The Austrian Problem

I

IT is with special thanks and pleasure that I follow the invitation of the editor of this magazine, to deal before an American public with the present situation of the German-Austrian people. For the saving of this people from the depth of its economic catastrophe seems to be, not only a philanthropic work, which appeals to all the noble feelings of the former enemy and may bless him who gives and forgives even more than him who receives—it is also a task which touches the most important interests of the future peace of the world. The European peace cannot be secured unless the inevitable result of this war, the dissolution of the old union of the European Southeast, shall be replaced by a new and higher form of federation, which may bind the individualistic forces of all the young nations of the Danube countries and educate them by coöperation and mutual contact.

Vienna, with all her old traditions of science, art, and refined forms and manners of life, must become the spiritual centre of such a new federation. Compared with the Prussian mentality, which represents the ‘nationalized5 type of man, the ‘state-soul,’ completely absorbed by political aims, the Austrian is the ‘human man,’as the Greek was in comparison with the Roman; Mozart is the typical Austrian, and the Mozart-soul is absolutely needed for the future harmony of the Danube orchestra. Under the guidance of Berlin, and under all the difficult circumstances of his political hegemony, the Austrian seemed to have lost some of his best human qualities; in his new modest situation the true character of the people will come out again and will prove itself a most important factor in the welding together of Southeast Europe.

Many little startling details of the desperate situation of the large cities of German Austria, and also the official cries for immediate help, may have reached the ear of the American public; may I complete those fragmentary impressions by presenting, not only some more facts, but also some remarks on the immediate and deeper causes of the whole state of things in new Austria.

What would happen if Chicago were suddenly excluded from all economic relations with the rest of American territory? Chicago would simply die. Now, that’s just the case with Vienna, and even worse. Vienna was not a selfsupporting area; it was not even a great centre of production, as Chicago is; it was the intellectual centre, the head of the whole Danube monarchy; it contained the bureaucracy for the centralized government of a population of fifty millions, and also the bureaucracy of the whole southeastern trade; it was the centre of Austrian schoollife; finally, it was the seat of all those industries which were in intimate connection with the highly developed Vienna art of life and refinement: all the elegants of the Danubian world were dressed in Vienna.

Now this head has been cut off from its body — that is the cruel reality. People say, ‘This state of things is due to the peace of St. Germain!’ That is certainly true, but the ’peace-treaty of St. Germain has only formulated and fixed the seemingly inevitable outcome of a long political crisis. The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy was the last act in the dissolution of the old supernational German Empire; the moral, religious, and political ideas, which inspired that old unity of the European peoples, were gone; the process of differentiation — as Spencer would put it — overcame the tendency for unity; an individualistic nationalism was absorbing all spiritual and social energies for its own purposes and passions; the German Austrian himself became mere nationalist, and therefore lost the moral and political power required to subordinate the other nationalities to a higher form of political life; instead of educating the younger nations, he fostered, by his bad example, their own national passion and self-consciousness. The narrow Bismarckian gospel of the national state, and the mere repressive and authoritative method of dealing with secession and rebellion resulting therefrom, entered the German-Austrian soul, made it forget all the old supemational traditions of German history, took away from it all capacity to keep together and to educate respectfully and sympathetically those little nations which were craving for more liberty and autonomy.

Possibly the complexity of the task widely transcended the political force and wisdom of a generation brought up in mere national aspirations: the burdensome experience of separation may have been necessary, in order to prepare men’s souls for new forms and manners of cooperation. The fact remains: the predominance of nationalism made the dismemberment of the old Austrian state inevitable; it could have been prevented only from wdthin, from the rising of new political ideas in the midst of the Austrian peoples. And indeed, some signs of a spiritual revival of the great supernational mission of the old Austrian league of nations appeared in the last years; but those tendencies were not strong enough to conquer public opinion; nationalism had its way in all camps and led Austria to destruction. A new union may arise from the very depth of that complete dissolution which has been consecrated by the treaty of St. Germain.

