The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Vienna Letter
VIENNA LETTER
IN this letter to the readers of The Dial I should prefer not to discuss cultural and artistic matters in Austria, but to take another point of view, and from this look out over another and a broader mental surface. But this point of view will always remain that of an Austrian, that is, of an individual who shares the language and the intellectual concerns common to the German, without belonging to that great political entity which was established in 1871 and humbled in the world war: the German Empire. Perhaps it is well to remind American readers, who are accustomed to dealing with large, simple, and plainly demarcated political and economic units, that in Europe there are many millions of Germans outside the German Empire who take an active part in their nation's essential and ultimate destiny—by which I do not mean its political destiny. There are the German Swiss—and in numbers they constitute the strongest part of the Swiss Confederation—the Austrians, and the millions of Germans who are incorporated in the Czecho-Slovak state, not to speak of the smaller and yet very considerable minorities which are to be found in the other countries of eastern Europe, and even in France.
Now it might seem that it would not be worth the trouble to bother American heads with the complications and intimate details of Europe; especially if one is not a politician, and the American interested in such things would less likely turn to The Dial than to the distinguished review which was founded a year ago with the purpose of propagating knowledge of foreign politics in the United States under the guiding spirit, if I am not mistaken, of Professor Coolidge of Boston. But in this old and complicated Europe, intellectual, historical, and political matters have the strictest and the most indissoluble connexion with one another. And this bewildering but essentially quite consistent interplay gives rise to that mystery which, if I were to turn a meteorological phenomenon into a spiritual one, I should call the pan-European weather; and exactly as with the weather, it has its maximum and its minimum temperatures, its rains and calms, its darknesses and stagnations, while the storms and cloudbursts are the European wars and revolutions. But I fear that Americans must be forced to take an interest in this weather, since somehow there will begin to be, not a European and an American weather, each independent of the other, but one general condition spreading over the whole planet. And I fear that to understand this meteorology they must learn to read more and more in the heavy tome of our (the European) intellectual life. Now to be sure, this book contains an unending amount of things which touch on the past; in fact, in the pages of this book the past and the present seem almost inseparable—a disturbing factor for the American attitude, which is based entirely on the present and derives so much momentary strength from this position. But nevertheless I fear that the American—I] mean the American who wants in some way to lay his hand on the hilt of present and future intellectual forces—cannot avoid puzzling over this old and heavy book. And his incentive will not be in the lukewarm pious deference which he owes to the intellectual situation in Europe because it has always lain behind his own experiences as a historical past, an hypothesis; but a much stronger and more feverish motive will impel him. In some day not far off, with the keenness of a besetting fever, with the poignancy of a dream, and the oppression of a nightmare, he will become conscious that all these European matters are by no means things of an unrelated past, but the living and fermenting present, a ferment in which so tremendously much of the past is a factor. He will see that this European present is also his American future, from which there is so little chance of his withdrawing himself or withdrawing his great young sea-encircled continent; that, rather, all the potentialities and catastrophes of geographic and racial destiny which are slumbering in this young continent will be released through no other conflagrations than that of Europe's intellectual future. We are now facing such an effect of the intellectual undercurrent of Europe upon the intellectual undercurrent of America. (I speak of processes which are worked out on a quite different plane from the relatively harmless economic crises and the almost stupid and inane vicissitudes of current politics.) The symptoms are manifesting themselves here and there, but to be sure they make a tremendously innocent and, in comparison with such great matters of the world's future, an almost trivial showing. I mean the gradual penetration of American imaginative life by the strong, subtle dream-toxins of the European imagination—a process whereby New York, the capital of the world (as it has now become in a certain sense owing to the war) has begun magically to attract all those individuals who are the carriers, in any sphere, of Europe's artistic and intellectual life. It makes no difference to me whether these individuals are called Bergson or France, or Chaliapine, Reinhardt, or Stanislawsky, or Anna Pavlowa, Elly Ney, or Maria Jeritza; or whether these results deriving from Europe are obtained through the subtleties of words and sentences with their spiritual import, through the soaring of a voice, the tones of an instrument, or the movements by which an inspired human body can display the incomprehensible. Also I completely and intentionally neglect the somewhat external and superficial forms in which this re-absorption seems to be taking place, and the primarily pleasure-seeking spirit behind the classes of the public who are the receivers of these influences. But no one who looks into such things can avoid the analogy between this situation and the situation which began with the last century of the Roman Republic and determined the nature of the centuries following—an analogy of course which, like any other, cannot be followed through too strictly. I refer to the invasion of the young Roman metropolis by the graeculus histrio, the Greek sophist, the Greek artist, the Greek dancer. With them enter Plato and his dreams, Egypt and its secrets, Persia, Babylon, Syria, Zoroaster, Mithras, and finally the gospel. The superficies of this society over which the invasion first spread, were, to be sure, only the rich classes, the pleasure-seekers, the sophisticated, and the curious. But the spirit is the subtlest of all poisons; inside of a century Rome was hollowed out, and in place of a relatively young and naïve, half-peasant civilization, it housed the mightiest and most portentous mixture of minds and religions that the world has ever seen. For such an intellectual infusion swiftly penetrates the blood vessels and the lymphatic chambers, and I believe that the United States, in the obscure depths of its becoming, conceals all those elements which are predestined, in making a contact with such enormous ferment as is contained in the intellectual life of Europe, to take on quite astonishing new extensions—especially of a religious nature, perhaps also artistic.
