Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

My friends in Vienna had given me a whole series of letters of introduction, but I did not use any of them. After all, the real point of my venture was to escape the secure, bourgeois atmosphere of home and instead live free of all ties, cast entirely on my own resources. The only people I wanted to meet were those to whom I found the way through my own literary endeavours—and I wanted them to be as interesting as possible. After all, not for nothing had I read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème , [2] Scenes from Bohemian Life , the novel on which Puccini’s opera La Bohème is based. and at the age of twenty I was bound to want to try the bohemian life for myself.

I did not have to search long for a lively and motley assortment of friends. Back in Vienna I had been contributing for some time to the leading journal of the Berlin modernists, which went by the almost ironic title of Das Gesellschaft —Society—and was edited by Ludwig Jacobowski. Shortly before his early death, this young writer had founded a society called ‘Die Kommenden’—The Coming Generation—a name calculated to entice the young, which met once a week on the first floor of a coffee house on Nollendorfplatz. A truly heterogeneous company met in this society, which was created on the model of the Parisian ‘Closerie des Lilas’—writers and architects, snobs and journalists, young women who liked to be regarded as artists or sculptors, Russian students and ash-blonde Scandinavian girls who had come to Berlin to perfect their German. From Germany itself came representatives of all its provinces—strong-boned Westphalians, unsophisticated Bavarians, Silesian Jews, all mingling freely in fervent discussion. Now and then poems or dramas were read aloud, but for all of us our main business was getting to know each other. Amidst these young people who deliberately called themselves bohemians sat one old, grey-bearded man, a figure like Father Christmas—Peter Hille, whom we all loved and respected because he was a real writer and a real bohemian. Hille, then aged seventy, gazed kindly and guilelessly at the curious crowd of children that we were to him. He always wore his grey raincoat, which hid a frayed suit and dirty linen, and would bring badly crumpled manuscripts out of one of his pockets and read his poems aloud. They were poems like no others, more like the improvisations of a poetic genius, but too loosely formed, with too much left to chance. He wrote them in pencil, on trams or in cafés, then forgot them, and had difficulty deciphering the words on the smudged, stained piece of paper when he read them aloud. He never had any money, but he didn’t care about money, sleeping the night now at one friend’s, now at another’s, and there was something touchingly genuine about his total unworldliness and absolute lack of ambition. It was hard to work out when and how this kindly child of nature had made his way to the big city of Berlin, and what he wanted here. However, as in fact he wanted nothing, not even to be famous or celebrated, thanks to his poetically dreamy nature he was more carefree and at ease with himself than anyone else I have ever met. Ambitious disputants shouted each other down in vociferous argument all around him; he listened quietly, did not argue with anyone, sometimes raised his glass to someone in friendly greeting, but he never joined in the conversation. You felt as if, even in the wildest tumult, words and verses were in search of each other in his shaggy and rather weary head, without ever quite touching and finding one another.

