Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

DURING THOSE EIGHT YEARS at grammar school, one very personal fact affected us all—starting as children of ten, we gradually became sexually mature young people of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Nature began to assert its rights. These days, the awakening of puberty seems to be an entirely private matter, to be dealt with for themselves by all young people as they grow up, and it does not at first glance appear at all suitable for public discussion. For our generation, however, the crisis of puberty reached beyond its own real sphere. At the same time, it brought an awakening in another sense—it taught us to look more critically, for the first time, at the world of the society in which we had grown up and its conventions. Children and even adolescents are generally inclined to conform respectfully to the laws of their environment at first. But they submit to the conventions enjoined upon them only as long as they see everyone else genuinely observing them. A single instance of mendacity in teachers or parents will inevitably make the young turn a distrustful and thus a sharper eye on their surroundings as a whole. And it did not take us long to discover that all those authorities whom we had so far trusted—school, the family, public morality—were remarkably insincere on one point—the subject of sexuality. Worse than that, they wanted us, too, to dissimulate and cover up anything we did in that respect.

The fact is that thirty or forty years ago, thinking on such subjects was not what it is in the world of today. Perhaps there has never been such a total transformation in any area of public life within a single human generation as here, in the relationship between the sexes, and it was brought about by a whole series of factors—the emancipation of women, Freudian psychoanalysis, cultivation of physical fitness through sport, the way in which the young have claimed independence. If we try to pin down the difference between the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century, which was essentially Victorian, and the more liberal uninhibited attitudes of the present, we come closest, perhaps, to the heart of the matter by saying that in the nineteenth century the question of sexuality was anxiously avoided because of a sense of inner insecurity. Previous eras which were still openly religious, in particular the strict puritanical period, had an easier time of it. Imbued by a genuine conviction that the demands of the flesh were the Devil’s work, and physical desire was sinful and licentious, the authorities of the Middle Ages tackled the problem with a stern ban on most sexual activity, and enforced their harsh morality, especially in Calvinist Geneva, by exacting cruel punishments. Our own century, however, a tolerant epoch that long ago stopped believing in the Devil and hardly believed in God any more, could not quite summon up the courage for such outright condemnation, but viewed sexuality as an anarchic and therefore disruptive force, something that could not be fitted into its ethical system and must not move into the light of day, because any form of extramarital free love offended bourgeois ‘decency’. A curious compromise was found to resolve this dilemma. While not actually forbidding a young man to engage in sexual activity, morality confined itself to insisting that he must deal with that embarrassing business by hushing it up. Perhaps sexuality could not be eradicated from the polite world, but at least it should not be visible. By tacit agreement, therefore, the whole difficult complex of problems was not to be mentioned in public, at school, or at home, and everything that could remind anyone of its existence was to be suppressed.

We, who have known since Freud that those who try to suppress natural instincts from the conscious mind are not eradicating them but only, and dangerously, shifting them into the unconscious, find it easy to smile at the ignorance of that naive policy of keeping mum. But the entire nineteenth century suffered from the delusion that all conflicts could be resolved by reason, and the more you hid your natural instincts the more you tempered your anarchic forces, so that if young people were not enlightened about the existence of their own sexuality they would forget it. In this deluded belief that you could moderate something by ignoring it, all the authorities agreed on a joint boycott imposed by means of hermetic silence. The churches offering pastoral care, schools, salons and the law courts, books and newspapers, fashion and custom all on principle avoided any mention of the matter, and to its discredit even science, which should have taken on the task of confronting all problems directly, also agreed to consider that what was natural was dirty, naturalia sunt turpia . [1] What is natural is vile. Science capitulated on the pretext that it was beneath its dignity to study such indecent subjects. Wherever you look in the books of the period—philosophical, legal, even medical—you find that by common consent every mention of the subject is anxiously avoided. When experts on criminal law met at conferences to discuss the introduction of humane practices to prisons and the moral damage done to inmates by life in jail, they scurried timidly past the real central problem. Although in many cases neurologists were perfectly well acquainted with the causes of a number of hysterical disorders, they were equally unwilling to tackle the subject, and we read in Freud how even his revered teacher Charcot admitted to him privately that he knew the real cause of these cases but could never say so publicly. Least of all might any writer of belles-lettres venture to give an honest account of such subjects, because that branch of literature was concerned only with the aesthetically beautiful. While in earlier centuries authors did not shrink from presenting an honest and all-inclusive picture of the culture of their time, so that in Defoe, the Abbé Prévost, Fielding and Rétif de la Bretonne we can still read unvarnished descriptions of the true state of affairs, the nineteenth century saw fit only to show the ‘sensitive’ and sublime, nothing embarrassing but true. Consequently you will find scarcely a fleeting mention in the literature of that era of all the perils and dark confusions of young city-dwellers of the time. Even when a writer boldly mentioned prostitution, he felt he should refine the subject, presenting a perfumed heroine as the Lady of the Camellias. [2] La Dame aux camélias , novel by Alexandre Dumas fils , on which Verdi’s famous opera La Traviata is based. So we are faced with the strange fact that if young people today, wanting to know how their counterparts of the last couple of generations made their way through life, open the novels of even the great writers of that time, the works of Dickens and Thackeray, Gottfried Keller and Bjørnson, [3] Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, 1832-1910, Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903. they will find—except in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who as Russians stood outside the pseudo-idealism of Europe—accounts of nothing but sublimated, toned-down love affairs because the pressures of the time inhibited that whole generation in its freedom of expression. And nothing more clearly illustrates the almost hysterical over-sensitivity of our forebears’ moral sense and the atmosphere in which they lived, unimaginable today, than the fact that even this literary restraint was not enough. Can anyone now understand how such a down-to-earth novel as Madame Bovary could be banned by a French court on the grounds of indecency? Or how Zola’s novels, in my own youth, could be considered pornographic, or so well-balanced a writer of neoclassical epic works as Thomas Hardy could arouse indignation in England and America? Reserved as they were on the subject, these books had given away too much of the truth.