned my distaste at unfavorable remarks about them into horror.
Thus far I did not so much as suspect the existence of an
organized opposition to the Jews.
Then I came to Vienna.
Preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions in the
architectural field, oppressed by the hardship of my own lot, I gained at first
no insight into the inner stratification of the people in this gigantic city.
Notwithstanding that Vienna in those days counted nearly two hundred thousand
Jews among its two million inhabitants, I did not see them. In the first few
weeks my eyes and my senses were not equal to the flood of values and ideas.
Not until calm gradually returned and the agitated picture began to clear did I
look around me more carefully in my new world, and then among other things I
encountered the Jewish question.
I cannot maintain that the way in which I became
acquainted with them struck me as particularly pleasant. For the Jew was still
characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of
human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as
in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese
antiSemitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great
nation. I was oppressed by the memory of certain occurrences in the Middle
Ages, which I should not have liked to see repeated. Since the newspapers in
question did not enjoy an outstanding reputation (the reason for this, at that
time, I myself did not precisely know), I regarded them more as the products of
anger and envy than the results of 4 principled though perhaps mistaken, point
of view.
I was reinforced in this opinion by what seemed to me the far more
dignified form in which the really big papers answered all these attacks, or,
what seemed to me even more praiseworthy, failed to mention them; in other
words, simply killed them with silence.
I zealously read the so-called world press (Neue Freie
Presse, Wiener Tageblatt, etc.) and was amazed at the scope of what they
offered their readers and the objectivity of individual articles. I respected
the exalted tone, though the flamboyance of the style sometimes caused me inner
dissatisfaction, or even struck me unpleasantly. Yet this may have been due to
the rhythm of life in the whole metropolis.
Since in those days I saw Vienna in that light, I thought
myself justified in accepting this explanation of mine as a valid
excuse.
But what sometimes repelled me was the undignified fashion in which
this press curried favor with the Court. There was scarcely an event in the
Hofburg which was not imparted to the readers either with raptures of
enthusiasm or plaintive emotion, and all this to-do, particularly when it dealt
with the 'wisest monarch' of all time, almost reminded me of the mating cry of
a mountain cock.
To me the whole thing seemed artificial.
In my eyes it was a blemish upon liberal
democracy.
To curry favor with this Court and in such indecent forms
was to sacrifice the dignity of the nation.
This was the first shadow to darken my intellectual
relationship with the ' big ' Viennese press.
As I had always done before, I continued in Vienna to
follow events in Germany with ardent zeal, quite regardless whether they were
political or cultural. With pride and admiration, I compared the rise of the
Reich with the wasting away of the Austrian state. If events in the field of
foreign politics filled me, by and large, with undivided joy, the less
gratifying aspects of internal life often aroused anxiety and gloom. a he
struggle which at that time was being carried on against William II did not
meet with my approval. I regarded him not only as the German Emperor, but first
and foremost as the creator of a German fleet. The restrictions of speech
imposed on the Kaiser by the Reichstag angered me greatly because they emanated
from a source which in my opinion really hadn't a leg to stand on, since in a
single session these parliamentarian imbeciles gabbled more nonsense than a
whole dynasty of emperors, including its very weakest numbers, could ever have
done in centuries.
I was outraged that in a state where every idiot not only
claimed the right to criticize, but was given a seat in the Reichstag and let
loose upon the nation as a 'lawgiver,' the man who bore the imperial crown had
to take 'reprimands' from the greatest babblers' club of all time.
But I was even more indignant that the same Viennese
press which made the most obsequious bows to every rickety horse in the Court,
and flew into convulsions of joy if he accidentally swished his tail, should,
with supposed concern, yet, as it seemed to me, ill-concealed malice, express
its criticisms of the German Kaiser. Of course it had no intention of
interfering with conditions within the German Reich-oh, no, God forbid-but by
placing its finger on these wounds in the friendliest way, it was fulfilling
the duty imposed by the spirit of the mutual alliance, and, conversely,
fulfilling the requirements of journalistic truth, etc. And now it was poking
this finger around in the wound to its heart's content.
In such cases the blood rose to my head.
It was this which caused me little by little to view the
big papers with greater caution.
And on one such occasion I was forced to recognize that
one of the anti-Semitic papers, the Deutsches Volksblatt, behaved more
decently.
Another thing that got on my nerves was the loathsome cult for
France which the big press, even then, carried on. A man couldn't help feeling
ashamed to be a German when he saw these saccharine hymns of praise to the
'great cultural nation.' This wretched licking of France's boots more than once
made me throw down one of these 'world newspapers.' And on such occasions I
sometimes picked up the Volksblatt, which, to be sure, seemed to me much
smaller, but in these matters somewhat more appetizing. I was not in agreement
with the sharp antiSemitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which
gave me some food for thought.
At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted
with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies:
Dr. Karl Lueger I and the Christian Social Party.
When I arrived in Vienna, I was hostile to both of
them.
The man and the movement seemed 'reactionary' in my eyes.
My
common sense of justice, however, forced me to change this judgment in
proportion as I had occasion to become acquainted with the man and his work;
and slowly my fair judgment turned to unconcealed admiration. Today, more than
ever, I regard this man as the greatest German mayor of all times.
How many of my basic principles were upset by this change
in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement!
My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to
the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all.
It
cost me the greatest inner soul struggles, and only after months of battle
between my reason and my sentiments did my reason begin to emerge victorious.
Two years later, my sentiment had followed my reason, and from then on became
its most loyal guardian and sentinel.
At the time of this bitter struggle between spiritual
education and cold reason, the visual instruction of the Vienna streets had
performed invaluable services. There came a time when I no longer, as in the
first days, wandered blindly through the mighty city; now with open eyes I saw
not only the buildings but also the people.
Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I
suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is
this a Jew? was my first thought.
For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I
observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this
foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question
assumed a new form:
Is this a German?
As always in such cases, I now began to try to relieve my
doubts by books. For a few hellers I bought the first antiSemitic pamphlets of
my life. Unfortunately, they all proceeded from the supposition that in
principle the reader knew or even understood the Jewish question to a certain
degree. Besides, the tone for the most part was such that doubts again arose in
me, due in part to the dull and amazingly unscientific arguments favoring the
thesis.
I relapsed for weeks at a time, once even for months.
The whole thing seemed to me so monstrous, the
accusations so boundless, that, tormented by the fear of doing injustice, I
again became anxious and uncertain.
Yet I could no longer very well doubt that the objects of
my study were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves;
for since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take
cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before.
Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they
became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the
Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people
which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans.
And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were
finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves.
Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna,
which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews:
this was the Zionists.
It looked to be sure, as though only a part of the Jews
approved this viewpoint, while the great majority condemned and inwardly
rejected such a formulation. But when examined more closely, this appearance
dissolved itself into an unsavory vapor of pretexts advanced for mere reasons
of expedience, not to say lies. For the so-called liberal Jews did not reject
the Zionists as non-Jews, but only as Jews with an impractical, perhaps even
dangerous, way of publicly avowing their Jewishness.
Intrinsically they remained unalterably of one
piece.
In a short time this apparent struggle between Zionistic and liberal
Jews disgusted me; for it was false through and through, founded on lies and
scarcely in keeping with the moral elevation and purity always claimed by this
people.
The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must say, is
a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell that these were no
lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes
closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these
caftan-wearers. Added to this, there was their unclean dress and their
generally unheroic appearance.
All this could scarcely be called very attractive; but it
became positively repulsive when, in addition to their physical uncleanliness,
you discovered the moral stains on this 'chosen people.'
In a short time I was made more thoughtful than ever by
my slowly rising insight into the type of activity carried on by the Jews in
certain fields.
Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in
cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?
If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you
found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light-a
kike!
What had to be reckoned heavily against the Jews in my eyes was when
I became acquainted with their activity in the press, art, literature, and the
theater. All the unctuous reassurances helped little or nothing It sufficed to
look at a billboard, to study the names of the men behind the horrible trash
they advertised, to make you hard for a long time to come. This was pestilence,
spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death of olden times, and the people
was being infected with it! It goes without saying that the lower the
intellectual level of one of these art manufacturers, the more unlimited his
fertility will be, and the scoundrel ends up like a garbage separator,
splashing his filth in the face of humanity. And bear in mind that there is no
limit to their number; bear in mind that for one Goethe Nature easily can foist
on the world ten thousand of these scribblers who poison men's souls like
germ-carriers of the worse sort, on their fellow men.
It was terrible, but not to be overlooked, that precisely
the Jew, in tremendous numbers, seemed chosen by Nature for this shameful
calling.
Is this why the Jews are called the 'chosen people'?
I now began to examine carefully the names of all the
creators of unclean products in public artistic life. The result was less and
less favorable for my previous attitude toward the Jews. Regardless how my
sentiment might resists my reason was forced to draw its conclusions.
The fact that nine tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and
theatrical idiocy can be set to the account of a people, constituting hardly
one hundredth of all the country's inhabitants, could simply not be tanked
away; it was the plain truth.
And I now began to examine my beloved 'world press' from
this point of view.
And the deeper I probed, the more the object of my former
admiration shriveled. The style became more and more unbearable; I could not
help rejecting the content as inwardly shallow and banal; the objectivity of
exposition now seemed to me more akin to lies than honest truth; and the
writers were-Jews.
A thousand things which I had hardly seen before now
struck my notice, and others, which had previously given me food for thought, I
now learned to grasp and understand.
I now saw the liberal attitude of this press in a
different light; the lofty tone in which it answered attacks and its method of
I killing them with silence now revealed itself to me as a trick as clever as
it was treacherous; the transfigured raptures of their theatrical critics were
always directed at Jewish writers, and their disapproval never struck anyone
but Germans. The gentle pinpricks against William II revealed its methods by
their persistency, and so did its commendation of French culture and
civilization. The trashy content of the short story now appeared to me | as
outright indecency, and in the language I detected the accents 0 of a foreign
people; the sense of the whole thing was so obviously hostile to Germanism that
this could only have been intentional.
But who had an interest in this?
Was all this a mere accident?
Gradually I became uncertain.
The development was accelerated by insights which I
gained into a number of other matters. I am referring to the general view of 1.
ethics and morals which was quite openly exhibited by a large part of the Jews,
and the practical application of which could be seen.
Here again the streets provided an object lesson of a
sort which was sometimes positively evil.
The relation of the Jews to prostitution and, even more,
to the white-slave traffic, could be studied in Vienna as perhaps in no other
city of Western Europe, with the possible exception of the southern French
ports. If you walked at night through the streets and alleys of Leopoldstadt at
every step you witnessed proceedings which remained concealed from the majority
of the German people until the War gave the soldiers on the eastern front
occasion to see similar things, or, better expressed, forced them to see
them.
When thus for the first time I recognized the Jew as the
cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting vice
traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back.
But then a flame flared up within me. I no longer avoided discussion
of the Jewish question; no, now I sought it. And when I learned to look for the
Jew in all branches of cultural and artistic life and its various
manifestations, I suddenly encountered him in a place where I would least have
expected to find him.
When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social
Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached
its conclusion.
Even in my daily relations with my fellow workers, I
observed the amazing adaptability with which they adopted different positions
on the same question, sometimes within an interval of a few days, sometimes in
only a few hours. It was hard for me to understand how people who, when spoken
to alone, possessed some sensible opinions, suddenly lost them as soon as they
came under the influence of the masses. It was often enough to make one
despair. When, after hours of argument, I was convinced that now at last I had
broken the ice or cleared up some absurdity, and was beginning to rejoice at my
success, on the next day to my disgust I had to begin all over again; it had
all been in vain. Like an eternal pendulum their opinions seemed to swing back
again and again to the old madness.
All this I could understand: that they were dissatisfied
with their lot and cursed the Fate which often struck them so harshly; that
they hated the employers who seemed to them the heartless bailiffs of Fate;
that they cursed the authorities who in their eyes were without feeling for
their situation; that they demonstrated against food prices and carried their
demands into the streets: this much could be understood without recourse to
reason. But what inevitably remained incomprehensible was the boundless hatred
they heaped upon their own nationality, despising its greatness, besmirching
its history, and dragging its great men into the gutter.
This struggle against their own species, their own clan,
their own homeland, was as senseless as it was incomprehensible. It was
unnatural.
It was possible to cure them temporarily of this vice, but
only for days or at most weeks. If later you met the man you thought you had
converted, he was just the same as before.
His old unnatural state had regained full possession of
him.
I gradually became aware that the Social Democratic press
was directed predominantly by Jews; yet I did not attribute any special
significance to this circumstance, since conditions were exactly the same in
the other papers. Yet one fact seemed conspicuous: there was not one paper with
Jews working on it which could have been regarded as truly national according
to my education and way of thinking.
I swallowed my disgust and tried to read this type of
Marxist press production, but my revulsion became so unlimited in so doing that
I endeavored to become more closely acquainted with the men who manufactured
these compendiums of knavery.
From the publisher down, they were all Jews.
I took all the Social Democratic pamphlets I could lay
hands on and sought the names of their authors: Jews. I noted the names of the
leaders; by far the greatest part were likewise members of the 'chosen people,'
whether they were representatives in the Reichsrat or trade-union secretaries,
the heads of organizations or street agitators. It was always the same gruesome
picture. The names of the Austerlitzes, Davids, Adlers, Ellenbogens, etc., will
remain forever graven in my memory. One thing had grown dear to me: the party
with whose petty representatives I had been carrying on the most violent
struggle for months was, as to leadership, almost exclusively in the hands of a
foreign people; for, to my deep and joyful satisfaction, I had at last come to
the conclusion that the Jew was no German.
