by Stefan Zweig
In hardly any other European city was the urge towards culture as passionate as in Vienna. For the very reason that for centuries Austria and its monarchy had been neither politically ambitious nor particularly successful in its military ventures, native pride had focused most strongly on distinction in artistic achievement. The most important and valuable provinces of the old Habsburg empire that once ruled Europe—German and Italian, Flemish and Walloon—had seceded long ago, but the capital city was still intact in its old glory as the sanctuary of the court, the guardian of a millennial tradition. The Romans had laid the foundation stones of that city as a castrum, a far-flung outpost to protect Latin civilization from the barbarians, and over a thousand years later the Ottoman attack on the West was repelled outside the walls of Vienna. The Nibelungs had come here, the immortal Pleiades of music shone down on the world from this city, Gluck, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Johann Strauss, all the currents of European culture had merged in this place. At court and among the nobility and the common people alike, German elements were linked with Slavonic, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, French and Flemish. It was the peculiar genius of Vienna, the city of music, to resolve all these contrasts harmoniously in something new and unique, specifically Austrian and Viennese. Open-minded and particularly receptive, the city attracted the most disparate of forces, relaxed their tensions, eased and placated them. It was pleasant to live here, in this atmosphere of intellectual tolerance, and unconsciously every citizen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world.
This art of adaptation, of gentle and musical transitions, was evident even in the outward appearance of the city. Growing slowly over the centuries, developing organically from its centre, with its two million inhabitants Vienna had a large enough population to offer all the luxury and diversity of a metropolis, and yet it was not so vast that it was cut off from nature, like London or New York. The buildings on the edge of the city were reflected in the mighty waters of the Danube and looked out over the wide plain, merged with gardens and fields or climbed the last gently undulating green and wooded foothills of the Alps. You hardly noticed where nature ended and the city began, they made way for one another without resistance or contradiction. At the centre, in turn, you felt that the city had grown like a tree, forming ring after ring, and instead of the old ramparts of the fortifications, the Ringstrasse enclosed the innermost, precious core with its grand houses. In that core, the old palaces of the court and the nobility spoke the language of history in stone; here Beethoven had played for the Lichnowskys; there Haydn had stayed with the Esterházys; the premiere of his Creation was given in the old university; the Hofburg saw generations of emperors, Napoleon took up residence at Schönbrunn Palace; the united rulers of Christendom met in St Stephen’s Cathedral to give thanks for their salvation from the Turks, the university saw countless luminaries of scholarship and science in its walls. Among these buildings the new architecture rose, proud and magnificent, with shining avenues and glittering emporiums. But old Vienna had as little to do with the new city as dressed stone has to do with nature. It was wonderful to live in this city, which hospitably welcomed strangers and gave of itself freely; it was natural to enjoy life in its light atmosphere, full of elation and merriment like the air of Paris. Vienna, as everyone knew, was an epicurean city—however, what does culture mean but taking the raw material of life and enticing from it its finest, most delicate and subtle aspects by means of art and love? The people of Vienna were gourmets who appreciated good food and good wine, fresh and astringent beer, lavish desserts and tortes, but they also demanded subtler pleasures. To make music, dance, produce plays, converse well, behave pleasingly and show good taste were arts much cultivated here. Neither military, political nor commercial matters held first place in the lives of individuals or society as a whole; when the average Viennese citizen looked at his morning paper, his eye generally went first not to parliamentary debates or foreign affairs but to the theatrical repertory, which assumed an importance in public life hardly comprehensible in other cities. For to the Viennese and indeed the Austrians the imperial theatre, the Burgtheater, was more than just a stage on which actors performed dramatic works; it was a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, a bright mirror in which society could study itself, the one true cartigiano of good taste. In an actor at the imperial theatre, spectators saw an example