Asylum

by Moriz Scheyer

  ‘Chef de feuilleton’

  From 1924, in Vienna, until his dismissal at the Anschluss, Scheyer was arts editor of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt.22 He was in charge of ‘Theater und Kunst’–the review section–and thus held a position of some cultural influence. He himself regularly reviewed for one particular theatre, the Josefstädter, and organised the reviewing of the others. He also contributed many book reviews. His literary activity, though, has to be understood in the particularly continental context of the feuilleton. The term refers both to the arts pages of a newspaper and to a distinct type of article. Typically, a feuilleton takes a particular cultural event, such as a book publication or exhibition, as its starting point, but goes beyond mere review to offer a broader, essayistic reflection–a retrospective on an author, a historical reflection on the subject of a biography, or on a genre; feuilletons may also include reflections of a more personal or imaginative kind.

  The writing of feuilletons became Scheyer’s main literary activity. Such writing has certain typical characteristics: the creation of mood in a short span; the miniaturist’s attention to detail; succinct, punchy summing-up of an argument, or character; typically, some kind of emotional or ‘sentimental’, rather than purely analytic, response to the subject. Scheyer was at home with this miniaturist’s art; and he surely brought some of it to the present book. Chapters like ‘In place of a chapter on the Resistance’, ‘Carlos’, ‘The undeserving survivors’, read rather like feuilletons–though with very different themes from the ones written for his paper.

  Scheyer’s three further published books were collections of such essays, previously published in the NWT. They are: Escape to Yesterday (Flucht ins Gestern, 1927); Human Beings Fulfil Their Destiny (Menschen erfüllen ihr Schicksal, 1931); Genius and Its Life on Earth (Erdentage des Genies, 1938). The titles in themselves are indicative of certain moods or attitudes. The last two reflect the author’s preoccupation with the notion of the ‘great man’ (or, occasionally, woman), and especially with that of the great artist. The first betrays his capacity for nostalgia.

  Scheyer in his milieu: early 20th-century Vienna

  Such preoccupations were characteristic not just of Scheyer but also of Viennese writing of the early twentieth century much more broadly. They are attitudes which Scheyer shared, not least, with his almost exact contemporary (1881–1942) and friend, Stefan Zweig.

  Much of Zweig’s literary output–his most substantial books, in fact–consisted of biographies of historical, literary or intellectual figures; his subjects included Balzac, Dickens, Romain Rolland, Dostoevsky, Casanova, Stendhal and Tolstoy. Scheyer shared with Zweig the fascination with biography and with the great men of history, as well as a tendency to see in the literary or artistic genius some more-than-merely-mortal individual. But he also shared a fascination with his specific subjects. Each of the above figures was the subject of a feuilleton by Scheyer–in most cases, it seems, inspired by the Zweig publication. Scheyer’s last two books consist largely of essays dramatising the life stories of such ‘greats’; to the above names are added those of Verlaine, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Rembrandt.

  It could be said that nostalgia was something of a Viennese literary speciality in the early years of the twentieth century. The obsession with transience, with a vanishing, unrecoverable world, recurs in the opera librettos of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the novels of Joseph Roth23 (Radetzky March, The Emperor’s Tomb),* obsessed with the loss of the Old Empire and its traditions, and in the short stories of Stefan Zweig. In Zweig’s Buchmendel, an unemployable but irreplaceable man of letters is ejected from the café where he has for years resided by the harsh utilitarian attitude of the new management; in Chess Story, the mental breakdown of the brilliant amateur chess player is in a sense the breakdown of the old world which he represents against the uneducated, machine-like character of his opponent. Letter from an Unknown Woman is redolent with the sense of a lost past; and The World of Yesterday provides the title of one of Zweig’s last books, in which he recalls in nostalgic detail the era of his parents’ generation.

