The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

There was no escape, not by day, not by night; always I was in a torment of anxiety about Europe and of Austria within Europe.

For nothing is more dangerous than the ambition of the small to be like the great, and the first thing that the small States did, hardly had they been created, was to intrigue against one another and to dispute for insignificant tracts of land – Poles against Czechs, Hungarians against Rumanians, Bulgarians against Serbs – and weakest among all in these rivalries stood tiny Austria against overwhelming Germany.

read or permitted myself to infer, the surrender of Austria, for what else could a discussion with Hitler mean?

if only a fraction of it came true it was the beginning of the end, then the stone would fall out of the wall and the wall with

My friends were astonished at my quick and unexpected return. But how they ridiculed me when I indicated my concern; I was still the same old “Jeremiah,” they mocked. Was I not aware that the whole population of Austria now stood one hundred per cent strong behind Schuschnigg?

I knew that the same voices which yelled “Heil Schuschnigg” today would thunder “Heil Hitler” tomorrow. But everybody I spoke to in Vienna showed an honest unconcern.

March 13, 1938, that day when Austria and Europe with it fell prey to sheer violence! The mask was off. The

Now there was no longer mere robbery and theft, but every private lust for revenge was given free rein. University professors were obliged to scrub the streets with their naked hands, pious white-bearded Jews were dragged into the synagogue by hooting youths and forced to do knee-exercises and to shout “Heil Hitler” in chorus. Innocent people in the streets were trapped like rabbits and herded off to clean the latrines in the S.A. barracks.

Breaking into homes and tearing earrings from trembling women may well have happened in the looting of cities, hundreds of years ago during medieval wars; what was new, however, was the shameless delight in public tortures, in spiritual martyrization, in the refinements of humiliation.

Hitler’s most diabolic triumph was that he succeeded through progressive excesses in blunting every sense of law and order.

but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave.

was not shocked and did not mourn upon learning of the death of my mother in Vienna; on the contrary, I even felt something like composure in the knowledge that she was now safe from suffering and danger.

Fortunately, my mother was spared suffering such brutality and humiliation for long. She died a few months after the occupation of Vienna and I cannot forbear to write about an episode in connection with her passing;

my Austrian passport became void and I had to request an emergency white paper from the English authorities, a passport for the stateless.

But I had to solicit the English certificate. It was a favor that I had to ask for, and what is more, a favor that could be withdrawn at any moment. Overnight I found myself one rung lower. Only yesterday still a visitor from abroad and, so to speak, a gentleman who was spending his international income and paying his taxes, now I had become an immigrant, a “refugee.”

“Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.”

rights. Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased.

Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was xenophobia; morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of the foreigner.

acquaintance with a stenographer in a consulate, who could cut down one’s waiting time was more significant to one’s existence than friendship with a Toscanini or a Rolland.

since the day when I had to depend upon identity papers or passports that were indeed alien, I ceased to feel as if I quite belonged to myself. A part of the natural identity with my original and essential ego was destroyed forever.

two or three days were the very ones that now are held to be the most fateful in modern history; the days of Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler in Munich.

agreement which guaranteed the peaceful settlement of all possible future conflicts between England and Germany. It looked like the triumph of the dogged will to peace of an otherwise unimportant and leathery statesman, and the immediate reaction was universal gratitude to him.

It took only a few days for the evil details to trickle through, of the completeness of the capitulation to Hitler, of the shameful betrayal of Czechoslovakia

Goebbels no longer restrained himself from shouting to heaven that England had been held up at Munich.

friendly hours which I was privileged to spend with Sigmund Freud during those last months before the catastrophe.

(once he said to me, “Absolute truth is as impossible as to obtain an absolute zero temperature”),

Over the years a conversation with Freud had always constituted one of my greatest intellectual satisfactions.

Once, on one of my last visits, I took Salvador Dali with me, in my opinion the most gifted painter of the younger generation, who revered Freud immensely and while I talked with Freud, he worked at a sketch. I dared not show it to Freud, because clairvoyantly Dali had already incorporated death in the picture.

First the Jews had been deprived of their professions; they were forbidden the theaters, the movies, the museums, and scholars lost the use of the libraries; they had stayed because of loyalty or of indolence, cowardice or pride. They preferred being humiliated at home to humiliating themselves as beggars abroad. They were not permitted to have servants, radios and telephones were removed from their homes, then the homes themselves were taken; the star of David was forced on them so that they might be recognized, avoided and mocked like lepers expelled and proscribed. Every right was withdrawn from them, every spiritual and physical cruelty was practiced on them with playful sadism and the old Russian proverb had suddenly become cruel truth for every Jew: “No one is safe from the beggar’s pack and the jail.”

Whoever did not leave was thrown into a concentration camp where German discipline crushed even the proudest.

the expulsion of a whole people which was denied nationhood but was yet a people which, for two thousand years sought nothing so much as to stop wandering and to rest their feet on quiet, peaceful earth.

But the Jews of the twentieth century had for long not been a community. They had no common faith, they were conscious of their Judaism rather as a burden than as something to be proud of and were not aware of any mission. They lived apart from the commandments of their once holy books and they were done with the common language of old. To integrate themselves and become articulated with the people with whom they lived, to dissolve themselves in the common life, was the purpose for which they strove impatiently for the sake of peace from persecution, rest on the eternal flight. Thus the one group no longer understood the other, melted down into other peoples as they were, more Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, Russians than they were Jews.

only now, for the first time in hundreds of years the Jews were forced into a community of interest to which they had long ceased to be sensitive, the ever-recurring – since Egypt – community of expulsion.

“The Germans have invaded Poland. This is war!” he shouted into the quiet room. The word fell like a hammer blow upon my heart. But the heart of our generation is already accustomed to all sorts of hard blows. “That doesn’t have to mean war,” I said in honest conviction. But the man was almost incensed. “No,” he cried vehemently, “we’ve had enough! We can’t let them start this sort of thing every six months! We’ve got to put a stop to it!”

It was war again, a war, more terrible and far-reaching than ever before on earth any war had been. Once more an epoch came to an end, once more a new epoch began.

Again I had dropped a rung lower, within an hour I was no longer merely a stranger in the land but an “enemy alien,” a hostile foreigner; this decree forcibly banned me to a situation to which my throbbing heart had no relation.

I wrote, I still thought in the German language, but my every thought and wish belonged to the countries which stood in arms for the freedom of the world.

His own biography, by friend Erwin Rieger, is published in Berlin.

short story Schachnovelle (The Royal Game) to his New York publisher. This short story becomes his most famous.