Only now did I become thoroughly acquainted with the
seducer of our people.
A single year of my sojourn in Vienna had sufficed to
imbue me with the conviction that no worker could be so stubborn that he would
not in the end succumb to better knowledge and better explanations. Slowly I
had become an expert in their own doctrine and used it as a weapon in the
struggle for my own profound conviction.
Success almost always favored my side.
The great masses could be saved, if only with the gravest
sacrifice in time and patience.
But a Jew could never be parted from his opinions.
At
that time I was still childish enough to try to make the madness of their
doctrine clear to them; in my little circle I talked my tongue sore and my
throat hoarse, thinking I would inevitably succeed in convincing them how
ruinous their Marxist madness was; but what I accomplished was often the
opposite. It seemed as though their increased understanding of the destructive
effects of Social Democratic theories and their results only reinforced their
determination.
The more I argued with them, the better I came to know
their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and
then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If
all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they
changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them,
they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again
attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking
about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on
a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the
next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so
telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and
if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your
amazement was great the next day. The Jew had not the slightest recollection of
the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all
had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't
remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions
the previous day.
Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck.
I didn't know what to be more amazed at: the agility of
their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.
Gradually I began to hate them.
All this had but one good side: that in proportion as the
real leaders or at least the disseminators of Social Democracy came within my
vision, my love for my people inevitably grew. For who, in view of the
diabolical craftiness of these seducers, could damn the luckless victims? How
hard it was, even for me, to get the better of thus race of dialectical liars !
And how futile was such success in dealing with people who twist the truth in
your mouth who without so much as a blush disavow the word they have just
spoken, and in the very next minute take credit for it after all.
No. The better acquainted I became with the Jew, the more
forgiving I inevitably became toward the worker. In my eyes the gravest fault
was no longer with him, but with all those who did not regard it as worth the
trouble to have mercy on him, with iron righteousness giving the son of the
people his just deserts, and standing the seducer and corrupter up against the
wall.
Inspired by the experience of daily life, I now began to track down
the sources of the Marxist doctrine. Its effects had become clear to me in
individual cases; each day its success was apparent to my attentive eyes, and,
with some exercise of my imagination, I was able to picture the consequences.
The only remaining question was whether the result of their action in its
ultimate form had existed in the mind's eye of the creators, or whether they
themselves were the victims of an error.
I felt that both were possible.
In the one case it was the duty of every thinking man to
force himself to the forefront of the ilI-starred movement, thus perhaps
averting catastrophe; in the other, however, the original founders of this
plague of the nations must have been veritable devils- for only in the brain of
a monster-not that of a man-could the plan of an organization assume form and
meaning, whose activity must ultimately result in the collapse of human
civilization and the consequent devastation of the world.
In this case the only remaining hope was struggle,
struggle with all the weapons which the human spirit, reason, and will can
devise, regardless on which side of the scale Fate should lay its
blessing.
Thus I began to make myself familiar with the founders of this
doctrine, in order to study the foundations of the movement. If I reached my
goal more quickly than at first I had perhaps ventured to believe, it was
thanks to my newly acquired, though at that time not very profound, knowledge
of the Jewish question. This alone enabled me to draw a practical comparison
between the reality and the theoretical flim-flam of the founding fathers of
Social Democracy, since it taught me to understand the language of the Jewish
people, who speak in order to conceal or at least to veil their thoughts; their
real aim is not therefore to be found in the lines themselves, but slumbers
well concealed between them.
For or me this was the time of the greatest spiritual
upheaval I have ever had to go through.
I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an
anti-Semite.
Just once more-and this was the last time-fearful,
oppressive thoughts came to me in profound anguish.
When over long periods of human history I scrutinized the
activity of the Jewish people, suddenly there rose up in me the fearful
question whether inscrutable Destiny, perhaps Or reasons unknown to us poor
mortals, did not with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory
of this little nation.
Was it possible that the earth had been promised as a
reward to this people which lives only for this earth?
Have we an objective right to struggle for our
self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within
ourselves?
As I delved more deeply into the teachings of Marxism and
thus in tranquil clarity submitted the deeds of the Jewish people to
contemplation, Fate itself gave me its answer.
The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic
principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by
the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of
personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and
thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture.
As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any
order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of ail
recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only
be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this
planet.
If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over
the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of
humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands l of years ago, move through
the ether devoid of men.
Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her
commands.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of
the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for
the work of the Lord.
TODAY it seems to me providential that Fate should have chosen
Braunau on the Inn as my birthplace. For this little town lies on the boundary
between two German states which we of the younger generation at least have made
it our life work to reunite by every means at our disposal.
German-Austria must return to the great German mother
country, and not because of any economic considerations. No, and again no: even
if such a union were unimportant from an economic point of view; yes, even if
it were harmful, it must nevertheless take place. One blood demands one Reich.
Never will the German nation possess the moral right to engage in colonial
politics until, at least, it embraces its own sons within a single state. Only
when the Reich borders include the very last German, but can no longer
guarantee his daily bread, will the moral right to acquire foreign soil arise
from the distress of our own people. Their sword will become our plow, and from
the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow. And so this
little city on the border seems to me the symbol of a great mission. And in
another respect as well, it looms as an admonition to the present day. More
than a hundred years ago, this insignificant place had the distinction of being
immortalized in the annals at least of German history, for it was the scene of
a tragic catastrophe which gripped the entire German nation. At the time of our
fatherland's deepest humiliation, Johannes Palm of Nuremberg, burgher,
bookseller, uncompromising nationalist and French hater, died there for the
Germany which he loved so passionately even in her misfortune. He had
stubbornly refused to denounce his accomplices who were in fact his superiors.
In thus he resembled Leo Schlageter. And like him, he was denounced to the
French by a representative of his government An Augsburg police chief won this
unenviable fame, thus furnishing an example for our modern German officials in
Herr Severing's Reich.
In this little town on the Inn, gilded by the rays of
German martyrdom, Bavarian by blood, technically Austrian, lived my parents in
the late eighties of the past century; my father a dutiful civil servants my
mother giving all her being to the household, and devoted above all to us
children in eternal, loving care Little remains in my memory of this period,
for after a few years my father had to leave the little border city he had
learned to love, moving down the Inn to take a new position in Passau, that is,
in Germany proper.
In those days constant moving was the lot of an Austrian
customs official. A short time later, my father was sent to Linz, and there he
was finally pensioned. Yet, indeed, this was not to mean "res"' for the old
gentleman. In his younger days, as the son of a poor cottager, he couldn't bear
to stay at home. Before he was even thirteen, the little boy laced his tiny
knapsack and ran away from his home in the Waldviertel. Despite the at tempts
of 'experienced' villagers to dissuade him, he made his way to Vienna, there to
learn a trade. This was in the fifties of the past century. A desperate
decision, to take to the road with only three gulden for travel money, and
plunge into the unknown. By the time the thirteen-year-old grew to be
seventeen, he had passed his apprentice's examination, but he was not yet
content. On the contrary. The long period of hardship, endless misery, and
suffering he had gone through strengthened his determination to give up his
trade and become ' something better. Formerly the poor boy had regarded the
priest as the embodiment of all humanly attainable heights; now in the big
city, which had so greatly widened his perspective, it was the rank of civil
servant. With all the tenacity of a young man whom suffering and care had made
'old' while still half a child, the seventeen-year-old clung to his new
decision-he did enter the civil service. And after nearly twenty-three years, I
believe, he reached his goal. Thus he seemed to have fulfilled a vow which he
had made as a poor boy: that he would not return to his beloved native village
until he had made something of himself.
His goal was achieved; but no one in the village could
remember the little boy of former days, and to him the village had grown
strange.
When finally, at the age of fifty-six, he went into retirement, he
could not bear to spend a single day of his leisure in idleness. Near the Upper
Austrian market village of Lambach he bought a farm, which he worked himself,
and thus, in the circuit of a long and industrious life, returned to the
origins of his forefathers.
It was at this time that the first ideals took shape in
my breast. All my playing about in the open, the long walk to school, and
particularly my association with extremely 'husky' boys, which sometimes caused
my mother bitter anguish, made me the very opposite of a stay-at-home. And
though at that time I scarcely had any serious ideas as to the profession I
should one day pursue, my sympathies were in any case not in the direction of
my father's career. I believe that even then my oratorical talent was being
developed in the form of more or less violent arguments with my schoolmates. I
had become a little ringleader; at school I learned easily and at that time
very well, but was otherwise rather hard to handle. Since in my free time I
received singing lessons in the cloister at Lambach, I had excellent
opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant
church festivals. As was only natural the abbot seemed to me, as the village
priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal. For
a time, at least, this was the case. But since my father, for understandable
reasons, proved unable to appreciate the oratorical talents of his pugnacious
boy, or to draw from them any favorable conclusions regarding the future of his
offspring, he could, it goes without saying, achieve no understanding for such
youthful ideas. With concern he observed this conflict of nature.
As it happened, my temporary aspiration for this
profession was in any case soon to vanish, making place for hopes more stated
to my temperament. Rummaging through my father's library, I had come across
various books of a military nature among them a popular edition of the
Franco-German War of 1870-7I It consisted of two issues of an illustrated
periodical from those years, which now became my favorite reading matter It was
not long before the great heroic struggle had become my greatest inner
experience. From then on I became more and more enthusiastic about everything
that was in any way connected with war or, for that matter, with
soldiering
But in another respect as well, this was to assume
importance for me. For the first time, though as yet in a confused form, the
question was forced upon my consciousness: Was there a difference -and if so
what difference-between the Germans who fought these battles and other Germans?
Why hadn't Austria taken part in this war; why hadn't my father and all the
others fought?
Are we not the same as all other Germans?
Do we not all belong together? This problem began to gnaw
at my little brain for the first time. I asked cautious questions and with
secret envy received the answer that not every German was fortunate enough to
belong to Bismarck's Reich..
This was more than I could understand.
It was decided that I should go to high school.
From my whole nature, and to an even greater degree from my
temperament, my father believed he could draw the inference that the humanistic
Gymnasium would represent a conflict with my talents. A Realschol seemed to him
more suitable. In this opinion he was especially strengthened by my obvious
aptitude for drawing; a subject which in his opinion was neglected in the
Austrian Gymnasiums. Another factor may have been his own laborious career
which made humanistic study seem impractical in his eyes, and therefore less
desirable. It was hus basic opinion and intention that, like himself, his son
would and must become a civil servant. It was only natural that the hardships
of his youth should enhance his subsequent achievement in his eyes,
particularly since it resulted exclusively from his own energy and iron
diligence. It was the pride of the self-made man which made him want his son to
rise to the same position in life, orJ of course, even higher if possible,
especially since, by his own industrious life, he thought he would be able to
facilitate his child's development so greatly.
It was simply inconceivable to him that I might reject
what had become the content of his whole life. Consequently, my father s
decision was simple, definite, and clear; in his own eyes I mean, of course.
Finally, a whole lifetime spent in the bitter struggle for existence had given
him a domineering nature, and it would have seemed intolerable to him to leave
the final decision in such matters to an inexperienced boy, having as yet no
Sense of responsibility. Moreover, this would have seemed a sinful and
reprehensible weakness in the exercise of his proper parental authority and
responsibility for the future life of his child, and as such, absolutely
incompatible with his concept of duty.
And yet things were to turn out differently.
Then barely eleven years old, I was forced into
opposition for the first time in my life. Hard and determined as my father
might be in putting through plans and purposes once conceived his son was just
as persistent and recalcitrant in rejecting an idea which appealed to him not
at all, or in any case very little.
I did not want to become a civil servant.
Neither persuasion nor 'serious' arguments made any
impression on my resistance. I did not want to be a civil servant no, and again
no. All attempts on my father's part to inspire me with love or pleasure in
this profession by stories from his own life accomplished the exact opposite. I
yawned and grew sick to my stomach at the thought of sitting in an office,
deprived of my liberty; ceasing to be master of my own time and being compelled
to force the content of a whole life into blanks that had to be filled
out.
And what thoughts could this prospect arouse in a boy who in reality
was really anything but 'good' in the usual sense of the word?
School work
was ridiculously easy, leaving me so much free time that the sun saw more of me
than my room. When today my political opponents direct their loving attention
to the examination of my life, following it back to those childhood days and
discover at last to their relief what intolerable pranks this "Hitler" played
even in his youth, I thank Heaven that a portion of the memories of those happy
days still remains with me. Woods and meadows were then the battlefields on
which the 'conflicts' which exist everywhere in life were decided.
In this respect my attendance at the Realschule, which now
commenced, made little difference.
But now, to be sure, there was a new
conflict to be fought out.
As long as my fathers intention of making me a civil
servant encountered only my theoretical distaste for the profession, the
conflict was bearable. Thus far, I had to some extent been able to keep my
private opinions to myself; I did not always have to contradict him
immediately. My own firm determination never to become a civil servant sufficed
to give me complete inner peace. And this decision in me was immutable. The
problem became more difficult when I developed a plan of my own in opposition
to my father's. And this occurred at the early age of twelve. How it happened,
I myself do not know, but one day it became clear to me that I would become a
painter, an artist. There was no doubt as to my talent for drawing; it had been
one of my father's reasons for sending me to the Realschule, but never in all
the world would it have occurred to him to give me professional training in
this direction. On the contrary. When for the first time, after once again
rejecting my father's favorite notion, I was asked what I myself wanted to be,
and I rather abruptly blurted out the decision I had meanwhile made, my father
for the moment was struck speechless.