  So, too, Scheyer–in an essay on his older contemporary Arthur Schnitzler–writes of ‘the reflection of a city, that has since lost its own “I”.’ Schnitzler’s Vienna–that world of tradition and culture, of clear social orders and customs, of elegant love-affairs–is gone; it is a ‘disappearing dream, the resonance of a memory’. One seems here to be involved not so much in a nostalgia-fest as in a potentially endless nostalgic regress. The focus on transience, and the desire to revisit the past, are prominent features of Schnitzler’s characters, for example in his best-known play, Reigen (La Ronde, or Merry-Go-Round), an interlocked chain of sketches depicting sexual encounters at all levels of Viennese society. Nostalgia is already an essential element in this poetic world for which Scheyer experiences nostalgia.24

  In the context of the present book, of course, Scheyer had good reason to be nostalgic. ‘Once upon a time…,’ he begins, and proceeds to talk of the lost innocence of the world of 1944, the impossibility of still enjoying nature, and the summer, as one used to before the War intruded. But it is striking that he here quite closely echoes words he had written in 1927, in the preface of Escape to Yesterday; there, already, summers are not what they were.

  Again, when he talks in Asylum of how it is the present that seems ghostly, and only the past seems real, the notion recalls perspectives in his previous writing:

  Yesterday… it seems so many years since there still was a yesterday. It has become something so distant, so improbable, that–even if you have actually experienced it–you think of this yesterday as of a lost dream… The time of expectations is past. Beyond the realm of hope, of fulfilment, of beauty and excitement, we watch unmoved as a present which is at once harsh and ghostly passes us by–a present which is nothing but discontented noise and emptiness.

  (Escape to Yesterday, pp. 9–11)

  And nostalgia was a theme Scheyer had elaborated even in his first published book, Europeans and Exotics: ‘I have sought, again and again, to take refuge from the desolate reality of the last years in the only truth that still makes existence tolerable, opening wounds but at the same time healing them: memory’.

  War and depression

  It is tempting, perhaps, to see Scheyer, not just as buying into Viennese literary nostalgia, but as a permanent malcontent. An extremely sensitive individual, easily hurt and nervous; though clearly, too, equally sensitive to the beauty, the excitement, of moments–of books, of musical experiences, of paintings, of relationships. In my father’s doubtless unsympathetic view, he was someone who simply found it difficult to be happy–a permanent pessimist. But it is worth pausing to consider the concrete reasons for pessimism, in the volumes published up to 1927.

  One (about which I can only speculate) may be unhappiness in love. Moriz met Grete, presumably in 1925 or 1926, after the death of her first husband. A previous romantic obsession seems to be hinted at in Tralosmontes; and unhappiness in love is a submerged theme in Escape to Yesterday (‘There is only one solution: to love. You can only rediscover that sunken island, your homeland, in the heart of another–no longer in yourself’). In Europeans and Exotics, the end of the preface–talking of the comforts to be had from travel, and from the memory of it–suggests a profound loneliness. Another kind of misery is easier to document–namely that related to the Great War and its aftermath. Alongside more general expressions of the dullness and emptiness of the present, the prefaces to both Europeans and Exotics and Escape to Yesterday contain some comments which are more historically specific.

  These pieces were mostly written during the War… but without belonging to that moment, with its debased, mendacious language. I felt it my duty as a ‘good European’ to keep as far as possible away from any officially sanctioned ‘mindset’.

  (Europeans and Exotics, p. 5)

  They have disappeared without trace–vanished in a puff of dull, suffocating smoke–those wonderful cas
tles in the air, those bright Palaces of the Grail that were pointed out to us by cunning deceivers on the Horizon of Peace… Dynasties were overthrown; oppressors put aside; but in their place came a thousand other dynasties, a thousand other oppressors, each with a well-polished lie at the ready–a lie which was quite cynically deposited in the dustbin just as soon as the ‘last’ fluctuation on the stock exchange of world history had turned the weaker into the stronger. People babbled of progress, made proclamations of freedom–but in reality every solemn phrase, every programme, every attack on the status quo–every form of progress–only really had the purpose of enabling the onward march of the Market.

