The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

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.

this faith in an uninterrupted and irresistible “progress” truly had the force of a religion for that generation. One began to believe more in this “progress” than in the Bible, and its gospel appeared ultimate because of the daily new wonders of science and technology.

There was as little belief in the possibility of such barbaric declines as wars between the peoples of Europe as there was in witches and ghosts.

They honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity and that peace and security, the highest of treasures, would be shared by all mankind.

But it is my father in me, and it is his secret pride that forces me back, and I may not offer opposition; for I thank him for what may well be my only definite possession – the feeling of inner freedom.

It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.

Art always reaches its peak where it becomes the life interest of a people.

It had better luck, the generation of my parents and my grandparents, it lived quietly, straight and clearly from one end of its life to the other. But even so, I do not know if I envy them. How they remained blissfully unaware of all the bitter realities, of the tricks and forces of fate, how they lived apart from all those crises and problems that crush the heart but at the same time marvelously uplift it!

For, if I am to be honest, the entire period of my schooling was nothing other than a constant and wearisome boredom, accompanied year after year by an increased impatience to escape from this treadmill.

Personally I thank this pressure for the early emergence of a passion to be free

every passive passionate attitude is of itself an unnatural one for youth, for it is in its being not only to take up impressions but to reproduce them actively. For a young man to love the theater means that he will at least desire or dream to work for, or in, the theater. To admire talent ecstatically in all its forms irresistibly leads to introspection, to see if it is not possible to discover some trace or possibility of this choicest of essences in one’s unexplored body or still cloudy soul.

In the matter of all speed and ability records in sport, I have always been of the same opinion as the Shah of Persia who, when urged to attend the Derby, replied with Oriental wisdom: “Why? I know that one horse can run faster than another. It makes no difference to me which one it is.”

A remarkable shifting began to prepare itself in our old sleepy Austria. The masses, which had silently and obediently permitted the liberal middle classes to retain the leadership for decades, suddenly became restless, organized themselves and demanded their rights. And it was just in the last decade that politics broke into the calm of easy living with sharp and sudden blasts. The new century wanted a new order, a new era.

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.

the nineteenth century labored under the illusion that all conflicts could be solved by rationalization, and that the more we hid the natural, the more we could temper our lawless powers.

Can one still imagine today that at the turn of the century when women first ventured to ride a bicycle or rode a man’s saddle, these daring creatures were stoned by peasants?

For weeks on end the entire body of anyone infected with syphilis was rubbed with mercury, the effect of which was that the teeth fell out and other injuries to health ensued.

Small wonder then that at that time many young people, once the diagnosis had been made, reached for their revolvers because they could not stand the feeling that they were suspected of being incurable.

I am genuinely happy to see how tremendous a moral revolution has occurred in favor of youth, how much freedom in loving and living they have regained, and how much they have recovered physically and spiritually in this freedom. The women appear to be more beautiful since it is permitted them to display their figures, their walk is more erect, their eyes clearer, their talk less artificial. What a different sense of security this new generation possesses, since its members need not give an accounting of their conduct to anyone but themselves, having wrung control from mothers and fathers and aunts and teachers, and no longer dream of all the suppression, intimidation, and tension that was forced upon us, no longer know anything of the bypaths and secretiveness with which we had to secure the forbidden, which they correctly conceive to be their right.

“I am innocent.” At that moment he knew in the depth of his heart that Dreyfus was innocent and that he had brought the horrible suspicion of treason on himself merely by being a Jew. Indeed in his upright and manly pride Theodor Herzl had already suffered under the Jewish lot when he was a student; moreover by his prophetic instinct he had foreseen the entire tragedy of his race at a time when it had not appeared to be an inevitable fate.

But now at the moment of Dreyfus’s degradation the thought of the eternal exile of his people entered his breast like the thrust of a dagger. If separation was inevitable, he said to himself, then let it be a complete one. If humiliation is to be our constant fate, then let us face it with pride. If we suffer because of our homelessness, then let us build our own homeland! And so he published his pamphlet, “The Jewish State,” in which he proclaimed that all attempts at assimilation and all hope for total tolerance were impossible for the Jewish people. They had to create a new homeland of their own in their old home, Palestine.

And to love someone alone is to love doubly.

And now I was outwardly free and all the years up to the present have been devoted to one struggle – a struggle which in our times grows constantly more difficult – to remain equally free inwardly.

Will it ever again be able to give to future generations what it gave to us – the wisest lesson, the most wonderful example of how to be free and creative at the same time,

Then it was still something of a trip from Montmartre to Montparnasse, and in view of the frugality of the Parisian bourgeois, I readily believe the legend that there were still Parisians on the right bank who had never been on the left,

Yet still, you never know a people or a city in its depth and its most hidden qualities through books, nor even most persistent poking about in its nooks and crannies, but only through its best people. It is only through an intellectual friendship with the living that one gains insight into the true connection between folk and land; all observation from without can give no more than a spurious premature view.