With this, by way of preliminary remarks, I shall try to outline in very rough strokes the inner aspect of spiritual Germany after the catastrophe of the war and of the peace which is continuing the war, and above all, the mentality and the attitude of the youth who are fully concerned in such crises. These young men do not see in the war any single sharply outlined historical event, but they look upon it as the climax of material and intellectual developments during the five or six preceding decades, or even the summing up, the symbolic and, one might say, the picturesque accomplishment of the whole nineteenth century. Their attitude after such a catastrophe is in every way entirely different from that of the young Russian men and women when they saw themselves in a similar situation after the collapse of the first Russian attempt at revolution in the years 1906-7. Among the young Russians at that time, there followed after a short but very acute exertion—for that revolution was a liberal one, carried on by the highest intellectual classes, and it was finally stifled by czarism with the help of the lower classes, the same people who are now Bolshevist—after a short period of activity, I say, there followed a complete relaxation of the nerves and of the will, a sinking back into melancholic apathy or into sensuality. In some of his novels which have obtained a passing fame, Artzibashev has described these circumstances. If I had to sum up in a word the effect of the great catastrophe of 1918 on the younger Germans, it would be the exact counter-concept of relaxation: namely, the most intense exertion, an exertion of a political nature, to a great extent—but I should like to omit here entirely the purely political. Exertion, then, of the mind, exertion of all mental exactions, exertion of the feeling of responsibility, and exertion of the consciousness, and of the sense of fate and the cosmos.
This young generation finds itself on the ruins of a world; not only the political world is a heap of ruins to them, but also the world of the intellect. The rationalism in which the nineteenth century thought that its world-outlook was organized indestructibly for all times, has collapsed. The first great act of the young generation was to dethrone rationalism, and subordinate it to the irrational. They abandoned the conceptions which the nineteenth century respected most: the conception of complete individual freedom, and the conception of evolution by which all the mysteries of existence have been more obscured than clarified. The conception of authority rose higher and purer, when all the actual bearers of authority had fallen. The effort was made as profoundly as possible to give the strongest possible foundation to the conception of authority in feeling and thinking (for when we are young we strive especially for a synthesis between feeling and thinking). All the misfortune which had been suffered, the tragic incomprehensibilities of the historic process to which one is subject, the awareness of their own shortcomings—all this was put into the corner-stone of the new belief. They tried to grasp the conception of fate as fully as possible. Incited and consolidated by the urge to arrive at new combinations of all things and to see something like order and sense in a dual—political and spiritual—catastrophe, they devoted themselves to two streams of thought and feeling. One is more Christian or mystic: the fusion of all things in a recognition of God which soars, so to speak, above and beyond the rational. The other is more ancient, or rather, oriental and pagan; starting from a magnificent comprehension of the material life, it arrives at the conception of life's flow, and likewise moves in a dark bed beneath the rational. But it is not as though each of these tendencies had precluded the other. Rather, they merged together, just as two tendencies had done almost two thousand years before, when a paganism striving after spirituality and a Judaic Christianity inclining towards a pagan outlook had really gone over into each other—and with tremendous results. This neither purely spiritual nor purely vitalistic attitude—which can no longer be reached by the categories of optimism or pessimism prevailing in the nineteenth century, because it operates, figuratively, on an entirely new plane—holds in thrall the minds of men who can be considered as forming one generation, and who will determine by their pressure all intellectual developments. It would be idle and trivial to desire to ascertain the numerical ratio between these individuals and the totality of available young men; yet I believe that there is a great body of these people who are filled with a religiosity which is not dogmatized, but living and pulsating, that they have swept through all classes of the nation, and are banding together in small conventicles everywhere throughout the German-speaking countries. This might be called a condition of pre-messianic religiosity. And it has even conjured up for itself a leader, or forerunner of the leader: not in the form of a human being of flesh and blood, but in the form of a dead man, a single deceased individual who had been forgotten by the nation for nearly a hundred years, but whose spiritual presence and power seems so great and unusual to the present generation