The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

the last emperor of Austria, heir of the Habsburg dynasty which had ruled for seven hundred years, was forsaking his realm! He had refused to abdicate formally, yet the Republic granted every honor on the departure which it compelled rather than submitted.

Substance, anything but money, became the watchword.

The chaos grew from week to week, the population became more excited. The progressive devaluation of money became increasingly manifest.

the chaos took on ever more fantastic forms. Soon nobody knew what any article was worth. Prices jumped arbitrarily;

Standards and values disappeared during this melting and evaporation of money; there was but one merit: to be clever, shrewd, unscrupulous, and to mount the racing horse instead of being trampled by it.

The only thing that remained stable within the land during the three years in which the inflation progressed at accelerating tempo was foreign currency.

Salzburg’s first-rate Hotel de l’Europe was occupied for a period by English unemployed, who, because of Britain’s generous dole were able to live more cheaply at that distinguished hostelry than in their slums at home. Whatever was not nailed down, disappeared.

Habits are acquired and the chaos became normal to life.

The will to pursue life was great enough to overcome the instability of the currency. Financial chaos prevailed yet the daily round seemed little affected.

The very fact that what once represented the greatest stability – money – was dwindling in value daily caused people to assess the true values of life, work, love, friendships, art and Nature the more highly, and the whole nation lived more intensively and more buoyantly than ever despite the catastrophe; young people went on mountain tramps and returned healthily tanned, dance halls kept going until late at night, new factories and business enterprises sprang up.

That was the spirit in which we lived, thousands of us, multitudes, giving forth to the limit of our capacity in those weeks and months and years, on the brink of destruction. Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.

In due time life became ordered and integrated and, surprisingly enough, the incredible came to pass: the crippled State persisted and was even ready to defend its independence when Hitler came to rob this folk – faithful and magnificently brave in suffering – of its soul.

Something besides the army had been crushed: faith in the infallibility of the authority to which we had been trained to over-submissiveness in our own youth.

It was only after the smoke of war had lifted that the terrible destruction that resulted became visible.

The post-war generation emancipated itself with a violent wrench from the established order and revolted against every tradition, determined to mold its own fate, to abandon bygones and to soar into the future.

In that epoch of wild experiment in every field everybody desired to surpass at a single impetuous leap, whatever had been achieved in the past; the younger one was, the less he knew, the better he suited the situation because of his freedom from all tradition: at last youth’s vengeance against the world of parents raged itself out triumphantly.

It was an epoch of high ecstasy and ugly scheming, a singular mixture of unrest and fanaticism.

Anything that gave hope of newer and greater thrills, anything in the way of narcotics, morphine, cocaine, heroin found a tremendous market; on the stage, incest and parricide, in politics, communism and fascism, constituted the most favored themes; unconditionally proscribed, however, was any representation of normality and moderation.

old friend G. A. Borgese

old friend Albert Stringa, a painter, rushed up to me on the street

one had heard that a socialist leader, by name Mussolini, had separated from his party during the war and had organized a counter-group.

Nobody thought of regarding these “Fascists” who wore black shirts instead of the Garibaldi red, as an important factor in the future development of Europe.

this hazy Fascism, until then almost unknown to me, was something real, something well directed and that it made fanatics of decided, bold, young people. No longer could I agree with my older friends in Florence and Rome who disposed of these young people with a contemptuous shrug of their shoulders as a “paid gang” and made fun of their Fra Diavolo.

negotiations at Genoa and Rapallo (the first at which Germany had a seat as an equal with the formerly hostile powers) would bring the hoped for alleviations of the war burdens, or at least a faint gesture of real understanding. The leader of these negotiations, so memorable in the history of Europe, was no other than my old friend Rathenau.

“Walter Rathenau assassinated.” A panic broke out and the tremor spread through the whole Reich. Abruptly the mark plunged down, never to stop until it had reached the fantastic figures of madness, the millions, the billions and trillions.

