So we must not be misled by the sentimental novels and novellas of that period; it was not a good time for the young when girls were placed in airtight compartments under the control of their families, sealed off from life, their physical and intellectual development stunted, and when young men in turn were forced into secrecy and underhand behaviour, all in support of a morality that at heart no one believed in or obeyed. Straightforward, honest relationships, exactly what ought to have been bringing happiness and delight to these young people by the laws of nature, were granted to only very few. And any man of that generation trying to be honest in recollecting his very first encounters with women will find few episodes on which he can really look back with unclouded pleasure. For apart from the social constraints always urging young men to be cautious and preserve secrecy, there was another element at the time to cast a shadow on their minds, even at the most intimate moments—the fear of infection. Here again the young men of the time were at a particular disadvantage compared to those of today, for it must not be forgotten that forty years ago sexual diseases were a hundred times more prevalent than they are now, and above all a hundred times more dangerous and terrible in their effects, because clinical practice did not yet know how to deal with them. There was still no scientific possibility of curing them as quickly and radically as today, when they are little more than a passing episode. While thanks to the treatment developed by Paul Ehrlich,[5] weeks may now pass at the teaching hospitals of small and medium-sized universities without a professor’s being able to show his students a new case of syphilis, statistics of that time showed that in the army, and in big cities, at least one or two in every ten young men had already contracted an infection. Young people at the time were constantly warned of the danger; walking through the streets of Vienna, you could read a plate on every sixth or seventh building proclaiming that a ‘specialist in skin and venereal diseases’ practised there, and to the fear of infection was added horror at the repellent, degrading nature of treatment at the time. Again, today’s world knows nothing of that. The entire body of a man infected with syphilis was subjected to weeks and weeks of treatment by rubbing with quicksilver, which made the teeth fall out and caused other kinds of damage to the patient’s health. The unfortunate victim of a bad attack felt not only mentally but also physically soiled, and even after such a terrible cure he could never for the rest of his life be sure that the malicious virus might not wake from its dormancy at any moment, paralysing him from the spinal marrow outwards and softening the brain inside his skull. No wonder that at the time many young men diagnosed with the disease immediately reached for a revolver, finding it intolerable to feel hopelessly suspect to themselves and their close family. Then there were the other anxieties resulting from a vita sexualis pursued only in secrecy. If I try to remember truthfully, I know hardly one of the comrades of my adolescent years who did not at some time look pale and distracted—one because he was sick or feared he would fall sick, another because he was being blackmailed over an abortion, a third because he lacked the money to take a course of treatment without his family’s knowledge, a fourth because he didn’t know how to pay the alimony for a child claimed by a waitress to be his, a fifth because his wallet had been stolen in a brothel and he dared not go to the police. So youth in that pseudo-moral age was much more dramatic and on the other hand unclean, much more exciting and at the same time oppressive, than the novels and plays of the court writers describe it. In the sphere of Eros, young people were almost never allowed the freedom and happiness proper to them at their time of life, any more than they were permitted it at school and at home.
All this has to be emphasised in an honest portrait of the time, because in talking to younger friends of the post-war generation, I often find it very hard to convince them that our young days were definitely not to be preferred to theirs. Certainly, we had more freedom as citizens of the state than the present generation, who are obliged to do military service or labour service, or in many countries to embrace a mass ideology, and are indeed generally at the mercy of the arbitrary stupidity of international politics. We could devote ourselves undisturbed to our artistic and intellectual inclinations; we could pursue our private lives in a more individual and personal way. We were able to live in a more cosmopolitan manner; the whole world was open to us. We could travel anywhere we liked without passes and permits; no one interrogated us about our beliefs, our origins, our race or religion. We certainly did—I do not deny it—have immeasurably more individual freedom, and we did not just welcome that, we made use of it. But as Friedrich Hebbel once nicely put it, “Sometimes we have no wine, sometimes we have no goblet.” Both are seldom granted to one and the same generation; if morality allows a man freedom, the state tries to remould him. If the state allows him freedom, morality will try to impose itself. We knew more of the world then, and knew it better, but the young today live their own youthful years more fully and are more aware of what they experience. Today, when I see young people coming out of their schools and colleges with heads held high, with bright, cheerful faces, when I see boys and girls together in free and easy companionship, competing with each other in studies, sport and games without false shame or bashfulness, racing over the snow on skis, rivalling each other in the swimming pool with the freedom known in the ancient world, driving over the countryside together in motor cars, engaging in all aspects of a healthy, untroubled life like brothers and sisters, without any internal or external pressure on them, I always feel as if not forty but a thousand years lay between them and those of us who had to look for any experience of giving and taking love in a hole-and-corner way in the shadows. I see genuinely happy expressions on their faces. What a great revolution in morality has taken place to the benefit of the young; how much freedom in life and love they have regained, and how much better they thrive both physically and mentally on this healthy new freedom! Women look more beautiful to me now that they are at liberty to display their figures; their gait is more upright, their eyes brighter, their conversation less stilted. What a different kind of confidence this new youth has acquired! They are not called upon by anyone else to account for what they do or do not do—they answer only to themselves and their own sense of responsibility, which has wrested control over them from mothers and fathers and aunts and teachers, and long ago threw off the inhibition, intimidation and tension that weighed down on their own development. They no longer know the devious secrecy we had to resort to to get the forbidden pleasures that they now correctly feel are their right. They happily enjoy their youth with the verve, freshness, lightness of heart and freedom from anxiety proper to their age. But the best of that happiness, it seems to me, is that they do not have to lie to others, while they can be honest with themselves and their natural feelings and desires. It is possible that the carefree way in which young people go through life today means they lack something of our own veneration for intellectual subjects when we were young. It may be that through the easy give and take that is accepted now, they lose an aspect of love that seemed to us particularly valuable and intriguing, they lose a certain reticence caused by shame and timidity, and certain especially tender moments. Perhaps they do not even have any idea how the awe of what is banned and forbidden mysteriously enhances one’s enjoyment of it. But all this seems to me a minor drawback by comparison with the saving grace—the fact that young people today are free from fear and oppression, and enjoy in full what was forbidden us at their age, a sense of frank self-confidence.
5
Paul Ehrlich, 1854-1915, distinguished German immunologist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908.