rallying about him that we should rather speak of it as a religious phenomenon than a purely literary one. This man who was reborn, called back from the grave by the pressure of a whole generation, is the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. It must seem strange to people who are powerfully enmeshed in the notion of the immediate present to think that a generation of living men allows its highest thoughts to circulate about the figure of a youth who was born about a hundred and fifty years ago (1771) and vanished from this world about 1803 or 1804; not through death, but through an almost fated madness, under the cloud of which he lived on until after the year 1840. Thus, approximately, a contemporary of Shelley, evoked by the faith and will of a whole generation to serve as the symbol of a leader in one of the most sinister conditions in all history. And yet I am speaking of things which are utterly real, in any case possessing much more reality in thousands of heads than all that is going on between ministers and ministers, party leaders and party leaders, and which is filling up the ephemeral columns of the newspapers; things also which have quite external and tangible effects, in that throughout the German world one edition after another of the works of this poet who was almost forgotten during his lifetime and fifty years ago was hardly known by name, is being issued and eagerly consumed by the public. It is not easy to tell foreigners what it is that can take a long-dead lyric poet—whose hymns and elegies are of a wonderful rhythmic strength, but at the same time are linguistically very difficult and in places truly obscure—and with a single stroke make him the leader of a whole fated generation, so that they recover themselves in him after a stupor of several years, and begin building the greatest structures in accordance with him. So I must content myself with a few mere pointers. But it is remarkable enough to think that in particular the strophes of his last productive years when he was already in the shadow of madness, strophes which passed for decades as completely incomprehensible or even as simply the senseless products of a maniac, are now really understood, not only by scattered individuals, but by many; and an unending content pours from these sibylline pages into their hearts, while this content is such that it seems to be precisely the one possible solace for the present hour and situation. He is especially fitted as the leader and the symbol of a tragic hour for this reason: he was a tragic figure, and besides, of remarkable purity, misunderstood, even completely disdained by the world of his contemporaries, beaten by fate in every way, entirely alone and therefore remaining entirely good, indeed—like the noble harp— answering every stroke with always purer and higher tones. But this declares only the pathetic element radiating from his figure, and not the intellectual. But quite aside from everything which makes him a touching, poetic figure, or a mystical one if you will, he possessed great intellectual potency. Driven by a relentless but genuinely German destiny to retire within himself, he made himself a world from within. Yet it was not at all—as with the romantics living after him—a world of the fleeting and music-like dream; it was a world of crystalline vision in which all the spiritual, moral, and historical forces of reality had their place, although not viewed coldly through the understanding, but with a mythopoeic or religious eye. The more pitilessly and confusingly the real world encircled him, the more powerfully his soul struggled to construct within itself a vision embracing all the forces in the world and reconciling them with one another. As I try to describe for Anglo-American readers of The Dial the aspect of this mighty supernatural presence, the name of William Blake comes spontaneously to my mind; and in fact an analogy does exist for those who look more closely at the phenomena of the spirit. In any case, abandoning himself to a pure and demoniacally powerful intuition, Hölderlin perfected within himself a synthesis of the great historical past on which our intellectual existence rests; and in this synthesis he produced the solemn union of the two great tendencies which I designated above as the religious complexes in the consciousness of this last living generation. He grasped Hellenism with his whole soul; but precisely because he grasped it completely and lived in it, towards the end of his life he also moved through an evolution which transpired in Hellenism itself—if we see, glimmering through Plato, a light which is identical with that of Christianity. He grasped this youthful and still undogmatized spirit of Christianity without, one might say, completely abandoning the spirit of Hellenism. The great pagan conceptions of fate and the gods live in his poetic world along with deeply Christian attitudes and intuitions—Aether and Bacchus with Christ. So the generation of the living sees its deepest yearning, the germ of its new religious dream, pre-existing in this mystic leader. His star shines over their spiritual world; and for the moment, as the stars will it, this figure is nearer to the heart and affects the heart more powerfully, than even the powerful and ever comforting vision of Goethe.