The unemployed stood around by the thousands and shook their fists at the profiteers and foreigners in their luxurious cars who bought whole rows of streets like a box of matches; everyone who could read and write traded, speculated and profited and had a secret sense that they were deceiving themselves and were being deceived by a hidden force which brought about this chaos deliberately in order to liberate the State from its debts and obligations.

never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions.

All values were changed, and not only material ones; the laws of the State were flouted, no tradition, no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world. Bars, amusement parks, honky-tonks sprang up like mushrooms. What we had seen in Austria proved to be just a mild and shy prologue to this witches’ sabbath; for ...

everywhere it was unmistakable that this over-excitation was unbearable for the people, this being stretched daily on the rack of inflation and that the whole nation, tired of war, actually only longed for order, quiet, and a little security and bourgeois life. And, secretly it hated the republic, not because it suppressed this wild freedom, but on the contrary, because it held the reins too loosely.

For the German people, a disciplined folk, did not know what to do with their freedom and already looked impatiently toward those who were to take it from them.

The day the German inflation ended (1924) could have become a turning point in history.

a whole generation never forgot or forgave the German Republic for those years and preferred to reinstate its butchers. But

the short decade between 1924 and 1933, from the end of the German inflation to Hitler’s seizure of power, represents – in spite of all – an intermission in the catastrophic sequence of events whose witnesses and victims our generation has been since 1914.

during this decade, peace at least seemed guaranteed in Europe and that in itself meant much.

In my personal life the most notable happening of those years was the presence of a guest who settled himself most benevolently, a guest whom I had never expected: success.

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; whoever still has a copy keeps it carefully hidden and in the public libraries they remain locked away in the so-called “poison cabinet” for those few who with a special permit from the authorities want to use them “scientifically” – mostly for purposes of defamation.

everything, or almost everything that represents my work in the world during forty years has been destroyed by one and the same fist. So, if I allude to my “success” I do not refer to something that belongs to me but something that formerly was mine, like my house, my home, my security, my freedom, my ease of manner; I could not adequately describe the fall into the abyss which I with countless others equally innocent suffered, if I did not indicate the height from which it occurred, and the singularity and consequences of this destruction of our whole literary generation, an occurrence unique in history.

Within a year fifty thousand copies had been sold in Germany, the same Germany that today is not allowed to read a single line of mine.

Whatever I undertook in those years, success and a steadily increasing body of German readers remained faithful to me.

Only a book that steadily, page after page, maintains its level and that seizes and carries one breathlessly to the last line, gives me perfect enjoyment.

one day I read in the statistics of the Coopération Intellectuelle of the League of Nations at Geneva that I was then the most-translated author in the world (but true to my disposition I doubted the correctness of the report).

Maxim Gorky were to write the introduction to it. Would it be agreeable to me!

Benjamin Huebsch of the Viking Press, who has remained the most reliable friend and adviser and who – all and everything having been crushed under Hitler’s hobnailed boots – has conserved a last homeland of expression for me, now that I have lost the old one, the one that was my own, the German, the European.

But whoever is naturally distrustful of himself regards every kind of outward success as just so much more of an obligation to preserve himself as unchanged as possible in such difficult case.

Anonymity in every aspect of life is a necessity to me.

street. I am convinced that when the physical appearance of a man becomes familiar, he is unconsciously tempted to live like – to use Werfel’s title – a “Mirror-man” of his own ego; to assume with each and every gesture a particular manner, and with this external alteration cordiality, freedom and carefreeness of the inner self are usually effaced.

It was a comparatively peaceful time for Europe – I shall recall it often in gratitude – this decade from 1924 to 1933, until that one man confused our world.

But in the early spring of 1928 I was invited to take part in the celebration of the hundredth birthday of Leo Tolstoy in Moscow as the delegate of the Austrian authors and to make a speech in his honor on the festive night.

accepted and I had no reason to regret my quick decision.

In Warsaw there was nothing to indicate that twice, three and four times victorious and vanquished armies had stormed through the city.