' Painter? Artist? '
He doubted my sanity, or perhaps he thought he had heard
wrong or misunderstood me. But when he was clear on the subject, and
particularly after he felt-the seriousness of my intention, he opposed it with
all the determination of his nature. His decision was extremely simple, for any
consideration of w at abilities I might really have was simply out of the
question.
'Artist, no, never as long as I live!' But since his son,
among various other qualities, had apparently inherited his father' s
stubbornness, the same answer came back at him. Except, of course, that it was
in the opposite sense.
And thus the situation remained on both sides. My father
did not depart from his 'Never!' And I intensified my 'Oh, yes!'
The consequences, indeed, were none too pleasant. The old
man grew embittered, and, much as I loved him, so did I. Ally father forbade me
to nourish the slightest hope of ever being allowed to study art. I went one
step further and declared that if that was the case I would stop studying
altogether. As a result of such 'pronouncements,' of course, I drew the short
end; the old man began the relentless enforcement of his authority. In the
future, therefore, I was silent, but transformed my threat into reality. I
thought that once my father saw how little progress I was making at the
Realschule, he would let me devote myself to my dream, whether he liked it or
not.
I do not know whether this calculation was correct. For the moment
only one thing was certain: my obvious lack of success at school. What gave me
pleasure I learned, especially everything which, in my opinion, I should later
need as a painter. What seemed to me unimportant in this respect or was
otherwise unattractive to me, I sabotaged completely. My report cards at this
time, depending on the subject and my estimation of it, showed nothing but
extremes. Side by side with 'laudable' and 'excellent,' stood 'adequate' or
even 'inadequate.' By far my best accomplishments were in geography and even
more so in history. These were my favorite subjects, in which I led the;
class.
If now, after so many years, I examine the results of this period, I
regard two outstanding facts as particularly significant:
First: I became a nationalist
Second: I learned to understand and grasp the meaning of
history.
Old Austria was a 'state of nationalities.'
By and large, a subject of the German Reich, at that time
at least, was absolutely unable to grasp the significance of this fact for the
life of the individual in such a state. After the great victorious campaign of
the heroic armies in the Franco-German War, people had gradually lost interest
in the Germans living abroad; some could not, while others were unable to
appreciate their importances Especially with regard to the GermanAustrians, the
degenerate dynasty was only too frequently confused with the people, which at
the core was robust and healthy.
What they failed to appreciate was that, unless the
German in Austria had really been of the best blood, he would never have had
the power to set his stamp on a nation of fifty-two million souls to such a
degree that, even in Germany, the erroneous opinion could arise that Austria
was a German state. This was an absurdity fraught with the direst consequences,
and yet a glowing testimonial to the ten million Germans in the Ostmark. Only a
handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and
merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of
life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of
Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland
and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their
mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight
for one's nationality. Today perhaps some can appreciate the greatness of the
Germans in the Reich's old Ostmark, who, with no one but themselves to depend
on, for centuries protected the Reich against incursions from the East, and
finally carried on an exhausting guerrilla warfare to maintain the German
language frontier, at a time when the Reich was highly interested in colonies,
but not in its own flesh and blood at its very doorstep.
As everywhere and always, in every struggle, there were,
in this fight for the language in old Austria, three strata:
The fighters, the lukewarm and the traitors.
This sifting process began at school. For the remarkable
fact about the language struggle is that its waves strike hardest perhaps in
the school, since it is the seed-bed of the coming generation. It is a struggle
for the soul of the child, and to the child its first appeal is
addressed:
'German boy, do not forget you are a German,' and,
'Little girl, remember that you are to become a German mother.'
Anyone who knows the soul of youth will be able to
understand that it is they who lend ear most joyfully to such a battle-cry.
They carry on this struggle in hundreds of forms, in their own way and with
their own weapons. They refuse to sing unGerman songs. The more anyone tries to
alienate them from German heroic grandeur, the wilder becomes their enthusiasm:
they go hungry to save pennies for the grown-ups' battle fund their ears are
amazingly sensitive to un-German teachers, and at the same time they are
incredibly resistant; they wear the forbidden insignia of their own nationality
and are happy to be punished or even beaten for it. Thus, on a small scale they
are a faithful reflection of the adults, except that often their convictions
are better and more honest.
I, too, while still comparatively young, had an
opportunity to take part in the struggle of nationalities in old Austria.
Collections were taken for the Sudmark I and the school association; we
emphasized our convictions by wearing corn-flowers and red lack, and gold
colors; 'Heil ' was our greeting, and instead of the imperial anthem we sang
'Deutschland uber Alles,' despite warnings and punishments. In this way the
child received political training in a period when as a rule the subject of a
so-called national state knew little more of his nationality than its language.
It goes without saying that even then I was not among the lukewarm. In a short
time I had become a fanatical 'German Nationalist,' though the term was not
identical with our present party concept.
This development in me made rapid progress; by the time I
was fifteen I understood the difference between dynastic ' patriotism' and
folkish "nationalism'; and even then I was interested only in the
latter.
For anyone who has never taken the trouble to study the inner
conditions of the Habsburg monarchy, such a process may not be entirely
understandable. In this country the instruction in world history had to provide
the germ for this development, since to all intents and purposes there is no
such thing as a specifically Austrian history. The destiny of this state is so
much bound up with the life and development of all the Germans that a
separation of history into German and Austrian does not seem conceivable.
Indeed, when at length Germany began to divide into two spheres of power, this
division itself became German history.
The insignia of former imperial glory, preserved in
Vienna, still seem to cast a magic spell; they stand as a pledge that these
twofold destinies are eternally one.
The elemental cry of the German-Austrian people for union
with the German mother country, that arose in the days when the Habsburg state
was collapsing, was the result of a longing that slumbered in the heart of the
entire people-a longing to return to the never-forgotten ancestral home. But
this would be in explicable if the historical education of the individual
GermanAustrian had not given rise to so general a longing. In it lies a well
which never grows dry; which, especially in times of forgetfulness, transcends
all momentary prosperity and by constant reminders of the past whispers softly
of a new future
Instruction in world history in the so-called high schools
is even today in a very sorry condition. Few teachers understand that the aim
of studying history can never be to learn historical dates and events by heart
and recite them by rote; that what matters is not whether the child knows
exactly when this or that battle was fought, when a general was born, or even
when a monarch (usually a very insignificant one) came into the crown of his
forefathers. No, by the living God, this is very unimportant.
To 'learn' history means to seek and find the forces
which are the causes leading to those effects which we subsequently perceive as
historical events.
The art of reading as of learning is this: to retain the
essential to forget the non-essential.
Perhaps it affected my whole later life that good fortune
sent me a history teacher who was one of the few to observe this principle in
teaching and examining. Dr. Leopold Potsch, my professor at the Realschule in
Linz, embodied this requirement to an ideal degree. This old gentleman's manner
was as kind as it was determined, his dazzling eloquence not only held us
spellbound but actually carried us away. Even today I think back with gentle
emotion on this gray-haired man who, by the fire of his narratives, sometimes
made us forget the present; who, as if by enchantment, carried us into past
times and, out of the millennial veils of mist, molded dry historical memories
into living reality. On such occasions we sat there, often aflame with
enthusiasm, and sometimes even moved to tears.
What made our good fortune all the greater was that this
teacher knew how to illuminate the past by examples from the present, and how
from the past to draw inferences for the present. As a result he had more
understanding than anyone else for all the daily problems which then held us
breathless. He used our budding nationalistic fanaticism as a means of
educating use frequently appealing to our sense of national honor. By this
alone he was able to discipline us little ruffians more easily than would have
been possible by any other means.
This teacher made history my favorite subject.
And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I
became a little revolutionary.
For who could have studied German history under such a
teacher without becoming an enemy of the state which, through its ruling house,
exerted so disastrous an influence on the destinies of the nation?
And who could retain his loyalty to a dynasty which in
past and present betrayed the needs of the German people again and again for
shameless private advantage?
Did we not know, even as little boys, that this Austrian
state had and could have no love for us Germans?
Our historical knowledge of the works of the House of
Habsburg was reinforced by our daily experience. In the north and south the
poison of foreign nations gnawed at the body of our nationality, and even
Vienna was visibly becoming more and more of an un-German city. The Royal House
Czechized wherever possible, and it was the hand of the goddess of eternal
justice and inexorable retribution which caused Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the
most mortal enemy of Austrian-Germanism, to fall by the bullets which he
himself had helped to mold. For had he not been the patron of Austria's
Slavization from above !
Immense were the burdens which the German people were
expected to bear, inconceivable their sacrifices in taxes and blood, and yet
anyone who was not totally blind was bound to recognize that all this would be
in vain. What pained us most was the fact that this entire system was morally
whitewashed by the alliance with Germany, with the result that the slow
extermination of Germanism in the old monarchy was in a certain sense
sanctioned by Germany itself. The Habsburg hypocrisy, which enabled the
Austrian rulers to create the outward appearance that Austria was a German
state, raised the hatred toward this house to flaming indignation and at the
same time -contempt.
Only in the Reich itself, the men who even then were
called to power saw nothing of all this. As though stricken with blindness,
they lived by the side of a corpse, and in the symptoms of rotten-
ness saw
only the signs of 'new' life.
The unholy alliance of the young Reich and the Austrian
sham state contained the germ of the subsequent World War and of the collapse
as well.
In the course of this book I shall have occasion to take up this
problem at length. Here it suffices to state that even in my earliest youth I
came to the basic insight which never left me, but Only became more
profound:
That Germanism could be safeguarded only by the
destruction of Austria, and, furthermore, that national sentiment is in no
sense Identical with dynastic patriotism; that above all the House of Habsburg
was destined to be the misfortune of the German nation.
Even then I had drawn the consequences from this
realization ardent love for my German-Austrian homeland state.
The habit of historical thinking which I thus learned in
school has never left me in the intervening years. To an ever-increasing extent
world history became for me an inexhaustible source of understanding for the
historical events of the present, in other words, for politics. I do not want
to 'learn' it, I want it to in instruct me.
Thus, at an early age, I had become a political '
revolutionary,' and I became an artistic revolutionary at an equally early
age.
The provincial capital of Upper Austria had at that time a theater
which was, relatively speaking, not bad. Pretty much of everything was
produced. At the age of twelve I saw Wilhelm Tell for the first time, and a few
months later my first opera, Lohengrin. I was captivated at once. My youthful
enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds. Again and again I was
drawn to his works, and it still seems to me especially fortunate that the
modest provincial performance left me open to an intensified experience later
on.
All this, particularly after I had outgrown my adolescence (which in
my case was an especially painful process), reinforced my profound distaste for
the profession which my father had chosen for me. My conviction grew stronger
and stronger that I would never be happy as a civil servant. The fact that by
this time my gift for drawing had been recognized at the Realschule made my
determination all the firmer.
Neither pleas nor threats could change it one
bit.
I wanted to become a painter and no power in the world could make me
a civil servant.
Yet, strange as it may seem, with the passing years I
became more and more interested in architecture.
At that time I regarded this as a natural complement to
my gift as a painter, and only rejoiced inwardly at the extension of my
artistic scope.
I did not suspect that things would turn out
differently.
The question of my profession was to be decided more
quickly than I had previously expected.
In my thirteenth year I suddenly
lost my father. A stroke of apoplexy felled the old gentleman who was otherwise
so hale, thus painlessly ending his earthly pilgrimage, plunging us all into
the depths of grief His most ardent desire had been to help his son forge his
career, thus preserving him from his own bitter experience. In this, to all
appearances, he had not succeeded. But, though unwittingly, he had sown the
seed for a future which at that time neither he nor I would have
comprehended.
For the moment there was no outward change.
My mother, to be sure, felt obliged to continue my
education in accordance with my father's wish; in other words, to have me study
for the civil servant's career. I, for my part, was more than ever determined
absolutely not to undertake this career. In proportion as my schooling departed
from my ideal in subject matter and curriculum, I became more indifferent at
heart. Then suddenly an illness came to my help and in a few weeks decided my
future and the eternal domestic quarrel. As a result of my serious lung
ailment, a physician advised my mother in most urgent terms never to send me
into an office. My attendance at the Realschule had furthermore to be
interrupted for at least a year. The goal for which I had so long silently
yearned, for which I had always fought, had through this event suddenly become
reality almost of its own accord.
Concerned over my illness, my mother finally consented to
take me out of the Realschule and let- me attend the Academy.
These were the happiest days of my life and seemed to me
almost a dream; and a mere dream it was to remain. Two years later, the death
of my mother put a sudden end to all my highflown plans.
It was the conclusion of a long and painful illness which
from the beginning left little hope of recovery. Yet it was a dreadful blow,
particularly for me. I had honored my father, but my mother I had
loved.
Poverty and hard reality now compelled me to take a quick decision.
What little my father had left had been largely exhausted by my mother's grave
illness; the orphan's pension to which I was entitled was not enough for me
even to live on, and so I was faced with the problem of somehow making my own
living.
In my hand a suitcase full of clothes and underwear; in my heart an
indomitable will, I journeyed to Vienna. I, too, hoped to wrest from Fate what
my father had accomplished fifty years before; I, too, wanted to become
'something'-but on no account a civil servant.
Chapter II: Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna
WHEN my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect, had made its
decisions.
