Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

Notable days in our lives have a brighter aura about them than the ordinary kind. So I now remember that first visit with great clarity. I climbed five narrow, winding flights of stairs in an unpretentious building in the boulevard Montparnasse, and even outside the door I felt a special kind of stillness; the noise in the street sounded hardly any louder than the wind blowing in the trees of an old monastery garden below the windows. Rolland opened the door and took me into his small room, which was crammed with books up to the ceiling. For the first time I saw his remarkably bright blue eyes, the clearest and at the same time kindest eyes I ever saw in any human being, eyes that drew colour and fire from his inmost feelings in conversation, darkly shadowed in sorrow, appearing to grow deeper when he was thinking, sparkling with excitement—those unique eyes, under lids that were a little overtired, easily became red-rimmed when he had been reading or staying up late, but could shine radiantly in a congenial and happy light. I observed his figure with a little anxiety. Tall and thin, he stooped slightly as he walked, as if the countless hours at his desk had weighed his head down; his very pale complexion and angular features made him look rather unwell. He spoke very quietly and was sparing of physical effort in general; he almost never went out walking, he ate little, did not drink or smoke, but later I realised, with admiration, what great stamina there was in that ascetic frame, what a capacity for intellectual work lay behind his apparent debility. He would write for hours at his small desk, which was piled high with papers; he would read in bed for hours, never allowing his exhausted body more than four or five hours of sleep, and the only relaxation in which he indulged was music. He played the piano very well, with a delicate touch that I shall never forget, caressing the keys as if to entice rather than force the notes out of them. No virtuoso—and I have heard Max Reger, Busoni and Bruno Walter playing in small gatherings—gave me such a sense of direct communication with the master composers he loved.

His knowledge was very wide, putting most of us to shame; although he really lived only through his reading eyes; he had a fine command of literature, philosophy, history, and the problems of all nations at all times. He knew every bar of classical music; he was familiar with even the least-known works of Galuppi and Telemann, and with the music of sixth-rate or seventh-rate composers as well, yet he took a passionate interest in all events of the present day. The world was reflected in this monastic cell of his as if in a camera obscura. He had been on familiar terms with the great men of his time, had been a pupil of Renan, a guest in Wagner’s house, a friend of Jaurès. Tolstoy had written him a famous letter that would go on record as human appreciation of his literary works. Here—and this always rejoices my heart—I sensed a human and moral superiority, an inner freedom without pride, something to be taken for granted in a strong mind. At first sight, and time has proved me right, I recognised him as the man who would be the conscience of Europe in its time of crisis. We talked about his Jean-Christophe novels. Rolland told me that he had tried to make the work fulfil a triple purpose—conveying his gratitude to music, his commitment to the cause of European unity, and an appeal to the nations to stop and think. Now we must all do what we could in our own positions, our own countries, our own languages. It was time, he said, to be more and more on our guard. The forces working for hatred, in line with their baser nature, were more violent and aggressive than the forces of reconciliation, and there were material interests behind them which, of their very nature, were more unscrupulous than ours. I found such grief over the fragility of earthly structures doubly moving in a man whose entire work celebrated the immortality of art. “It can bring comfort to us as individuals,” he replied to me, “but it can do nothing against stark reality.”

This was in 1913. It was the first conversation that showed me it was our duty not to confront the possibility of a European war passively and unprepared. When the crucial moment came, nothing gave Rolland such great moral superiority over everyone else as the way he had already, and painfully, strengthened his mind to face it in advance. Perhaps the rest of our circle had done something too. I had translated many works, I had promoted the best writers in the countries that were our neighbours, I had accompanied Verhaeren on a lecture tour all over Germany in 1912, and the tour had turned out to be a symbolic demonstration of Franco-German fraternity. In Hamburg Verhaeren and Dehmel, respectively the greatest poets of their time writing in French and German, had embraced in public. I had interested Reinhardt in Verhaeren’s new play; our collaboration on both sides had never been warmer, more intense or more unconstrained, and in many hours of enthusiasm we entertained the illusion that we had shown the world the way that would save it. The world, however, took little notice of such literary manifestations, but went its own way to ruin. There was a kind of electrical crackling in the structural woodwork as if of invisible friction. Now and then a spark would fly up—the Zabern Affair, [6] Also known as the Saverne Affair, from Saverne (in German Zabern) in Alsace, where incidents illustrating Prussian militarism foreshadowed the Great War. the crises in Albania, the occasional unfortunate interview. Never more than a spark, but each one could have caused the accumulation of explosive material to blow up. We in Austria were keenly aware that we were at the heart of the area of unrest. In 1910 Emperor Franz Joseph passed the age of eighty. The old man, an icon in his own lifetime, could not last much longer, and a mystical belief began to spread among the public at large that after his death there would be no way to prevent the dissolution of the thousand-year-old monarchy. At home, the pressure of opposing nationalities grew; abroad Italy, Serbia, Romania and to some extent even Germany were waiting to divide up the Austrian empire. The war in the Balkans, where Krupp and Schneider-Creusot competed in trying out their artillery on ‘human material’, just as later the Germans and Italians tried out their aeroplanes during the Spanish Civil War, drew us further and further into the raging torrent. We kept waking with a start, but to breathe again and again, with a sigh of relief, “Not this time. Not yet, and let us hope never!”

As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. That atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes of the kind that I am going to recount here. To be honest, I did not believe that war was coming at the time. But I twice had what might be called a waking dream of it, and woke with my mind in great turmoil. The first time was over the ‘Redl Affair’, which like many of those episodes that form a backdrop to history is not widely known.

Personally I knew Colonel Redl, the central character in one of the most complex of espionage dramas, only slightly. He lived a street away from me in the same district of Vienna, and once, in the café where this comfortable-looking gentleman, who appreciated the pleasures of the senses, was smoking his cigar, I was introduced to him by my friend Public Prosecutor T. After that we greeted each other when we met. But it was only later that I discovered how much secrecy surrounds us in the midst of our daily lives, and how little we really know about those who are close to us. This colonel, who looked very much the usual capable Austrian officer, was in the confidence of the heir to the throne. It was his important responsibility to head the army’s secret service and thwart the activities of their opposing counterparts. It came out that during the crisis of the war in the Balkans in 1912, when Russia and Austria were mobilising to move against each other, the most important secret item in the hands of the Austrian army, the ‘marching plan’, had been sold to Russia. If war had come, this would have been nothing short of disastrous, for the Russians now knew in advance, move by move, every tactical manoeuvre for attack planned by the Austrian army. The panic set off among the General Staff of the army by this act of treachery was terrible. It was up to Colonel Redl, as the man in charge, to apprehend the traitor, who must be somewhere in the very highest places. The Foreign Ministry, not entirely trusting the competence of the military authorities, also let it be known without first informing the General Staff—a typical example of the jealous rivalry of those organisations—that they were going to follow the matter up independently, and to this end gave the police the job of taking various measures, including the opening of letters from abroad sent poste restante, regardless of the principle that such correspondence was strictly private.