Messages from a Lost World

by Stefan Zweig

  Si nous nous admirons vraiment les uns les autres

  Du fond même de notre ardeur et notre foi,

  Vous, les pensiers, vous les savants, vous les apôtres,

  Pour les temps qui viendront, vous extrairez la loi.

  If truly we admire one another

  to the depths of our faith, our ardour,

  You, thinkers, you learned men, you apostles,

  You’ll find the formula for the coming era.

  When we in Europe know no more antagonism, no more pulling rank, if we could just stop underlining our differences in a hostile manner, if we could admire with sincerity the leading influence of one people then another, we might properly pursue that moral force which has always been the decisive one in the history of our time. We must stand united, we men of the West, inheritors of ancient cultures, if we wish to preserve the spiritual direction of the world and accomplish the half-finished task. All our differences and our petty jealousies must be put aside in order that we might achieve this single aim of faithfulness towards our past, and of our community-based future.

  So in the period preceding the war, the ideal of a common European way of thinking and doing is nascent: a philosopher proclaims it with rational conviction, then a lyric poet in the fiery fervour of his enthusiasm, and another great work of this epoch also contributes to the idea of a united states of Europe: Jean-Christophe, the novel by Romain Rolland. Here a writer attempts to fuse the voices of different peoples into a great symphony and, like Orpheus, to tame the conflict of the elements, thanks to the spirit of music. In this work Rolland allows his hero to say, sadly: “The Europe of today has no communal book, not a poem, a prayer, an act of faith which can be said to belong to us all, and this is shameful, and something which proves devastating for the artists of our time. Not one who writes for all, who thinks for all.” It is this deficiency that Jean-Christophe seeks to confront: the antagonism of nations, and the consequent prevention of works that might serve to unify. This novel sells itself as a catechism of mutual understanding, of reciprocal education in the recognition that each nation owes an intellectual debt to another. Jean-Christophe is a German, cloistered in his own country; he has no understanding of other peoples, other nations. He arrives in Paris, finds everything strange, mendacious, fraudulent, preposterous, until he meets a friend, Olivier, a Frenchman, who teaches him to understand the peculiar inner character of French culture. Each learns something from the other, German power from French intelligence, creative action linked to creative thought. But Germany and France are only a duo: that’s not enough. So with Gracia a third country enters the scene: after German strength and French lucidity, we have the pure beauty of the Italian genius. “The smile of the Italian sky” suddenly shines over the battleground and brings clarity to the atmosphere with its golden light. It is in Italy, then, that the symphony of this work finds its most musical and humane conclusion. Infused with the spirit of three nations, Jean-Christophe becomes a European; the heights of inner freedom have been reached, a sense of justice, righteousness, which favours reason over pride.

  I only cite three works, three men among all those in the period before the war who demonstrated with clear conscience the need for a united Europe. Countless are the others who furtively and silently shared this faith; and from the beginning of the new century, due to closer and closer commercial relations between peoples and the growing wealth of nations, an optimistic voice began to be heard across the continent. Always at moments of great unity, humanity feels empowered by a kind of religious feeling; in the periods where she rises highest, the distant seems that much closer, and even the inaccessible within easy reach. That’s why the young of my generation—we who grew up in the new century and everywhere, in France, England, Italy, Spain and the Scandinavian countries—found new friends and comrades working together for the general reconciliation of peoples, and, guided by our faith, thought that the whole world could be made one through such friendships, that a united states of Europe was already virtually a reality; how such a thought made us rejoice! But it was precisely this generation, those who experienced the uniting of Europe as a kind of evangelism, who were forced to see the total collapse of these hopes with the outbreak of war in Europe. Once again our spiritual Rome was destroyed, once again our Tower of Babel was left abandoned by its artisans.

