The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

I grew up in Vienna, the two-thousand-year-old super-national metropolis, and was forced to leave it like a criminal before it was degraded to a German provincial city. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, was burned to ashes in the same land where my books made friends of millions of readers. And so I belong nowhere, and everywhere am a stranger, a guest at best. Europe, the homeland of my heart’s choice, is lost to me, since it has torn itself apart suicidally a second time in a war of brother against brother. Against my will I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages.

I have seen the great mass ideologies grow and spread before my eyes – Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all else that arch-plague nationalism which has poisoned the flower of our European culture.

Not until our time has mankind as a whole behaved so infernally, and never before has it accomplished so much that is godlike.

For I look upon our memory not as an element which accidentally retains or forgets, but rather as a consciously organizing and wisely exclusionary power. All that one forgets of one’s life was long since predestined by an inner instinct to be forgotten. Only that which wills to preserve itself has the right to be preserved for others. So choose and speak for me, ye memories, and at least give some reflection of my life before it sinks into the dark!

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

Despite the propriety and the modesty of this view of life, there was a grave and dangerous arrogance in this touching confidence that we had barricaded ourselves to the last loophole against any possible invasion of fate. In its liberal idealism, the nineteenth century was honestly convinced that it was on the straight and unfailing path toward being the best of all worlds. Earlier eras, with their wars, famines, and revolts, were deprecated as times when mankind was still immature and unenlightened. But now it was merely a matter of decades until the last vestige of evil and violence would finally be conquered, and this faith in an uninterrupted and irresistible “progress” truly had the force of a religion for that generation.

A “good” family therefore means more than the purely social aspect which it assigns to itself with this classification; it means a Jewry that has freed itself of all defects and limitations and pettiness which the ghetto has forced upon it, by means of adaptation to a different culture and even possibly a universal culture. That this flight into the intellectual has become as disastrous for the Jew, because of a disproportionate crowding of the professions, as formerly his confinement in the purely material, simply belongs to the eternal paradoxes of Jewish destiny.

Vienna was, we know, an epicurean city; but what is culture, if not to wheedle from the coarse material of life, by art and love, its finest, its most delicate, its most subtle qualities?

In the Vienna Opera and in the Burgtheater, nothing was overlooked; every flat note was remarked, every incorrect intonation and every cut were censured; and this control was exercised at premieres not by the professional critics alone, but day after day by the entire audience, whose attentive ears had been sharpened by constant comparison. Whereas in politics, in administration, or in morals, everything went on rather comfortably and one was affably tolerant of all that was slovenly, and overlooked many an infringement, in artistic matters there was no pardon; here the honor of the city was at stake. Every singer, actor, and musician had constantly to give his best or he was lost. It was wonderful to be the darling of Vienna, but it was not easy to remain so; no letdown was forgiven. And this knowledge and the constant pitiless supervision forced each artist in Vienna to give his best, and gave to the whole its marvelous level.

A Viennese who had no sense of art or who found no enjoyment in form was unthinkable in “good society.” Even in the lower circles, the poorest drew a certain instinct for beauty out of the landscape and out of the merry human sphere into his life; one was not a real Viennese without this love for culture, without this sense, aesthetic and critical at once, of the holiest exuberance of life. ~~~

The newspapers recommended preparations which hastened the growth of the beard, and twenty-four- and twenty-five-year-old doctors, who had just finished their examinations, wore mighty beards and gold spectacles even if their eyes did not need them, so that they could make an impression of “experience” upon their first patients. Men wore long black frock coats and walked at a leisurely pace, and whenever possible acquired a slight embonpoint, in order to personify the desired sedateness; and those who were ambitious strove, at least outwardly, to belie their youth, since the young were suspected of instability.

apodictic

I was present at a première of one of Arnold Schönberg’s early atonal works, when a gentleman energetically hissed and whistled, and when my friend Buschbeck gave him an equally energetic slap in the face.

afflatus,

To be sure, in the last century the sport wave had not yet reached our continent from England. There were as yet no stadiums where a hundred thousand people went wild with joy when one boxer hit another on the chin. The newspapers did not yet send reporters to fill columns with Homeric rapture about a hockey game. Fights, athletic clubs, and heavyweight records were still regarded in our time as a thing of the outer city, and butchers and porters really made up their audience; at best the noble and more aristocratic sport of racing drew the so-called “good society” several times a year to the racetrack, but could not lure us who looked upon every physical activity as a plain waste of time.

