Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

At first Herzl could reasonably feel misunderstood—Vienna, where he thought himself most secure after enjoying years of popularity, was abandoning him, even laughing at him. But then the answer came thundering back with such a weight of approval that he was almost alarmed to see what a mighty movement, far greater than his own person, he had called into being with his few dozen pages. Admittedly the answer did not come from the well-situated, middle-class Western Jews with their comfortable lives, but from the great masses in the East, the Galician, Polish and Russian proletariat. Without knowing it, Herzl’s pamphlet had fanned the heart of Judaism into flame. The Messianic dream, two thousand years old, of the return to the Promised Land as affirmed in the holy books, had been smouldering among the ashes of foreign domination. It was a hope and at the same time a religious certainty, the one thing that still gave meaning to life for those downtrodden and oppressed millions. Whenever someone, whether prophet or impostor, had plucked that string in the millennia of exile, the soul of the people had vibrated in sympathy, but never so powerfully as now, never echoing back with such a clamorous roar. One man, with a few dozen pages, had shaped a scattered and disunited throng into a single entity.

That first moment, when the idea was still taking dreamlike but uncertain shape, was to be the happiest in Herzl’s short life. As soon as he began to define the aims of the movement in real terms, trying to combine its forces, he could not help seeing how different these people had become under various different nationalities, with their different histories, sometimes religious, sometimes free-thinking, some of them socialist and others capitalist Jews, stirring themselves up against each other in a wide variety of languages, and none of them willing to fall into line with a single unified authority. In the year 1901, when I first met him, he was in mid-struggle, and was perhaps at odds with himself as well; he did not yet believe in ultimate success enough to give up the post that earned him and his family a living. He had to divide himself between his lesser work of journalism and the mission that was his real life. It was as feuilleton editor that Theodor Herzl received me that day.

Theodor Herzl rose to greet me, and instinctively I felt there was a grain of truth in the ill-intentioned joke about the King of Zion—he really did look regal with his high forehead, his clear-cut features, his long and almost blue-black beard and his deep-blue, melancholy eyes. His sweeping, rather theatrical gestures did not seem affected, because they arose from a natural dignity, and it would not have taken this particular occasion to make him look imposing to me. Even standing in front of the shabby desk heaped high with papers in that miserably cramped editorial office with its single window, he was like a Bedouin desert sheikh; a billowing white burnous would have looked as natural on him as his black morning coat, well-cut in an obviously Parisian style. After a brief and deliberately inserted pause—as I often noticed later, he liked such small effects, and had probably studied them at the Burgtheater—he deigned to give me his hand, though in a very friendly way. Indicating the chair beside him, he asked, “I think I’ve heard or read your name somewhere before. You write poetry, don’t you?” I said that I did. “Well,” he said leaning back, “so what have you brought me?”

I told him I would very much like to submit a little prose essay to him, and handed him my manuscript. He looked at the title page, turned to the end to assess its extent, and then leant back further in his chair. And to my surprise (I had not expected it) I saw that he had already begun to read the manuscript. He read slowly, turning the page without looking up. When he had finished the final page, he slowly folded the manuscript, then ceremoniously and still without looking at me put it into an envelope, and wrote something on the envelope in pencil. Only then, after keeping me in suspense for some time with these mysterious moves, did he raise his dark, weighty glance to me, saying with deliberate and slow solemnity, “I am glad to tell you that your fine piece is accepted for publication in the feuilleton of the Neue Freie Presse .” It was like Napoleon presenting a young sergeant with the cross of the Légion d’Honneur on the battlefield.

This may seem a minor, unimportant episode in itself. But you would have to be Viennese, and Viennese of my generation, to understand what a meteoric rise this encouragement meant. In my nineteenth year, I had risen to a position of prominence overnight, and Theodor Herzl, who was kind to me from that first moment, used the occasion of our meeting to say, in one of his next essays, that no one should believe the arts were in decline in Vienna. On the contrary, he wrote, as well as Hofmannsthal there were now a number of gifted young writers around who might be expected to do great things, and he mentioned my name first. I have always felt it a particular distinction that a man of the towering importance of Theodor Herzl, in his highly visible and thus very responsible position, was the first to express support for me.

It was a difficult decision for me to make when I said later, with apparent ingratitude, that I felt I could not join his Zionist movement actively and even help him to lead it, as he had asked. However, I could never have made a real success of such a connection; I was alienated most of all by the lack of respect, hardly imaginable today, that his real comrades expressed towards Herzl himself. The Eastern Jews complained that he understood nothing about the Jewish way of life and wasn’t even conversant with Jewish customs, while the economists among them regarded him as a mere journalist and feuilletonist. Everyone had his own objection, and did not always express it respectfully. I knew how much goodwill, particularly just then, those truly attuned to Herz’s ideas, particularly the young, could and should owe him, and the quarrelsome, opinionated spirit of constant opposition, the lack of honest, heartfelt acceptance in the Zionist circle, estranged me from a movement that I would willingly have approached with curiosity, if only for Herzl’s sake. Once, when we were discussing the subject, I openly confessed my dislike of the indiscipline in his ranks. He smiled rather bitterly and said, “Don’t forget, we’ve been used to dealing with problems and arguing over ideas for centuries. After all, historically speaking, we Jews have gone two thousand years without any experience of bringing something real into the world. Unconditional commitment has to be learnt, and I still haven’t learnt it myself. I still write for feuilletons now and then, I am still Feuilleton Editor of the Neue Freie Presse , when it should really be my duty to have only one thought in the world and never write a line about anything else. But I’m on my way to rectifying that; I’ll have to learn unconditional commitment myself first, and then maybe the rest of them will learn with me.” I still remember the deep impression these remarks made on me, for none of us could understand why it took Herzl so long to give up his position with the Neue Freie Presse —we thought it was for his family’s sake. But the world did not know until much later that such was not the case, and he had even sacrificed his own private fortune to the cause. This conversation showed me how much Herzl suffered personally in this dilemma, and many accounts in his diaries confirm it.

I met him many more times, but of all our encounters only one other seems to me really worth remembering, indeed unforgettable, because it was the last. I had been abroad, keeping in touch with Vienna only by letter, and met him one day in the city park. He was obviously coming away from the editorial offices, walking very slowly and not with his old, swinging step, but stooping slightly. I greeted him politely and was going to pass on, but he quickly came towards me, straightening his posture, and gave me his hand. “Now, why are you hiding away? There’s no need for that.” He approved of my frequent trips abroad. “It’s our only way,” he said. “All I know I learnt abroad. Only there do you get used to thinking on a wide scale. I’m sure that I would never have had the courage to form my first concept here, it would have been nipped in the bud. But thank God, when I came up with it, it was all ready, and they couldn’t do anything but try tripping me up.” He then spoke very bitterly about Vienna where, he said, he had found most opposition, and if new initiatives had not come from outside, particularly from the East and now from America too, he would have grown weary. “What’s more,” he said, “my mistake was to begin too late. Victor Adler was leader of the Social Democratic party at the age of thirty, the age when he was best fitted for the struggle, and I won’t even speak of the great figures of history. If you knew how I suffer mentally, thinking of the lost years—regretting that I didn’t find my vocation earlier. If my health were as strong as my will, then all would still be well, but you can’t buy back the past.” I went back to his house with him. Arriving there, he stopped, shook hands with me, and said, “Why do you never come to see me? You’ve never visited me at home. Telephone first and I’ll make sure I am free.” I promised him, firmly determined not to keep that promise, for the more I love someone the more I respect his time.