When this report comes before the eyes of the American reader, all dates of the hour will be antiquated: the underfed Vienna will be the simply starving Vienna; so it seems to me useless to give here many statistics about the present situation, which must change rapidly into a situation of absolute despair. May I confine myself therefore to explaining the immediate economic causes of the complete breakdown of the food-provision in Vienna and some other Austrian cities? A true insight into those connections will give the best suggestion for the right method of help and healing.

The political isolation of new German Austria from all the other parts of the former Danubian monarchy would not have resulted in starvation if German Austria were a self-supporting country. But the effect of the long symbiosis between all the different parts of the old Austria-Hungary was a very highly developed division of labor, corresponding to the immense variety of ethnological, geographical and economic conditions in the countries of the Habsburg monarchy. By this division of labor Vienna became absolutely dependent on the border states: Hungary sent meat, meal, and fat; Galicia, potatoes; Bohemia and Moravia, coals and sugar. Now — by the new political order — Vienna is excluded from all its earlier sources of food-provision and raw material. The new states are remplis d’euxmêmes, they are occupied with the upbuilding of their own economic and political order, and have no longing at, all for the Austrian ‘crown’; the desire for complete independency blinds them against the laws of exchange; they are caught by a kind of spasm of self-reliance. Modern psycho-analysis would speak of a subconscious ‘AntiVienna-Complex.’

This attitude may be quite natural with regard to the experiences of the war; but for the unhappy metropolis it is simply disastrous. Even the small quantities of coal and food which have been stipulated between Vienna and Bohemia are often stopped at some station, and are taken by the population, which does not like the wagons going to Vienna. Now the advice has been given to German Austria to multiply the production of its own industries; but the most valuable part of those industries has been handed over to the Czecho-Slovak state. The industries of high quality — the graphic industries, the industries for furniture, for clothes and modes — have no raw material and therefore have sent all their working people into the army of the unemployed. And so, even if they could get raw material, the coal is lacking which alone can bring the whole work in action. This absolute want of coal will stop in these days the whole work of electricity in the city of Vienna; to the hunger and the frost then will be added the absolute darkness; in the midst of the best quarters of the city one walks slowly in the evening, and in fearful tension, always fearful of a sudden attack.

That is the picture of the celebrated centre of Southeastern Europe, whose streets in the evening were full of beaming light and crowded with people from all quarters of the Danube. At the moment when these lines are written, the largest part of the population can get only 24 per cent of the normal foodneed; a part of the children from two to six years get one eighth of a litre of milk per head and per. day; children beyond six years are getting no milk at all. Sugar is absolutely lacking; bread is distributed 180 grammes per day, but very bad and heavy, not at all fit for children; since the last two weeks even those 180 grammes were to be shortened. Meat, almost nothing, and only for well-doing people.

Naturally the mortality is rapidly increasing: before the war about 3200 persons died per year; in 1917 already 46,131; in 1918, 51,497; in 1919 the number will be nearly doubled. The misery is multiplied by the return to Austria of the whole army of officials, who represented the old government, and have become useless with the formation of the new states. Thousands and thousands of those officials, with their families, are living now in Vienna and other cities; thrown out of their careers, with no hope of being called up again for a new application of their skill and experience; dependent upon a very small pension — a heavy burden on the state finances. This burden is still augmented by the professional officers of the old army, who also have no outlook for the future. To grasp the full reality of the situat ion, the reader may fancy all the officials and officers of the whole British Empire suddenly sent back to London, and London itself cut off from nearly all economic relations with the former Empire! No similar catastrophe in all history!

