Childhood Home
in old Austria while I was still quite small. Money was collected for Südmark by school associations; cornflower and black-red-gold badges proclaimed our sentiments; “Heil” was our greeting, and instead of the Imperial anthem we would sing Deutschland über alles despite warnings and punishments. All this trained young people politically at a time when citizens of a so-called national state still knew very little more about their own national characteristics than their language. That I was not among the lukewarm, even in those days, will be understood. I was soon a fanatical German Nationalist—naturally not the same thing as the present party of that name.
My development in that direction was very rapid, so that by the time I was fifteen I realized the difference between dynastic “patriotism” and the “nationalism” of the people; and for me even then only the latter existed.
Anyone who has not taken the trouble to study internal conditions in the Hapsburg Monarchy may find such a development puzzling. But in Austrian schools, instruction in world history was bound to sow the seed of this feeling, for there is after all scarcely any specifically Austrian history worth mentioning. The fate of that State is so completely bound up with the life and growth of Germanity as a whole that it is unthinkable (for instance) to divide history into German and Austrian history. Nay more, when at last Germany began to split into two spheres of authority, this very separation was German history.
The insignia of a former Imperial splendor, preserved at Vienna, seem to go on exercising their spell as a pledge of everlasting common life.
The elemental cry of the German Austrian people for union with their German mother country in the days of the Hapsburg state’s collapse was but the product of an ache slumbering deep in the people’s heart—a longing for this return to the unforgotten home of their fathers. But there would be no explaining this if the historical training of the individual German Austrian had not caused such a general nostalgia. In that training is a fountain that never runs dry, a silent reminder in times of forgetfulness,
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