Learning and Suffering in Vienna
them than to turn their young hopeful over their knees and bring him to reason. And nothing else that the little fellow may hear at home can strengthen his respect for his fellow human beings. Not a good word is said for humanity, no institution is inviolate, from the school teacher to the head of the state. No matter whether it is religion or morals, state or society, everything is vilified and dragged obscenely in the muck. When the boy leaves school at the age of fourteen, it is hard to tell which is greater—his incredible stupidity where knowledge and skill are concerned, or his biting insolence of manner, united with an immorality even at that age which makes one’s hair stand on end.
Even now he holds scarcely anything sacred; he has never met true greatness, but he does know every abyss of life; what position can he possibly occupy in the world which he is about to enter?
The three-year-old child has become a fifteen-year-old despiser of all authority. Aside from filth and uncleanness he has as yet known nothing which might stir him to any high enthusiasm.
Now he goes through the advanced grades of this existence. He begins the same life he has learned about from his father all the years of his childhood. He roves about, comes home heaven knows when, by way of diversion beats the tattered creature who once was his mother, curses God and the world, and finally on some particular ground is sentenced to a prison for juvenile delinquents.
Here he gets a final polish.
His dear fellow-citizens, however, are astonished at this young “citizen’s” lack of “national enthusiasm.”
They see theater and movies, trashy literature and yellow press day by day pouring out poison by the bucket upon the people; and then they are surprised at the low “moral tone,” the “national indifference” of the masses of that people. As if movie trash, cheap journalism and the like would produce the foundations for recognizing the greatness of the fatherland! To say nothing of the early education of the individual.
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