One product of the Ido crisis was the first worldwide organization of Esperantists, the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA), founded in 1908 by a Swiss 21-year-old, Hector Hodler. Hodler's initiative was a reflection of the Esperantists' preference, in the wake of the Ido crisis, to abandon reforms in the language in favor of immediate action to insert it into practical life. Sidestepping discussion of an international organiza- tion based on national Esperanto societies, Hodler established an associa- tion consisting only of individual members and offering them various services assisted by a worldwide network of so-called Delegates.
By founding UEA, Hodler aimed to inaugurate a new period in the history of Esperanto, namely that of the actual use of the language. The time when the exclusive concern was propaganda for the language was, he declared, over. He labeled as anachronisms those 'who, imagining that Esperanto's success will come unexpectedly, through intervention by some outside authority, separate it from their everyday life and regard it simply as a hobby'.[100]
Equally significantly, Hodler defined for the movement an ideology— one more realistic than Zamenhof's Homaranismo yet less optional than the 'internal idea'. For him, Esperantism was, unlike a purely lin- guistic movement, 'principally a social, constructive, and progressive movement'.[101] He distinguished between an Esperantist in the sense of the Declaration of Boulogne-sur-Mer and a member of UEA—an esperantiano, a member of the Esperanto community, who sees in this community (Esperantio) a model for future humanity, linked internation- ally in solidarity and cooperation.[102] UEA's 'practical internationalism', Hodler explained, could bring more concrete results for the improve- ment of relations among peoples than 'those individuals who constantly talk about brotherhood among peoples but make no serious effort to real- ize their aspirations, even partly, in real life'.[103] In contrast to traditional internationalism and pacifism, which 'merely try to facilitate relations among the nations' but 'create nothing above them', Esperantism should form the vanguard of a new, positive phase of internationalism, bringing people together and ignoring nationhood, language and race.[104]
UEA's combination of idealistic impulses and practical services was a major force in the successful expansion of the Esperanto movement before and after the First World War. By 1914, UEA already had more than 7000 dues-paying members.
2
War and Its Aftermath
Obstacles Prior to the First World War
At first, the main obstacle to Esperanto's dissemination was simply doubt about its survival. What Zamenhof offered to the world was only one of the many proposals for a new language that appeared almost annu- ally, though generally they did not move much beyond the stage of a single small publication. We should also remember that at the end of the nineteenth century the idea of an international language, perhaps sup- ported in principle by a majority of informed people, was compromised by the sudden rise of the language project Volapuk in the 1880s and its equally sudden fall.[105] Consequently, public disillusionment, commercial and scientific skepticism and the indifference or mockery of the linguistic establishment were the principal obstacles confronting the first adepts of Esperanto.
But when the language began to emerge as a social reality, when it actu- ally penetrated wider circles of society, and, particularly, when its users revealed a tendency to connect with movements for emancipation and rev- olution, this largely passive attitude gave way in some circles to opposition and direct hostility. How many seeds of conflict with the external world were carried by Zamenhof's seemingly somewhat nai've and innocent vision soon became apparent—for example to the Esperantists of Russia.
Later, the concern of its French pioneers to avoid all connection between Esperanto and pacifism and to remain as silent as possible on the Jewishness of its author demonstrated how important it was to guard against provoking the nationalistic and anti-Semitic prejudices rampant in the French bourgeoisie following the Dreyfus scandal. On the other hand, and in contrast to Russia, the French Esperantists still had plenty of room in which to advance their arguments and expand their move- ment, such that Boirac felt able to note at the end of 1906 that the preju- dices against an artificial language were weakening and that 'in almost all civilized countries the name of Esperanto is well known and no longer provokes mockery'.[106] And in October 1905 Javal contentedly noted that out of 700 newspaper articles appearing after the Boulogne congress, only one mentioned that Zamenhof was a Jew.3
However, nationalist emotions hampered the Esperanto movement to a far greater extent in neighboring Germany. There, the language was accepted with greater hesitancy than in France. At the time, the German Reich was energetically engaged in trying to join the club of imperialist powers. Its rulers sought to neutralize the social disturbances brought on by rapid industrialization by accelerating the country's commercial expansion across the world. These efforts, along with a latent awareness that the Germans achieved their unification not by revolution from below but by pressure from above, produced a characteristic mixture of assured self-confidence in the new role of world power and not entirely repres- sible feelings of envy toward the established imperialist states, Britain and France. In particular, the widely held opinion that the Germans suffered from a deficit of national pride and therefore had to protect themselves particularly carefully against internationalist and anti-German machina- tions was not without influence on the development of the Esperanto movement in Germany.
Although the journal Esperantisto and the first important literary pub- lications in Esperanto were published in Nuremberg in the years before 1895, Esperanto expanded into Germany only slowly. An article in the popular magazine Die Woche,A published in mid-1902, helped to move Esperanto forward; its author was the well-known Austrian pacifist Alfred Hermann Fried, who in the following year published an Esperanto primer for German speakers.5 Not until 1906, when strong national societies were already operating in other countries of Europe, was the German Esperantist Society, as of 1909 the German Esperanto Association, estab- lished. However, as early as 1908 the Germans were able to host the fourth World Congress in Dresden, during which Goethe's Iphigenia was performed in Zamenhof's translation—an event that won over many skeptics in Germany because of the mellifluousness and powers of expres- sion revealed by the translation.
Memories of the Volapuk fiasco may well have been one of the rea- sons why the German public only hesitantly developed an interest in Esperanto. But it was not only doubts about the practical possibilities of the international language that explained Germany's tardiness. A few weeks after the founding of the Society, the editor of its journal Germana Esperantisto confessed that a certain resistance, more significant than mere ignorance or prejudice, hampered the cause of Esperanto. This resistance came not 'from the majority, not from the masses', but from 'a strong, powerful and influential' category of people, namely those 'who consider all international sympathy to be dangerous and opposed to national inter- ests', causing them to judge an international language 'more severely'.[107]As one of the leaders of the German movement observed at the end of 1912, the press 'has, until recently, and with rare unanimity, dismissed the Esperanto movement or remained completely silent about it'.[108]