Messages From a Lost World: Europe on the Brink

by Stefan Zweig

  This moment is the culminating point of Europe’s fragmentation, the lowest point of our communal culture, the most withering blow that it has ever received. It is truly horrifying to recall this epoch—horrifying, because you are gripped by the fear that, once again and with a similar blow, the new edifice to which we have all contributed a stone might collapse through the same spiritual and moral upheaval and its catastrophic effects be loosed on the world. But let us not forget: even in the very moment of extreme anarchy, Europe did not completely jettison the idea of unity. For this idea is indestructible. Like the human body when it opposes murderous germs within its own blood, the organism called humanity, in moments of grave danger, draws from itself an equable curative strength. In the epoch where the earth has been devastated and then delivered from the elements of destruction, the spirit builds a new construction; for at the very moment the Roman Empire collapsed, the united architectural will of humanity created a new, admirable work, that of the Roman Church, as if it lifted to the clouds a reflection of its earthly power. The material was destroyed but the spirit was saved; the terrible hailstorm had passed; a grain had germinated, the Latin tongue, which rose phoenix-like from the flames. What the hand had built up might collapse, but what the spirit had created from the community of humanity could be obscured, but not lost. Latin, the language of unity, the mother tongue of all European cultures, has been preserved for us even at this apocalyptic hour.

  True, the monks salvaged the language from the rabid destruction of the barbarians, hiding it in the catacombs of their cloisters, but the life force of Latin became clouded through this concealment. In the same way that pearls lose their lustre when lacking contact with the warmth of a human body, so Latin, when confined to the scholastic, unused as spoken language, dwindled on the lips of men and lost its international standing. Deprived of air, no longer irradiated by the Italian skies, this Latin language lost its sensuousness, its clarity, its elegance, all the highest virtues which had given us so much joy in the reading of its poets. In this language you could no more rejoice, joke, laugh or speak with finesse and taste of tender and vital things, no more maintain contact with your friends, neither by letter nor by voice. What had once been the language of the world was now only used for scholarly subjects, those “artes liberales”, and not for general usage. For several centuries all possibility of understanding within Europe was shattered.

  A dark slumber weighed on the world of the spirit, a sleep peopled with mysterious dreams and visions. But awaiting its end, already beginning to shine, is a new dawn; already a handful of men are working to imbue Latin, lost in the shadow of theological parchment, with the blood-warmed rays of life, the suppleness of living speech. A whole cavalcade of poets, with Petrarch at its head, infuses the old mummified language with blood and vigour, forming a new alliance around it; a new class of spiritual men of the world, a kind of classical Esperanto.

  And all of a sudden the miracle is realized: spiritual men across Europe, separated by the diversity of their national languages, can now correspond with each other again, can write letters and understand each other in a fraternity enabled by language. Frontiers between countries are breached in a wing-beat thanks to the new language. It matters not in the epoch of Humanism whether you study in Prague, Oxford or Paris. The books are in Latin, the teachers speak Latin—one art of speaking, thought and social intercourse brings all Europe’s intellects under one umbrella. Erasmus of Rotterdam, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Bacon, Leibniz, Descartes—they all feel themselves citizens of the same republic, the men of knowledge. Europe feels that once again it is forging towards a new community, a new future of Western civilization. The intellectuals of all nations visit each other, dedicate their books to each other, they discuss—and always together—the problems of the time. With a swiftness which contrasts uncannily with the heaviness and slowness of mail coaches and sailing ships, they share their knowledge, their literary works and the problem that they belong to different nations, the first being a Dutchman, the second a German, the third an Italian, the fourth a Frenchman and the fifth a Portuguese Jew is of less importance than the new-found exhilarating feeling that they are all deputies in an invisible parliament of Europe, that they have a heritage to manage together, that all new discoveries and all ancient spiritual conquests belong to the community. If a forgotten comedy of Terence is found in a hidden corner of Italy, there is a cry of joy in England as in Poland and Spain among the men of intellect, as if a child has been born, or some fortune dropped out of the sky. In this supranational kingdom of Humanism, through this supremacy of an international elite, indifferent to political struggles, guided by artistic passion, feeling themselves above all frontiers, the proof is furnished once more, for the first time since the collapse of the Roman Empire, that communal European thought is possible, and this concept enlivens and animates all minds. It seems to these men that the free world has become wider and richer; from the earth rise up, in the form of statues and speaking the language of former times, the spirits of an ancient world; across the seas old continents emerge, the invention of printing spreads its invisible wings—and likewise, with a richness hitherto undreamt of, the spiritual word. Whenever the world expands, spirits are gladdened, and this exuberance of strength, of pleasure, of life aura finds its greatest and most enduring form in what we now name the Renaissance, in the truest sense of the word a rebirth of the spirit.

  This first form of European intellectualism, which we look on with envy, coming as it did after a protracted period of war, brutality and hostility, surely represents one of the high points of humanity. Although separated from one another by thousands of miles, the poets, thinkers and artists of Europe were more intimately connected than today, in the time of aeroplanes, railways and automobiles. The moment of the Tower of Babel, that of the highest human assurance, appeared to have returned.