  (Escape to Yesterday, pp. 10–11)

  Scheyer’s press pass for the Vienna Opera for the 1937–38 season belied any sense that he would be forced to leave the city before the programme’s end.

  The remarks attest to the profound disillusionment and despair that resulted, not just from the War itself, but from the disastrous Depression that followed it, in Austria in particular. Scheyer is speaking of the illusory hopes that political leaders raised for the post-war world. There is a nostalgia for the ‘old order’ in preference to rampant capitalism; but it would also be possible to interpret the words in a more definitely socialist manner. It is interesting here to consider Scheyer’s political attitude to the First World War itself. A poem, Lonely Battlefield, was published by Scheyer in the Arbeiter-Zeitung (the organ of the Austrian Social Democratic party) on 17th November 1914:

  Lonely Battlefield

  Under the pale first snow

  Many a young sorrow lies buried.

  The late moon, indifferent and cold,

  Shines down like a funeral torch.

  The night utters prayers for the dead.

  In the east there glimmers a distant light.

  Scheyer (like Zweig) had been an ardent admirer of the pacifist Romain Rolland, and of the anti-nationalist philosophy of the ‘good European’. There seems insufficient evidence as to whether he remained a committed pacifist during Austria’s involvement in the War; however, the above poem, written so early on in the hostilities, makes a powerful statement.

  It is also noteworthy and horribly ironic that Scheyer’s last published volume, completed in 1937 and published in 1938, has much less sense of the ‘terrible times’, and the ‘need to escape’, than any of the others. But this too is revealing. Life was pretty good: he had a stable, respected professional position and was economically comfortable. And the advent of Hitler in Austria, though feared, was simply not anticipated as an immediate threat. Moreover, in early 1938 that latest book was receiving considerable critical acclaim, including an enthusiastic letter from Stefan Zweig, then resident in London.

  Music

  Scheyer’s attitude to and involvement with music also have to be understood in relation to their time and place. It is perhaps difficult for us to understand how fundamental music was to this culture, not just in artistic but also in social and intellectual terms. In Vienna classical music and its practitioners and institutions–especially the opera–were the focus of enormous popular fame, rivalries and press interest; but, more than that, to intellectuals music was a pursuit with a moral, even religious, dimension, its practitioners, in particular the composer and conductor, godlike figures, whose realm of activity lifted them far above normal human endeavour. It is noteworthy that Scheyer, though not actually a music critic, had a pass to attend dress rehearsals at the Opera. A family anecdote has him addressing Gustav Mahler in the street, and he seems to have been friendly with Bruno Walter; for both of whom he clearly had enormous admiration.

  Music recurs as a metaphor in his writing, too: the sound of Nazi boots provides ‘the new theme tune of Parisian life’; and in the camp at Beaune there is the ‘nightly symphony of misery and sorrow, with the rustling of straw running through it like a pedal note on the organ’. (Such elaborate metaphors could also be paralleled from the writings of Zweig.)25

  Moriz Scheyer’s French residence permit, issued in July 1947.

  The rediscovery of music at Labarde, via the radio, is one of the most vivid emotional experiences in the book. Nowhere is his nostalgia more real than in the evocation of the vanished faces of Mahler–‘the noble, illuminated face… the devotee at the altar of genius’–and of a previous generation of performers at the Vienna Opera. Music has the capacity to take him back, but also to take him completely outside normal reality. An otherworldly vision, as he says, which at the same time can shed light on this world.

  Scheyer’s work: historical and real-life experience

  There seems a terrible retrospective irony, as one reads through Scheyer’s collections of essays, with regard to two of the recurrent themes of his work: that of ‘becoming great through suffering’ and that of women who sacrifice themselves for the men in their lives. Tolstoy, Wilde and Verlaine, for example, are characterised as achieving their true potential–fulfilling their destiny–through suffering. It was, very specifically, Verlaine’s period of imprisonment that brought out his greatness; Wilde’s turned him into a poet.