  The deep anguish that this conflict caused among nations we know all too well. Even today bridges remain to be rebuilt, even today these years of destruction create through large swathes of the population a sense of opposition to thoughts of community and brotherhood. But a strange thing is happening—outside of our will and knowledge; for if I were to try to formulate the situation of today I would say that any tendency towards unification is far stronger in material things than in the spirit of mankind itself. A different kind of spirit to that of poets, seers, philosophers is working now towards universal accord, to world interaction, a wholly impersonal spirit: the spirit of the technological century. This spirit is taking other forms than we have known until now; it is a spirit entirely detached from the individual and belongs wholly to the collective; indeed most of what we call technological progress, which is rapidly transforming the world, perhaps with rare exceptions, answers only to the collective. The technological spirit working today towards the unification of the world is more about a way of thinking than anything to do with humanity. This spirit has no country, no home, no human language; it thinks in formulae, reckons in figures and it creates machines which, in their turn, create us, almost against our will, in an exterior form which is more and more identical. The new art forms lose more and more their national characteristics and take on the collective one. Whether we like it or not, the more our communal technology reduces distances, the more narrowly we proceed in space and time. Does any sense of distance still exist, when it is so effortlessly bridged by aeroplane and an exotic foreign journey can be had through the radio; when, with a twist of the dial, we can tune into London, Rome, Moscow or Madrid? The faculty of being everywhere at one and the same time has been granted us in these recent technological advancements, to a degree our forefathers could never have imagined. What is of importance to a nation can be transmitted in the space of a breath and it is inconceivable that our individual spirit can somehow evade this relentless drive towards the collective. With superhuman force the conquests of technology bring us inexorably closer together; and if there were not this unshakeable impulse towards the individual and that other drive, each nation striving for independence, then we would for a long time now have been a single community. But this opposition, this nationalist tendency has been markedly reinforced by the state of tension in which we now live; resistance has grown proportionately to the pressure, and thus the problem of the struggle between the national and the international, the national state and the super-European state, has climaxed at precisely the most dramatic moment in history.

  I felt obliged to show briefly in a rough sketch how, across the centuries, these two currents were always in permanent opposition: that is to say, the affirmation of national independence and the desire for a supranational community. I tried to show how the individual will and that of the community moved in a more or less rhythmical ebb and flow. Today they are locked in a decisive struggle one against the other. Never has the gulf between states been so yawning, more vehement, more conscious, more organized than today: with decrees of all sorts, autarchic economic measures, each nation can resist another in ruthless isolationism. But while they shut themselves off behind their frontiers, these countries remain conscious that their destiny is irrevocably linked to a European economic and political model, that no country can entirely escape, isolating itself from a world crisis, for, as in Goethe’s Faust, when you bar the doors, trouble enters anyway through the keyhole. Nationalism versus supranationalism—it is the problem from which there is no hiding, and the coming times will tell us if the states of Europe wish to persist in their political and economic hostility, or fin
ally resolve this exhausting conflict through complete union, a superstate. I believe we all feel everywhere today that electric crackle caused by the collision of antagonisms; and nervously we ponder if one of the two tendencies might prevail. But if so, which? Will Europe pursue a path to its own destruction, or will it become united? Forgive me if I do not say that reason will win and tomorrow and beyond we will see a unified Europe, an end to war, to internal politics and this destructive hate between peoples: I do not dare issue such a promise. Please excuse my faintheartedness. Our generation, which for a quarter-century has only witnessed political events directed against the rational, which sees key decisions made not at the eleventh hour but at the twelfth, our tested and disappointed race which saw the insanity of war and its aftermath no longer has the childish hope to believe in sane, clear, rapid decisions. It too has recognized the strength of these opposing tendencies, the favouring of short-term interests over the required wider view, the power of egoism pitched against the spirit of brotherhood. No, this united Europe will not happen tomorrow, we may have to wait years, decades, and perhaps our generation will not see it come to pass. But—and I have said this already—a genuine conviction does not need to be confirmed by reality to know it is just and true. And today no one should be denied the right to write his letter from the front as a European, to call himself a citizen of Europe and, in spite of borders, consider the world as a fraternal community. Of course this might all be an illusion. But whoever can somehow raise his thinking above the naked reality of the world as it stands now, will have created a state of personal freedom for himself that flies in the face of our preposterous epoch. He can look on all the posturing and deceiving artistry of long-drawn-out diplomacy with a certain smile playing on his lips; he can mistrust the hate-saturated journalism perpetrated on both sides, abhor the squabbles and rankling between nations and regret with compassion the malodorous intolerance of peoples towards each other. If he can himself look away, hold his breath against the vile hatred which lays across our world today like a cloud of poison gas, and, disassociating himself, wave aside these conflicts, then will he better understand humankind on this earth and elevate himself to a serene, unprejudiced and clearer sense of justice, thanks to which—in the magnificent words of Goethe—he shall perceive the destiny of all peoples as his own.