In the last months of her sickness, I had gone to Vienna
to take the entrance examination for the Academy. I had set out with a pile of
drawings, convinced that it would be child's play to pass the examination. At
the Realschule I had been by far the best in my class at drawing, and
since then my ability had developed amazingly; my own satisfaction caused me to
take a joyful pride in hoping for the best.
Yet sometimes a drop of bitterness put in its appearance:
my talent for painting seemed to be excelled by my talent for drawing,
especially in almost all fields of architecture. At the same time my interest
in architecture as such increased steadily, and this development was
accelerated after a two weeks' trip to Vienna which I took when not yet
sixteen. The purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court
Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself. From
morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to another, but
it was always the buildings which held my primary interest. For hours I could
stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the
whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of -The
Thousand-and-One-Nights.
Now I was in the fair city for the second time, waiting
with burning impatience, but also with confident self-assurance, for the result
of my entrance examination. I was so convinced that I would be successful that
when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue. Yet that is
what happened. When I presented myself to the rector, requesting an explanation
for my non-acceptance at the Academy's school of painting, that gentleman
assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my
unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously lay in the field of
architecture; for me, he said, the Academy's school of painting was out of the
question, the place for me was the School of Architecture. It was
incomprehensible to him that I had never attended an architectural school or
received any other training in architecture. Downcast, I left von Hansen's
magnificent building on the Schillerplatz, for the first time in my young life
at odds with myself. For what I had just heard about my abilities seemed like a
lightning flash, suddenly revealing a conflict with which I had long been
afflicted, although until then I had no clear conception of its why and
wherefore.
In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become
an architect.
To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the
studies I had neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely
needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without having
attended the building school at the Technic, and the latter required a
high-school degree. I had none of all this. The fulfill- ment of my artistic
dream seemed physically impossible.
When after the death of my mother I went to Vienna for the
third time, to remain for many years, the time which had mean-while elapsed had
restored my calm and determination. My old defiance had come back to me and my
goal was now clear and definite before my eyes. I wanted to become an
architect, and obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be
broken. I was determined to overcome these obstacles, keeping before my eyes
the image of my father, who had started out as the child of a village
shoemaker, and risen by his own efforts to be a government official. I had a
better foundation to build on, and hence my possibilities in the struggle were
easier, and what then seemed to be the harshness of Fate, I praise today as
wisdom and Providence. While the Goddess of Suffering took me in her arms,
often threatening to crush me, my will to resistance grew, and in the end this
will was victorious.
I owe it to that period that I grew hard and am still
capable of being hard. And even more, I exalt it for tearing me away from the
hollowness of comfortable life; for drawing the mother's darling out of his
soft downy bed and giving him 'Dame Care' for a new mother; for hurling me,
despite all resistance, into a world of misery and poverty, thus making me
acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.
In this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of
which I had previously scarcely known the names, and whose terrible importance
for the existence of the German people I certainly did not understand: Marxism
and Jewry.
To me Vienna, the city which, to so many, is the epitome
of innocent pleasure, a festive playground for merrymakers, represents, I am
sorry to say, merely the living memory of the saddest period of my
life.
Even today this city can arouse in me nothing but the most dismal
thoughts. For me the name of this Phaeacian city I represents five years of
hardship and misery. Five years in which I was forced to earn a living, first
as a day laborer, then as a small painter; a truly meager living which never
sufficed to appease even my daily hunger. Hunger was then my faithful
bodyguard; he never left me for a moment and partook of all I had, share and
share alike. Every book I acquired aroused his interest; a visit to the Opera
prompted his attentions for days at a time; my life was a continuous struggle
with this pitiless friend. And yet during this time I studied as never before.
Aside from my architecture and my rare visits to the Opera, paid-for in hunger,
I had but one pleasure: my books.
At that time I read enormously and thoroughly. All the
free time my work left me was employed in my studies. In this way I forged in a
few years' time the foundations of a knowledge from which I still draw
nourishment today.
And even more than this:
In this period there took shape within me a world picture
and a philosophy which became the granite foundation of all my acts. In
addition to what I then created, I have had to learn little; and I have had to
alter nothing.
On the contrary.
Today I am firmly convinced that basically and on the
whole all creative ideas appear in our youth, in so far as any such are
present. I distinguish between the wisdom of age, consisting solely in greater
thoroughness and caution due to the experience of a long life, and the genius
of youth, which pours out thoughts and ideas with inexhaustible fertility, but
cannot for the moment develop them because of their very abundance. It is this
youthful genius which provides the building materials and plans for the future,
from which a wiser age takes the stones, carves them and completes the edifice,
in so far as the so-called wisdom of age has not stifled the genius of
youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home differed little
or not at all from the life of other people. Carefree, I could await the new
day, and there was no social problem for me. The environment of my youth
consisted of petty-bourgeois circles, hence of a world having very little
relation to the purely manual worker. For, strange as it may seem at first
glance, the cleft between this class, which in an economic sense is by no means
so brilliantly situated, and the manual worker is often deeper than we imagine.
The reason for this hostility, as we might almost call it, lies in the fear of
a social group, which has but recently raised itself above the level of the
manual worker, that it will sink back into the old despised class, or at least
become identified with it. To this, in many cases, we must add the repugnant
memory of the cultural poverty of this lower class, the frequent vulgarity of
its social intercourse; the petty bourgeois' own position in society, however
insignificant it may be, makes any contact with this outgrown stage of life and
culture intolerable.
Consequently, the higher classes feel less constraint in
their dealings with the lowest of their fellow men than seems possible to the
'upstart.'
For anyone is an upstart who rises by his own efforts from
his previous position in life to a higher one.
Ultimately this struggle, which is often so hard, kills
all pity. Our own painful struggle for existence destroys our feeling for the
misery of those who have remained behind.
In this respect Fate was kind to me. By forcing me to
return to this world of poverty and insecurity, from which my father had risen
in the course of his life, it removed the blinders of a narrow petty-bourgeois
upbringing from my eyes. Only now did I learn to know humanity, learning to
distinguish between empty appearances or brutal externals and the inner
being.
After the turn of the century, Vienna was, socially
speaking, one of the most backward cities in Europe.
Dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply.
In the center and in the inner districts you could really feel the pulse of
this realm of fifty-two millions, with all the dubious magic of the national
melting pot. The Court with its dazzling glamour attracted wealth and
intelligence from the rest of the country like a magnet. Added to this was the
strong centralization of the Habsburg monarchy in itself.
It offered the sole possibility of holding this medley of
nations together in any set form. But the consequence was an extraordinary
concentration of high authorities in the imperial capital
Yet not only in the political and intellectual sense was
Vienna the center of the old Danube monarchy, but economically as well. The
host of high of officers, government officials, artists, and scholars was
confronted by an even greater army of workers, and side by side with
aristocratic and commercial wealth dwelt dire poverty. Outside the palaces on
the Ring loitered thousands of unemployed, and beneath this Via Triumphalis of
old Austria dwelt the homeless in the gloom and mud of the canals.
In hardly any German city could the social question have
been studied better than in Vienna. But make no mistake. This 'studying' cannot
be done from lofty heights. No one who has not been seized in the jaws of this
murderous viper can know its poison fangs. Otherwise nothing results but
superficial chatter and false sentimentality. Both are harmful. The former
because it can never penetrate to the core of the problem, the latter because
it passes it by. I do not know which is more terrible: inattention to social
misery such as we see every day among the majority of those who have been
favored by fortune or who have risen by their own efforts, or else the
snobbish, or at times tactless and obtrusive, condescension of certain women of
fashion in skirts or in trousers, who ' feel for the people.' In any event,
these gentry sin far more than their minds, devoid of all instinct, are capable
of realizing. Consequently, and much to their own amazement, the result of
their social 'efforts' is always nil, frequently, in fact, an indignant rebuff,
though this, of course, is passed off as a proof of the people's
ingratitude.
Such minds are most reluctant to realize that social
endeavor has nothing in common with this sort of thing; that above all it can
raise no claim to gratitude, since its function is not to distribute favors but
to restore rights.
I was preserved from studying the social question in such
a way. By drawing me within its sphere of suffering, it did not seem to invite
me to 'study,' but to experience it in my own skin. It was none of its doing
that the guinea pig came through the operation safe and sound.
An attempt to enumerate the sentiments I experienced in
that period could never be even approximately complete; I shall describe here
only the most essential impressions, those which often moved me most deeply,
and the few lessons which I derived from them at the time.
The actual business of finding work was, as a rule, not
hard for me, since I was not a skilled craftsman, but was obliged to seek my
daily bread as a so-called helper and sometimes as a casual laborer.
I
adopted the attitude of all those who shake the dust of Europe from their feet
with the irrevocable intention of founding a new existence in the New World and
conquering a new home. Released from all the old, paralyzing ideas of
profession and position, environment and tradition, they snatch at every
livelihood that offers itself, grasp at every sort of work, progressing step by
step to the realization that honest labor, no matter of what sort, disgraces no
one. I, too, was determined to leap into this new world, with both feet, and
fight my way through.
I soon learned that there was always some kind of work
to be had, but equally soon I found out how easy it was to lose it.
The
uncertainty of earning my daily bread soon seemed to me one of the darkest
sides of my new life.
The ' skilled' worker does not find himself out on the
street as frequently as the unskilled; but he is not entirely immune to this
fate either. And in his case the loss of livelihood owing to lack of work is
replaced by the lock-out, or by going on strike himself.
In this respect the
entire economy suffers bitterly from the individual's insecurity in earning his
daily bread.
The peasant boy who goes to the big city, attracted by
the easier nature of the work (real or imaginary), by shorter hours, but most
of all by the dazzling light emanating from the metropolis, is accustomed to a
certain security in the matter of livelihood. He leaves his old job only when
there is at least some prospect of a new one. For there is a great lack of
agricultural workers, hence the probability of any long period of unemployment
is in itself small. It is a mistake to believe that the young fellow who goes
to the big city is made of poorer stuff than his brother who continues to make
an honest living from the peasant sod. No, on the contrary: experience shows
that all those elements which emigrate consist of the healthiest and most
energetic natures, rather than conversely. Yet among these 'emigrants' we must
count, not only those who go to America, but to an equal degree the young
farmhand who resolves to leave his native village for the strange city. He,
too, is prepared to face an uncertain fate. As a rule he arrives in the big
city with a certain amount of money; he has no need to lose heart on the very
first day if he has the ill fortune to find no work for any length of time. But
it is worse if, after finding a job, he soon loses it. To find a new one,
especially in winter, is often difficult if not impossible. Even so, the first
weeks are tolerable. He receives an unemployment benefit from his union funds
and manages as well as possible. But when his last cent is gone and the union,
due to the long duration of his unemployment, discontinues its payments, great
hardships
begin. Now he walks the streets, hungry; often he pawns and sells
his last possessions; his clothing becomes more and more wretched; and thus he
sinks into external surroundings which, on top of his physical misfortune, also
poison his soul. If he is evicted and if (as is so often the case) this occurs
in winter, his misery is very great. At length he finds some sort of job again.
But the old story is repeated. The same thing happens a second time, the third
time perhaps it is even worse, and little by little he learns to bear the
eternal insecurity with greater and greater indifference. At last the
repetition becomes a habit.
And so this man, who was formerly so hard-working, grows
lax in his whole view of life and gradually becomes the instrument of those who
use him only for their own base advantage. He has so often been unemployed
through no fault of his own that one time more or less ceases to matter, even
when the aim is no longer to fight for economic rights, but to destroy
political, social, or culturaL values in general. He may not be exactly
enthusiastic about strikes, but at any rate he has become indifferent.
With open eyes I was able to follow this process in a thousand
examples. The more I witnessed it, the greater grew my revulsion for the big
city which first avidly sucked men in and then so cruelly crushed them.
When they arrived, they belonged to their people; after remaining
for a few years, they were lost to it.
I, too, had been tossed around by life in the metropolis-
in my own skin I could feel the effects of this fate and taste them with my
soul. One more thing I saw: the rapid change from work to unemployment and vice
versa, plus the resultant fluctuation of income, end by destroying in many all
feeling for thrift, or any understanding for a prudent ordering of their lives.
It would seem that the body gradually becomes accustomed to living on the fat
of the land in good times and going hungry in bad times. Indeed, hunger
destroys any resolution for reasonable budgeting in better times to come by
holding up to the eyes of its tormented victim an eternal mirage of good living
and raising this dream to such a pitch of longing that a pathological desire
puts an end to all restraint as soon as wages and earnings make it at all
possible. The consequence is that once the man obtains work he irresponsibly
forgets all ideas of order and discipline, and begins to live luxuriously for
the pleasures of the moment. This upsets even the small weekly budget, as even
here any intelligent apportionment is lacking; in the beginning it suffices for
five days instead of seven, later only for three, finally scarcely for one day,
and in the end it is drunk up in the very first night.
Often he has a wife
and children at home. Sometimes they, too, are infected by this life,
especially when the man is good to them on the whole and actually loves them in
his own way. Then the weekly wage is used up by the whole family in two or
three days; they eat and drink as long as the money holds out and the last days
they go hungry. Then the wife drags herself out into the neighborhood, borrows
a little, runs up little debts at the food store, and in this way strives to
get through the hard last days of the week. At noon they all sit together
before their meager and sometimes empty bowls, waiting for the next payday,
speaking of it, making plans, and, in their hunger, dreaming of the happiness
to come.
And so the little children, in their earliest beginnings, are made
familiar with this misery.