What I have said in regard to Vienna is also the case with Salzburg, Innsbrück, and other large cities. The writer of these lines has just had a report from a colleague of his at the University of Innsbrück. The letter is nothing but a report of general starvation, without any outlook. Not enough bread, terrible bread, no milk, no fat, no meat. Many families are selling the last pieces of their household to the peasants, in order to get some food from the peasants; but even the peasants are exhausted by the war; millions of cattle had to be delivered to the army; the soil is neglected, the value of the money is so low that there is no incentive for the productive forces of the agriculture. A typical situation is reported from Innsbrück: they get there even no wood for the winter, although they are surrounded by endless forests: the workmen are so underfed, that they have not force enough to cut the trees.

II

Now, is it possible that the rest of the world continues to have its full meals four times the day, and allows, in the fullest peace of the soul, all those millions to degenerate and starve; to let the mothers see their darlings slowly extinguish without any power to help? When Pope Gregory I was once informed that a person in Rome had perished with hunger, he included himself for three days in his room. But in our modem Christian civilization a terrible kind of moral let hargy seems to allow the continuation of festivals and of every kind of comfort and joy, while in another quarter of the world numberless fellow creatures have to undergo the torture of slow starvation, and even the greater torture of seeing their dear ones inevitably fall into all the terrible and hopeless diseases of the underfed.

But even the darkest picture of the present situation is not sufficient to give the full reality of the misery. To get an exact impression, one must have in mind that already, since 1916, the lower and middle classes in the larger cities were in a state of slow starvation. An American, who has no personal insight into the hidden real situation of the people of the Central Powers during the last two years of the war, or since the Armistice, or who, as visitor, lived only in hotels and got no impression from the hidden misery of the smaller households, cannot have the slightest idea of the real extent of the undernourishment there, and how it affected, not only the bodily health and force of resistance, but all the nervous resources and even the intellectual functions. Imagine that all those men, women, and children had been for three years not only generally underfed, but were lacking almost absolutely some elements of food, like fat and sugar, which are indispensable for our physical machine.

When I first, in the summer of 1917, got an insight into those conditions, I always asked: ‘How is it possible that, all those poor people are still living and walk and work?’ The answer is, that our body and our nervous system have an incredible fund of reserve strength, and also an incredible capacity of adaptation. But those thus ‘adapted’ are like men from the moon: apathetic, depressed, pale or yellow; they have no steam longer for protest or revolution — they extinguish silently. With the children this ‘adaptation’ comes out in every form of rickets, scrofula, and tuberculosis, and in diminished growth: children of eleven years look as if they were only six years old. In the grownup people the result appears also in the life of the soul: they begin to lack all spiritual force and capacity of digesting their own experiences, especially the experience of their national downfall; they cannot even grasp the fact that their failure to react properly to what has happened — this stiffness of the whole mind, this incapacity for a national ‘investigation of conscience’ — must paralyze also the dawning sympathy of the world with their fate, and stir up again every kind of distrust on the part of their former enemies.

May the generous souls among the Allied peoples take this into account in all their judgments concerning the German mentality. It is not materialism, to bring a little more into the foreground the indubitable fact that even our highest spiritual and moral functions have here on earth their physical and nervous substrata, which finally stop their functioning, if they are chronically underfed. And I think the degenerated mentality of all those underfed masses is threatening the whole world far more than the mere physical diseases. Is not the intellectual stiffness and the soullessness of Bolshevism partly due to Russian hunger and despair during the war? And may not a nervous and mental ‘grippe’ arise from the Austrian regions of slow starvation? May not the paralysis and the elimination of certain higher faculties of the soul become the result of those sufferings, and produce a degeneration by whose contagious effect the solidarity of human fate may be revealed in the most terrible form? Is it not amid thunder and lightning that Jehovah gives his interpretation of the eternal laws of human life?

The American people, with its great tradition and habit of philanthropic work, has first broken the lethargy of the world and is now saving thousands and thousands of lives in Vienna. But the catastrophe has grown so beyond all measure t hat the cooperation of the whole world is needed.

