The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European

by Stefan Zweig

Never until our time has mankind as a whole acted so diabolically, or made such almost divine progress.

it is my father I have to thank for what I feel is, perhaps, my one secure possession: my sense of inner freedom.

When a single attempt was made in the anti-Semitic period3 to found a so-called National Theatre, there were no playwrights or actors or audiences available; after a few months the ‘National Theatre’ failed miserably, and that example first made it clear that nine-tenths of what the world of the nineteenth century celebrated as Viennese culture was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna.

Austria was an old state ruled by an old emperor, governed by old ministers, a state that, having no ambition, hoped only to preserve itself intact by rejecting all radical changes in Europe.

‘We must help the little man’, united the discontented lower middle class, whose envy of those more prosperous than themselves was considerably lesser than their fear of sinking from bourgeois status into the proletariat. This was exactly the same kind of social group living in a state of anxiety that Adolf Hitler later gathered around him to provide his first large body of followers.

Hitler also adopted his anti-Semitic theory of race—In der Rass’ liegt die Schweinerei,11 said a famous example—and above all, he took over Schönerer’s use of ruthless storm troopers to strike out at random, and with it the principle where by a small group intimidates a numerically superior but humane and passive majority through terrorism.

Today’s generation has grown up amidst disasters, crises, and the failure of systems. The young see war as a constant possibility to be expected almost daily, and it may be difficult to describe to them the optimism and confidence in the world that we felt when we ourselves were young at the turn of the century. Forty years of peace had strengthened national economies, technology had speeded up the pace of life, scientific discoveries had been a source of pride to the spirit of our own generation..

Who dared, won. If you bought a house, a rare book, a picture you saw its value rise; the bolder and more ambitious the ideas behind an enterprise, the more certain it was to succeed.

This is about the hyperinflationary period.

prudery of every kind now seemed old-fashioned. Increasingly, the wooden partitions in swimming baths that used to divide the gentlemen’s and ladies’ pools from each other were taken down.

The forces working for hatred, in line with their baser nature, were more violent and aggressive than the forces of reconciliation, and there were material interests behind them which, of their very nature, were more unscrupulous than ours.

Freud perceptively described as a rejection of civilisation, a longing to break out of the bourgeois world of laws and their precepts for once and indulge the ancient bloodlust of humanity.

But the generation of 1939 knew about war. They no longer deceived themselves. They knew that war was barbaric, not romantic. They knew it would last for years and years, a part of their lifespan that they would never get back. They knew that you did not set out adorned with oak leaves and coloured ribbons to attack the enemy; instead, thirsty and infested with lice, you vegetated for weeks on end in trenches and military quarters waiting to be smashed to pieces or mutilated from a distance, without ever having set eyes on your adversary. You knew in advance from the newspapers and cinema newsreels about the new and terrible arts of technological destruction, you knew that huge tanks crushed the wounded in their path and aircraft blew women and children to pieces in their beds, you knew that a world war in 1939, thanks to its soulless mechanisation, would be a thousand times worse, more bestial and inhuman than any earlier war mankind had seen.

Swiss idea of the co-existence of originally different nationalities in the same place without hostility, its ability to take that wisest of maxims and, by dint of mutual respect within an honest democratic system, raise linguistic and national differences to a sense of fraternity. What an example to the rest of our confused continent of Europe!

There was rebellion, purely for the fun of rebelling against everything once accepted, even against the natural order and the eternal difference between the sexes. Girls had their hair cut in such short bobs that they could not be told from boys; young men shaved off their beards to look more like girls. Homosexuality and lesbianism were very much in fashion,

Nothing was so disastrous for the German Republic as its idealistic attempt to leave the people and even its enemies their liberty. The orderly German nation did not know what to do with its liberty, and was already looking impatiently for someone to take it away again.

Nine-tenths of the books that come my way seem to be padded out with unnecessary descriptions, too much loquacious dialogue and superfluous minor characters;

everyone I spoke to in Vienna genuinely appeared not to have a care in the world. They invited each other to parties where evening dress was de rigueur, never guessing that they would soon be wearing the convict garb of the concentration camps;