  THE UNIFICATION OF EUROPE

  FOR US WHO HAVE FOUND ourselves here reunited around an idea, I feel there is no longer a need to discuss the necessity and compelling logic of that idea, for to do so would simply be to waste time. All the leading heads of state, intellectuals, artists and scholars have been convinced for some time now that only a slender allegiance by all states to a superior governing body could relieve current economic difficulties, reduce the propensity for war and eliminate anxieties aroused by the threat of conflict, which are themselves one of the primary causes of the economic crisis. Our sole common task, then, is now to shift our ideas from the sphere of sterile discussion to one of creative action.

  For that to happen we must first above all understand the exceptional challenges which confront the realization of that idea, for until now it has been the domain, as in the epoch of Humanism, of a selective higher class and its roots have not yet penetrated the earth of the people, so we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that we were anywhere close to our ultimate objective. Let us first recognize the pre-eminence of nationalism in our epoch. The European idea is not a primary emotion like patriotism or ethnicity; it is not born of a primitive instinct, but rather of perception; it is not the product of spontaneous fervour, but the slow-ripened fruit of a more elevated way of thinking. It entirely lacks the impassioned instinct which fuels patriotic feeling, and thus the sacro-egoism of nationalism will always cut more keenly through to the average man than the sacro-altruism of the European ideal, because it is always easier to be aware, through a spirit of devotion and veneration, of one’s own kind than of one’s neighbour. Moreover, nationalism has been organizing itself for centuries and has always profited from the support of the most powerful in society. Nationalism can count on the education system, the army, those in uniform, newspapers, songs and insignia, the radio and language; it has the state as its protector and wins the response of the masses, while in the service of our idea we have only the word and writing, which (one can hardly deny) proves woefully ineffectual against many centuries of nationalism’s tried and tested formula. With books and pamphlets, with conferences and discussions, we only ever reach a tiny minority of this European community, and even then we are merely preaching to the converted; what’s more, we equally fail to employ modern technical and visual channels to further our cause. Let us take today’s discussion. Perhaps a brief extract will appear tomorrow in a newspaper, lost between a hundred other items of news, and over this extract millions of cursory and indifferent eyes will skim in an instant; and tomorrow, when we are keen to test public reaction, enquiring of the taxi driver who is taking us home or when we are at the kiosk buying cigarettes, we become aware that, even in the city where the conference took place, the anonymous mass is completely oblivious to our endeavours. We were perhaps too hasty in imagining that what we took for decisive action was in fact little more than a gesture, a fine but futile gesture, the same one that each generation of scholarly elites has performed down the centuries.

  If our idea is to have any tangible effect, we must recover it from the esoteric domain and devote all our energy to making it more visible and persuasive to a wider circle. To this end, the word alone is not enough, and we need to harness all the fomenting diffusive forces of our time to make our ideas more visually compelling to the masses. We should recognize and admire how nationalism, already manipulating the state’s levers of power, flaunts its artistic and theatrical mastery: recall if you will the speech by Mussolini before 200,000 souls this 1st May on Tempelhof field, or the million assembled on Red Square in Moscow, where some two million workers and soldiers marched in an uninterrupted procession for hours on end; and let us learn from these examples that the masses are most jubilant when they feel themselves visible and can display themselves en masse. In all this mass behaviour a hypnotic force is at work, whilst a frenzy of exaltation rises into which no authentic thought can penetrate. Never through the mere reading of a brochure or newspaper can the true depths of a nation be properly demonstrated. If we cannot arouse such enthusiasm for our idea, there, in the heart and blood of peoples, our formula will be in vain, for never in the history of change has the intellectual sphere and that of patient reflection ever triumphed. We must, then, before all else, give visibility and passion to our idea, transform it from pure ideology to one of practical organization which goes beyond mere logic and shows a more demonstrative character. It is in this eminently practical and organizational form that all our thoughts and propositions must now be concentrated and each of us must acquire a new perspective to meet all practical and psychological contingencies.

  Allow me to attempt to put to you a proposal which moves in this direction and which may permit us better to visualize our idea.

