I was twelve, then, when the First World War broke out; and the war years, and their aftermath, were in every respect decisive for my intellectual development. They made me critical of accepted opinions, especially political opinions.
Of course, few people knew at that time what war meant. There was a deafening clamour of patriotism throughout the country in which even some of the members of our previously far from warmongering circle participated. My father was sad and depressed. Yet even Arndt could see something hopeful. He hoped for a democratic revolution in Russia.
Afterwards I often remembered these days. Before the war, many members of our circle had discussed political theories which were decidedly pacifist, and at least highly critical of the existing order, and had been critical of the alliance between Austria and Germany, and of the expansionist policy of Austria in the Balkans, especially in Serbia. I was staggered by the fact that they could suddenly become supporters of that very policy.
Today I understand these things a little better. It was not only the pressure of public opinion; it was the problem of divided loyalties. And there was also fear — the fear of violent measures which, in war, have to be taken by the authorities against dissenters, since no sharp line can be drawn between dissent and treason. But at the time I was greatly puzzled. I knew, of course, nothing about what had happened to the socialist parties of Germany and France: how their internationalism disintegrated. (A marvellous description of these events can be found in the last volumes of Roger Martin du Gard’s Les Thibaults.)5
For a few weeks, under the influence of war propaganda in my school, I became a little infected by the general mood. In the autumn of 1914 I wrote a silly poem “Celebrating the Peace”, in which the assumption was expressed that the Austrians and the Germans had successfully resisted the attack (I then believed that “we” had been attacked) and which described, and celebrated, the restoration of peace. Though it was not a very warlike poem I soon became thoroughly ashamed of the assumption that “we” had been attacked. I realized that the Austrian attack on Serbia and the German attack on Belgium were terrible things and that a huge apparatus of propaganda was trying to persuade us that they had been justified. In the winter of 1915–16 I became convinced—under the influence, no doubt, of prewar socialist propaganda—that the cause of Austria and Germany was a bad cause and that we deserved to lose the war (and therefore that we should lose it, as I naively argued).
One day, I think it must have been in 1916, I approached my father with a reasonably well-prepared statement of this position, but found him less responsive than I expected. He was more doubtful than I about the rights and wrongs of the war, and also about its outcome. In both respects he was, of course, correct, and obviously I had seen these things in an oversimplified manner. Yet he took my views very seriously, and after a lengthy discussion he expressed an inclination to agree with them. So did my friend Arndt. After this I had few doubts.
Meanwhile all of my cousins who were old enough were fighting as officers in the Austrian army, and so were many of our friends. My mother still took us for our summer vaction to the Alps, and in 1916 we were again in the Salzkammergut—this time in Ischl, where we rented a little house high up on a wooded slope. With us was Freud’s sister, Rosa Graf, who was a friend of my parents. Her son Hermann, only five years my senior, came for a visit in uniform on his final leave before going to the front. Soon after came the news of his death. The grief of his mother—and of his sister, Freud’s favourite niece—was terrible. It made me realize the meaning of those frightful long lists of people killed, wounded and missing.
Soon afterwards political issues made themselves felt again. The old Austria had been a multilingual state: there were Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, southern Slavs (Yugoslavs), and Italian-speaking people. Now rumour began to leak through of the defection of Czechs, Slavs, and Italians from the Austrian army. The dissolution had begun. A friend of our family who was acting as judge advocate told us about the Pan-Slavic movement, which he had to study professionally, and about Masaryk, a philosopher from the Universities of Vienna and Prague who was the leader of the Czechs. We heard about the Czech army formed in Russia by Czech-speaking Austrian prisoners of war. And then we heard rumours about death sentences for treason, and the terror directed by the Austrian authorities against people suspected of disloyalty.