Messages from a Lost World

by Stefan Zweig

  Here is an example. Around 3,000 years ago, numberless peoples were dispersed around the Mediterranean and yet we are only properly informed of two: the Greek and the Jewish cultures. The rest have vanished. Why do we only know about these two peoples? Were they somehow greater and more important than all the others? Did more events happen to them than their neighbours? Not at all. Solon the wise was mayor of a small town, barely more significant than a village of today, and the battles between Sparta and Rome, between the Jews and the Amalekites were little more than tussles between parishes. Yet all this has preserved a grandiose and vivid portrait in our memory; it belongs to our deepest sense of history, and the Battle of Marathon, that of Salamis, the conquest of Thermopylae and the taking of Jericho form part of our intellectual knowledge. Each of us has an image of these events engraved on his soul. Why? Not because they were important facts in geographic or numerical terms, but because the Bible on the one hand and the Greeks on the other knew how to recount them in an incomparably splendid and imaginative way, for the poetic expectation had been wholly fulfilled. We see here, and a thousand times more: great actions, great exploits are never enough on their own; a double action is always necessary—the great fact and the great narrator, the exciting figure and the imaginative performer. Achilles was nothing more than a simple, bold, strong swashbuckler, a hundred of whom can be found in every town and thousands more in every people, from the Papuans to the Iroquois; but only this Achilles became the global hero because Homer saw him as great and presented him thus: the poet transformed him into a legendary mythical character. Consequently, the only way to preserve such events is to re-form them into poetic history. It alone, like the secret of embalming practised by the Egyptians, preserves the colourful over millennia. All the caliphs and princes of antiquity and the Middle Ages knew that any action could not remain alive without a skilful storyteller; that’s why they had all their bards, their troubadours and chroniclers. Caesar, Napoleon and Bismarck lost no time in writing the facts of their lives themselves in order that their future legend would accord with their own taste; and our statesmen and diplomats of today know this equally well, which is why they maintain such a healthy rapport with journalists and willingly grant them interviews. These last know that all that happens in the world has no chance of existing for posterity unless the account is forged with the legendary in mind, even at the expense of truth. For men and entire peoples have a craving for legends; I would even dare to say that one key element for a great man is that he creates around himself a poetic aura, an atmosphere of legend, where again and again posterity attempts to reconstitute poetically his character or explain it psychologically. Certain figures such as Napoleon, Gustav Adolf and Caesar will always attract new dramatic and epic poets. Their psychological impetus appears undiminished even after many centuries; it just continues, like a tree which always gives out new leaves at the appropriate time.

  But what is true of individuals is also true of nations, for are they not simply collective individuals? A nation gains more power in the spiritual space, the more poetically it can present its historical existence and development in the world. It is not enough that a people might have achieved great things in the domain of culture or war—that is only half of it. The Skipetares of the Balkans, warring for centuries and in a permanent state of insurrection, thereby take a leading role in the history of our world culture, for they knew how best to present the poetic element in their own deeds, raising the life of their people to the level of a saga, a graphic myth. What counts in the contemporary world, as in the past, is not the numeric superiority of a people, nor the tally of its war dead, nor the vastness of its destroyed areas, but that each people profits from universal history, by the value it contributes in terms of artistic sculpturing to the poetic arsenal of humanity. It is not warring peoples who decide, but the poetic peoples, and what is decisive in this sense is not the importance of the mass of humanity, but humanity in terms of its creative claim.

  I shall take the example of the Scandinavian countries, whose destiny, over centuries, since Charles XII, ceased to have any bearing on the warmongering, imperialist shaping of Europe. Yet with what sculptural force, with what powerful reality are they ever present! As we know their history, their cultural developments, so we sense their presence, through the knowledge that Scandinavian literature conquered Europe at the close of the nineteenth century, that Sweden and Norway possessed for a time an uncontested supremacy in the art of the essay and that their men of letters exercised a primary influence in all Europe. Thanks to Strindberg, to Selma Lagerlöf, to Verner von Heidenstam and a number of others, we have been informed of the historical, sociological and ethnic problems of Sweden as if we were living them ourselves, because poets have spoken of them, because the history and culture of this country have been articulated to us not in a dry and flat academic manner, but in poetic form. Even those countries numerically inferior, poorer or more insignificant in a political, economic or military sense, can make their presence equally felt in world history; and we Austrians feel with the same pride that it is not necessary to be politically challenging or especially rich and powerful economically in order to make our mark on the world with our own cultural life. It is enough that via music the breath of a whole people can be animated, that its being can be opened up to the world, because music harbours this mysterious poetic accent which has the power to render everything that exists with greater substance and reality. I say again that history only lives where it achieves a certain poetic grandeur, which is why the highest accomplishment of a people is to transform as much as possible of its national history into world history, its private people’s myth into a world myth. What ultimately counts are the spiritual values a single nation can offer humanity as a whole. My hope is that the hour is not far off when the nations will only compete in the sense of giving something back to each other, when one can convince the other of its raison d’être not through military might but through artistic talent, and history will no longer be recounted via the immortal war ballad but will raise all to a common height with a heroic hymnal poem to unity.

