Seite - 139 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Salvation through War 139 A friend of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Count Harry Kessler, wrote to Zweig of a ‘spiritual awakening’. He claimed there had been a transformation of the entire nation. And being in a position to experience this was regarded as the most important event in the life of this generation. The war, as Stefan Zweig wrote, had ‘something magnificent, captivating and even seductive’ about it, ‘which one could escape only with difficulty’.321 Hugo von Hofmannsthal sought in a letter to depict the mood of the beginning of the war with a few words : ‘Believe me and tell all our friends that all of us here, right down to the last woodcutter, enter into this matter and in everything that might become of it with a determination, even a joy, that we have never before experienced, indeed had never thought possible.’322 Sigmund Freud noted : ‘Perhaps for the first time in thirty years, I feel like an Aus- trian and would like to give it another try with this rather hopeless Empire. […] The mood everywhere is excellent. The liberating element of the courageous act and the secure backing for Germany contribute a great deal to this.’323 In Hungary, poets and writers such as Zsigmond Móricz, Gyulá Juhász and Géza Gyóni carried the masses along with them. The Austrian poet of the working class Alfons Petzold wrote : ‘It is now irrelevant whether you are black or red, cleric or com- rade […].’ The Arbeiter-Zeitung extolled the ‘Day of the German Nation’ and its edi- tor-in-chief, Friedrich Austerlitz, wrote in the 5 August issue that it was a question of the preservation of the ‘existence as a state and a nation’ of the German people. In doing so, he adopted part of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s slogan to the effect that this was a war of Germanic peoples against Slavs. Another social democratic pioneer, Wilhelm Ellenbo- gen, detected a common interest among the international proletariat. And he quickly pinpointed the main enemy, namely imperialism and, above all, Tsarism. ‘It makes no difference to this barbaric monster to plunge the whole of humanity into the horrid misery of a world war.’324 Otto Bauer, later one of the far-left theoreticians of Austrian social democracy, rallied to the flag. Karl Renner compellingly declared that a victory for the Entente would be a victory for monopoly capitalism and imperialism, whereas a victory for the Central Powers would certainly bring victory for socialism.325 Ernst Karl Winter, later as much a Catholic as a ‘left-wing’ pioneer, wrote on 19 July 1914 in the periodical Groß-Österreich : ‘Because we know that only by means of a war can the new and great Austria be born, the happy Greater Austria that satisfies its peo- ples ; that is why we want war.’326 The historian and publicist Richard Charmatz, in turn, let it be known : only our generation has been permitted to experience something so ‘wonderful’ and ‘this great mood’, this closeness, confidence and the ‘awareness of one’s own mission’. August Fournier, Oswald Redlich, Ludo Moritz Hartmann, Heinrich Friedjung and many other important and well-known historians wrote feature articles and treatises or began presentation tours in order to explain the background to the war. It was naturally assumed that the war was a defensive war, and thus the only war, as