The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

From Warsaw we went on towards the Russian frontier.

“Workers of the world, unite!” Passing under this flaming red band one had entered the empire of the proletariat, the Soviet Republic, a new world.

saw nothing more magnificent, nothing more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave.

Nameless the great man lies buried who like none other suffered from his name and his fame, just like some wayside vagrant, like an unknown soldier.

The wind tones like God’s word over the grave of the nameless; no other voice; one might pass it unsuspectingly without knowing more than that a body lies there, that of any Russian man in Russian earth. Not Napoleon’s crypt under the marble arches of the Invalides, not Goethe’s coffin in the Fürstengruft, not the sepulchers in Westminster Abbey evoke such profound emotion as this gloriously silent, touchingly unmarked grave somewhere in the forest, that hears only whispers of the wind and itself offers no word or message.

What was it exactly that so aroused one? Soon, I hit on it: it was the people and the impulsive cordiality that welled from them. All of them, from the first to the last, were convinced that they were participants in a momentous matter which concerned all mankind; all were imbued with the thought that the privations and restrictions which they had to take upon themselves were for the sake of a higher mission.

That I did not succumb to this magic intoxication was due less to any force within myself than to an unknown whose name I do not know and never shall find out.

was a letter without signature, a very wise, human letter, not one from a White Russian but full of bitterness against the ever growing restriction of freedom during recent years. “Don’t believe everything one tells you,” this unknown said. “Don’t forget that with all that they show you, there is much that is not shown you.

the most valuable thing I brought home with me was the friendship of Maxim Gorky

To be with him meant for me to experience Russia, not the bolshevik, neither the erstwhile Russia, nor that of today, but the broad, strong, dark soul of the whole people.

Benedetto Croce.

Nothing harms a thinking man more than lack of opposition; it is only since I found myself alone and no longer surrounded by youth that I was forced to become young again myself.”

Like all important things in life one never derives such knowledge from other peoples’ experience but only from one’s own fate.

The little town of Salzburg with its forty thousand inhabitants, which I had selected just for its romantic remoteness, had become amazingly transformed: it had become the summer artistic capital not only of Europe but of the whole world.

Salzburg was and remained for a decade the artistic Mecca of Europe.

My joy always lay in the act of creating, never in what had been created. So I do not lament for what I once owned; for, if we, driven and hunted in these times which are inimical to every art and every collection, were put to it to learn a new art it would be that of parting from all that once had been our pride and our love.

I am frankly unable to recall when I first heard the name of Adolf Hitler, that name which for years we have been forced to think of or to pronounce every day, yes, almost every second, in one connection or another; the name of the man who has brought more evil to our world than any other through the ages.

There must have been mightier hands which used this new “movement” as a front.

these troops had been trained to attack, force, and terror.

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.

A few years elapsed before he again rose to the surface, this time on a rising wave of dissatisfaction that quickly lifted him high. Inflation, unemployment, the political crises and, not least, the folly of lands abroad, had made the German people restless; a tremendous desire for order animated all circles of the German people, to whom order had always been more important than freedom and justice. And anyone who promised order – even Goethe said that disorder was more distasteful to him than even an injustice – could count on hundreds of thousands of supporters from the start.

So well had he distributed his promises that on the day of his coming to power there was jubilation in the most diverse camps.

Hitler was particularly welcome to the military because his outlook was militaristic and he vilified pacifism.

even the German Jews were not very worried.

what could he put through by force in a State where law was securely anchored, where the majority in parliament was against him, and where every citizen believed his liberty and equal rights secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution?

But even then I did not suspect when I looked at these fugitives that I ought to perceive in their pale faces, as in a mirror, my own life and that we all, we all, we all would become victims of the lust for power of this one man.

possible I have to admit that none of us in Germany and in Austria in 1933 and even in 1934 thought that even a hundredth, a thousandth part of what was to break upon us within a few weeks could be possible.

National Socialism in its unscrupulous technique of deceit was wary about disclosing the full extent of its aims before the world had become inured. Thus they practised their method carefully: only a small dose to begin with, then a brief pause. Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength, to see whether the world conscience would still digest this dose. And since the European conscience – to the hurt and shame of our civilization – eagerly accented its unconcern because, after all, these atrocities occurred “beyond the border,” the doses became progressively stronger until all of Europe finally perished from them.