  I have sought to present history as “the workshop of God”, as an art studio without rival, an archive of the most uplifting and stimulating documents. But what we might say in favour of the past must not make us blind as regards the present. Admittedly, the present is not so easy to warm to: rarely has it been the fate of a generation to live in such a tense and overheated atmosphere as ours, and we all experience a craving to rest a while from the constant overabundance of events which our epoch produces, to take a breath amidst the unremitting political assault to which we are subjected. But precisely if we know world history, if we grow to love it, we can take courage from the present in remembering that in the long run nothing that happens is entirely senseless, that all which in past epochs seemed to be useless and senseless to the contemporary mind was later seen from a higher perspective as revealing a creative idea or extolling some metaphysical sense. This is why all the confusion and distress we experience today are but waves bearing us to something new, to the future—nothing is in vain. Each moment that we live, as soon as we give word to it, becomes past. There is no present that does not immediately become history, and thus we are all, as actors and fellow players, endlessly blended into a great drama which is in a perpetual state of becoming; let us then in suspense and awe await its solution. Whoever loves history as a poetic work brimming with soul must equally consider the present and his own existence as also possessing a profound sense and believe, despite current evidence to the contrary, that in the conscious act of creating, acting, writing, we fulfil the real life goal, each of us someone else but all of us the same, that supreme objective, the great triumph over time for which Goethe provides such an admirable formula: “It is to make us eternal that we are here.”

  EUROPEAN THOUGHT IN ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

  HISTORY, this seemingly tideless ocean of events, in fact obeys an unswerving rhy
thmic law, an internal swell which divides the epochs through ebb and flow, in forward and backward currents—and how could it be otherwise, given that it is created by man and his psychic laws only reflect those of the individual? In each of us this duality exists; the process we call life is in the end only a state of tension between opposing poles. Fortunately we are able to name these opposing forces as the centrifugal and the centripetal, or, in the language of the new psychology, the introvert and the extrovert, or, in that of morals, the egoistic and the altruistic—and it is always through this formula that we express the shifting tendency which is in each of us, on the one hand with the “I” isolated from the world and on the other the “I” bound to the world. We want to retain our “I”, the unique personality, who we are, to make this personality still more personal. But simultaneously this personality, this substance which binds us to the world, our individuality, is drawn inexorably into the community. What then is a people other than a collective of individuals? So, underlying all nations is this double tendency: on the one hand their individuality, their spirit and cultural personality, coloured by nationalism, and on the other the supranational search for a higher community which will enrich them but which will demand in return a measure of their wealth and personality. Across all history, these two tendencies of attraction and repulsion, peace and war, the concentric and the expansive, proceed in eternal opposition. As soon as the great structures of state and religion are built they dissolve; over decades and centuries periods of hostility are succeeded by those of reconciliation and friendship; but essentially humanity, with its ever-expanding vision, has always striven towards unions which are more elevated and illuminative. Both of these tendencies, the national and the supranational, already have, since they exist, their cultural and corporeal sense; one is not possible without the other in the intellectual organism of beings that we call states or nations. This opposition is necessary in order to maintain a creative tension at the heart of humanity. But I shall take only one as the object for my study here, in an epoch of nationalist disunity. I wish to underline the contrasting element of unity, that mysterious Eros which has always drawn humanity over differences in language, culture and ideas towards a superior union. I wish to attempt, by casting a glance at the intellectual development of Europe, to furnish a brief history of this perennial yearning for unity, in feelings, wills, thoughts and lives, which across two millennia has created the magnificent common edifice which we can proudly name European culture.

  I say “across two millennia”. But in truth this basic instinct for an eventual creative community reaches well beyond the history we know, to the primitive times of myths. Already in the most ancient book of the world, at the beginning of the Bible, when it speaks of the first men, we find through a magnificent symbol the first signs of this desire for the creative union of humanity. It is of course the profound legend of the Tower of Babel, and it is this myth that I wish to recall here and explain a little. At that time, having barely departed a state of ignorance, men—whom we might call humanity—had gathered to undertake a communal work. Above them they saw a sky, and because they were men they already experienced the sense of the superhuman, the beyond, so they said to themselves: “Let us build a city and a tower, whose summit will touch the sky, in order that we might secure our place in eternity.” And they set to work as one, kneading clay and firing bricks, and began to build their first colossal work.