It ends badly if the man goes his own way from the very
beginning and the woman, for the children's sake, opposes him. Then there is
fighting and quarreling, and, as the man grows estranged from his wife, he
becomes more intimate with alcohol. He is drunk every Saturday, and, with her
instinct of selfpreservation for herself and her children, the woman has to
fight to get even a few pennies out of him; and, to make matters worse, this
usually occurs on his way from the factory to the barroom. When at length he
comes home on Sunday or even Monday night, drunk and brutal, but always parted
from his last cent, such scenes often occur that God have mercy!
I have seen this in hundreds of instances. At first I was
repelled or even outraged, but later I understood the whole tragedy of this
misery and its deeper causes. These people are the unfortunate victims of bad
conditions!
Even more dismal in those days were the housing conditions. The
misery in which the Viennese day laborer lived was frightful to behold. Even
today it fills me with horror when I think of these wretched caverns, the
lodging houses and tenements, sordid scenes of garbage, repulsive filth, and
worse.
What was-and still is-bound to happen some day, when the stream of
unleashed slaves pours forth from these miserable dens to avenge themselves on
their thoughtless fellow men F
For thoughtless they are!
Thoughtlessly they let things slide along, and with their
utter lack of intuition fail even to suspect that sooner or later Fate must
bring retribution, unless men conciliate Fate while there is still time.
How
thankful I am today to the Providence which sent me to that school! In it I
could no longer sabotage the subjects I did not like. It educated me quickly
and thoroughly.
If I did not wish to despair of the men who constituted
my environment at that time, I had to learn to distinguish between their
external characters and lives and the foundations of their development. Only
then could all this be borne without losing heart. Then, from all the misery
and despair, from all the filth and outward degeneration, it was no longer
human beings that emerged, but the deplorable results of deplorable laws; and
the hardship of my own life, no easier than the others, preserved me from
capitulating in tearful sentimentality to the degenerate products of this
process of development.
No, this is not the way to understand all these
things!
Even then I saw that only a twofold road could lead to the goal of
improving these conditions:
The deepest sense of social responsibility for the
creation of better foundations for our development, coupled with brutal
determination on breaking down incurable tenors.
Just as Nature does not concentrate her greatest
attention in preserving what exists, but in breeding offspring to carry on the
species, likewise, in human life, it is less important artificially to
alleviate existing evil, which, in view of human nature, is ninety-nine per
cent impossible, than to ensure
from the start healthier channels for a
future development.
During my struggle for existence in Vienna, it had become
clear to me that
Social activity must never and on no account be directed
toward philanthropic flim-flam, but rather toward the elimination of the basic
deficiencies in the organization of our economic and cultural life that must-or
at all events can-lead to the degeneration of the individual .
The difficulty of applying the most extreme and brutal
methods against the criminals who endanger the state lies not least in the
uncertainty of our judgment of the inner motives or causes of such contemporary
phenomena.
This uncertainty is only too well founded in our own
sense of guilt regarding such tragedies of degeneration; be that as it may, it
paralyzes any serious and firm decision and is thus partly responsible for the
weak and half-hearted, because hesitant, execution of even the most necessary
measures of selfpreservation.
Only when an epoch ceases to be haunted by the shadow of
its own consciousness of guilt will it achieve the inner calm and outward
strength brutally and ruthlessly to prune off the wild shoots and tear out the
weeds.
Since the Austrian state had practically no social legislation or
jurisprudence, its weakness in combating even malignant tumors was
glaring.
I do not know what horrified me most at that time: the
economic misery of my companions, their moral and ethical coarseness, or the
low level of their intellectual development.
How often does our bourgeoisie rise in high moral
indignation when they hear some miserable tramp declare that it is all the same
to him whether he is a German or not, that he feels equally happy wherever he
is, as long as he has enough to live on!
This lack of 'national pride' is most profoundly
deplored, and horror at such an attitude is expressed in no uncertain
terms.
How many people have asked themselves what was the real reason for
the superiority of their own sentiments?
How many are aware of the infinite number of separate
memories of the greatness of our national fatherland in all the fields of
cultural and artistic life, whose total result is to inspire them with just
pride at being members of a nation so blessed?
How many suspect to how great an extent pride in the
fatherland depends on knowledge of its greatness in all these fields?
Do
our bourgeois circles ever stop to consider to what an absurdly small extent
this prerequisite of pride in the fatherland is transmitted to the
'people'?
Let us not try to condone this by saying that ' it is no better in
other countries,' and that in those countries the worker avows his nationality
'notwithstanding.' Even if this were so, it could serve as no excuse for our
own omissions. But it is not so; for the thing that we constantly designate as
'chauvinistic' education; for example among the French people, is nothing other
than extreme emphasis on the greatness of France in all the fields of culture,
or, as the Frenchman puts it, of 'civilization The fact is that the young
Frenchman is not brought up to be objective, but is instilled with the most
subjective conceivable view, in so far as the importance of the political or
cultural greatness of his fatherland is concerned.
This education will always have to be limited to general
and extremely broad values which, if necessary, must be engraved in the memory
and feeling of the people by eternal repetition.
But to the negative sin of omission is added in our
country the positive destruction of the little which the individual has the
good fortune to learn in school. The rats that politically poison our nation
gnaw even this little from the heart and memory of the broad masses, in so far
as this has not been previously accomplished by poverty and suffering.
Imagine, for instance, the following scene:
In a basement apartment, consisting of two stuffy rooms,
dwells a worker's family of seven. Among the five children there is a boy of,
let us assume, three years. This is the age in which the first impressions are
made on the consciousness of the child Talented persons retain traces of memory
from this period down to advanced old age. The very narrowness and overcrowding
of the room does not lead to favorable conditions. Quarreling and wrangling
will very frequently arise as a result. In these circumstances, people do not
live with one another, they press against one another. Every argument, even the
most trifling, which in a spacious apartment can be reconciled by a mild
segregation, thus solving itself, here leads to loathsome wrangling without
end. Among the children, of course, this is still bearable; they always fight
under such circumstances, and among themselves they quickly and thoroughly
forget about it. But if this battle is carried on between the parents
themselves, and almost every day in forms which for vulgarity often leave
nothing to be desired, then, if only very gradually, the results of such visual
instruction must ultimately become apparent in the children. The character the)
will inevitably assume if this mutual quarrel takes the form of brutal attacks
of the father against the mother, of drunken beatings, is hard for anyone who
does not know this milieu to imagine. At the age of six the pitiable little boy
suspects the existence of things which can inspire even an adult with nothing
but horror. Morally poisoned, physically undernourished, his poor little head
full of lice, the young 'citizen' goes off to public school. After a great
struggle he may learn to read and write, but that is about all. His doing any
homework is out of the question. On the contrary, the very mother and father,
even in the presence of the children, talk about his teacher and school in
terms which are not fit to be repeated, and are more inclined to curse the
latter to their face than to take their little offspring across their knees and
teach them some sense. All the other things that the little fellow hears at
home do not tend to increase his respect for his dear fellow men. Nothing good
remains of humanity, no institution remains unassailed; beginning with his
teacher and up to the head of the government, whether it is a question of
religion or of morality as such, of the state or society, it is all the same,
everything is reviled in the most obscene terms and dragged into the filth of
the basest possible outlook. When at the age of fourteen the young man is
discharged from school, it is hard to decide what is stronger in him: his
incredible stupidity as far as
any real knowledge and ability are concerned,
or the corrosive insolence of his behavior, combined with an immorality, even
at this age, which would make your hair stand on end
What position can this man-to whom even now hardly
anything is holy, who, just as he has encountered no greatness conversely
suspects and knows all the sordidness of life- occupy in the life into which he
is now preparing to emerge?
The three-year-old child has become a fifteen-year-old
despiser of all authority. Thus far, aside from dirt and filth, this young man
has seen nothing which might inspire him to any higher enthusiasm.
But only now does he enter the real university of this
existence.
Now he begins the same life which all along his childhood
years he has seen his father living. He hangs around the street corners and
bars, coming home God knows when; and for a change now and then he beats the
broken-down being which was once his mother, curses God and the world, and at
length is convicted of some particular offense and sent to a house of
correction.
There he receives his last polish.
And his dear bourgeois fellow men are utterly amazed at
the lack of 'national enthusiasm' in this young 'citizen.'
Day by day, in the theater and in the movies, in
backstairs literature and the yellow press, they see the poison poured into the
people by bucketfuls, and then they are amazed at the low 'moral content,' the
'national indifference,' of the masses of the people.
As though trashy films, yellow press, and such-like dung
could. furnish the foundations of a knowledge of the greatness of our
fatherland!-quite aside from the early education of the individual.
What I had never suspected before, I quickly and thoroughly learned
in those years:
The question of the 'nationalization' of a people is,
among other things, primarily a question of creating healthy social conditions
as a foundation for the possibility of educating the individual. For only those
who through school and upbringing learn to know the cultural, economic, but
above all the political, greatness of their own fatherland can and unit achieve
the inner pride in the privilege of being a member of such a people. And I can
fight only for something that I love, love only what I respect, and respect
only what I at least know.
Once my interest in the social question was aroused, I
began to study it with all thoroughness. It was a new and hitherto unknown
world which opened before me.
In the years 1909 and 1910, my own situation had changed
somewhat in so far as I no longer had to earn my daily bread as a common
laborer. By this time I was working independently as a small draftsman and
painter of watercolors. Hard as this was with regard to earnings-it was barely
enough to live on- it was good for my chosen profession. Now I was no longer
dead tired in the evening when I came home from work, unable to look at a book
without soon dozing off. My present work ran parallel to my future profession.
Moreover, I was master of my own time and could apportion it better than had
previously been possible.
I painted to make a living and studied for
pleasure.
Thus I was able to supplement my visual instruction in the social
problem by theoretical study. I studied more or less all of the books I was
able to obtain regarding this whole field, and for the rest immersed myself in
my own thoughts.
I believe that those who knew me in those days took me for
an eccentric.
Amid all this, as was only natural, I served my love of
architecture with ardent zeal. Along with music, it seemed to me the queen of
the arts: under such circumstances my concern with it was not 'work.' but the
greatest pleasure. I could read and draw until late into the night, and never
grow tired. Thus my faith grew that my beautiful dream for the future would
become reality after all, even though this might require long years. I was
firmly convinced that I should some day make a name for myself as an
architect.
In addition, I had the greatest interest in everything
connected with politics, but this did not seem to me very significant. On the
contrary: in my eyes this was the self-evident duty of every thinking man.
Anyone who failed to understand this lost the right to any criticism or
complaint.
In this field, too, I read and studied much.
By 'reading,' to be sure, I mean perhaps something
different than the average member of our so-called 'intelligentsia.'
I
know people who 'read' enormously, book for book, letter for letter, yet whom I
would not describe as 'well-read.' True they possess a mass of 'knowledge,' but
their brain is unable to organize and register the material they have taken in.
They lack the art of sifting what is valuable for them in a book from that
which is without value, of retaining the one forever, and, if possible, not
even seeing the rest, but in any case not dragging it around with them as
useless ballast. For reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end. It
should primarily help to fill the framework constituted by every man's talents
and abilities; in addition, it should provide the tools and building materials
which the individual needs for his life's work, regardless whether this
consists in a primitive struggle for sustenance or the satisfaction of a high
calling; secondly, it should transmit a general world view. In both cases,
however, it is essential that the con tent of what one reads at any time should
not be transmitted to the memory in the sequence of the book or books, but like
the stone of a mosaic should fit into the general world picture in its proper
place, and thus help to form this picture in the mind of the reader. Otherwise
there arises a confused muddle of memorized facts which not only are worthless,
but also make their unto fortunate possessor conceited. For such a reader now
believes himself in all seriousness to be {educated,' to understand something
of life, to have knowledge, while in reality, with every new acquisition of
this kind of 'education,' he is growing more and more removed from the world
until, not infrequently, he ends up in a sanitarium or in parliament.
Never
will such a mind succeed in culling from the confusion of his ' knowledge '
anything that suits the demands of the hour, for his intellectual ballast is
not organized along the lines of life, but in the sequence of the books as he
read them and as their content has piled up in his brain If Fate, in the
requirements of his daily life, desired to remind him to make a correct
application of what he had read, it would have to indicate title and page
number, since the poor fool would otherwise never in all his life find the
correct place. But since Fate does not do this, these bright boys in any
critical situation come into the most terrible embarrassment, cast about
convulsively for analogous cases, and with mortal certainty naturally find the
wrong formulas.
If this were not true, it would be impossible for us to
understand the political behavior of our learned and highly placed government
heroes, unless we decided to assume outright villainy instead of pathological
propensities.
On the other hand, a man who possesses the art of correct
reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and
immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently
remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth
knowing. Once the knowledge he has achieved in this fashion is correctly
coordinated within the somehow existing picture of this or that subject created
by the imaginations it will function either as a corrective or a complement,
thus enhancing either the correctness or the clarity of the picture. Then, if
life suddenly sets some question before us for examination or answer, the
memory, if this method of reading is observed, will immediately take the
existing picture as a norm, and from it will derive all the individual items
regarding these questions, assembled in the course of decades, submit them to
the mind for examination and reconsideration, until the question is clarified
or answered.
Only this kind of reading has meaning and
purpose.
An orator, for example, who does not thus provide his intelligence
with the necessary foundation will never be in a position cogently to defend
his view in the face of opposition, though it may be a thousand times true or
real. In every discussion his memory will treacherously leave him in the lurch;
he will find neither grounds for reinforcing his own contentions nor any for
confuting those of his adversary. If, as in the case of a speaker, it is only a
question of making a fool of himself personally, it may not be so bad, but not
so when Fate predestines such a know-it-all incompetent to be the leader of a
state.