The aura of childlike truthfulness emanating from this naive poet, who is almost forgotten today even in Germany, may perhaps have distracted my attention from the chosen chairman of the Coming Generation, yet this was a man whose ideas and remarks were to have a crucial influence on the lives of countless people. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, in whose honour his adherents built the most magnificent schools and academies to put his ideas into practice, was the first man I met after Theodor Herzl who was destined to show millions of human beings the way to go. In person he did not suggest a leader as strongly as Herzl, but his manner was more persuasive. There was hypnotic force in his dark eyes, and I could listen to him better and more critically if I did not look at him, for his ascetically lean face, marked by intellectual passion, was inclined to influence people by itself, men as well as women. At this time Rudolf Steiner had not yet worked out his own doctrines, but was still seeking and learning. He sometimes spoke to us about Goethe’s theory of colour, and in Steiner’s account of him the poet became more Faustian and Paracelsian. It was exciting to listen to him, for his learning was vast, and in particular it was magnificently wide and diverse by comparison with ours, which was confined to literature. After his lectures and many enjoyable private conversations I always went home both full of enthusiasm and slightly depressed. All the same—when I wonder now whether, at the time, I could have foretold that this young man would have such strong philosophical and ethical influence on so many people, I have to confess, to my shame, that I would not. I expected his questing spirit to do great things in science, and it would not have surprised me at all to hear of some great biological discovery made by his intuitive mind, but when many years later I saw the great Goetheanum in Dornach, the ‘school of wisdom’ that his followers founded for him as the Platonic academy of anthroposophy, I was rather disappointed that his influence had declined so far into the ordinary and sometimes even banal. I will not presume to pronounce judgement on anthroposophy itself, for to this day it is not perfectly clear to me what it aims for and what it means; I am inclined to think that in essence its seductive force came not from an idea but from the fascinating person of Rudolf Steiner himself. But in any case, to meet a man of such magnetic power at that early stage, when he was still imparting his ideas to younger men in a friendly manner and without dogmatism, was an inestimable benefit to me. His astonishing and at the same time profound knowledge showed me that true universality, which with schoolboy arrogance the rest of us thought we had already mastered, cannot be achieved by superficial reading and discussion, but calls for many years of ardent effort.

However, at that receptive time of life when friendships are easily made, and social and political differences have not yet become entrenched, a young man really learns better from his contemporaries in the same line of business than from his superiors. Once again I felt—although now on a higher and more international level than at school—how fruitful collective enthusiasm is. While my Viennese friends almost all came from the bourgeoisie, and indeed nine-tenths of them from the Jewish bourgeoisie, so that we were merely duplicating and multiplying our own inclinations, the young people of this new world came from very different social classes both upper and lower. One might be a Prussian aristocrat, another the son of a Hamburg shipowner, a third from a Westphalian farming family. Suddenly I was living in a circle where there was also real poverty, people in ragged clothes and worn-out shoes; I had never been near anything like it in Vienna. I sat at the same table as heavy drinkers, homosexuals and morphine addicts, I shook hands—proudly—with a well-known con man who had served a jail sentence (and later published his memoirs, thus joining our company as a writer). What I had hardly credited in realist novels was present here, teeming with life, in the little bars and cafés that I frequented, and the worse someone’s reputation was the more I wanted to know him personally. This particular liking for or curiosity about people living on the edge of danger has, incidentally, stayed with me all my life; even at times when more discrimination would have been seemly, my friends used to point out that I seemed to like mingling with amoral and unreliable people whose company might be compromising. Perhaps the very fact that I came from a solidly established background, and felt to some extent that this ‘security’ complex weighed me down, made me more likely to be fascinated by those who almost recklessly squandered their lives, their time, their money, their health and reputation—passionate monomaniacs obsessed by aimless existence for its own sake—and perhaps readers may notice this preference of mine for intense, intemperate characters in my novels and novellas. And then there was the charm of the exotic and outlandish; almost everyone presented my questing mind with a gift from a strange new world. For the first time I met a genuine Eastern Jew, the graphic artist E M Lilien, son of a poor Orthodox master turner from Drohobycz, and so I encountered an aspect of Jewishness previously unknown to me in its force and tough fanaticism. A young Russian translated for my benefit the finest passages from the Brothers Karamazov, unknown in Germany at the time; a young Swedish woman first introduced me to the pictures of Munch; I visited painters’ studios to observe their technique (admittedly they were not very good painters), a believer in spiritualism took me to seances—I sensed the diversity of a thousand forms of life, and never tired of it. The intense interest which at school I had shown only in literary form, in rhymes, verses and words, was now bent on human beings. From morning to night, I was always with new and different acquaintances in Berlin, fascinated, disappointed, even sometimes cheated by them. I think that in ten years elsewhere I never have enjoyed such a variety of intellectual company as I did in that one short semester in Berlin, the first of my total freedom.