The Society of the Crossed Keys

by Stefan Zweig

  I told her that I was going to Paris, and perhaps we could try to draw up a joint manifesto there.

  “Why ‘perhaps’?” she urged me. “Things look worse than ever, the wheels have begun turning.” Uneasy as I was myself, I had difficulty in calming her down.

  But it was in France that a second, personal episode was to remind me how prophetically the old lady, who was not taken very seriously in Vienna, had foreseen the future. It was a very small incident, but it made a powerful impression on me. In the spring of 1914 I had left Paris, with a woman friend, to spend a few days in Touraine, where we were going to see the grave of Leonardo da Vinci. We had walked along the banks of the Loire in mild, sunny weather, and were pleasantly weary by evening. So we decided to go to the cinema in the rather sleepy town of Tours, where I had already paid my respects to the house in which Balzac was born.

  It was a small suburban cinema, not at all like our modern picture palaces made of chromium and shining glass. Only a hall perfunctorily adapted for the purpose, and full of labourers, soldiers, market women, a crowd of ordinary people enjoying a gossip and blowing clouds of Scaferlati and Caporal tobacco smoke into the air, in defiance of a No Smoking sign. First on the screen came a newsreel—‘News From All Over the World’. A boat race in England; the people talked and laughed. Then a French military parade, and again the audience took little notice. But the third item was entitled: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Visits Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna’. Suddenly I saw on the screen the familiar platform of the Westbahnhof in Vienna, an ugly railway station building, along with a few policemen waiting for the train to come in. Then a signal was given, and old Emperor Franz Joseph walked past the guard of honour to welcome his guest. As the old Emperor appeared on the screen, stooping slightly and not entirely steady on his feet as he passed the line of men, the audience in Tours smiled kindly at the old gentleman with his white side whiskers. Then there was a picture of the train coming in, the first, the second and the third carriages. The door of the saloon car was opened, and out stepped Wilhelm II, the ends of his moustache bristling, wearing the uniform of an Austrian general.

  At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst. It was only a second, a single second. All was forgotten once other pictures were shown. The audience laughed heartily at the comedy that now followed, slapping their knees loudly with delight. Only a second, yes, but it showed me how easy it could be to whip up bad feeling on both sides at a moment of serious crisis, in spite of all attempts to restore understanding, in spite of our own efforts.

  The entire evening was spoilt for me. I couldn’t sleep. If it had happened in Paris, it would have made me just as uneasy, but it would not have shaken me so much. However, seeing how far hatred had eaten into the kindly, simple people here in the depths of the provinces made me shudder. In the next few days I told the story of this episode to many friends. Most of them didn’t take it seriously. “Remember how we French mocked stout old Queen Victoria, and two years later came the Entente Cordiale with Britain. You don’t know the French; they don’t feel deeply about politics.” Only Rolland saw it in a different light. “The simpler the people, the easier it is to win them over. Things have looked bad since Poincaré was elected. His journey to Petersburg will not be a pleasure jaunt.” We talked for a long time about the International Socialist Congress that had been fixed for that summer in Vienna, but here too Rolland was more sceptical than most. “Who knows how many will stand firm once the posters ordering mobilisation go up? We have entered a time of mass emotion, crowd hysteria, and we cannot see yet what power it will have if war comes.”

  But, as I said earlier, such moments of anxiety passed by like gossamer blowing in the wind. We did think of war now and then, but in much the same way as one sometimes thinks of death—a possibility but probably far away. And Paris was too beautiful at that time, and we ourselves too young and happy to think of it much. I still remember a delightfully farcical ceremony devised by Jules Romains in which the idea of a prince des poètes was to be superseded by the crowning of a prince des penseurs, a good if rather simple-minded man who let the students lead him to the statue of Rodin’s Thinker outside the Panthéon. In the evening we made merry like schoolboys at a parody of a banquet. The trees were in blossom, the air was sweet and mild; who wanted to think of something as unimaginable as war in the face of so many pleasures?

  My friends were more my friends than ever, and I was making new friends too in a foreign land—an ‘enemy’ land. The city was more carefree than ever before, and we loved its freedom from care along with our own. In those final days I went with Verhaeren to Rouen, where he was to give a reading. That night we stood outside the cathedral, its spires gleaming magically in the moonlight—did such mild miracles belong to only one fatherland, didn’t they belong to us all? At Rouen station, where one of the railway engines he had celebrated in verse was to crush him two years later,7 we said our goodbyes. Verhaeren embraced me. “I’ll see you on the first of August at Caillou qui Bique!” I promised to be there. I visited him at his place in the country every year to translate his new poems, working in close collaboration with him, so why not this year too? I said goodbye to my other friends without a care, goodbye to Paris, an unsentimental goodbye such as you say to your own house when you are just going away for a few weeks. My plan for the next few months was clear. I was off to Austria, to somewhere secluded in the country to get on with my work on Dostoevsky (which as things turned out could not be published until five years later), and thus complete my book on Three Masters of Their Destiny, depicting three great nations through the work of their greatest novelists. Then I would visit Verhaeren, and perhaps make my long-planned journey to Russia in winter, to form a group there as part of our movement for intellectual understanding. All lay plain and clear before me in this, my thirty-second year; that radiant summer the world offered itself like a delicious fruit. And I loved it for the sake of what it was now, and what it would be in an even greater future.