  But, just as pitilessly, after the flow comes the ebb, and these periods of fraternization are replaced by those of conflict and destruction: human nature is unable to exist without direct contrasts. Once again, after the highest summit comes the deepest downward plunge. The cohesion of the Catholic Church, which for more than a thousand years had linked the various countries of Western Europe, fails, the wars of religion begin and the Reformation destroys the Renaissance. With it also dies the sovereignty of that resuscitated body of the Latin tongue, this last symbol of a united Europe. Once again the European idea remains just a torso, an inchoate monument, left behind and forgotten. Through the discovery of antiquity on Italian soil the nations experience a prodigious sense of empowerment, and as always power is transformed into pride. Now each country is keen to achieve political and intellectual hegemony for itself; each wants to create through its own language a literature capable of rivalling that of antiquity. In every people, the poets throw off the communal language, Latin, and create masterpieces in their own: Tasso and Ariosto in Italy, Ronsard, Corneille and Racine in France; Calderón, Cervantes and Lope de Vega in Spain; Milton and Shakespeare in England. A glorious contest then follows, as if each European people felt the duty to prove on the Areopagus of history that they were the one best fitted to lead the direction of world literature after Rome. Nationalistic literature is born, the primary power, still peaceful, of the national consciousness, and for two or three centuries, from the end of the Renaissance to the French Revolution, any fraternal spirit in the arts all but dies out, the flame that Humanism had fanned so ardently and magnificently.

  But as I have said from the outset, the impulsion for mutual engagement and confluence is an intrinsic element of the human soul, and nothing issuing from our innermost soul can ever be suppressed. World history knows no pause, no termination; the drive for a higher connection, the communal spiritual life force never falters, it only changes its mode of expression. This finds symbolic form in the civilization of Rome and her language, then in religion, then in Humanism, in the new Latin and in science. Now the common language has fallen into
ruin following the awakening of Italian, Spanish, French, English, German, the inclination towards community seeks a new form, and finds it—a new language standing above all others—in music. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it’s not the poets, nor the theologians, nor the learned men but the musicians who are the standard-bearers for European unity; these most qualified representatives of cosmopolitanism form a single great fraternal family. Barely have Monteverdi and Palestrina in their “stile nuovo” brought a new brilliance and greatness to the language than Europe says to herself: here is a new language through which we all understand each other and so it matters little where the musician lives or where he practises his art, or which language he speaks: ubi ars, ibi patria. One nation accords to another the fullest hospitality. Musicians are the great travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the messengers between peoples. Let us not forget how they transform every country: the old Heinrich Schütz goes to Italy to learn from Gabrieli, Handel makes his home in Naples and London, Gluck is sometimes in Vienna and sometimes Paris. One of the sons of the arch-Protestant Bach sets up in Milan, the other in England. The Austrian Mozart is welcomed at the age of fourteen into the Bologna Academy and his most celebrated works, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro, raise their immortal Italian words to the very heights of song. But just as the Germans are found in Italy, so the Italians reach all cities of Europe: Porpora in London and Dresden, Piccinni and Cherubini in Paris, Jommelli in Stuttgart, Caldara and Salieri in Vienna, Cimarosa in St Petersburg, and his immortal work Il matrimonio segreto was composed in Vienna, in that Vienna where Metastasio wrote operatic texts for musicians of all languages. Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, Spontini—they write their operas from French, English, German, Italian texts and their correspondence reveals the most colourful variegation of languages. This great cosmopolitan race lives beyond country, language, nation, and feels a sense of pride in its brotherhood. Everything seems united in the common impulse to express human feeling; all are priests worshipping one God, servants to a common enterprise.

  As we see, the rhythm of this movement that pushes one people towards another never really stops completely. A spiritual quality is always discernible whenever the people of Europe are awakened to culture, another form of art—science—always raises the multi-coloured flag of unity; but always violence—sworn enemy of the spirit—ruptures this fraternal sentiment: this time it’s the Revolution, then the Napoleonic Wars that give birth to national armies and forge the idea that patriotism is no longer just the business of princes, but of interest to the people. From this, art and thought take on a national character. Once again we see a retreat. With Beethoven and Schubert, and still more with Wagner, Chopin or Mussorgsky, Rossini and Verdi, the supranational in music becomes national and the literature patriotic, a situation which still exists today and which is called intellectual autarchy, the conscious awareness of an isolationist element to the national soul.