Only after the grandiose order “for the protection of the German people” by which the printing, sale, and distribution of our books were declared criminal had become law, were we forcibly estranged from the millions of Germans who even today would rather read our works than all the mushroom growth “blood and soil” writers and would endorse what we represent.

regarded it more as an honor than a disgrace to be permitted to share this fate of the complete destruction of literary existence in Germany with such eminent contemporaries as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Freud, Einstein, and many others whose work I consider incomparably more important than my own, and as any gesture of martyrdom is so repugnant to me I mention my personal inclusion in the common fate only reluctantly.

Strauss works to the point and composes like Johann Sebastian Bach, like all those sublime craftsmen of their art, quietly and systematically.

January 1933, when Hitler came into power, the piano score of our opera The Silent Woman was as good as finished and the first act practically orchestrated. A few weeks later a strict order was issued to German theaters not to produce any works by non-aryans or even such in which a Jew had merely participated. This comprehensive ban reached even to the dead and to the indignation of music lovers everywhere the statue of Mendelssohn in front of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig was removed.

I asked him why he had not left Russia immediately on the outbreak of the revolution as so many others had done. “Ah,” he answered, “who would have believed that such a thing as a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Republic could last longer than a fortnight?” It was the self deception that we practice because of reluctance to abandon our accustomed life.

Heimwehr

My experience of the Viennese revolution, therefore, has only the value of demonstrating how little a contemporary, unless he chances to stand at the crucial spot, sees of events which alter the face of the earth and his own destiny as well.

“Don’t ask me. Better buy a foreign newspaper.”

There stood four policemen in mufti who said that they had orders to search the house and to seize immediately whatever arms belonging to the Republican Schutzbund were hidden there.

For of recent decades Europe and the world have almost forgotten the old sacredness of personal rights and civil liberties. Since 1933, searches, arbitrary arrests, expropriation of property, expulsion from home and country, deportation and all other imaginable forms of humiliation have become an almost matter-of-course occurrence;

on the very first day of Hitler’s invasion the most faithful of Austrian officials were dragged to the concentration camps.

Behind this episode, in itself unimportant, I felt how serious the situation had become in Austria, how overpowering the pressure from Germany.

The same evening I started to pack my most important papers, determined to live abroad permanently from now on, and this meant more than giving up house and country, for my family clung to the house as their home, they loved the land. For me, however, personal liberty was the most important thing on earth.

since those days in Vienna I had been aware that Austria was lost, not yet suspecting, to be sure, how much I had lost thereby.

Austria continued to endure even after the so-called “revolution” and the attempt, hard thereupon, of the National Socialists to seize the country by a coup d’état and the murder of Dollfuss.

my life was already unconsciously accommodating itself to the temporary rather than to the permanent.

The sharper the political tension became the more I withdrew from discussions and from any public participation. England was the only country in the old world in which I never published an opportune article in a newspaper, never spoke over the radio, never shared in a public discussion; my life in the small apartment there was more anonymous than that of the student in his Vienna thirty years before.

once I had the special and truly unforgettable pleasure of hearing those two cleverest brains, Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, engage in a brilliant discussion which was outwardly perfectly courteous though highly charged with a concealed current.

in accordance with their very pronounced personalities, they had developed more and more away from each other, Wells persisting in practical idealism, indefatigably perfecting his vision of the future of mankind, Shaw on the contrary increasingly viewing the future with the same skepticism and irony as the present, as stuff for his amused, superior play of intellect. In physical appearance,

In the summer of 1936 the Spanish Civil War had begun; superficially viewed it was no more than an internal strife of that beautiful and tragic country, in reality, however, the preparatory maneuver of the two ideological power groups for their future encounter.

And again I asked myself: who supplies, who pays for these new uniforms, who organizes these impoverished young men, who whips them up against the powers that be, against the elected parliament, against their own legal representatives?

It was a new power that sought to come into power, one and the same power which was at work here, there and everywhere, a power that loved violence and stood in need of violence and to which all those concepts to which we held and for which we lived – peace, humanity, conciliation – seemed infirmities of a bygone day.