  Then, on 28th June 1914, a shot was fired in Sarajevo, the shot that in a single second was to shatter the world of security and creative reason in which we had been reared, where we had grown up and were at home, as if it were a hollow clay pot breaking into a thousand pieces.

  NOTES

  1 This Zeppelin was the fourth model of the rigid airships developed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin through the last years of the nineteenth century; the first took to the air in 1900. The one described by Zweig, LZ 4, landed at Echterdingen near Stuttgart in 1906 to satisfy the requirements of the German army, which was thinking of buying it. But it then tore away from its moorings in the air and was wrecked. Luckily there was no one inside it at the time.

  2 Cyrenaica, a region of modern Libya occupied by Italy in 1911.

  3 René Arcos, 1881-1959, French poet and novelist.

  4 The Market in the Square, the subtitle of the first of Romain Rolland’s ten novels in the Jean-Christophe series. It was published in 1908.

  5 The magazine in which Rolland’s Jean-Christophe novels were first published in serial form.

  6 Also known as the Saverne Affair, from Saverne (in German Zabern) in Alsace, where incidents illustrating Prussian militarism foreshadowed the Great War.

  7 Emile Verhaeren was run over by a train and died at Rouen station in 1916.

  From

  BEWARE OF PITYr />
  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A SHORT EXPLANATION may perhaps be necessary for the English reader. The Austro-Hungarian Army constituted a uniform, homogeneous body in an Empire composed of a very large number of nations and races. Unlike his English, French, and even German confrère, the Austrian officer was not allowed to wear mufti when off duty, and military regulations prescribed that in his private life he should always act standesgemäss, that is, in accordance with the special etiquette and code of honour of the Austrian military caste. Among themselves officers of the same rank, even those who were not personally acquainted, never addressed each other in the formal third person plural, Sie, but in the familiar second person singular, Du, and thereby the fraternity of all members of the caste and the gulf separating them from civilians were emphasised. The final criterion of an officer’s behaviour was invariably not the moral code of society in general, but the special moral code of his caste, and this frequently led to mental conflicts, one of which plays an important part in this book. Stefa n Zweig

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  INTRODUCTION

  “To him that hath, more shall be given.” Every writer knows the truth of this biblical maxim, and can confirm the fact that “To him who hath told much, more shall be told.” There is nothing more erroneous than the idea, which is only too common, that a writer’s imagination is always at work, and he is constantly inventing an inexhaustible supply of incidents and stories. In reality he does not have to invent his stories; he need only let characters and events find their own way to him, and if he retains to a high degree the ability to look and listen, they will keep seeking him out as someone who will pass them on. To him who has often tried to interpret the tales of others, many will tell their tales.

  The incidents that follow were told to me almost entirely as I record them here, and in a wholly unexpected way. Last time I was in Vienna I felt tired after dealing with a great deal of business, and I went one evening to a suburban restaurant that I suspected had fallen out of fashion long ago, and would not be very full. As soon as I had come in, however, I found to my annoyance that I was wrong. An acquaintance of mine rose from the very first table with every evidence of high delight, to which I am afraid I could not respond quite so warmly, and asked me to sit down with him. It would not be true to say that this excessively friendly gentleman was disagreeable company in himself; but he was one of those compulsively sociable people who collect acquaintances as enthusiastically as children collect stamps, and like to show off every item in their collection. For this well-meaning oddity—a knowledgeable and competent archivist by profession—the whole meaning of life was confined to the modest satisfaction of being able to boast, in an offhand manner, of anyone whose name appeared in the newspapers from time to time, “Ah, he’s a good friend of mine,” or, “Oh, I met him only yesterday,” or, “My friend A told me, and then my friend B gave it as his opinion that…” and so on all through the alphabet. He was regularly in the audience to applaud the premieres of his friends’ plays, and would telephone every leading actress next morning with his congratulations, he never forgot a birthday, he never referred to any poor reviews of your work in the papers, but sent you those that praised it to the skies. Not a disagreeable man, then—his warmth of feeling was genuine, and he was delighted if you ever did him a small favour, or even added a new item to his fine collection of acquaintances.