  But in the very moment of division—over a hundred years of it—a great voice rises, pronouncing with an imperious air these prophetic words: “The times of national literature are over, the time of world literature is upon us.” Who says these words? Is it some stateless poet, someone who does not care for his own language, who doesn’t understand the feelings of his country, who has no love for it, a “fuoruscito”, one banished, exiled from his own land? No, it’s the greatest of German poets, Goethe. The more this ascending spirit grows and gains clarity, the more space he demands. The German world, the purely German point of view now appears to him, he who spreads his gaze over the whole earth; but alongside his wholly German position he creates a European consciousness and strives, despite being German first, to think of all peoples to the depths of his soul. He says (and his words ring true as if he had said them today): “At the time when man is absorbed in creating new fatherlands, for the man who thinks freely, for him who can raise himself above his epoch, the fatherland is nowhere and everywhere.” Goethe’s spirit embraces reality but at the same time foresees the future, grandiosely anticipating, at a time when railways and aeroplanes were merely childish fantasies, a future network of nations bound together through technological progress: “the free exchange of ideas and feelings,” he says, “is as fruitful for growth as the free exchange of goods for the wealth and well-being of mankind. If that has not happened until now, it is for the lack of firm laws, and the way to these is through robust international relations.” What wise words, so profound, reaching beyond the narrow parameters of his own time, words which already by the early years of the nineteenth century proved to be true. Whilst in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it took decades for a literary or artistic influence to pass from people to people—Shakespeare was forced to wait 150 years to be translated—in the nineteenth century certain feelings and currents of collective thinking began to appear in Europe; men in France, Germany, Italy and England were showing an equitable spiritual disposition. It is not by chance that the lyrical pessimism of a Byron, a Shelley, a Hölderlin, a Pushkin and a Mickiewicz find similar expression in all countries at the same time, or that in 1848 the same political explosion happened everywhere at the same moment; in former times such flare-ups were separated from one another by decades and centuries. The nineteenth century sees, thinks, feels in an identical way; in all countries one senses a kind of communal psyche evolving above national literatures and national spirit, a world literature, European thought, a spirit of coexisting humanity is coming into being.

  Once the spiritual phenomenon is recognized, then we see the intellectual process shine forth and we witness an increase in power to speed up this process. While in earlier times the sense of a European brotherhood, a constellation of cosmopolitan feeling was only occasionally felt at certain moments, by the end of the nineteenth century the prospect of political and extra-political agreements lent credence to the notion of “A United States of Europe”. The idea that all countries on this continent could belong to a single economic and spiritual organism has in fact only been in existence for the last half-century. Nietzsche, first among contemporary thinkers, declared resolutely that we must be done with the “fatherlanders” and create a supranational consciousness, the patriotic sentiment of a new Europe. For him, so tragically ahead of his time, there was no discussion possible about the inevitable fact that Europe, “this little peninsula off Asia”, as he ironically dubbed it, must ultimately unite. “Thanks to the pathological alienation,” he says, “which the nationalistic idiocy has established and still establishes among European peoples, thanks as well to the short-sighted politicians with hasty hands who are on top today with the help of this idiocy and have no sense of how the politics of disintegration which they carry on can necessarily only be politics for an intermission, thanks to all this and to some things today which are quite impossible to utter, now the most unambiguous signs that Europe wants to become a unity are being overlooked or wilfully and mendaciously reinterpreted.” You might perhaps say that reality has ferociously stifled this way of seeing between nations for a further quarter-century, due to the outbreak of the most horrifying war humanity has experienced. But this eventuality, which Nietzsche had in some sense foreseen, did not allow him to be shaken in his beliefs: “This process of the formation of the new Europe,” he said, “might be slowed by a significant reduction in velocity, but perhaps it will emerge with more depth and intensity.” He who has real faith in an idea does not let himself be diverted by isolated facts which seem to contradict his conviction, for a thought, fully recognized in its necessity, has some invincible shock force that, through the intermediary of the war, brought the “depth and intensity” desired by Nietzsche closer in a way the less vigorous formula of Goethe never could. Just as ardently, a few years later, Émile Verhaeren, the great Belgian lyricist, developed in his poetry the idea of the need for a community between European peoples. This poet, existing between two separate linguistic groups, between two great pe
oples locked in struggle for a century, had been struck profoundly by the fact that on the other side of the ocean Walt Whitman, the “Americano”, was being feted as the man of the future. Whitman proclaimed his American people as those who would be dominant in any forthcoming spiritual sovereignty over the earth. This aroused the pride in the great European Verhaeren to issue a response. Should Europe really give way? No, Never! In this still-youthful man, inflamed with ardour, there was something that refused to countenance the idea that Europe, which for 2,000 years had been “la forge de l’idée”, the sacred forge where all the great thoughts had been hammered out, this incomparable force born of the blood and spirit of all nations—that now this Europe must submit and tender her sword and sceptre to the young pretender. Verhaeren became exasperated with all the chatter over the “decline of the West”, as if somehow Europe’s mission on earth was now at an end. Verhaeren believed (and we believed with him) in the vitality of Europe and in its strength, which was far from being exhausted; he was of the mind that European nations had a responsibility to safeguard the spiritual direction of the world, but only on condition that we not reduce ourselves, destroy ourselves in futile struggles, but rather bind ourselves through impassioned community. This binding and elevating element between Europe’s nation states Verhaeren viewed with generous enthusiasm, expressing candid and joyous admiration for our achievements in such a mutually enabling coming-together.