The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

“Our youth has already become history, never to return,” he wrote; “the next years will be full of confusion, hatred, bitterness; for us the best is over, and our only task is to testify truthfully for the day that will come.”

dictum of the nineteenth-century Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer: “The road of modern culture leads from humanitarianism via nationalism to bestiality.”

To us, gruesomely taught, witnesses of a catastrophe which, at a swoop, hurled us back a thousand years of humane endeavor, that rash optimism seems banal. But even though it was a delusion our fathers served, it was a wonderful and noble delusion, more humane and more fruitful than our watchwords of today; and in spite of my later knowledge and disillusionment, there is still something in me which inwardly prevents me from abandoning it entirely.

It is from this unusual attitude alone that we can understand how the State exploited the schools as an instrument for the maintenance of its authority. Above all else we were to be educated to respect the existing as perfect, the opinion of the teacher as infallible, our father’s words as uncontradictable, the provisions of the State as absolute and valid for all eternity.

A remarkable shifting began to prepare itself in our old sleepy Austria. The masses, which had silently and obediently permitted the liberal middle classes to retain the leadership for decades, suddenly became restless, organized themselves and demanded their rights.

The first of these great mass movements in Austria was the socialist movement.

middle-class democrats honestly thought that with small concessions and gradual improvements they were furthering the welfare of all subjects in the best way possible. But they had completely forgotten that they represented only fifty or a hundred thousand well-situated people in the large cities, and not the hundreds of thousands and millions of the entire country.

The Christian Social Party, a lower middle-class party throughout, was actually only the organic counterpart of the proletarian movement and, like it, was fundamentally a product of the victory of the machine over manual crafts.

It was exactly the same worried group which Adolf Hitler later collected around him as his first substantial following.

When I look back upon my life I can recall but few moments as happy as those first years when I was a university student without a university.

I do not claim any judgment of anthroposophy, for even today I am not quite clear as to what it seeks or means, and I believe that on the whole its seductive power is bound up not with an idea, but with the fascinating personality of Rudolf Steiner.

I found myself in a circle where actual poverty existed, with torn clothing and worn-out shoes, a sphere which I had never touched in Vienna. I sat at the same table with heavy drinkers, homosexuals, morphine addicts.

It was always the technique of National Socialism to supply an ideological and pseudo-moral foundation for its thoroughly unequivocal egotistical instinct for power.

France was puffed up with wealth; it wanted yet more, wanted a colony even though there was no superfluous population for the old ones; it almost went to war over Morocco. Italy wanted Cyrenaica, Austria annexed Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria pushed toward Turkey, and Germany, still excluded for the time being, raised its paw for an angry blow.

Oh, we loved our inspired time well enough and we loved our Europe! But this blind belief that reason would balk the madness at the last minute, established itself as our one shortcoming.

In 1910 Emperor Franz Josef had passed his eightieth year. The aged man, long since become a symbol, could not last much longer and a mystical feeling began to spread universally that after his passing the dissolution of the thousand-year-old monarchy could no longer be stayed.

I could not escape the feeling that these simple, primitive people had understood the war more truly than our university professors and poets: namely, as a disaster that had come over them with which they had had nothing to do, and that everyone who had happened into this misfortune was somehow a brother.

A man who had been saving for forty years and who, furthermore, had patriotically invested his all in war bonds, became a beggar. A man who had debts became free of them.

The girls adopted “boyish bobs” so that they were indistinguishable from boys; the young men for their part shaved in an effort to seem girlish; homosexuality and lesbianism became the fashion, not from an inner instinct but by way of protest against the traditional and normal expressions of love. The general impulse to radical and revolutionary excess manifested itself in art, too, of course. The new painting declared all that Rembrandt, Holbein, and Velasquez had created as finished and done for, and set off on the most fantastic cubistic and surrealistic experiments. The comprehensible element in everything was proscribed, melody in music, resemblance in portraits, intelligibility in language.

But I would not for anything wipe out that era of chaos, neither from my own life nor from art in its onward movement. Thrusting forward in the orgy of its first impulse it had, like every spiritual revolution, swept the air clean of all stuffy tradition, and relieved the strains of many years; for all that may be said its daring experiments have left a residuum of valuable stimuli.

For three years, 1919, 1920, 1921, Austria’s three hardest post-war years, I lived buried in Salzburg, practically giving up hope of ever seeing the world again. The collapse after the war, the hate abroad against every German and all German writing, and the devaluation of our currency were so catastrophic that one was already resigned from the start to stay put for life in one’s narrow sphere at home. But everything turned out much better. We ate our fill again. We sat undisturbed at our desks. There had been no plundering, there was no revolution. We lived, we sensed our powers. Why not once more test the pleasure of one’s youth and travel?

it is important to remember this – nothing made them so furious with hate and so ripe for Hitler as the inflation.

But I have a particular right and am even compelled not to pass over this fact in the story of my life, because this success, upon Hitler’s advent nine years ago passed into history. Of the hundreds of thousands and even millions of my books which had their secure place in the bookshops and in innumerable homes in Germany, not a single one is obtainable today;

The fiftieth year means a turning point; disturbed, one looks back to see how much of the way has already been covered and silently asks oneself whether it leads further upward.

only then I sensed that financial and otherwise influential forces must be behind these mobs which disclosed themselves so unexpectedly.

Soon one heard more about these undercover maneuvers in Bavaria. In the dead of night the young men sneaked out of their homes and assembled for such nightly “terrain exercises”; officers of the Reichswehr on active duty or retired, paid by the State or the Party’s mysterious financial backers, drilled these troops, and the authorities paid little attention to these strange nocturnal goings on.

Nothing misled the German intellectuals as much as this education-vainglory into believing that Hitler was still only the beer-hall agitator who never could become a real danger, at a time when, thanks to his invisible wirepullers, he already had won to himself powerful supporters in the most varied circles.

Later I had frequent confirmations of the phenomenon that people thousands of miles away are better informed than those who live ten blocks from the scene of momentous decisions.

Perhaps some premonition told me that one should hoard against darker days as many impressions and experiences as the heart could hold while the world was still open and ships could still take their course peacefully across the seas, also it may have been the longing to know that while the old world was destroying itself through suspicion and strife another one was building itself over there;

They believed in the League of Nations and in the peace treaties as sick people do in neatly labeled medicines.

only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived. ~