  As for the women whose lives of self-sacrifice excite Scheyer’s interest, they include Mata Hari, the Empress Eugenie, Lady Hamilton (who inspires Nelson to greatness but dies lonely and unknown), Rachel (a famous French actress exploited mercilessly by her family), two literary figures, Mariana Alcoforado and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, whose sorrows are sublimated in poetry, and Anna Grigorievna and Sophie Andreevna, who sacrifice their lives to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy respectively. (There are, conversely, various female villains or ‘adventuresses’–Verlaine’s wife, the Tsaritza Catherina.)

  On the one hand, all this may seem to belong to the realm of outdated and historically unreal romanticisations of the great personalities of history and literature–and of a decidedly pre-feminist ‘harridan-or-heroine’ attitude to women. On the other, it may seem too horribly close to the bone, in relation to the very real suffering, heroism and female self-sacrifice that are so central to this book.

  At least it must be said that that in his historical account Scheyer is acutely conscious of the real-life heroism and self-sacrifice of two women in particular–Sláva Kolářová and Hélène Rispal; and also–though less explicitly, and though he never mentions her by name–of his own wife, Grete.

  Also that, again with the cruel judgement of hindsight, Scheyer’s main literary output, consisting of some 250 feuilletons, as well as sundry theatre and book reviews, all for immediate publication and consumption, may seem to today’s reader like a literary preparation, a honing of the talents required for the present work. The one which struggled to make it from writing to publication–indeed, to survive at all–but which, surely, provides his most enduring testament.

  People mentioned in the text

  Below are notes on people (and organisations) mentioned in the text.

  Abetz, Otto (1903–58). Appointed German ambassador to France in 1940, and as such theoretically at the head of the political wing of the Occupation, although in practice the SS and the Gestapo seem to have dominated. Abetz was, however, energetic both in the field of the promotion of German culture and, for a period in 1940, in ‘safeguarding’, i.e. confiscating, French works of art, especially those under Jewish ownership.

  Cairncross, Alec (1911–98). Distinguished economist and later Chancellor of Oxford University. He was in 1938 the representative of the International Student Service in Glasgow.

  ‘Carlos’: see Ordeig.

  Cassou, Jean (1897–1986). Museum curator, art critic, literary critic and, during his incarceration in Toulouse for Resistance activities in 1941 (he had been active in propaganda), author of a set of poems, 33 Sonnets Composés au Secret, composed and memorised in the absence of pen and paper.

  Crémieux, Benjamin (1888–1944). Author and intellectual who was in a position to help Moriz Scheyer during his time in Paris; however, he himself was to end up in Buchenwald. A French Jew, he became involved in Res
istance activities and anti-Vichy publications, and was arrested and then deported to the camp, where he died.

  Crucy, François (1875–1958). Journalist and socialist politician. He had been head of information in the left-wing Front Populaire government of 1936–37 under Léon Blum, and was a central figure in the Agence France-Presse after the Liberation.

  Darquier, Louis (1897–1980). Extreme fascist and anti-Semite. He succeeded Vallat as head of Vichy’s Commissariat général aux questions juives in May 1942 (immediately before the first mass deportations from France to the death camps); he was replaced in February 1944, apparently for excessive greed and incompetence.

  Dunlop, Marian (1880–1974). Inspirational teacher, writer and founder (in 1932) of the Fellowship of Meditation, developing a technique of Christian meditation which still has adherents. She acted as guarantor for Scheyer’s stepsons, Konrad and Stefan Singer, enabling them to come to Britain in 1938.

  ‘Exposition Juive’. The notorious exhibition ‘Le juif et la France’, mounted at the Palais Berlitz in Paris from September 1941 to January 1942 as Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

  FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur). Body formed in early 1944 through merging of several armed Resistance groups in France.