Since my earliest youth I have endeavored to read in the correct
way, and in this endeavor I have been most happily supported by my memory and
intelligence. Viewed in this light, my Vienna period was especially fertile and
valuable. The experiences of daily life provided stimulation for a constantly
renewed study of the most varied problems. Thus at last I was in a position to
bolster up reality by theory and test theory by reality, and was preserved from
being stifled by theory or growing banal through reality.
In this period the experience of daily life directed and
stimulated me to the most thorough theoretical study of two questions in
addition to the social question.
Who knows when I would have immersed myself in the
doctrines and essence of Marxism if that period had not literally thrust my
nose into the problem!
What I knew of Social Democracy in my youth was
exceedingly little and very inaccurate.
I was profoundly pleased that it should carry on the
struggle for universal suffrage and the secret ballot. For even then my
intelligence told me that this must help to weaken the Habsburg regime which I
so hated. In the conviction that the Austrian Empire could never be preserved
except by victimizing its Germans, but that even the price of a gradual
Slavization of the German element by no means provided a guaranty of an empire
really capable of survival, since the power of the Slavs to uphold the state
must be estimated as exceedingly dubious, I welcomed every development which in
my opinion would inevitably lead to the collapse of this impossible state which
condemned ten million Germans to death. The more the linguistic Babel corroded
and disorganized parliament, the closer drew the inevitable hour of the
disintegration of this Babylonian Empire, and with it the hour of freedom for
my German-Austrian people. Only in this way could the Anschluss with the old
mother country be restored.
Consequently, this activity of the Social Democracy was
not displeasing to me. And the fact that it strove to improve the living
conditions of the worker, as, in my innocence, I was still stupid enough to
believe, likewise seemed to speak rather for it than against it. What most
repelled me was its hostile attitude toward the struggle for the preservation
of Germanism, its disgraceful courting of the Slavic 'comrade,' who accepted
this declaration of love in so far as it was bound up with practical
concessions, but otherwise maintained a lofty and arrogant reserve, thus giving
the obtrusive beggars their deserved reward.
Thus, at the age of seventeen the word 'Marxism' was as
yet little known to me, while ' Social Democracy ' and socialism seemed to me
identical concepts. Here again it required the fist of Fate to open my eyes to
this unprecedented betrayal of the peoples.
Up to that time I had known the Social Democratic Party
only as an onlooker at a few mass demonstrations, without possessing even the
slightest insight into the mentality of its adherents or the nature of its
doctrine; but now, at one stroke, I came into contact with the products of its
education and 'philosophy.' And in a few months I obtained what might otherwise
have required decades: an understanding of a pestilential whore,l cloaking
herself as social virtue and brotherly love, from which I hope humanity will
rid this earth with the greatest dispatch, since otherwise the earth might well
become rid of humanity.
My first encounter with the Social Democrats occurred
during my employment as a building worker.
From the very beginning it was none too pleasant. ;My
clothing was still more or less in order, my speech cultivated, and my manner
reserved. I was still so busy with my own destiny that I could not concern
myself much with the people around me. I looked for work only to avoid
starvation, only to obtain an opportunity of continuing my education, though
ever so slowly. Perhaps I would not have concerned myself at all with my new
environment if on the third or fourth day an event had not taken place which
forced me at once to take a position. I was asked to join the
organization.
My knowledge of trade-union organization was at that time
practically non-existent. I could not have proved that its existence was either
beneficial or harmful. When I was told that I had to join, I refused. The
reason I gave was that I did not understand the matter, but that I would not
let myself be forced into anything. Perhaps my first reason accounts for my not
being thrown out at once. They may perhaps have hoped to convert me or break
down my resistance in a few days. In any event, they had made a big mistake. At
the end of two weeks I could no longer have joined, even if I had wanted to. In
these two weeks I came to know the men around me more closely, and no power in
the world could have moved me to join an organization whose members had
meanwhile come to appear to me in so unfavorable a light.
During the first days I was irritable.
At noon some of the workers went to the near-by taverns
while others remained at the building site and ate a lunch which, as a rule was
quite wretched. These were the married men whose wives brought them their
noonday soup in pathetic bowls. Toward the end of the week their number always
increased, why I did not understand until later. On these occasions politics
was discussed.
I drank my bottle of milk and ate my piece of bread
somewhere off to one side, and cautiously studied my new associates or
reflected on my miserable lot. Nevertheless, I heard more than enough; and
often it seemed to me that they purposely moved closer to me, perhaps in order
to make me take a position. In any case, what I heard was of such a nature as
to infuriate me in the extreme. These men rejected everything: the nation as an
invention of the ' capitalistic ' (how often was I forced to hear this single
word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the
exploitation of the working class; the authority of law as a means for
oppressing the proletariat; the school as an institution for breeding slaves
and slaveholders; religion as a means for stultifying the people and making
them easier to exploit; morality as a symptom of stupid, sheeplike patience,
etc. There was absolutely nothing which was not drawn through the mud of a
terrifying depths
At first I tried to keep silent. But at length it became
impossible. I began to take a position and to oppose them. But I was forced to
recognize that this was utterly hopeless until I possessed certain definite
knowledge of the controversial points. And so I began to examine the sources
from which they drew this supposed wisdom. I studied book after book, pamphlet
after pamphlet.
From then on our discussions at work were often very
heated. I argued back, from day to day better informed than my antagonists
concerning their own knowledge, until one day they made use of the weapon which
most readily conquers reason: terror and violence. A few of the spokesmen on
the opposing side forced me either to leave the building at once or be thrown
off the scaffolding. Since I was alone and resistance seemed hopeless, I
preferred, richer by one experience, to follow the former counsel.
I went away filled with disgust, but at the same time so
agitated that it would have been utterly impossible for me to turn my back on
the whole business. No, after the first surge of indignation, my stubbornness
regained the upper hand. I was determined to go to work on another building in
spite of my experience. In this decision I was reinforced by Poverty which, a
few weeks later, after I had spent what little I had saved from my wages.
enfolded me in her heartless arms. I had to go back whether I wanted to or not.
The same old story began anew and ended very much the same as the first
time.
I wrestled with my innermost soul: are these people human, worthy to
belong to a great nation?
A painful question; for if it is answered in the
affirmative, the struggle for my nationality really ceases to be worth the
hardships and sacrifices which the best of us have to make for the sake of such
scum; and if it is answered in the negative, our nation is pitifully poor in
human beings.
On such days of reflection and cogitation, I pondered
with anxious concern on the masses of those no longer belonging to their people
and saw them swelling to the proportions of a menacing army.
With what changed feeling I now gazed at the endless
columns of a mass demonstration of Viennese workers that took place one day as
they marched past four abreast! For neatly two hours I stood there watching
with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding by. In oppressed
anxiety, I finally left the place and sauntered homeward. In a tobacco shop on
the way I saw the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the central organ of the old Austrian
Social Democracy. It was available in a cheap people's cafe, to which I often
went to read newspapers; but up to that time I had not been able to bring
myself to spend more than two minutes on the miserable sheet, whose whole tone
affected me like moral vitriol. Depressed by the demonstration, I was driven on
by an inner voice to buy the sheet and read it carefully. That evening I did
so, fighting down the fury that rose up in me from time to time at this
concentrated solution of lies.
More than any theoretical literature, my daily reading of
the Social Democratic press enabled me to study the inner nature of these
thought-processes.
For what a difference between the glittering phrases
about freedom, beauty, and dignity in the theoretical literature, the delusive
welter of words seemingly expressing the most profound and laborious wisdom,
the loathsome humanitarian morality- all this written with the incredible gall
that comes with prophetic certainty-and the brutal daily press, shunning no
villainy, employing every means of slander, lying with a virtuosity that would
bend iron beams, all in the name of this gospel of a new humanity. The one is
addressed to the simpletons of the middle, not to mention the upper, educated,
'classes,' the other to the masses.
For me immersion in the literature and press of this
doctrine and organization meant finding my way back to my own people.
What
had seemed to me an unbridgable gulf became the source of a greater love than
ever before.
Only a fool can behold the work of this villainous
poisoner and still condemn the victim. The more independent I made myself in
the next few years the clearer grew my perspective, hence my insight into the
inner causes of the Social Democratic successes. I now understood the
significance of the brutal demand that I read only Red papers, attend only Red
meetings, read only Red books, etc. With plastic clarity I saw before my eyes
the inevitable result of this doctrine of intolerance.
The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to
anything that is half-hearted and weak.
Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by
grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force
which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a
strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more
than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine, tolerating no
other beside itself, than by the granting of liberalistic freedom with which,
as a rule, they can do little, and are prone to feel that they have been
abandoned. They are equally unaware of their shameless spiritual terrorization
and the hideous abuse of their human freedom, for they absolutely fail to
suspect the inner insanity of the whole doctrine. All they see is the ruthless
force and brutality of its calculated manifestations, to which they always
submit in the end.
If Social Democracy is opposed by a doctrine of greater
truth, but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer, though this may
require the bitterest struggle.
Before two years had passed, the theory as well as the
technical methods of Social Democracy were clear to me.
I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this
movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor
mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable
barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous,
until the nerves of the attacked persons break down and, just to have peace
again, they sacrifice the hated individual.
However, the fools obtain no peace.
The game begins again and is repeated over and over until
fear of the mad dog results in suggestive paralysis.
Since the Social Democrats best know the value of force
from their own experience, they most violently attack those in whose nature
they detect any of this substance which is so rare. Conversely, they praise
every weakling on the opposing side, sometimes cautiously, sometimes loudly,
depending on the real or supposed quality of his intelligence.
They fear an irnpotent, spineless genius less than a
forceful nature of moderate intelligence.
But with the greatest enthusiasm they commend weaklings
in both mind and force.
They know how to create the illusion that this is the
only way of preserving the peace, and at the same time, stealthily but
steadily, they conquer one position after another, sometimes by silent
blackmail, sometimes by actual theft, at moments when the general attention is
directed toward other matters, and either does not want to be disturbed or
considers the matter too small to raise a stir about, thus again irritating the
vicious antagonist.
This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all
human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical
certainty unless the opposing side learns to combat poison gas with poison
gas.
It is our duty to inform all weaklings that this is a question of to
be or not to be.
I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of
physical terror toward the individual and the masses.
Here, too, the psychological effect can be calculated with
precision.
Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the
meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be
successful unless opposed by equal terror.
In this case, to be sure, the party will cry bloody
murder; though it has long despised all state authority, it will set up a
howling cry for that same authority and in most cases will actually attain its
goal amid the general confusion: it will find some idiot of a higher official
who, in the imbecilic hope of propitiating the feared adversary for later
eventualities, will help this world plague to break its opponent.
The impression made by such a success on the minds of the
great masses of supporters as well as opponents can only be measured by those
who know the soul of a people, not from books, but from life. For while in the
ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice
of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the
success of any further resistance.
The more familiar I became, principally with the methods
of physical terror, the more indulgent I grew toward all the hundreds of
thousands who succumbed to it.
What makes me most indebted to that period of suffering
is that it alone gave back to me my people, taught me to distinguish the
victims from their seducers.
The results of this seduction can be designated only as
victims. For if I attempted to draw a few pictures from life, depicting the
essence of these 'lowest' classes, my picture would not be complete without the
assurance that in these depths I also found bright spots in the form of a rare
willingness to make sacrifices, of loyal comradeship, astonishing frugality,
and modest reserve, especially among the older workers. Even though these
virtues were steadily vanishing in the younger generation, if only through the
general effects of the big city, there were many, even among the young men,
whose healthy blood managed to dominate the foul tricks of life. If in their
political activity, these good, often kind-hearted people nevertheless joined
the mortal enemies of our nationality, thus helping to cement their ranks, the
reason was that they neither understood nor could understand the baseness of
the new doctrine, and that no one else took the trouble to bother about them,
and finally that the social conditions were stronger than any will to the
contrary that may have been present. The poverty to which they sooner or later
succumbed drove them into the camp of the Social Democracy.
Since on innumerable occasions the bourgeoisie has in the
clumsiest and most immoral way opposed demands which were justified from the
universal human point of view, often without obtaining or even justifiably
expecting any profit from such an attitude, even the most self-respecting
worker was driven out of the trade-union organization into political
activity.
Millions of workers, I am sure, started out as enemies of the Social
Democratic Party in their innermost soul, but their resistance was overcome in
a way which was sometimes utterly insane; that is, when the bourgeois parties
adopted a hostile attitude toward every demand of a social character. Their
simple, narrow-minded rejection of all attempts to better working conditions,
to introduce safety devices on machines, to prohibit child labor and protect
the woman, at least in the months when she was bearing the future national
comrade under her heart, contributed to drive the masses into the net of Social
Democracy which gratefully snatched at every case of such a disgraceful
attitude. Never can our political bourgeoisie make good its sins in this
direction, for by resisting all attempts to do away with social abuses, they
sowed hatred and seemed to justify even the assertions of the mortal enemies of
the entire nation, to the effect that only the Social Democratic Party
represented the interests of the working people
Thus, to begin with, they created the moral basis for the
actual existence of the trade unions, the organization which has always been
the most effective pander to the political party.
In my Viennese years I was forced, whether I liked it or
not, to take a position on the trade unions.
Since I regarded them as an inseparable ingredient of the
Social Democratic Party as such, my decision was instantaneous
and-mistaken.
