Seite - 138 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

138 Unleashing the War left out. The fascination was uniform and it proved, as Raymond Aron later formulated it so memorably : humans make history and do not notice that history makes them. It was precisely the intellectual impulse for war that allowed the tremendous enthusiasm for the conflict to emerge that would become a phenomenon of the 20th century. Stu- dents, professors, artists, philosophers, writers, priests, atheists, anarchists, political ac- tivists, radicals : they all wanted to be involved when the Pax Europaea came to an end. They can be listed at random : Romain Rolland, Henri Bergson, Max Scheler, Ernst Haeckel, Frederic Harrison, Sigmund Freud, Georgi Plechanov, etc. They all saw in the war not something ghastly but change and only a very few could elude the suggestion and instead see something other than an awakening, namely the end of a European century.317 This storm on the human consciousness could not be maintained, to be sure, but during the first weeks even those people who had initially hesitated were carried along. A mixture of ‘trepidation, fear, curiosity, patriotic enthusiasm and natural unknowing- ness’ spread.318 The poets, philosophers and, lest we forget, the historians were often the first to formulate central statements on the purpose of the war and its aims. The so-called ‘German Manifesto’ was signed by, among others, the Baden-born actor and director Max Reinhardt. The young Viennese philosopher of religion Martin Buber was a member of an Austrian committee for the liberation of Russian Jews. Chaim Weizmann, who had been born in Russia and was living in England, later to become the Israeli president, fanatically supported the Entente powers.319 It was evidently im- possible to elude the suggestive power of the event and to resist the collective endeavour to overcome one’s own individual standpoint. Any argument was valid in justifying the conduct of war by one’s own state and nation. Appeals for moderation remained half- hearted at best. Even in the case of Stefan Zweig, who described this mood so memorably in Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) and in whose biography the escape from war and to Switzerland is of course part of literary history, it must be added that he initially succumbed completely to the fascination of the outbreak of war. It was only the feeling of not being needed and a later attempt to stem what he called ‘mass passion’ that led to his emigration. Initially, however, he wrote to the ‘Honourable Ministry of the Interior’ in order to express his thoughts on a proclamation of war. It was written, according to Zweig, in a style that was no longer comprehensible in the Viennese district of Florids- dorf. It contained foreign words that the suburbanites of the imperial capital and seat of royal residence did not understand. In order to redress this grievance, namely that proclamations vital to the war effort were written using inappropriate language, Zweig offered his services free of charge for the duration of the war. His offer was rejected twice without any reasons being given. Only then did Zweig’s enthusiasm for the war subside.320