  However, there is no need for me to say more about my friend the hanger-on—such was the usual name in Vienna for this particular kind of well-intentioned parasite among the motley group of social climbers—for we all know hangers-on, and we also know that there is no way of repelling their well-meant attentions without being rude. So I resigned myself to sitting down beside him, and half-an-hour had passed in idle chatter when a man came into the restaurant. He was tall, his fresh-complexioned, still youthful face and the interesting touch of grey at his temples made him a striking figure, and a certain way of holding himself very upright marked him out at once as a former military man. My table companion immediately leapt to his feet with a typically warm greeting, to which, however, the gentleman responded with more indifference than civility, and the newcomer had hardly ordered from the attentive waiter who came hurrying up before my friend the lion-hunter was leaning towards me and asking in a whisper, “Do you know who that is?” As I well knew his collector’s pride in displaying his collection, and I feared a lengthy story, I said only a brief, “No,” and went back to dissecting my Sachertorte. However, my lack of interest only aroused further enthusiasm in the collector of famous names, and he confidentially whispered, “Why, that’s Hofmiller of the General Commissariat—you know, the man who won the Order of Maria Theresia in the war.” And since even this did not seem to impress me as much as he had hoped, he launched with all the enthusiasm of a patriotic textbook into an account of the great achievements of this Captain Hofmiller, first in the cavalry, then on the famous reconnaissance flight over the river Piave when he shot down three enemy aircraft single-handed, and finally the time when he occupied and held a sector of the front for three days with his company of gunners—all with a wealth of detail that I omit here, and many expressions of astonishment at finding that I had never heard of this great man, decorated by Emperor Karl in person with the highest order in the Austrian Army.

  Reluctantly, I let myself be persuaded to glance at the other table for a closer view of a historically authentic hero. But I met with a look of annoyance, as much as to say—has that fellow been talking about me? There’s no need to stare! At the same time the gentleman pushed his chair to one side with an air of distinct displeasure, ostentatiously turning his back to us. Feeling a little ashamed of myself, I looked away from him, and from then on I avoided looking curiously at anything, even the tablecloth. Soon after that I said goodbye to my talkative friend. I noticed as I left that he immediately moved to the table where his military hero was sitting, probably to give him an account of me as eagerly as he had talked to me about Hofmiller.

  That was all. A mere couple of glances, and I would certainly have forgotten that brief meeting, but at a small party the very next day it so happened that I again found myself opposite the same unsociable gentleman, who incidentally looked even more striking and elegant in a dinner jacket than he had in his casual tweeds the day before. We both had some difficulty in suppressing a small smile, the kind exchanged in a company of any size by two people who share a well-kept secret. He recognised me as easily as I did him, and probably we felt the same amusement in thinking of the mutual acquaintance who had failed to throw us together yesterday. At first we avoided speaking to one another, and indeed there was not much chance to do so, because an animated discussion was going on around us.

  I shall be giving away the subject of that discussion in advance if I mention that it took place in the year 1938. Later historians of our time will agree that in 1938 almost every conversation, in every country of our ruined continent of Europe, revolved around the probability or otherwise of a second world war. The theme inevitably fascinated every social gathering, and you sometimes felt that fears, suppositions and hopes were being expressed not so much by the speakers as by the atmosphere itself, the air of those times, highly charged with secret tensions and anxious to put them into words.

  The subject had been broached by the master of the house, a lawyer and self-opinionated, as lawyers tend to be. He trotted out the usual arguments to prove the usual nonsense—the younger generation knew about war now, he said, and would not stumble blindly into another one. At the moment of mobilisation, guns would be turned on those who had given orders to fire them. Men like him in particular, said our host, men who had fought at the front in the last war, had not forgotten what it was like. At a time when explosives and poison gas were being manufactured in tens of thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of armaments factories, he dismissed the possibility of war as easily as he flicked the ash off his cigarette, speaking in a confident tone that irritated me. We
shouldn’t always, I firmly retorted, believe in our own wishful thinking. The civil and military organisations directing the apparatus of war had not been asleep, and while our heads were spinning with utopian notions they had made the maximum use of peacetime to get control of the population at large. It had been organised in advance and was now, so to speak, primed ready to fire. Even now, thanks to our sophisticated propaganda machine, general subservience had grown to extraordinary proportions, and we had only to look facts in the face to see that when mobilisation was announced on the radio sets in our living rooms, no resistance could be expected. Men today were just motes of dust with no will of their own left.

  Of course everyone else was against me. We all know from experience how the human tendency to self-delusion likes to declare dangers null and void even when we sense in our hearts that they are real. And such a warning against cheap optimism was certain to be unwelcome at the magnificently laid supper table in the next room.

  Unexpectedly, although I had assumed that the hero who had won the Order of Maria Theresia would be an adversary, he now spoke up and took my side. It was sheer nonsense, he said firmly, to suppose that what ordinary people wanted or did not want counted for anything today. In the next war machinery would do the real work, and human beings would be downgraded to the status of machine parts. Even in the last war, he said, he had not met many men in the field who were clearly either for or against it. Most of them had been caught up in hostilities like a cloud of dust in the wind, and there they were, stuck in the whirl of events, shaken about and helpless like dried peas in a big bag. All things considered, he said, perhaps more men had fled into the war than away from it.