I flatly rejected them without thinking.
And in this infinite]y important question, as in so many
others, Fate itself became my instructor.
The result was a reversal of my first judgment.
By
my twentieth year I had learned to distinguish between a union as a means of
defending the general social rights of the wage-earner, and obtaining better
living conditions for him as an individual, and the trade union as an
instrument of the party in the political class struggle.
The fact that Social Democracy understood the enormous
importance of the trade-union movement assured it of this instrument and hence
of success; the fact that the bourgeoisie were not aware of this cost them
their political position. They thought they could stop a logical development by
means of an impertinent 'rejection,' but in reality they only forced it into
illogical channels. For to call the trade-union movement in itself unpatriotic
is nonsense and untrue to boot. Rather the contrary is true. If trade-union
activity strives and succeeds in bettering the lot of a class which is one of
the basic supports of the nation, its work is not only not anti-patriotic or
seditious, but 'national' in the truest sense of the word. For in this way it
helps to create the social premises without which a general national education
is unthinkable. It wins the highest merit by eliminating social cankers,
attacking intellectual as well as physical infections, and thus helping to
contribute to the general health of the body politic.
Consequently, the question of their necessity is really
superfluous.
As long as there are employers with little social
understanding or a deficient sense of justice and propriety, it is not only the
right but the duty of their employees, who certainly constitute a part of our
nationality, to protect the interests of the general public against the greed
and unreason of the individual; for the preservation of loyalty and faith in z
social group is just as much to the interest of a nation as the preservation of
the people's health.
Both of these are seriously menaced by unworthy employers
who do not feel themselves to be members of the national community as a whole.
From the disastrous effects of their greed or ruthlessness grow profound evils
for the future.
To eliminate the causes of such a development is to do a
service to the nation and in no sense the opposite.
Let no one say that every individual is free to draw the
consequences from an actual or supposed injustice; in other words, to leave his
job. No ! This is shadow-boxing and must be regarded as an attempt to divert
attention. Either the elimination of bad, unsocial conditions serves the
interest of the nation or it does not. If it does, the struggle against then
must be carried on with weapons which offer the hope of success. The individual
worker, however, is never in a position to defend himself against the power of
the great industrialist, for in such matters it cannot be superior justice that
conquers (if that were recognized, the whole struggle would stop from lack of
cause)-no, what matters here is superior power. Otherwise the sense of justice
alone would bring the struggle to a fair conclusion, or, more accurately
speaking, the struggle could never arise.
No, if the unsocial or unworthy treatment of men calls
for resistance, this struggle, as long as no legal judicial authorities have
been created for the elimination of these evils, can only be decided by
superior power. And this makes it obvious that the power of the employer
concentrated in a single person can only be countered by the mass of employees
banded into a single person, if the possibility of a victory is not to be
renounced in advance.
Thus, trade-union organization can lead to a
strengthening of the social idea in its practical effects on daily life, and
thereby to an elimination of irritants which are constantly giving cause for
dissatisfaction and complaints.
If this is not the case, it is to a great extent the
fault of those who have been able to place obstacles in the path of any legal
regulation of social evils or thwart them by means of their political
influence.
Proportionately as the political bourgeoisie did not
understand, or rather did not want to understand, the importance of trade-union
organization, and resisted it, the Social Democrats took possession of the
contested movement. Thus, far-sightedly it created a firm foundation which on
several critical occasions has stood up when all other supports failed. In this
way the intrinsic purpose was gradually submerged, making place for new
aims.
It never occurred to the Social Democrats to limit the movement they
had thus captured to its original task.
No, that was far from their intention.
In a few decades the weapon for defending the social
rights of man had, in their experienced hands? become an instrument for the
destruction of the national economy. And they did not let themselves be
hindered in the least by the interests of the workers. For in politics, as in
other fields, the use of economic pressure always permits blackmail, as long as
the necessary unscrupulousness is present on the one side, and sufficient
sheeplike patience on the other.
Something which in this case was true of both
sides
By the turn of the century, the trade-union movement had
ceased to serve its former function. From year to year it had entered more and
more into the sphere of Social Democratic politics and finally had no use
except as a battering-ram in the class struggle. Its purpose was to cause the
collapse of the whole arduously constructed economic edifice by persistent
blows, thus, the more easily, after removing its economic foundations, to
prepare the same lot for the edifice of state. Less and less attention was paid
to defending the real needs of the working class, and finally political
expediency made it seem undesirable to relieve the social or cultural miseries
of the broad masses at all, for otherwise there was a risk that these masses,
satisfied in their desires could no longer be used forever as docile shock
troops.
The leaders of the class struggle looked on this development with
such dark foreboding and dread that in the end they rejected any really
beneficial social betterment out of hand, and actually attacked it with the
greatest determination.
And they were never at a loss for an explanation of a
line of behavior which seemed so inexplicable.
By screwing the demands higher and higher, they made
their possible fulfillment seem so trivial and unimportant that they were able
at all times to tell the masses that they were dealing with nothing but a
diabolical attempt to weaken, if possible in fact to paralyze, the offensive
power of the working class in the cheapest way, by such a ridiculous
satisfaction of the most elementary rights. In view of the great masses' small
capacity for thought, we need not be surprised at the success of these
methods.
The bourgeois camp was indignant at this obvious insincerity of
Social Democratic tactics, but did not draw from it the slightest inference
with regard to their own conduct. The Social Democrats' fear of really raising
the working class out of the depths of their cultural and social misery should
have inspired the greatest exertions in this very direction, thus gradually
wrestling the weapon from the hands of the advocates of the class
struggle.
This, however, was not done.
Instead of attacking and seizing the enemy's position,
the bourgeoisie preferred to let themselves
be pressed to the wall and
finally had recourse to utterly inadequate makeshifts, which remained
ineffectual because they came too late, and, moreover, were easy to reject
because they were too insignificant. Thus. in reality, everything remained as
before, except that the discontent was greater.
Like a menacing storm-cloud, the ' free trade union '
hung, even then, over the political horizon and the existence of the
individual.
It was one of the most frightful instruments of terror
against the security and independence of the national economy, the solidity of
the state, and personal freedom.
And chiefly this was what made the concept of democracy a
sordid and ridiculous phrase, and held up brotherhood to everlasting scorn in
the words: 'And if our comrade you won't be, we'll bash your head in-one, two,
three ! '
And that was how I became acquainted with this friend of humanity.
In the course of the years my view was broadened and deepened, but I have had
no need to change it.
The greater insight I gathered into the external
character of Social Democracy, the greater became my longing to comprehend the
inner core of this doctrine.
The official party literature was not much use
for this purpose. In so far as it deals with economic questions, its assertions
and proofs are false; in so far as it treats of political aims, it lies.
Moreover, I was inwardly repelled by the newfangled pettifogging phraseology
and the style in which it was written. With an enormous expenditure of words,
unclear in content or incomprehensible as to meaning, they stammer an endless
hodgepodge of phrases purportedly as witty as in reality they are meaningless.
Only our decadent metropolitan bohemians can feel at home in this maze of
reasoning and cull an 'inner experience' from this dung-heap of literary
dadaism, supported by the proverbial modesty of a section of our people who
always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them
personally. However, by balancing the theoretical untruth and nonsense of this
doctrine with the reality of the phenomenon, I gradually obtained a clear
picture of its intrinsic will.
At such times I was overcome by gloomy foreboding and
malignant fear. Then I saw before me a doctrine, comprised of egotism and hate,
which can lead to victory pursuant to mathematical laws, but in so doing must
put an end to humanity.
Meanwhile, I had learned to understand the connection
between this doctrine of destruction and the nature of a people of which, up to
that time, I had known next to nothing.
Only a knowledge of the Jews provides the key with which
to comprehend the inner, and consequently real, aims of Social
Democracy.
The erroneous conceptions of the aim and meaning of this
party fall from our eyes like veils, once we come to know this people, and from
the fog and mist of social phrases rises the leering grimace of
Marxism.
Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say
when the word 'Jew ' first gave me ground for special thoughts. At home I do
not remember having heard the word during my father's lifetime. I believe that
the old gentleman would have regarded any special emphasis on this term as
cultural backwardness. In the course of his life he had arrived at more or less
cosmopolitan views which, despite his pronounced national sentiments, not only
remained intact, but also affected me to some extent.
Likewise at school I found no occasion which could have
led me to change this inherited picture.
At the Realschule, to be sure, I did meet one Jewish boy
who was treated by all of us with caution, but only because various experiences
had led us to doubt his discretion and we did not particularly trust him; but
neither I nor the others had any thoughts on the matter.
Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to
come across the word 'Jew,' with any frequency, partly in connection with
political discussions. This filled me with a mild distaste, and I could not rid
myself of an unpleasant feeling that always came over me whenever religious
quarrels occurred in my presence.
At that time I did not think anything else of the
question.
There were few Jews in Linz. In the course of the centuries their
outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look; in
fact, I even took them for Germans. The absurdity of this idea did not dawn on
me because I saw no distinguishing feature but the strange religion. The fact
that they had, as I believed, been persecuted on this account sometimes almost
turned my distaste at unfavorable remarks about them into horror.
Thus far I did not so much as suspect the existence of an
organized opposition to the Jews.
Then I came to Vienna.
Preoccupied by the abundance of my impressions in the
architectural field, oppressed by the hardship of my own lot, I gained at first
no insight into the inner stratification of the people in this gigantic city.
Notwithstanding that Vienna in those days counted nearly two hundred thousand
Jews among its two million inhabitants, I did not see them. In the first few
weeks my eyes and my senses were not equal to the flood of values and ideas.
Not until calm gradually returned and the agitated picture began to clear did I
look around me more carefully in my new world, and then among other things I
encountered the Jewish question.
I cannot maintain that the way in which I became
acquainted with them struck me as particularly pleasant. For the Jew was still
characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of
human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as
in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese
antiSemitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great
nation. I was oppressed by the memory of certain occurrences in the Middle
Ages, which I should not have liked to see repeated. Since the newspapers in
question did not enjoy an outstanding reputation (the reason for this, at that
time, I myself did not precisely know), I regarded them more as the products of
anger and envy than the results of 4 principled though perhaps mistaken, point
of view.
I was reinforced in this opinion by what seemed to me the far more
dignified form in which the really big papers answered all these attacks, or,
what seemed to me even more praiseworthy, failed to mention them; in other
words, simply killed them with silence.
I zealously read the so-called world press (Neue Freie
Presse, Wiener Tageblatt, etc.) and was amazed at the scope of what they
offered their readers and the objectivity of individual articles. I respected
the exalted tone, though the flamboyance of the style sometimes caused me inner
dissatisfaction, or even struck me unpleasantly. Yet this may have been due to
the rhythm of life in the whole metropolis.
Since in those days I saw Vienna in that light, I thought
myself justified in accepting this explanation of mine as a valid
excuse.
But what sometimes repelled me was the undignified fashion in which
this press curried favor with the Court. There was scarcely an event in the
Hofburg which was not imparted to the readers either with raptures of
enthusiasm or plaintive emotion, and all this to-do, particularly when it dealt
with the 'wisest monarch' of all time, almost reminded me of the mating cry of
a mountain cock.
To me the whole thing seemed artificial.
In my eyes it was a blemish upon liberal
democracy.
To curry favor with this Court and in such indecent forms
was to sacrifice the dignity of the nation.
This was the first shadow to darken my intellectual
relationship with the ' big ' Viennese press.
As I had always done before, I continued in Vienna to
follow events in Germany with ardent zeal, quite regardless whether they were
political or cultural. With pride and admiration, I compared the rise of the
Reich with the wasting away of the Austrian state. If events in the field of
foreign politics filled me, by and large, with undivided joy, the less
gratifying aspects of internal life often aroused anxiety and gloom. a he
struggle which at that time was being carried on against William II did not
meet with my approval. I regarded him not only as the German Emperor, but first
and foremost as the creator of a German fleet. The restrictions of speech
imposed on the Kaiser by the Reichstag angered me greatly because they emanated
from a source which in my opinion really hadn't a leg to stand on, since in a
single session these parliamentarian imbeciles gabbled more nonsense than a
whole dynasty of emperors, including its very weakest numbers, could ever have
done in centuries.
I was outraged that in a state where every idiot not only
claimed the right to criticize, but was given a seat in the Reichstag and let
loose upon the nation as a 'lawgiver,' the man who bore the imperial crown had
to take 'reprimands' from the greatest babblers' club of all time.
But I was even more indignant that the same Viennese
press which made the most obsequious bows to every rickety horse in the Court,
and flew into convulsions of joy if he accidentally swished his tail, should,
with supposed concern, yet, as it seemed to me, ill-concealed malice, express
its criticisms of the German Kaiser. Of course it had no intention of
interfering with conditions within the German Reich-oh, no, God forbid-but by
placing its finger on these wounds in the friendliest way, it was fulfilling
the duty imposed by the spirit of the mutual alliance, and, conversely,
fulfilling the requirements of journalistic truth, etc. And now it was poking
this finger around in the wound to its heart's content.
In such cases the blood rose to my head.
It was this which caused me little by little to view the
big papers with greater caution.
And on one such occasion I was forced to recognize that
one of the anti-Semitic papers, the Deutsches Volksblatt, behaved more
decently.
Another thing that got on my nerves was the loathsome cult for
France which the big press, even then, carried on. A man couldn't help feeling
ashamed to be a German when he saw these saccharine hymns of praise to the
'great cultural nation.' This wretched licking of France's boots more than once
made me throw down one of these 'world newspapers.' And on such occasions I
sometimes picked up the Volksblatt, which, to be sure, seemed to me much
smaller, but in these matters somewhat more appetizing. I was not in agreement
with the sharp antiSemitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which
gave me some food for thought.