of the way to dress, enter a room, make conversation, were shown which words a man of taste might use and which should be avoided. The stage was not just a place of entertainment but a spoken, three-dimensional manual of good conduct and correct pronunciation, and an aura of esteem, rather like a saint’s halo, surrounded all who had even the faintest connection with the court theatre. The Prime Minister, the richest magnate, could walk through the streets of Vienna and no one would turn to stare, but every salesgirl and every cab driver would recognise an actor at the court theatre or an operatic diva. When we boys had seen one of them pass by (we all collected their pictures and autographs) we proudly told each other, and this almost religious personality cult even extended to their entourages; Adolf von Sonnenthal’s barber, Josef Kainz’s cab driver were regarded with awe and secretly envied. Young dandies were proud to have their clothes made by the tailors patronised by those actors. A notable anniversary in a famous actor’s career, or a great actor’s funeral, was an event overshadowing all the political news. It was every Viennese dramatist’s dream to be performed at the Burgtheater, a distinction that meant a kind of ennoblement for life and brought with it a series of benefits such as free theatre tickets for life and invitations to all official occasions, because you had been a guest in an imperial house. I still remember the solemn manner of my own reception. The director of the Burgtheater had asked me to visit his office in the morning, where he informed me—after first offering his congratulations—that the theatre had accepted my play. When I got home that evening, I found his visiting card in my apartment. Although I was only a young man of twenty-six, he had formally returned my call; my mere acceptance as an author writing for the imperial stage had made me a gentleman whom the director of that institution must treat as on a par with himself. And what went on at the theatre indirectly affected every individual, even someone who had no direct connection with it whatsoever. I remember, for instance, a day in my earliest youth when our cook burst into the sitting room with tears in her eyes: she had just heard that Charlotte Wolter, the star actress of the Burgtheater, had died. The grotesque aspect of her extravagant grief, of course, lay in the fact that our old, semi-literate cook had never once been to that distinguished theatre herself, and had never seen Charlotte Wolter either on stage or in real life, but in Vienna a great Austrian actress was so much part of the common property of the entire city that even those entirely unconnected with her felt her death was a catastrophe. Every loss, the death of a popular singer or artist, inevitably became an occasion for national mourning. When the old Burgtheater where the premiere of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro had been given was to be demolished, Viennese high society gathered there in a mood of solemn emotion, and no sooner had the curtain fallen than everyone raced on stage to take home at least a splinter from the boards that had been trodden by their favourite artists as a relic. Even decades later, these plain wooden splinters were kept in precious caskets in many bourgeois households, just as splinters of the Holy Cross are preserved in churches.
In my own day, we acted no more rationally when the so-called Bösendorfer Saal was torn down. In itself that little concert hall, which was reserved exclusively for chamber music, was a modest building, not suggesting any great artistic distinction. It had been Prince Liechtenstein’s riding school, and was adapted for musical purposes only by the addition of interior boarding, without any ostentation. But it had the resonance of an old violin, and it was a sacred place to music-lovers because Chopin and Brahms, Liszt and Rubinstein had given recitals there, and many of the famous quartets had first performed in this hall. A
nd now it was to make way for a new purpose-built concert hall; such a thing was beyond the understanding of those of us who had spent many memorable hours there. When the last bars of Beethoven died away, played better than ever by the Rosé Quartet, none of the audience left their seats. We shouted and applauded, some of the women were sobbing with emotion, no one was willing to admit that this was goodbye. The lights in the hall were extinguished to clear us out of the place. Still none of the four or five hundred people present left their seats. We stayed for half-an-hour, an hour, as if our presence could save the sacred hall by force. And as students, how we campaigned, with petitions and demonstrations and articles, to keep the house where Beethoven died from demolition! Whenever one of these historic Viennese buildings went, it was as if a part of our souls were being torn from our bodies.