  The tragedy of our European idea is that it has no stable central foundation on which to stand. Our Europe lacks a capital city, for Geneva, which should play this role, never became a capital like Washington, but remained a conference place, the sterile assemblage of emissaries from all states, a gathering not of the people but of diplomats—who form a necessarily narrow elite. What happens there and what is decided never touches the feelings of the masses nor taps the lifeblood of nations. Geneva has never become popular, and the Slovakian worker, or the Norwegian sailor, to the extent that he has even heard the term “League of Nations”, does not associate with it one iota of his feelings; his passions are not aroused, he lacks the optical, the visual, the tactile aspects of these political and economic discussions. And, I repeat, until the European idea achieves these basic forms of the visible and tangible, of what we can feel passionate about, until it becomes for people a sort of p
atriotism and supranationalism—until then it is doomed to remain sterile and it will never manage to become reality. We must above all else locate a central idea which is visually recognizable!

  Allow me to submit to you such a proposal; I would naturally be happy if you judged it appropriate, but I would be even happier if it could be surpassed by something better or more efficient, or at least trimmed down. I have just emphasized that supranational links already exist in diverse forms. Every year sees sporting events bringing all nations together and hundreds of international conferences, of doctors, theologians, workers, writers, bank directors, sociologists, physicians, technicians, post-office employees, poultry farmers, philosophers, wine merchants—I list these professions in a rather preposterous manner, a small section of an interminable list, for there is not a group or a class in our eternally diverse world which does not find itself gathered each year for a conference of one kind or another. Each time, through these meetings, vital contacts are forged, emboldened by a sense of the European. Each time at these events a small circle becomes conscious of the need for a supranational entente. But it is only ever an isolated bloom which blossoms and then fades as quickly without anyone even noticing, lost as it is in the sprawling machinery. With all these conferences, the effect of visibility, that visual element that I deem so necessary, can only last a day, maybe only an hour; our reunion today, it too will fall fatally into the sphere of transience. But if an organization—and this is my suggestion—could arrange for every international congress to be held in such a way that they proceeded, regularly one after another and at all times throughout the year, in one particular city for a month, then surely the chosen city for that month would acquire the visibility of a European capital. The fact that all the workers, the legal profession, the scholars, dentists, clerks, farmers, all the inhabitants of the town could, for this month, each in their area of expertise, feel themselves linked to foreign lands, means that this town could really be infected by our European idea. This feeling would spread to the region and surrounding countries and for months after, even years, they would still remember that great moment lived as one community. The same force that habitually loses its strength through being fragmented and scattered would gather itself in a single great expository act which would be deemed of great significance, since men rarely conserve the memory of a great event in their country unless they clothe it in a solemn character. Let us suppose, then, that one day all the conferences over one year might be booked for Helsinki, Prague or Lyons, Hamburg or Glasgow (I exclude the great metropolises such as London, Paris or Berlin, for they are too vast for the most important group of foreigners attending this or that congress to remain visible); this city, for the duration of a month, would be decked with flags of all nations, she would be alive with the entire variegation of European languages, ceremonies would be held and for decades the city and with her the whole country would have engraved on their collective memory their role as capital of Europe, a role which would bring them to the attention and knowledge of the rest of the world. We should not doubt that these festivities might take on a theatrical air; but, on the other hand, let us remember that nothing is more vital to our somewhat abstract idea than what Germany might term regalia, and France mise en scène, and let us beware our indigenous timidity in this regard. Since antiquity all political forms have regularly sought to acquire visibility, and any European politics today must be underpinned by all the powers and stratagems of current European technology, through the radio and loudspeakers, through sporting festivities and performances, through the summoning of huge living crowds, for only a visible crowd makes any impression on the masses and any powerful movement in real space stimulates intellectual activity. If we then travel from city to city we can hope that, in all the places where the various classes of society have been assembled in the manner of a European parliament, these links will remain a vigorous and fertile idea, that the community we have founded in these places will not form an ephemeral closed circle of elites but will be nourished by and reinforced in all classes and all milieux. Thus we might hope that little by little our ideas will gain in popularity. Each city and each country will forge links with others, and that competition which so often translates into hostility we would steer into an amicable rivalry of hospitable communal spirit. Of course, it will be years before our peregrinations spread throughout Europe, but these detours from city to city seem to me more fruitful than the mere use of the word and writing, for these—and let us be quite honest with ourselves here—only ever managed to touch an elevated group that has little weight to bear; but the great masses, those we need to reckon with, they can only be reached through what is placed right before their eyes, through the physically perceivable image, not through the spoken word. They can only be persuaded, in fact, through the most thorough, purposeful organization.