At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted
with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies:
Dr. Karl Lueger I and the Christian Social Party.
When I arrived in Vienna, I was hostile to both of
them.
The man and the movement seemed 'reactionary' in my eyes.
My
common sense of justice, however, forced me to change this judgment in
proportion as I had occasion to become acquainted with the man and his work;
and slowly my fair judgment turned to unconcealed admiration. Today, more than
ever, I regard this man as the greatest German mayor of all times.
How many of my basic principles were upset by this change
in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement!
My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to
the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all.
It
cost me the greatest inner soul struggles, and only after months of battle
between my reason and my sentiments did my reason begin to emerge victorious.
Two years later, my sentiment had followed my reason, and from then on became
its most loyal guardian and sentinel.
At the time of this bitter struggle between spiritual
education and cold reason, the visual instruction of the Vienna streets had
performed invaluable services. There came a time when I no longer, as in the
first days, wandered blindly through the mighty city; now with open eyes I saw
not only the buildings but also the people.
Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I
suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is
this a Jew? was my first thought.
For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I
observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this
foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question
assumed a new form:
Is this a German?
As always in such cases, I now began to try to relieve my
doubts by books. For a few hellers I bought the first antiSemitic pamphlets of
my life. Unfortunately, they all proceeded from the supposition that in
principle the reader knew or even understood the Jewish question to a certain
degree. Besides, the tone for the most part was such that doubts again arose in
me, due in part to the dull and amazingly unscientific arguments favoring the
thesis.
I relapsed for weeks at a time, once even for months.
The whole thing seemed to me so monstrous, the
accusations so boundless, that, tormented by the fear of doing injustice, I
again became anxious and uncertain.
Yet I could no longer very well doubt that the objects of
my study were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves;
for since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take
cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before.
Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they
became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the
Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people
which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans.
And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were
finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves.
Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna,
which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews:
this was the Zionists.
It looked to be sure, as though only a part of the Jews
approved this viewpoint, while the great majority condemned and inwardly
rejected such a formulation. But when examined more closely, this appearance
dissolved itself into an unsavory vapor of pretexts advanced for mere reasons
of expedience, not to say lies. For the so-called liberal Jews did not reject
the Zionists as non-Jews, but only as Jews with an impractical, perhaps even
dangerous, way of publicly avowing their Jewishness.
Intrinsically they remained unalterably of one
piece.
In a short time this apparent struggle between Zionistic and liberal
Jews disgusted me; for it was false through and through, founded on lies and
scarcely in keeping with the moral elevation and purity always claimed by this
people.
The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must say, is
a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell that these were no
lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes
closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these
caftan-wearers. Added to this, there was their unclean dress and their
generally unheroic appearance.
All this could scarcely be called very attractive; but it
became positively repulsive when, in addition to their physical uncleanliness,
you discovered the moral stains on this 'chosen people.'
In a short time I was made more thoughtful than ever by
my slowly rising insight into the type of activity carried on by the Jews in
certain fields.
Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in
cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?
If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you
found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light-a
kike!
What had to be reckoned heavily against the Jews in my eyes was when
I became acquainted with their activity in the press, art, literature, and the
theater. All the unctuous reassurances helped little or nothing It sufficed to
look at a billboard, to study the names of the men behind the horrible trash
they advertised, to make you hard for a long time to come. This was pestilence,
spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death of olden times, and the people
was being infected with it! It goes without saying that the lower the
intellectual level of one of these art manufacturers, the more unlimited his
fertility will be, and the scoundrel ends up like a garbage separator,
splashing his filth in the face of humanity. And bear in mind that there is no
limit to their number; bear in mind that for one Goethe Nature easily can foist
on the world ten thousand of these scribblers who poison men's souls like
germ-carriers of the worse sort, on their fellow men.
It was terrible, but not to be overlooked, that precisely
the Jew, in tremendous numbers, seemed chosen by Nature for this shameful
calling.
Is this why the Jews are called the 'chosen people'?
I now began to examine carefully the names of all the
creators of unclean products in public artistic life. The result was less and
less favorable for my previous attitude toward the Jews. Regardless how my
sentiment might resists my reason was forced to draw its conclusions.
The fact that nine tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and
theatrical idiocy can be set to the account of a people, constituting hardly
one hundredth of all the country's inhabitants, could simply not be tanked
away; it was the plain truth.
And I now began to examine my beloved 'world press' from
this point of view.
And the deeper I probed, the more the object of my former
admiration shriveled. The style became more and more unbearable; I could not
help rejecting the content as inwardly shallow and banal; the objectivity of
exposition now seemed to me more akin to lies than honest truth; and the
writers were-Jews.
A thousand things which I had hardly seen before now
struck my notice, and others, which had previously given me food for thought, I
now learned to grasp and understand.
I now saw the liberal attitude of this press in a
different light; the lofty tone in which it answered attacks and its method of
I killing them with silence now revealed itself to me as a trick as clever as
it was treacherous; the transfigured raptures of their theatrical critics were
always directed at Jewish writers, and their disapproval never struck anyone
but Germans. The gentle pinpricks against William II revealed its methods by
their persistency, and so did its commendation of French culture and
civilization. The trashy content of the short story now appeared to me | as
outright indecency, and in the language I detected the accents 0 of a foreign
people; the sense of the whole thing was so obviously hostile to Germanism that
this could only have been intentional.
But who had an interest in this?
Was all this a mere accident?
Gradually I became uncertain.
The development was accelerated by insights which I
gained into a number of other matters. I am referring to the general view of 1.
ethics and morals which was quite openly exhibited by a large part of the Jews,
and the practical application of which could be seen.
Here again the streets provided an object lesson of a
sort which was sometimes positively evil.
The relation of the Jews to prostitution and, even more,
to the white-slave traffic, could be studied in Vienna as perhaps in no other
city of Western Europe, with the possible exception of the southern French
ports. If you walked at night through the streets and alleys of Leopoldstadt at
every step you witnessed proceedings which remained concealed from the majority
of the German people until the War gave the soldiers on the eastern front
occasion to see similar things, or, better expressed, forced them to see
them.
When thus for the first time I recognized the Jew as the
cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting vice
traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back.
But then a flame flared up within me. I no longer avoided discussion
of the Jewish question; no, now I sought it. And when I learned to look for the
Jew in all branches of cultural and artistic life and its various
manifestations, I suddenly encountered him in a place where I would least have
expected to find him.
When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social
Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached
its conclusion.
Even in my daily relations with my fellow workers, I
observed the amazing adaptability with which they adopted different positions
on the same question, sometimes within an interval of a few days, sometimes in
only a few hours. It was hard for me to understand how people who, when spoken
to alone, possessed some sensible opinions, suddenly lost them as soon as they
came under the influence of the masses. It was often enough to make one
despair. When, after hours of argument, I was convinced that now at last I had
broken the ice or cleared up some absurdity, and was beginning to rejoice at my
success, on the next day to my disgust I had to begin all over again; it had
all been in vain. Like an eternal pendulum their opinions seemed to swing back
again and again to the old madness.
All this I could understand: that they were dissatisfied
with their lot and cursed the Fate which often struck them so harshly; that
they hated the employers who seemed to them the heartless bailiffs of Fate;
that they cursed the authorities who in their eyes were without feeling for
their situation; that they demonstrated against food prices and carried their
demands into the streets: this much could be understood without recourse to
reason. But what inevitably remained incomprehensible was the boundless hatred
they heaped upon their own nationality, despising its greatness, besmirching
its history, and dragging its great men into the gutter.
This struggle against their own species, their own clan,
their own homeland, was as senseless as it was incomprehensible. It was
unnatural.
It was possible to cure them temporarily of this vice, but
only for days or at most weeks. If later you met the man you thought you had
converted, he was just the same as before.
His old unnatural state had regained full possession of
him.
I gradually became aware that the Social Democratic press
was directed predominantly by Jews; yet I did not attribute any special
significance to this circumstance, since conditions were exactly the same in
the other papers. Yet one fact seemed conspicuous: there was not one paper with
Jews working on it which could have been regarded as truly national according
to my education and way of thinking.
I swallowed my disgust and tried to read this type of
Marxist press production, but my revulsion became so unlimited in so doing that
I endeavored to become more closely acquainted with the men who manufactured
these compendiums of knavery.
From the publisher down, they were all Jews.
I took all the Social Democratic pamphlets I could lay
hands on and sought the names of their authors: Jews. I noted the names of the
leaders; by far the greatest part were likewise members of the 'chosen people,'
whether they were representatives in the Reichsrat or trade-union secretaries,
the heads of organizations or street agitators. It was always the same gruesome
picture. The names of the Austerlitzes, Davids, Adlers, Ellenbogens, etc., will
remain forever graven in my memory. One thing had grown dear to me: the party
with whose petty representatives I had been carrying on the most violent
struggle for months was, as to leadership, almost exclusively in the hands of a
foreign people; for, to my deep and joyful satisfaction, I had at last come to
the conclusion that the Jew was no German.
Only now did I become thoroughly acquainted with the
seducer of our people.
A single year of my sojourn in Vienna had sufficed to
imbue me with the conviction that no worker could be so stubborn that he would
not in the end succumb to better knowledge and better explanations. Slowly I
had become an expert in their own doctrine and used it as a weapon in the
struggle for my own profound conviction.
Success almost always favored my side.
The great masses could be saved, if only with the gravest
sacrifice in time and patience.
But a Jew could never be parted from his opinions.
At
that time I was still childish enough to try to make the madness of their
doctrine clear to them; in my little circle I talked my tongue sore and my
throat hoarse, thinking I would inevitably succeed in convincing them how
ruinous their Marxist madness was; but what I accomplished was often the
opposite. It seemed as though their increased understanding of the destructive
effects of Social Democratic theories and their results only reinforced their
determination.
The more I argued with them, the better I came to know
their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and
then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If
all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they
changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them,
they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again
attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking
about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on
a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the
next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so
telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and
if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your
amazement was great the next day. The Jew had not the slightest recollection of
the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all
had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't
remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions
the previous day.
Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck.
I didn't know what to be more amazed at: the agility of
their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.
Gradually I began to hate them.
All this had but one good side: that in proportion as the
real leaders or at least the disseminators of Social Democracy came within my
vision, my love for my people inevitably grew. For who, in view of the
diabolical craftiness of these seducers, could damn the luckless victims? How
hard it was, even for me, to get the better of thus race of dialectical liars !
And how futile was such success in dealing with people who twist the truth in
your mouth who without so much as a blush disavow the word they have just
spoken, and in the very next minute take credit for it after all.
No. The better acquainted I became with the Jew, the more
forgiving I inevitably became toward the worker. In my eyes the gravest fault
was no longer with him, but with all those who did not regard it as worth the
trouble to have mercy on him, with iron righteousness giving the son of the
people his just deserts, and standing the seducer and corrupter up against the
wall.
Inspired by the experience of daily life, I now began to track down
the sources of the Marxist doctrine. Its effects had become clear to me in
individual cases; each day its success was apparent to my attentive eyes, and,
with some exercise of my imagination, I was able to picture the consequences.
The only remaining question was whether the result of their action in its
ultimate form had existed in the mind's eye of the creators, or whether they
themselves were the victims of an error.
I felt that both were possible.
In the one case it was the duty of every thinking man to
force himself to the forefront of the ilI-starred movement, thus perhaps
averting catastrophe; in the other, however, the original founders of this
plague of the nations must have been veritable devils- for only in the brain of
a monster-not that of a man-could the plan of an organization assume form and
meaning, whose activity must ultimately result in the collapse of human
civilization and the consequent devastation of the world.
In this case the only remaining hope was struggle,
struggle with all the weapons which the human spirit, reason, and will can
devise, regardless on which side of the scale Fate should lay its
blessing.
Thus I began to make myself familiar with the founders of this
doctrine, in order to study the foundations of the movement. If I reached my
goal more quickly than at first I had perhaps ventured to believe, it was
thanks to my newly acquired, though at that time not very profound, knowledge
of the Jewish question. This alone enabled me to draw a practical comparison
between the reality and the theoretical flim-flam of the founding fathers of
Social Democracy, since it taught me to understand the language of the Jewish
people, who speak in order to conceal or at least to veil their thoughts; their
real aim is not therefore to be found in the lines themselves, but slumbers
well concealed between them.
For or me this was the time of the greatest spiritual
upheaval I have ever had to go through.
I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an
anti-Semite.
Just once more-and this was the last time-fearful,
oppressive thoughts came to me in profound anguish.
When over long periods of human history I scrutinized the
activity of the Jewish people, suddenly there rose up in me the fearful
question whether inscrutable Destiny, perhaps Or reasons unknown to us poor
mortals, did not with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory
of this little nation.
Was it possible that the earth had been promised as a
reward to this people which lives only for this earth?
Have we an objective right to struggle for our
self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within
ourselves?
As I delved more deeply into the teachings of Marxism and
thus in tranquil clarity submitted the deeds of the Jewish people to
contemplation, Fate itself gave me its answer.
The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic
principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by
the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of
personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and
thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture.
As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any
order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of ail
recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only
be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this
planet.
If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over
the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of
humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands l of years ago, move through
the ether devoid of men.
Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her
commands.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of
the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for
the work of the Lord.