They all had small governmental jobs in which there was little actual work. The great respect for intellectual activity which is apparent in France from the highest to the lowest for years inspired the intelligent system of conferring inconspicuous sinecures upon poets and writers whose work brought them only a small revenue; they were, for example, appointed librarians in the Ministry of Marine or in the Senate.

My first lesson had been taught me – that the greatest men are always the kindest.

Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind.

I chose small quarters at the city’s edge intentionally, so that my freedom was not weighted by costliness.

But it is only early in life that one believes fate to be identical with chance. Later one knows that the actual course of one’s life was determined from within; however confusedly and meaninglessly our way may deviate from our desires, after all it does lead us inevitably to our invisible goal.

This was my first sight of the pest of the racial purity mania which has become more dangerous for our world of today than the actual plague had been centuries ago.

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.

In this manner I had convinced myself more vividly than by mere strolling about how much room, how much opportunity there was in this young country for anyone willing to work, and that impressed me. Also through this experience at agencies and interviews in shops and offices, I gained an insight into the divine freedom of the country. No one had asked me about my nationality, my religion, my origin, and – fantastic as it may seem to the world of today with its fingerprinting, visas, and police certificates – I had traveled without a passport.

Talking about US

because of our pride in the successive triumphs of our technical skills, our science, a European community spirit, a European national consciousness was coming into being. How useless, we said to ourselves, are frontiers when any plane can fly over them with ease, how provincial and artificial are customs-duties, guards and border patrols, how incongruous in the spirit of these times which visibly seeks unity and world brotherhood! This soaring of our feelings was no less wonderful than that of the planes, and I pity those who were not young during those last years of confidence in Europe. For the air about us is not dead, is not empty, it carries in itself the vibration and the rhythm of the hour, it presses them unknowingly into our blood and directs them deep into our heart and brain. In those years each one of us derived strength from the common upswing of the time and increased his individual confidence out of the collective confidence. Perhaps, thankless as we human beings are, we did not realize then how firmly and surely the wave bore us. But whoever experienced that epoch of world confidence knows that all since has been retrogression and gloom.

The French industrialists with their big profits agitated against the Germans who were fattening no less fast, because both of them, Krupp and Schneider-Creusot, wanted to produce more cannon.

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 affrighted...

The stand of most of the intellectuals was unfortunately an indifferently passive one, because our optimism blinded us to the problem of war with all of its moral consequences; in

We thought we were doing enough when we thought as Europeans and fraternized internationally, when we professed in our sphere the ideal of peaceful understanding and intellectual brotherhood beyond language and frontier, seeking only indirectly to affect the affairs of the day.

L’Aube, by Romain Rolland – and began to read it, my interest and astonishment constantly increasing.

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

We know from experience that it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of an era than its spiritual atmosphere. Its traces are not to be found in official events, but rather in the small, personal episodes such as I should like to include here.

We did think of war occasionally, but no more than we did of death – as a possibility, yet probably a distant one. And Paris was too beautiful in those days, and we were too young and too happy.

As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together.

That I myself did not succumb to this sudden rapture of patriotism was not due to any unusual sobriety or discernment on my part, but rather because of my former manner of life. Two days earlier I had still been in “enemy” country and could convince myself that the great masses in Belgium were just as peaceful and unaware as our own people. What is more, I had lived too internationally to be able suddenly, overnight, to hate a world that was as much mine as my fatherland. I had long been dubious of politics, and especially during recent years I had discussed countless times with my French and Italian friends the stupidity of a possible war. I was inoculated to some extent against the infection of patriotic enthusiasm and, being thus prepared against this fever of the first hours, I remained fully determined not to allow this war of brothers, brought about by clumsy diplomats and brutal munitions-manufacturers, to affect my conviction of the necessity of European unity.

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.

It has always been the same, the eternal pack throughout the times, calling the prudent cowardly, the humane weak, only to be supine themselves in the hour of catastrophe which they themselves wantonly conjure up. It was always the same pack, the same who derided Cassandra in Troy, Jeremiah in Jerusalem, and never had I sensed the greatness and the tragedy of those figures as in these all too similar hours. From the very beginning I had no faith in victory and was certain of but one thing: that even if it could be achieved by immeasurable sacrifice, it could never justify that sacrifice.

I had no intention of writing a “pacifist” play, or to set in words and verses the truth that peace was better than war, but to portray the man who in time of enthusiasm is despised as the weakling, the timid one, but who in the hour of defeat proves himself to be the only one able not only to endure it, but also to master it.