The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

Calmly reflecting on the past, if one asks why Europe went to war in 1914, neither reasonable ground nor even provocation can be found. It had nothing to do with ideas and hardly even with petty frontiers. I cannot explain it otherwise than by this surplus of force, a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had accumulated in those forty years of peace and now sought violent release. Every State suddenly had the feeling of being strong and forgot that every other State had the same feeling, each wanted more and wanted something from the other. And the worst was that just the sentiment which we most highly valued – our common optimism – betrayed us. For each one thought that in the last moment the other would draw back affrightedly; and so the diplomats began their game of bluff.

“Art can bring us consolation as individuals,” he said, “but it is powerless against reality.”

one saw Belgian soldiers who had never before been seen on the beach, and machine guns in small carts drawn by dogs, this being a peculiarity of the Belgian army.

It was the war of an unsuspicious generation, and the greatest peril was the inexhaustible faith of the nations in the single-sided justice of their cause. ~~~

inculpations.

Non, je ne quitterai jamais mes amis.

Out of the measureless despair of a compassionate soul, out of the entire force of powerless bitterness, written to a friend beyond the border, officially an “enemy,” they may possibly be the most penetrating moral documents of a time where understanding was a gigantic manifestation of strength, and loyalty to one’s own beliefs in itself demanded grandiose courage.

like so many war poets and revolutionists, he was no more than the product of a passing hour. Natures that are out of equilibrium always suffer collapse after an abrupt rise.

trice

vocable

asperity;

affined

At last the earth was yielding place to the long promised empire of justice and brotherhood; now or never was the hour for the united Europe of our dreams. Hell lay behind us; what was there to frighten us after that! Another world was about to begin. We were young, and said to ourselves: it will be the world of our dreams, a better, a humaner world.

It was the first instance in history, as far as I know, in which a country was saddled with an independence which it exasperatedly resisted. Austria wished, either to be united with its former neighbor states or with its kindred Germany, but not to lead the humiliated life of a beggar in this mutilated form. But the neighbor states wanted no economic union, partly because they thought Austria too poor and partly for fear of a return of the Habsburgs; Anschluss with Germany was forbidden by the Allies because it might strengthen that defeated nation. Hence the decree that the Austrian Republic was to persist. A country that did not wish to be got its orders: You must exist!

In consequence of this mad disorder the situation became more paradoxical and unmoral from week to week. A man who had been saving for forty years and who, furthermore, had patriotically invested his all in war bonds, became a beggar. A man who had debts became free of them. A man who respected the food rationing system starved; only one who disregarded it brazenly could eat his fill. A man schooled in bribery got ahead, if he speculated he profited. If a man sold at cost price, he was robbed, if he made careful calculation he yet cheated. 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.

Incredible as it may seem, I can vouch for it as an eyewitness that 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.

This beer war between two inflations remains one of my oddest recollections because it was a precise reflection, in grotesque graphic miniature, of the whole insane character of those years.

Whatever had meant much to us in days gone by meant even more now; at no time had we ever been so devoted to art in Austria as in those years of chaos, because the collapse of money made us feel that nothing was enduring except the eternal within ourselves.

theosophy,

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.

Nothing ever embittered the German people so much – it is important to remember this – nothing made them so furious with hate and so ripe for Hitler as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it was, had yet yielded hours of jubilation, with ringing of bells and fanfares of victory.

Even in the most celebrated classics the many sandy and dragging passages disturb me, and often I have laid before publishers the bold notion of a comprehensive series of the literature of the world from Homer through Balzac and Dostoievsky to The Magic Mountain thoroughly curtailing the superfluous in each; then all of those works whose timeless value is undoubted could acquire new life and influence in our day. This

Publicity in itself, of whatever nature, connotes a disturbance of the natural equilibrium of a man. Under normal circumstances, the name a human being bears is no more than the band is to a cigar: a means of identification, a superficial, almost unimportant thing that is only loosely related to the real subject, the true ego. In the event of a success the name begins to swell, so to say. It loosens itself from the human being that bears it and becomes a power in itself, a force, an independent thing, an article of commerce, a capital asset; and psychologically again with strong reaction it becomes a force which tends to influence, to dominate, to transform the person who bears it. Happy, self-confident people usually identify themselves unconsciously with the effect they produce. A title, a post, a decoration, let alone a name become well-known, have a tendency to create in them a greater measure of self-assurance, a heightened self-confidence and to seduce them into the conviction that special importance is their due in society, the State and the age, and involuntarily they inflate themselves in order to attain in their person the volume of their external achievement. 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.

Therefore, if I could start all over again today, I should try to derive double enjoyment, as it were, from those two happy states, those of literary success and of personal anonymity, by publishing my works under another, an invented name, a pseudonym; because if life itself is exciting and full of surprises, how much more so is a double life!

Often one had to smile when they showed us middling factories and expected startled amazement as if we had never seen such things in Europe or America; “electric,” said a worker, quite proud, pointing to a sewing machine and looking at me in expectation of wonderment and admiration. Because the people had never before seen these technical contrivances they humbly believed the revolution and the little fathers Lenin and Trotsky had thought up and invented them all.

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.

irrefragable

Moreover, everybody had a ready-made phrase: “That cannot last long.” But I remembered a conversation with my publisher in Leningrad on my short trip to Russia. He had been telling me how rich he had once been, what beautiful paintings he had owned and 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.

Later I had frequent confirmations of the phenomenon that people thousands of miles away are better informed than those who live ten blocks from the scene of momentous decisions.

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.

It almost seems like the mysterious revenge of Nature on man, that all the achievements of science by which he has harnessed her most secret powers should serve also to confuse his soul. Science has brought no worse curse on us than that it prohibits our escaping the present even for a single moment.

In times of catastrophe former generations could revert to isolation and remoteness; it was reserved for us to have to know and to co-sense whatever evil happened on our globe at the moment of its occurrence. No matter how far I withdrew from Europe, its fate accompanied me.

I had learned and written too much history not to know that the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be. I knew that the same voices which yelled “Heil Schuschnigg” today would thunder “Heil Hitler” tomorrow.

For amidst his military and political victories Hitler’s most diabolic triumph was that he succeeded through progressive excesses in blunting every sense of law and order.

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.