  But God gazed down from heaven—so says the Bible—at this ambitious striving and realized the magnificent scale of the work. He recognized the greatness of the spirit with which he had endowed his creature man, and the extraordinary strength which existed, irresistibly, in this humanity, as long as it remained as one. And in order that humanity was not presumptuous, the Creator decided to obstruct the work and said: “Let us confuse them, so that none knows the language of the other.” And the Bible states that the men’s work quickly foundered, since they could no longer understand each other; and because of this they became angry and irritable among themselves. They threw down their bricks, their trowels and other tools and fought each other; then they abandoned their half-begun work, each returning to his home and town. They cultivated their own ground and stayed in their own homesteads, professing love for their country and language alone. Thus the Tower of Babel, a communal work of all humanity, remained deserted and fell into ruins.

  This myth taken from the opening pages of the Bible is a wonderful symbol of the idea that with humanity as a community all is possible, even the highest aspirations, but only when it is united, and never when it is partitioned into languages and nations which do not understand each other and do not want to understand each other. And perhaps—who knows what mysterious memories can still be traced in our blood?—there is still some vague reminiscence in our spirit of those distant times, the Platonic memory of when humanity was united and the persuasive, haunted longing that it might eventually recommence the unfinished work; in any case, this dream of a unified world, a unified humanity, is more ancient than all literature, art and scientific knowledge.

  A legend, a childish myth, a heroic fable—but what was it our great master of psychology Sigmund Freud taught us on the subject of myths? That they are nothing more than the wish dreams of a people, no different to an individual’s dreams, which are merely expressions of the unconscious and conceal a desire hidden deep within. Never are dreams, especially those of whole generations, completely futile. We should trust in these myths of primitive epochs. For each idea which occurs was formerly a dream, and all we invent and realize now was simply what our courageous forefathers desired or longed for before us.

  But let us depart from the vestibule of legend and enter the inner sanctum of history. In its earliest beginnings there was unrelieved darkness. Then we see, on the shore of the Mediterranean and in the east, empires begin to form, then disappear, their destiny sometimes down to the will of a single man, an Alexander, or that of a whole people concentrated in a force so powerful it spreads like a tide across different countries, but only to plunder, ravage and destroy them; and when this warrior tide draws back there is left only the silt of decay. Those civilizations born at the dawn of history possessed no edifying or organizational powers; they did not yet serve the idea of community, and even the Greek civilization did not stamp the seal of unity on the world. There was a measure of it, and it was new and wondrous for the human soul, but it was not bestowed on humanity. The true political and intellectual unification of Europe only began with Rome and the Roman Empire. Here for the first time a city was established, a language and, through law, the will to govern and administer all peoples, all nations of the world under a single system, brilliantly worked out—domination not only by force of arms but on the basis of a spiritual principle, domination not as an objective in itself but for the intelligent organization of the world. With Rome, Europe had for the first time a unified format—and one might say for the last time, for never was the world so unified as in that distant epoch. A single plan, a visionary plan, stretched like an ingenious network across the countries of Europe, still uninformed and devoid of culture, from the cloudy isles of the Britons to the blistering sands of the Parthian Empire, from the columns of Hercules to the Black Sea and the steppes of Scythia. One single system of administration, of finances, military organization, justice, morals, science, and a single language, Latin, dominated all others. On the roads constructed with Roman technology, marching behind the legions came Roman culture, a methodical and constructive spirit to succeed one of unthinking destructive force. Where the sword had cleared the land, language, laws and morals were sown and germinated. For the first time Europe’s chaos was replaced by unified order, a new idea was born, the idea of civilization, of humanity managed according to moral principle. If this edifice had held out for two or three centuries more, the roots of peoples would have been inexorably intertwined and the unified Europe which is today a mere dream would have been a reality, and all continents dis
covered later would have fallen in line with the central idea.

  But precisely because this Roman Empire was so huge, so sprawling and so deeply anchored to the European soil, its unravelling signified nothing less than a moral and spiritual catastrophe, a collapse without parallel in the history of European culture. From this standpoint, the fall of the Roman Empire can only be compared to a man who, following a terrible convulsion of the brain, has suddenly forgotten everything that happened before, and from a mature intellectual state falls into one of complete imbecility. Communication between peoples ground to a halt and roads fell into disrepair; towns became depopulated, for a common language and Roman organization no longer linked the countries. The new colonies, like the old, forgot over an incredibly short period of time all they had known: art, science, architecture, painting, medicine—they all dried up overnight like springs following an earthquake. In a single blow European culture fell far below that of the Orient and China. Let us recall this moment of European shame; literary works were burnt or sat rotting in libraries. Italy and Spain were forced to hire their doctors and scholars from the Arabs and clumsily and onerously learnt art and trade from the Byzantines. Our great Europe, teacher of civilization, had to go back to school and be taught by her own pupils! A great heritage was needlessly wasted, statues were destroyed, buildings were razed, aqueducts collapsed and the roads were left in a state of dereliction. This tragic epoch was even unable to recount its own history, while only 400 years earlier Tacitus, Livy, Caesar and Pliny described theirs so artfully.