and only he who has learned early to spread his soul out wide may later hold the entire world within himself.

faubourgs

An able and popular leader was Dr. Karl Lueger, who mastered this unrest and worry and with the slogan “the little man must be helped,” carried with him the entire small bourgeoisie and the disgruntled middle class, whose envy of the wealthy was markedly less than the fear of sinking from its bourgeois status into the proletariat. It was exactly the same worried group which Adolf Hitler later collected around him as his first substantial following.

Children and even young people are at first inclined to adapt themselves respectfully to the laws of their surroundings. But they submit to the conventions demanded of them only so long as they see that these are honestly observed by everyone else. A single untruthfulness on the part of teachers or parents inevitably leads a young person to regard his entire surroundings with a suspicious and therefore a sharper eye.

For they thought differently about these things thirty or forty years ago than they do now. It is quite possible that there is no sphere of public life in which a series of factors – the emancipation of women, Freudian psychoanalysis, physical culture, the independence of youth – have brought about so complete a change within one generation as in the relationship between the sexes.

But this wise morality completely forgot that if one shuts the front door on the Devil, he usually forces an entrance through the chimney or the back door.

Since it searched without interruption for all that was “improper,” it found itself in a constant state of alert; to the world of that day “decency” was always in mortal danger, in every word and in every gesture. Perhaps we can still understand that in those days it would have been a crime for a woman to wear a pair of trousers at play. The possibility of two young people of the same social class, but of different sexes, going on an excursion together without proper supervision was unthinkable; or rather, the first thought would have been that “something might happen.” Such companionship was only permissible if some chaperone, a mother or a governess, followed the young people step by step.

Everywhere the suppressed sought byways, loopholes, and detours. In the final analysis that generation, to whom all enlightenment and all innocent association with the opposite sex was prudishly denied, was a thousand times more erotically inclined than the younger generation of today with its greater freedom of love. For it is only the forbidden that occupies the senses, only the forbidden excites desire; and the less the eyes manage to see and the ears to hear, the more the mind will dream. The less air, light, and sun were allowed to the body, the more the senses were troubled. To sum up, the pressure of society on our youth, instead of bringing about a higher morality, brought forth nothing but mistrust and bitterness against all authorities.

I am still amused by a grotesque story of an aunt of mine who, on the night of her marriage, stormed the door of her parents’ house at one o’clock in the morning. She never again wished to see the horrible creature to whom she had been married. He was a madman and a beast, for he had seriously attempted to undress her. It was only with great difficulty that she had been able to escape from this obviously perverted desire.

Whoever picks up a volume of the Fliegende Blätter, or any one of the humorous magazines of that period, will shudder at their stupid jeering at aging maidens, who with nerves disturbed did not know how to conceal their natural desire for love. Instead of recognizing the tragedy which beset these sacrificed lives, which for reasons of family and good name were forced to suppress the demands of Nature and the desire for love and motherhood, people ridiculed them with a lack of understanding that disgusts us today. For a society is always most cruel to those who disclose and reveal its secrets, when through dishonesty society itself has outraged Nature. ~~~

And only a very few fortunate young men achieved the literary ideal of love of the times – the only one which it was permitted to describe in novels – an affair with a married woman.

On the other hand, being a real student meant giving proof of one’s manhood by participating in as many duels as possible, and bearing the evidence of such heroic deeds in the shape of scars on one’s face; smooth cheeks and a nose that had not been disfigured were not worthy of a genuine Germanic academician.

Carlyle’s axiom that the true university of these days is a good collection of books has remained valid as far as I am concerned, and even today I am convinced that one can become an excellent philosopher, historian, philologist, lawyer, or what you will, without having attended a university or even a Gymnasium. Countless times I have seen it proved in daily life that a secondhand dealer will know more about books than professors of literature, that art dealers know more than art historians, that a goodly portion of the important discoveries and inspirations in all fields are made by outsiders.

And to love someone alone is to love doubly.

