ROBERT S. WISTRICH
55
humanity could progress towards universality only through the cultiva–
tion of individuals and never
en masse.
He always sought in his popular
novels and biographies to decompose the masses into their individual
components and thereby
humanize
them, to demonstrate that it was the
moral and intellectual capacities of individual human beings which ulti–
mately determine events.
Yet Stefan Zweig's poignant commitment to Europe's humanist cul–
ture rigorously excluded any
political
action (despite his militant pacifism)
and literally paralyzed him in the 1930s when confronted by the frenzied
German masses who rallied to Hitler. Ironically, in his classic memoir,
Die Welt von Gestern,
an unscrupulous Austrian demagogue, similar to
Karl Lueger (who served as a political role model for the young Hitler
in Vienna) is sympathetically portrayed by Zweig as an irreproachable
democrat, serenely integrated into the "Golden Age of Security" that
allegedly existed before 1914. Only the brutalized, beer-swilling German
Nationalist
Korpstudenten
at the prewar Austrian universities with their
racist anti-Semitism (according to Zweig) , appear to trouble the
luxe,
(alme et voll/pte
of that era before the deluge, when the world of theater,
poetry, and music relegated political and military events to the insignifi–
cant margins of consciousness for his fellow literati
ofjung Wien.
Not all the intellectuals of "Young Vienna," however, were as im–
pervious as Zweig to the public sphere of politics or looked solely to
the pure world of
Geist
as a secure sanctuary from religious intolerance
and racial prejudice. One of the most spectacular exceptions to the rule
and one of the best examples of a
fin-de-siecle
Viennese intellectual who
sought collective solutions and a final exit from the disintegrating liberal
culture of his age was undoubtedly Theodor Herzl. His was clearly a
pecifically
political
response to the broader dilemmas of Jewish power–
lessness throughout the long history of exile, one which entailed orga–
nizing the masses hitherto neglected by the Jewish liberal establishment in
its period of ascendency. Herzl's success in capturing the imagination of
the Eastern Jewish masses
(Ostjuden)
and impressing Zionism on the con–
sciousness of the Gentile world was a
tour de Jorce
of dramatic orchestra–
tion. It owed not a little to his intuitive yet profoundly Viennese sense
of theater, of the importance of myth, symbolism, and the imponderables
that unconsciously mold the life of individuals and nations.
In a collection of fragmentary thoughts for the
judenstaat,
Herzl re–
vealingly wrote: "In fact, in all this I am still a dramatist. I take poor,
ragged fellows from the street, dress them in beautiful garments and let
them perform before the world a wonderful play which I have devised. I
do
not operate any more with individual people but with masses: clergy,
