Die Welt

Appears every Friday.

Editorial Office and Administration: Vienna IX., Türkenstraße 9. Telephone No. 8805. Communications are to be addressed not to individual persons, but to the Editorial Office or Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstraße 9. Unstamped letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned. Advertising rates: the four-column petit line, 10 kr. Single numbers 15 kr.

Subscription rates: Austria-Hungary: half-yearly 3 fl. = 6 Kr., yearly 6 fl. = 12 Kr.; For abroad: Germany yearly 13 Mk. 70 Pf., half-yearly 6 Mk. 85 Pf.; England yearly 14 Shg., half-yearly 7 Shg.; Russia yearly 7 R., half-yearly 3 R. 50 Kop.; Switzerland, France, Italy, Turkey, Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Egypt yearly 17 Frcs., half-yearly 8 Frcs. 50 Cts.; America yearly 3 Doll. 40.

No. 28. — Vienna, 15 July 1898. — Vol. II.

Berlin Letter.

By Redivivus.

10 July.

Do not fear, esteemed friend, that I shall trouble you with our election theme, which for weeks past has been trodden flat to the very point of a police offence. The subject is exhausted to its foundations once one has established that since the year 1893 the Social Democratic votes have increased by half a million and the anti-Semitic by more than 40,000. All the rest is downright incidental, for the great social marks of distinction of our time lie precisely nowhere else, and whether the National Liberals, the Conservatives, the Freisinnige have just barely contrived to maintain their holdings is a matter of indifference, since one and all they eke out their existence upon nothing but the alternative: Social Democratic or anti-Semitic. The National Liberals, if they are not to be ground to pieces, must be agrarian, and with the agrarians anti-Semitic; the Freisinnige will not be spared the choice whether they will be Social Democratic or anti-Semitic, even though for the present they still lead a parliamentary shadow-existence as the bodyguard of the liberal bourgeoisie — which, incidentally, scarcely exists any longer.

Yet I meant to keep clear of the election theme, and here I am in the midst of it. I sin in despite of the good little saying: "Trodden curd grows broad, not strong." And I had it in mind, after all, to entertain you with something quite different, namely with Berlin Zionism and its adversaries.

Here, however, I shall no doubt have to establish my credentials ad causam, for one who was moreover formerly very much of an assimilationist cannot come to you just like that and say: anch' io sono pittore! A whole Zionist, then, of the strict Basle observance I am not yet, which can hardly be laid to my charge, since I passed my youth under the discipline of the strongest Germanizer, namely the Prussian school, and the first part of my manhood was lit by the iridescent liberal-cosmopolitan will-o'-the-wisp. Only quite gradually, since anno Stöcker, has a process of transformation accomplished itself within me, at first imperceptibly, then under the symptoms of an obstinate moral indigestion, and now I know of what I have finally recovered. Of the contradiction between the faith in assimilation and the facts of my consciousness. This contradiction cannot be reconciled, only bridged by the renunciation of personality; and because I say with Goethe: "The highest happiness of the children of earth is, after all, personality," I preserve mine and rather renounce assimilation, which moreover — vide Stöcker, Lueger, Drumont — has long since ceased to be a convenience.

Accordingly, esteemed friend, in reading these lines you have to do for the present only with a half-confessor. Let us say, to speak in student fashion, with a Kneipschwanz of Zionism. But of these, I believe, there is in Berlin of all places a great multitude, because here the detachment from the national-German culture has for its precondition a hard struggle, inward and outward, which not everyone possesses the moral strength to go through. In Berlin there exist an enormous number of secret Social Democrats, of whose existence only the ballot-paper, once in five years, spreads approximate tidings. In like manner Berlin harbours numerous secret Zionists, who merely cannot summon the courage to confess themselves publicly, because they fear to be treated by the non-Jews as strangers and by the pseudo-Jews as enemies. Berlin is, so to speak, the artificial cradle of Jewish assimilation. Long before there was such a thing as the so-called constitutional equality of rights, a kind of literary assimilation was accomplished by means of personal influences, wherein, to be sure, baptism was the outward sign of the supposed adaptation. They were the orgies of a romantic-philosophical hallucination. Moses Mendelssohn's descendants fell victim to it, which did not hinder Treitschke, the author of the phrase about the "trouser-selling Jews," from making himself very comfortable indeed, much, much later, in the Mendelssohn salon; and the brothers Michael and Meyer Beer put off the faith of their fathers, the one nevertheless to lament in the drama "Der Paria" the wrong practised upon the Jews, the other to take refuge in the international atmosphere of cosmopolitan music. As often as I pass by the small, unadorned Trinity Church beside the Kaiserhof Hotel, there comes alive before my eyes the picture of the days when Schleiermacher led Henriette Herz and Rahel over to Christianity after philosophical preparation.