Learning and Suffering in Vienna
of its own guilt will there be both the inward calm and the outward power brutally and ruthlessly to prune the suckers, to uproot the weeds.
As the Austrian state had practically no social legislation or administration of justice at all, its weakness in suppressing even the worst excesses was conspicuous.
I do not know what horrified me most at that time—the economic misery of my companions, their moral coarseness, or the low state of their intellectual development.
How often does our bourgeoisie rise up in righteous indignation when it hears some wretched tramp say he does not care whether he is a German or not, that he is equally happy anywhere so long as he has what he needs to five on!
This lack of “national pride” is deeply deplored, and abhorrence for such sentiments most vigorously expressed.
But how many have really asked themselves the true cause of their own better sentiments? How many realize the vast number of individual reminders of the grandeur of the fatherland, the nation in every field of cultural and art life, which taken together make up a justified pride in belonging to so fortunate a people?
How many people can imagine the extent to which pride of fatherland depends on knowledge of its greatness in all these fields? Have the members of our bourgeoisie considered the laughable extent to which this prerequisite for pride in the fatherland is made available to the “people?”
There is no resorting to the excuse that “it is just the same in other countries,” but that the worker there holds to his nationality “nevertheless.” Even if this were so, it would be no excuse for one’s own shortcomings. But it is not so. For what we call the “chauvinistic” upbringing of, for instance, the French people is nothing more than excessive emphasis on France’s greatness in every department of culture, or as the Frenchman says, of “civilization.” The young Frenchman is simply not trained to objectivity, but to the most subjective attitude imaginable wherever the political or cultural greatness of his fatherland is concerned.
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