Our time lives too rapidly and experiences too much to possess a good memory,

And if today I were to counsel a young writer who is still unsure of his way, I would try to persuade him first to adapt or translate a sizable work. In all sacrificing service there is more assurance for the beginner than in his own creation, and nothing that one has ever done with devotion is done in vain.

In him, a born comrade, I found the highest type of self-sacrificing person in flesh and blood, truly devoted, considering his life’s work to be nothing but to help the natural talents of his time to realize themselves and bear fruit, and never even aspiring to the justifiable pride of being renowned as their discoverer and promoter. His active enthusiasm was simply a natural function of his moral consciousness.

will it be possible for such personalities, completely devoted to the lyric art, to exist in our time, in our new forms of life, which drive men out murderously from all inner contemplation as a forest fire drives wild animals from their hidden lairs? I know full well that the miracle of a poet repeats itself in all times, and Goethe’s moving consolation in his elegy on Lord Byron remains eternally true: “For the Earth will conceive them again, as she has always conceived them.” Again and again such poets will arise in blessed recurrence, for from time to time immortality lends so precious a pledge to even the most unworthy era.

Every movement, every gesture was soft; even when he laughed it was no more than a suggestion of a sound.

No less than measured conduct, orderliness, cleanliness and quiet were physical necessities; to ride in an overfilled streetcar, or to have to sit in a noisy public place, disturbed him for hours thereafter.

Once I watched him in his rooms prior to his departure – he declined my help as superfluous – as he was packing his trunk. It was like mosaic work, each individual piece gently put into the carefully reserved space; I would have felt it to be an outrage to disturb this flowerlike arrangement by a helping hand.

It was as impossible to think of Rilke being noisy as it was to imagine a man in his presence who did not lose his loudness and arrogance through the vibrations that emanated from Rilke’s quietness.

Die Weise von Liebe und Tod

But the actual poetic discovery that came to me in London did not concern a living poet, but an artist who at that time was very much forgotten – William Blake, that lonely and problematical genius who, with his mixture of helplessness and sublime perfection, still fascinates me. A friend had advised me to look at the books illustrated in color in the Print Room of the British Museum, which was then directed by Laurence Binyon, “Europe,” “America,” and “The Book of Job,” which, today, have become the great rarities at the dealers, and I was enchanted. Here for the first time I saw one of those magic natures who, without planning their own way in advance, are borne on angel’s wings by visions through all the wilderness of fantasy.

this one leaf has accompanied me for more than thirty years; and how often the magic flashing glance of this mad king has looked down from the wall at me. Of all that is lost and distant from me, it is that drawing which I miss most in my wandering. The genius of England, which I tried in vain to recognize in streets and cities, was suddenly revealed to me in Blake’s truly astral figure. And now I had added another to my many world loves.

pied-à-terre,

That mysterious moment of transition in which a verse, a melody, emerges out of the invisible, out of the vision and intuition of a genius, and is graphically fixed in a material form – where else can it so well be examined and observed as in the tortured or trance-born manuscript of the master? I do not know enough about an artist if I am familiar only with his finished work, and I agree perfectly with Goethe when he says that to understand completely great creations one must have seen them not only in their perfection but have pursued the process of their creation. The sight of one of Beethoven’s first sketches with its wild impatient strokes, its chaotic mixture of motifs begun and discarded, and with the creative fury, the superabundance of his genius, compressed into a few pencil strokes is physically exciting to me because it is mentally exciting. I can look at such a scribbled page of hieroglyphics with enchantment and love, as others gaze upon a perfect picture.

A proof sheet of Balzac in which practically every sentence is torn apart, every line plowed through, the white margin blackened with strokes, signs and words, represents to me the eruption of a human Vesuvius; and to see any poem that I have loved for years in its first draft, in its first earthly realization arouses a religious awe in me and I hardly dare to touch it.

colophon

declamation,

euphony

Perforce

He exemplified the fact that every science, even the military, when pursued profoundly, must necessarily push beyond its own limits and impinge on all the other sciences.

But to look down from the Brooklyn Bridge, with its constant gentle swaying, at the harbor and to wander about in the stone canyons of the avenues, was discovery and excitement enough.

gamboled,