The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

feeling, that England was the arch enemy of Germany and responsible for the war, found expression in his “Hymn of Hate,” a poem – I do not have a copy before me – that in hard, short, impressive stanzas raised the hatred against England to an eternal oath never to forgive her for her “crime.”

poor “Hate-Lissauer” was pilloried as the sole culprit of this insane hysteria of hate, which in fact everyone from the highest to the lowest had shared in 1914.

Finally he was driven out by Hitler from the Germany to which he had been attached with every fiber of his heart, to die forgotten, the tragic victim of the one poem which had raised him so highly only to dash him to the lowest depths.

war. War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness. It needs stimulated emotions, enthusiasm for its own cause and hatred for the adversary.

It lies in human nature that deep emotion cannot be prolonged indefinitely, either in the individual or in a people, a fact that is known to all military organizations. Therefore it requires an artificial stimulation, a constant “doping” of excitement; and this whipping up was to be performed by the intellectuals, the poets, the writers and the journalists, scrupulously or otherwise, honestly or as a matter of professional routine.

so the pure, beautiful, sacrificial enthusiasm of the opening days became gradually transformed into an orgy of the worst and most stupid impulses.

The mental confusion increased in absurdity.

There was no city, no group that had not fallen prey to this dreadful hysteria of hatred.

It was the war of an unsuspicious generation, and the greatest peril was the inexhaustible faith of the nations in the single-sided justice of their cause.

Friends whom I had looked upon as decided individualists and even as philosophical anarchists, changed overnight into fanatic patriots and from patriots into insatiable annexionists.

wrote an article called “To Friends Abroad”

Throughout my life it had never been my purpose to convert others to my opinions. It sufficed for me to be permitted to express them, and to express them openly.

Romain Rolland.

world. In the Autumn of 1914, when most writers were out-shouting each other in hatred, and spat and bellowed at one another, he wrote that notable avowal Au-dessus de la Mêlée, in which he fought against intellectual hatred between nations and demanded justice and humanity from all artists even in the midst of war.

the favorable difference between the First World War and the second: in the first the word still had power. It had not yet been done to death by the organization of lies, by “propaganda,” and people still considered the written word, they looked to it. Whereas in 1939 not a single pronouncement by any writer had the slightest effect either for good or evil, and up to the present no book, pamphlet, essay, or poem has stirred the masses to their core.

The moral conscience of the world had not yet become as tired or washed-out as it is today.

Out of the measureless despair of a compassionate soul, out of the entire force of powerless bitterness, written to a friend beyond the border, officially an “enemy,” they may possibly be the most penetrating moral documents of a time where understanding was a gigantic manifestation of strength, and loyalty to one’s own beliefs in itself demanded grandiose courage.

The most important and most representative German poet at that time was Gerhart Hauptmann.

in order to describe the war in a poetic synthesis, I lacked the most important thing: I had not seen it. I

But any sort of description would have carried the obligation to depict the war in an exclusively positive and patriotic sense, and I had sworn to myself – an oath which I still kept in 1940 – never to write a single word that affirmed war or disparaged another nation.

Whenever I came into one of the Galician cities, Tarnow, Drohobycz, or Lemberg, I found a few Jews, so-called agents, whose profession it was to provide whatever one wished.

Above all else, I saw the terrible misery of the civilian population, upon whose eyes the horror of what they had experienced lay like a shadow.

saw the unsuspected misery of the Jews in the ghettos, where eight or twelve of them would live in one room level with the ground or in a cellar. And, for the first time, I saw the “enemy.”

The captives did not display the slightest desire to escape, nor the Austrian militia the slightest inclination to be strict about their duties. They sat about in a neighborly fashion with their captives, and the very fact that they could not understand each other’s language caused huge enjoyment.

four. 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.

time I was unable to conceive that just as quickly as the traces of the war would disappear from the face of the earth, the memory of its horrors would also as quickly disappear from the minds of men.

I heard the words that I was never to forget, spoken in a hard, angry voice: “I am sixty-seven and I have seen much. But I would never have believed such a crime on the part of humanity possible.”

how frail and perishable man is, whose life with all its memories, ecstasies, and knowledge can be destroyed in the thousandth part of a second by a little piece of lead, that one understood why multitudes thronged to the gleaming river to join in the morning promenade, to see the sun, to feel themselves, their own blood, their own lives with perhaps heightened power.

It has always been the same, the eternal pack throughout the times, calling the prudent cowardly, the humane weak, only to be supine themselves in the hour of catastrophe which they themselves wantonly conjure up.

But in choosing a Biblical theme I had unknowingly touched upon something that had remained unused in me up to that time: that community with the Jewish destiny whether in my blood or darkly founded in tradition.

in the very hour in which everything in me was “No” against the times, I had found the “Yes” to myself.

The publication of my tragedy Jeremiah at Easter 1917,

In 1914 the world that elevated culture above force would have rejected slogans like sacro egoismo and Lebensraum as immoral, for it held nothing to be more urgent than the appreciation of contributions to universal intellectual attainment.

We had all thought those things privately many times but none had had the courage to say in broad daylight: “Let us renounce the Germans and their expansionist aims while there is time,” because that would have been to “betray” our brother-in-arms.

Europe would be better off if the project which that wise and pious man then revealed to me had not been ruined by weakness and clumsiness.

not only our mental state but our physical organism as well declines within a world at war;

the change from the abnormality of war to the normality of peace called for a corporal adjustment, too.

In him I perceived the other heroism, the spiritual and moral, as in a living monument;

The most noteworthy figure of this group, from the point of view of psychology and history but not of art, was Henri Guilbeaux.

it is to Guilbeaux’s lasting merit that he established and conducted the only anti-war periodical of the First World War of intellectual substance, Demain, a document to be studied by all who wish really to understand the spiritual tendencies of that epoch.

oddly, one lived the war in one’s mind more intensively than at home in a country at war, because here the problem became objective, and so to speak, wholly detached from any national interest in victory or defeat.

James Joyce

Another of those living amphibiously between two nations was Feruccio Busoni,

René Schickele

The more European a life a man had lived in Europe, the harder he was punished by the fist that battered Europe.

that sound and peaceful, quiet and solid Switzerland was being undermined by the mole-like activities of secret agents from both camps.

this whole circle of interesting gifted people went up in smoke as soon as the object of their resistance – the war – was gone.

We were young, and said to ourselves: it will be the world of our dreams, a better, a humaner world.

It was the first instance in history, as far as I know, in which a country was saddled with an independence which it exasperatedly resisted. Austria wished, either to be united with its former neighbor states or with its kindred Germany, but not to lead the humiliated life of a beggar in this mutilated form.

his black-clad wife, Empress Zita. I was