The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

Only the man who could look into the future without worry could thoroughly enjoy the present.

Practically all the great art collections of the nineteenth century were formed by them, nearly all the artistic attempts were made possible only by them; without the ceaseless stimulating interest of the Jewish bourgeoisie, Vienna, thanks to the indolence of the court, the aristocracy, and the Christian millionaires, who preferred to maintain racing stables and hunts to fostering art, would have remained behind Berlin in the realm of art as Austria remained behind the German Reich in political matters.

nine-tenths of what the world celebrated as Viennese culture in the nineteenth century was promoted, nourished, or even created by Viennese Jewry. For it was precisely in the last years – as it was in Spain before the equally tragic decline – that the Viennese Jews had become artistically productive although not in a specifically Jewish way; rather, through a miracle of understanding, they gave to what was Austrian, and Viennese, its most intensive expression.

Only the coming decades will show the crime that Hitler perpetrated against Vienna when he sought to nationalize and provincialize this city whose meaning and culture were founded in the meeting of the most heterogeneous elements, and in her spiritual supernationality.

“Live and let live” was the famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me to be more humane than all the categorical imperatives, and it maintained itself throughout all classes.

The hatred of country for country, of nation for nation, of one table for another, did not yet jump at one daily from the newspaper, it did not divide people from people and nations from nations; not yet had every herd and mass feeling become so disgustingly powerful in public life as today. Freedom in one’s private affairs, which is no longer considered comprehensible, was taken for granted.

The trains were filled with fresh recruits, banners were flying, music sounded, and in Vienna I found the entire city in a tumult. The first shock at the news of war – the war that no one, people or government, had wanted – the war which had slipped, much against their will, out of the clumsy hands of the diplomats who had been bluffing and toying with it, had suddenly been transformed into enthusiasm.

The war of 1914, on the other hand, knew nothing of realities, it still served a delusion, the dream of a better, a righteous and peaceful world. And it is only delusion, and not knowledge, that bestows happiness.

Limited in their experience of Europe as a whole and living entirely within the German circle of thought, most of our writers believed that their best contribution was to strengthen the enthusiasm of the masses and support the supposed beauty of war with poetic appeals or scientific ideologies.

it took little time for it to become apparent how terrible a disaster had been caused by these songs in praise of war and orgies of hatred.

In Germany, in France, in Italy, in Russia, and in Belgium, they all obediently served the war propaganda and thus the mass delusion and mass hatred, instead of fighting against it.

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.

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.

I had recognized the foe I was to fight – false heroism that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military who, boldly promising victory, prolong the war, and behind them the hired chorus, the “word makers of war” as Werfel has pilloried them in his beautiful poem.

A deep split divided the whole people; it seemed as if the country had divided into two quite different worlds, that of the fighters at the front who were suffering the most terrible privations, and the one of the stay-at-homes care-free, crowding the theaters, and even profiting from the others’ misery.

this was my first proper insight into the eternal type of the professional revolutionary who feels himself lifted out of his insignificance by the mere fact of being in opposition and who clings to his dogma for want of resources within himself.

Because property implied fresh ties, I did not take a house but rented a little flat, just big enough to accommodate the two bookcases holding the volumes which I was unwilling to do without and a writing table. Therewith I really had all that an intellectual worker needs.

Hitler merely had to utter the word “peace” in a speech to arouse the newspapers to enthusiasm, to make them forget all his past deeds, and desist from asking why, after all, Germany was arming so madly.

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 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.

Ukraine and Russia 2022?

who had supplied them and who had paid for them? 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. It was mysterious groups, screened by offices and businesses which cynically diverted the naïve idealism of youth to their lust for power and their concerns. It was the will to violence which sought with a new and subtler technique to engulf our unfortunate Europe in the old barbarism of war.