But the question is, in what view and in what direction the work of salvation should be undertaken. Is mere RedCross work required, or, in addition, the work of the statesman and of the organizer of economics? May I, in answering this question, draw the attention of the reader to the causes of the whole disaster: to the radical dismemberment of the old Austria. This dismemberment was inevitable, as pointed out in the beginning of this paper, because the upholders of the old system in Austria were not equal to the urgent task of finding new methods for reconciling liberty and unity, autonomy and federation. They were not able to live up to the reality of the Austria created in 1866, when the German part became a minority, surrounded by a majority of Slav, Italian, Magyar population, and had no chance for the preservation of its leadership except by bringing out its deepest moral and spiritual power. If the German Austrians at that time had renewed the old federalists tradition of the Holy Roman Empire, and had organized the southeastern Völkerbund as a protest against the new European nationalism, the present dissolution would never have happened. But Providence led the European peoples the other way: it seems as if the new union of nations cannot be realized until the fever of national ambition and self-glorification has lived out its deepest hell of dissolution and self-destruction: mankind learns only by the reductio ad absurdum.

Now the only way out of the present difficulties seems to be a restitution in quite new forms of the old economic unity of Southeastern Europe, assisted by new political bonds. This new development seems to be of extreme importance, also, for securing European peace. Is not the immediate result of the war the removing of the Balkans one thousand kilometres farther west? This moving westward by the political atoms of little new-born states is a menace to Europe, and ought to be counterbalanced, at all events. Old Austria in her best times was the Southeastern Völkerbund and a guaranty of the world’s peace. Only by forgetting her historical mission and losing the moral and religious ideas which inspired that mission, she became a prey to the general nationalist poison, and experienced and suffered the very dismemberment which is the essence of the principle blindly accepted even by her best and most idealistic souls. The hour has come when the rest of the world must help the separated elements, which cannot find t he way to a new understanding in the organizing of a new coöperation.

It is not necessary to begin with a new Danube federation: nothing more is needed than a certain beneficent pressure from without, in order to remove a certain inheritance of the warspirit: and the war-methods in dealing with economic organization; those obstacles once done away with (it is not possible without help from abroad), the natural factors of mutual exchange will soon clear the road and prepare a better future.

What are those obstacles? They arise from a bureaucratic regulation of import and export, which keeps down, not only all the natural forces of trade and commerce between the different countries, but also the productive energies in all branches. The stopping of this terrible nonsense — a relic of the old black-yellow officialism — should be the first condition on which help from abroad is promised.¹

Of course, at the present moment, the leading circles in Austria are too fully absorbed by the burning need of the hour to be free for a sudden and radical change of methods. Therefore, the first necessity is, in the interest of the whole world, to secure to the tortured people a solid food-supply for the next four or five months, and meanwhile to prepare the soil for a sound exchange between the southeastern states and for a certain restitution of their earlier division of labor, which is so deeply rooted in their history and in their nature. All other developments may be expected from the working of the natural forces of mutual exchange, which will be soon put in action by all the deeply rooted needs of the southeastern situation.

Possibly, just in the most desperate situation of the Austrian millions, Providence has given to the world the only opportunity to create the moral and psychological conditions of a higher international order: the cooperation on the field of love, the constructive work of saving millions of human lives and of assisting them in securing new possibilities of their economic and political existence, may alone have the power to purify all mankind from that destructive passion and from that contempt of human life which grew out of four years of war, and which may otherwise, if they are not overcome at the root, endanger the whole human civilization.

Since the war, in all countries, social problems have appeared on the stage, the complexity of which calls fora moral and religious force and for a political wisdom which at present seem not to be at the disposition of the modern world; we all need therefore the passing through a school of sacrifice and compassion, of self-denial and love, in order to prepare our soids for the powerful moral tasks of the near future. Blessed seems the nation to which to-day all eyes are turned for help, and which may therefore become the spiritual leader of the Occident in the building up of the solidarity of mankind, which cannot be secured by weapons, by programmes, pamphlets, and books, but only by living acts of human love and generosity.