Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [222]
That summer Strauss completed Joseph. Meeting with Diaghilev and Bakst in Venice, Hofmannsthal planned a production that was to be “the most lavish and beautiful imaginable.” It was to be set not in Egypt but in the Venice of Tintoretto and Veronese because as Count Kessler explained, “Too scrupulous an accuracy can but impede the freedom of imagination.”
Already busy with several new works, Strauss was news. When in July he finished Ein Deutsches Motette for chorus and orchestra it was considered worth a cable dispatch to the New York Times. For the opening of a new concert hall in Vienna in November he composed a Festival Prelude scored for a bigger orchestra than ever: one hundred and fifty musicians including eight horns, eight drums, six extra trumpets and an organ. It was suitable to a year of national chest-thumping in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig and the simultaneous twenty-fifth anniversary of the Kaiser’s reign.
For the Centenary a book called Germany in Arms was published with an introduction by the Crown Prince, who wrote: “It is the holy duty of Germany above all other peoples to maintain an army and a fleet ever at the highest point of readiness. Only then, supported by our own good sword, can we preserve the place in the sun which is our due but which is not willingly granted to us.” Although the “gigantic conflagration” of nations, once started, would not be easily extinguished, this should not deter the German hand from the sword, “for the sword will remain the decisive factor till the end of the world.”
More factually Karl Helfferich, director of the Deutsche Bank, published a survey of Germany’s Economic Progress and National Wealth, 1888–1913 which supplied overwhelming figures of the “impetuous and triumphant upward movement” of the last twenty-five years. Helfferich showed that the population had increased by more than a third, that Germany’s excess of births over deaths was greater than any other country’s except Russia, that economic opportunity and demand for labour had expanded faster than the population, that productivity of German workers and percentage of population gainfully employed had increased, that upward was the word for statistics on production, transportation, consumption, capital aggregation, investments, savings-bank deposits and every other factor of economic life. Helfferich’s pages groaned under such phrases as “enormous development,” “vast progress,” “prodigious expansion,” “gigantic increase.”
That year an Englishman traveling in Alsace-Lorraine asked a waiter in Metz what nationality he considered himself. “Muss-Preussen” (Obligatory Prussian) the man replied, and for the rest of the journey the Englishman was heard by his traveling companion to mutter at intervals, “Muss-Preussen—we’re all going to be Muss-Preussen before long.”
Fear of the same ancient sin of pride that had prompted Kipling to write “Recessional” in the year of Britain’s Jubilee now afflicted an occasional thoughtful German. Walther Rathenau, introspective and literary heir of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, published a long poem called “Festal Song” in Die Zukunft whose tone was a protest against the organized enthusiasm worked up for the Centenary. He too saw an apocalyptic vision and headed his poem with a text from Ezekiel, “Also thou son of man, thus saith the Lord God unto the land of Israel, ‘An end, the end is come upon the four corners of the land. Now is the end come upon thee; it watcheth for thee; behold it is come.’ ” Rathenau quoted no more but readers who turned to Ezekiel would have found the judgment upon Tyre: “With thy wisdom and thy understanding thou hast gotten thee riches and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasure and by thy traffick hast thou increased