This fanatical love of art, in particular the art of the theatre, was common to all classes of society in Vienna. Its hundreds of years of tradition had made the city itself a place with a clearly ordered and also—as I once wrote myself—a wonderfully orchestrated structure. The imperial house still set the tone, while the imperial palace represented not only the spatial centre of the city but also the supranational nature of the monarchy. Around that palace lay the grand residences of the Austrian, Polish, Czech and Hungarian nobility, forming what might be called a second rampart. Then came the houses of the members of ‘good society’—the minor nobility, higher civil servants, captains of industry and the ‘old families’. Below them came the lower middle class and the proletariat. All these social classes lived in their own circles and even in their own districts of the city: at the centre the great noblemen in their palaces, the diplomats in District Three, businessmen and industrialists near the Ringstrasse, the lower middle class in the inner districts, Districts Two to Nine, the proletariat on the periphery. However, they all came into contact with each other at the theatre and for major festivities such as the Floral Parade, when three hundred thousand spectators enthusiastically greeted the ‘upper ten thousand’ in their beautifully decorated carriages. Everything in Vienna that expressed itself in colour or music became an occasion for festivities: religious spectacles like the Corpus Christi procession, the military parades, performances by the outdoor musicians of the Burgmusik, even funerals attracted enthusiastic audiences, and it was the ambition of every true Viennese to end up as ‘a handsome corpse’ with a fine funeral procession and many companions escorting him on his last journey. A genuine Viennese turned even his death into a fine show for others to enjoy. The entire city was united in this sensitivity to everything colourful, musical and festive, in this delight in theatrical spectacle as a playful reflection of life, whether on the stage or in real space and time.
It was not difficult to make fun of the theatrical mania of the Viennese, whose delight in tracking down the tiniest details of the lives of their favourites sometimes became grotesque, and our Austrian political indolence and economic backwardness, by comparison with the determined German Reich next door, may indeed be partly ascribed to our overrating of sensuous pleasure. But in cultural terms the very high value placed on the arts created something unique—a great veneration for all artistic achievement, leading over the centuries to unequalled expertise, and finally, thanks in its own turn to that expertise, to outstandingly high standards in all cultural fields. An artist always feels most at ease and at the same time most inspired in a place where he is valued, even overvalued. Art always reaches its zenith where it is important in the life of an entire nation. And just as Renaissance Florence and Rome attracted painters and trained them to achieve greatness, because every one of them felt bound to keep outdoing others and himself, competing in front of the citizens as a whole, so musicians and actors knew how important they were in Vienna. At the Opera House, in the Burgtheater, nothing was overlooked, every wrong note was instantly detected, every incorrect entry or abridged passage deplored, and this keen surveillance was exercised not only by professional critics at premieres, but day after day by the alert ear of the public at large, honed as it was by constant comparison. While the attitude in politics, the administration and morality was easygoing, and one made allowances for a slipshod piece of work and showed leniency for an offence, no quarter was given in artistic matters. Here the honour of the city was at stake. Every singer, every actor, every musician must constantly give of his best, or his career was finished. It was wonderful to be a darling of the public in Vienna, but it was not easy to maintain that position. No lowering of standards was forgiven. And this awareness of being under constant and pitiless observation forced every artist in Vienna to do his best, bringing the art of the city as a whole to a very high level. All of us who lived there in our youth have brought a stern and implacable standard of artistic performance into our lives from those years. Those who saw discipline exercised down to the smallest detail at the Opera House under Gustav Mahler, and vitality combined with meticulous accuracy taken as the norm in music played by the Philharmonic, are rarely entirely satisfied with theatrical or musical performances today. But we also learnt to criticise our own artistic performance; the example before us was, and still is, a high level of achievement inculcated into rising artists in few other cities in the world. This understanding of the right rhythm and momentum went deep into the people themselves, for even the most unassuming citizen sitting over his Heurige,2 demanded good music from the wind band just as he expected good value from the landlord. Similarly, people knew exactly which military band played with most verve in the Prater, whether it was the German Masters or the Hungarians. Anyone who lived in Vienna absorbed a sense of rhythm as if it were in the air. And just as that musicality expressed itself in writers in the particular attention we paid to writing particularly well-turned prose, in others the sense of delicacy was expressed in social attitudes and daily life. In what was known as ‘high society’, a Viennese with no appreciation of art or pleasure in form was unimaginable, but even among the lower classes the lives of the poorest showed a certain feeling for beauty drawn from the surrounding landscape and genial human attitudes. You were not truly Viennese without a love for culture, a bent for both enjoying and assessing the prodigality of life as something sacred.
