Although most of us know the date and the place of our birth—mine is July 28, 1902, at a place called Himmelhof in the Ober St Veit district of Vienna—few know when and how their intellectual life began. So far as my philosophical development goes, I do remember some of its early stages. But it certainly started later than my emotional and moral development.
As a child I was, I suspect, somewhat puritanical, even priggish, though this attitude was perhaps tempered by the feeling that I had no right to sit in judgement on anybody except myself. Among my earliest memories are feelings of admiration for my elders and betters, for example for my cousin Eric Schiff, whom I greatly admired for being one year older than I, for his tidiness and, especially, for his good looks: gifts which I always regarded as important and unattainable.
One often hears it said nowadays that children are cruel by nature. I do not believe it. I was, as a child, what Americans might call a “softy”, and compassion is one of the strongest emotions I remember. It was the main component of my first experience of falling in love, which happened when I was four or five years old. I was taken to a kindergarten, and there was a beautiful little girl who was blind. My heart was torn, both by the charm of her smile and by the tragedy of her blindness. It was love at first sight. I have never forgotten her, though I saw her only once, and only for an hour or two. I was not sent to the kindergarten again; perhaps my mother noticed how much I was upset.
The sight of abject poverty in Vienna was one of the main problems which agitated me when I was still a small child—so much so that it was almost always at the back of my mind. Few people now living in one of the Western democracies know what poverty meant at the beginning of this century: men, women, and children suffering from hunger, cold and hopelessness. But we children could not help. We could do no more than ask for a few coppers to give to some poor people.
It was only after many years that I found that my father had worked hard and long to do something about this situation, although he had never talked about these activities. He worked on two committees which were running homes for the homeless: a freemasons’ lodge of which he was for many years the Master ran a home for orphans, while the other committee (not masonic) built and administered a large institution for homeless adults and families. (An inmate of the latter institution—the “Asyl für Obdachlose”—was Adolf Hitler during his early stay in Vienna.)
This work of my father’s received unexpected recognition when the old Emperor made him a knight of the Order of Francis Joseph (Ritter des Franz Josef Ordens), which must have been not only a surprise but a problem. For although my father—like most Austrians—respected the Emperor, he was a radical liberal of the school of John Stuart Mill, and not at all a supporter of the government.
As a freemason he was even a member of a society which at that time was declared illegal by the Austrian government, though not by the Hungarian government of Francis Joseph. Thus the freemasons often met beyond the Hungarian border, in Pressburg (now Bratislava in Czechoslovakia). The Austro-Hungarian Empire, though a constitutional monarchy, was not ruled by its two Parliaments: they had no power to dismiss the two Prime Ministers or the two Cabinets, not even by a vote of censure. The Austrian Parliament, it would seem, was even weaker than the English Parliament under William and Mary, if such a comparison can be made at all. There were few checks and balances, and there was severe political censorship; for example, a brilliant political satire, Anno 1903, which my father had written under the pen name Siegmund Karl Pflug, was seized by the police on its publication in 1904 and remained on the Index of prohibited books until 1918.
Nevertheless, in those days before 1914 there was an atmosphere of liberalism in Europe west of Czarist Russia; an atmosphere which also pervaded Austria and which was destroyed, for ever it now seems, by the First World War. The University of Vienna, with its many teachers of real eminence, had a great degree of freedom and autonomy. So had the theatres, which were important in the life of Vienna—almost as important as music. The Emperor kept aloof from all political parties and did not identify himself with any of his governments. Indeed he followed, almost to the letter, the precept given by Søren Kierkegaard to Christian VIII of Denmark.1