For Jews, adaptation to the human or national environment in which they lived was not only a measure taken for their own protection, but also a deeply felt private need. Their desire for a homeland, for peace, repose and security, a place where they would not be strangers, impelled them to form a passionate attachment to the culture around them. And nowhere else, except for Spain in the fifteenth century, were such bonds more happily and productively forged than in Austria. Here the Jews who had been settled in the imperial city for over two hundred years met people who took life lightly and were naturally easygoing, while under that apparently light-hearted surface they shared the deep Jewish instinct for intellectual and aesthetic values. And the two came together all the more easily in Vienna, where they found a personal task waiting for them, because over the last century Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy. In the eighteenth century Maria Theresia had had her daughters taught the pleasures of music, Joseph II had discussed Mozart’s operas with him as a connoisseur, Leopold II was a composer himself, but the later emperors Franz II and Ferdinand had no kind of interest in art, and Emperor Franz Joseph, who in his eighty years of life never read or even picked up a book other than the Army List, even felt a decided antipathy to music. Similarly, the great noblemen had abandoned their former position as patrons; gone were the glorious days when the Esterházys gave house-room to Haydn, when the Lobkowitzes and Kinskys and Waldsteins competed for the first performance of a work by Beethoven to be given in their palaces, when Countess Thun went on her knees to that great daemonic figure asking him not to withdraw Fidelio from the Opera. Even Wagner, Brahms, Johann Strauss and Hugo Wolf no longer received the slightest support from them; the citizens of Vienna had to step into the bre
ach to keep up the old high standard of the Philharmonic concerts and enable painters and sculptors to make a living, and it was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance. They had always loved the city, taking it to their hearts when they settled there, but it was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese. In fact they exerted little influence otherwise in public life; the lustre of the imperial house left all private wealth in the shade, high positions in the leadership of the state were in hereditary hands, diplomacy was reserved for the aristocracy, the army and the higher reaches of the civil service for the old-established families, and the Jews did not even try to look so high as to force their way into those privileged circles. They tactfully respected such traditional privileges as something to be taken for granted. I remember, for instance, that my father never in his life ate at Sacher’s, not for reasons of economy—the price difference between Sacher and the other great hotels was ridiculously small—but out of a natural instinct for preserving a distance. He would have felt it embarrassing or unseemly to sit at the table next to one occupied by, say, Prince Schwarzenberg or Prince Lobkowitz. It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights, because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone in the city, and the part played by the Jewish bourgeoisie in Viennese culture, through the aid and patronage it offered, was immeasurable. They were the real public, they filled seats at the theatre and in concert halls, they bought books and pictures, visited exhibitions, championed and encouraged new trends everywhere with minds that were more flexible, less weighed down by tradition. They had built up virtually all the great art collections of the nineteenth century, they had made almost all the artistic experiments of the time possible. Without the constant interest of the Jewish bourgeoisie as stimulation, at a time when the court was indolent and the aristocracy and the Christian millionaires preferred to spend money on racing stables and hunts rather than encouraging art, Vienna would have lagged as far behind Berlin artistically as Austria did behind the German Reich in politics. Anyone wishing to introduce a novelty to Vienna, anyone from outside seeking understanding and an audience there, had to rely on the Jewish bourgeoisie. When a single attempt was made in the anti-Semitic period3 to found a so-called National Theatre, there were no playwrights or actors or audiences available; after a few months the ‘National Theatre’ failed miserably, and that example first made it clear that nine-tenths of what the world of the nineteenth century celebrated as Viennese culture was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna.