The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  Not that he was given too many opportunities for them at that time. Only a very few and especially rich young men could afford the luxury of keeping a mistress, meaning renting an apartment for her and providing for her keep. Similarly, a few particularly lucky young men matched a literary ideal of the time in the matter of extramarital love—for extramarital love was the only kind that could be described in novels—and entered into a relationship with a married woman. The rest managed as best they could with shop girls and waitresses, affairs that provided little real satisfaction. Before the emancipation of women, only girls from the very poorest proletarian background had few enough scruples and sufficient liberty to engage in such fleeting relationships when there was no serious prospect of marriage. Poorly dressed, tired out after working at a poorly paid job for twelve hours a day, neglectful of personal hygiene (a bathroom was the privilege of rich families in those days), and reared in a very narrow social class, these poor girls were so far below the intellectual level of their lovers that the young men themselves usually shrank from being seen with them in public. It was true that convention had found a way of dealing with this awkward fact in the institution of chambres séparées, as they were known, where you could eat supper with a girl in the evening unobserved, and everything else was done in the small hotels in dark side streets that had been set up exclusively for this trade. But all these encounters were bound to be fleeting and without any real attraction; they were purely sexual rather than erotic, because they were always conducted hastily and surreptitiously, like something forbidden. At best, there was the possibility of a relationship with one of those hybrid beings who were half inside society, half outside it—actresses, dancers, women artists, the only ‘emancipated’ women of the day. In general, however, the basis of eroticism outside marriage at that time was prostitution, which in a way represented the dark vaulted cellar above which rose the magnificent structure of bourgeois society, with its immaculately dazzling façade.

  The present generation has little idea of the vast extent of prostitution in Europe before the world wars. While today prostitutes are seen in big cities as seldom as horses in the streets, at the time the pavements were so crowded with women of easy virtue that it was harder to avoid them than to find them. In addition there were all the ‘closed houses’ or brothels, the night-spots, cabarets and dance halls with their female dancers and singers, the bars with their hostesses. Feminine wares were openly offered for sale at such places, in every price range and at every time of day, and it really cost a man as little time and trouble to hire a woman for quarter-of-an-hour, an hour, or a night as to buy a packet of cigarettes or a newspaper. Nothing seems to me better evidence of the greater and more natural honesty of life and love today than the fact that these days it is possible, and almost taken for granted, for young men to do without this once indispensable institution, and prostitution has been partly eliminated, but not by the efforts of the police or the law. Decreasing demand for this tragic product of pseudo-morality has reduced it to a small remnant.

  The official attitude of the state and its morality to these murky affairs was never really comfortable. From the moral standpoint, no one dared to acknowledge a woman’s right to sell herself openly; but when hygiene entered the equation it was impossible to do without prostitution, since it provided a channel for the problem of extramarital sexuality. So the authorities resorted to ambiguity by drawing a distinction between unofficial prostitution, which the state opposed as immoral and dangerous, and licensed prostitution, for which a woman needed a kind of certificate and which was taxed by the state. A girl who had made up her mind to become a prostitute got a special licence from the police, and a booklet of her own certifying her profession. By placing herself under police control and dutifully turning up for a medical examination twice a week, she had gained business rights to hire out her body at whatever price she thought appropriate. Her calling was recognised as a profession along with other professions, but all the same—and here came the snag of morality—it was not fully recognised. If a prostitute had, for instance, sold her wares, meaning her body, to a man who then refused to pay the agreed price, she could not bring charges against him. At that point her demand had suddenly become an immoral one, and the authorities provided no protection—ob turpem causam was the reason given by the law, because it was a dirty trade.

  Such details showed up the contradictions in a system that on the one hand gave these women a place in a trade permitted by the state, but on the other considered them personally outcasts beyond the common law. However, the real dishonesty lay in the fact that these restrictions applied only to the poorer classes. A Viennese ballerina who could be bought by any man at any time of day for two hundred crowns, just as a street girl could be bought for two crowns, did not, of course, need a licence; the great demi-mondaines even featured in newspaper reports of the prominent spectators present at horse-racing events—trotting races, or the Derby—because they themselves belonged to ‘society’. In the same way, some of the most distinguished procuresses, women who supplied the court, the aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie with luxury goods, were outside the law, which otherwise imposed severe prison sentences for procuring. Strict discipline, merciless supervision and social ostracism applied only to the army of thousands upon thousands of prostitutes whose bodies and humiliated souls were recruited to defend an ancient and long-since-eroded concept of morality against free, natural forms of love.

  This monstrous army of prostitutes was divided into different kinds, just as the real army was divided into cavalry, artillery, infantry and siege artillery. In prostitution, the closest equivalent to the siege artillery was the group that adopted certain streets of the city as their own quarter. These were usually areas where, during the Middle Ages, the gallows, a leper house or a graveyard used to stand, places frequented by outlaws, hangmen and other social outcasts. The better class of citizens had preferred to avoid such parts of the city for centuries, and the authorities allowed a few alleys there to be used as a market for love. Two hundred or five hundred women would sit next door to one another, side by side, on display at the windows of their single-storey apartments, as twentieth-century prostitutes still do in Yoshiwara in Japan or the Cairo fish market. They were cheap goods working in shifts, a day shift and a night shift.

  Itinerant prostitutes corresponded to the cavalry or infantry; these were the countless girls for sale trying to pick up customers in the street. Street-walkers of this kind were said in Vienna to be auf den Strich,4 because the police had divided up the street with invisible lines, leaving the girls their own patches in which to advertise. Dressed in a tawdry elegance which they had gone to great pains to purchase, they paraded around the streets day and night, until well into the hours of dawn, even in freezing and wet weather, constantly forcing their weary and badly painted faces into an enticing smile for every passer-by. All the big cities today look to me more beautiful and humane places now that these crowds of hungry, unhappy women no longer populate the streets, offering pleasure for sale without any expectation of pleasure themselves, and in their endless wanderings from place to place, all finally going the same inevitable way—to the hospital.

  But even these throngs of women were not enough to satisfy the constant demand. Some men preferred to indulge themselves more discreetly and in greater comfort than by picking up these sad, fluttering nocturnal birds of paradise in the street. They wanted a more agreeable kind of lovemaking in the light and warmth, with music and dancing and a pretence of luxury. For these clients there were the ‘closed houses’, the brothels. The girls gathered there in a so-called salon furnished with fake luxury, some of them in ladylike outfits, some already unequivocally clad in negligees. A pianist provided musical entertainment, there was drinking and dancing and light conversation before the couples discreetly withdrew to bedrooms. In many of the more elegant houses, brothels that had a certain international fame (to be found particularly in Paris and Milan), a naive
mind could imagine that he had been invited to a private house with some rather high-spirited society ladies. In addition, the girls in these houses were better off than the street-walkers. They did not have to walk through the dirt of alleyways in wind and rain; they sat in a warm room, had good clothes, plenty to eat and in particular plenty to drink. In reality, however, they were prisoners of their madams, who forced them to buy the clothes they wore at extortionate prices, and played such arithmetical tricks with the expense of their board and lodging that even a girl who worked with great industry and stamina was always in debt to the madam in some way, and could never leave the house of her own free will.

  It would be intriguing, and good documentary evidence of the culture of that time, to write the secret history of many of these houses, for they held the most remarkable secrets, which of course were well known to the otherwise stern authorities. There were secret doors, and special staircases up which members of the very highest society—even, it was rumoured, gentlemen from the court—could visit these places, unseen by other mortals. There were rooms lined with mirrors, and others offering secret views of the rooms next door, where couples engaged in sex unaware that they were being watched. There were all kinds of strange costumes for the girls to wear, from nuns’ habits to ballerinas’ tutus, kept in drawers and chests ready for men with special fetishes. And this was the same city, the same society, the same morality that expressed horror if young girls rode bicycles, and called it a violation of the dignity of science for Freud, in his clear, calm and cogent manner, to state certain truths that they did not like to acknowledge. The same world that so emotionally defended the purity of woman tolerated this horrifying trade in female bodies, organised it and even profited by it.

  So we must not be misled by the sentimental novels and novellas of that period; it was not a good time for the young when girls were placed in airtight compartments under the control of their families, sealed off from life, their physical and intellectual development stunted, and when young men in turn were forced into secrecy and underhand behaviour, all in support of a morality that at heart no one believed in or obeyed. Straightforward, honest relationships, exactly what ought to have been bringing happiness and delight to these young people by the laws of nature, were granted to only very few. And any man of that generation trying to be honest in recollecting his very first encounters with women will find few episodes on which he can really look back with unclouded pleasure. For apart from the social constraints always urging young men to be cautious and preserve secrecy, there was another element at the time to cast a shadow on their minds, even at the most intimate moments—the fear of infection. Here again the young men of the time were at a particular disadvantage compared to those of today, for it must not be forgotten that forty years ago sexual diseases were a hundred times more prevalent than they are now, and above all a hundred times more dangerous and terrible in their effects, because clinical practice did not yet know how to deal with them. There was still no scientific possibility of curing them as quickly and radically as today, when they are little more than a passing episode. While thanks to the treatment developed by Paul Ehrlich,5 weeks may now pass at the teaching hospitals of small and medium-sized universities without a professor’s being able to show his students a new case of syphilis, statistics of that time showed that in the army, and in big cities, at least one or two in every ten young men had already contracted an infection. Young people at the time were constantly warned of the danger; walking through the streets of Vienna, you could read a plate on every sixth or seventh building proclaiming that a ‘specialist in skin and venereal diseases’ practised there, and to the fear of infection was added horror at the repellent, degrading nature of treatment at the time. Again, today’s world knows nothing of that. The entire body of a man infected with syphilis was subjected to weeks and weeks of treatment by rubbing with quicksilver, which made the teeth fall out and caused other kinds of damage to the patient’s health. The unfortunate victim of a bad attack felt not only mentally but also physically soiled, and even after such a terrible cure he could never for the rest of his life be sure that the malicious virus might not wake from its dormancy at any moment, paralysing him from the spinal marrow outwards and softening the brain inside his skull. No wonder that at the time many young men diagnosed with the disease immediately reached for a revolver, finding it intolerable to feel hopelessly suspect to themselves and their close family. Then there were the other anxieties resulting from a vita sexualis pursued only in secrecy. If I try to remember truthfully, I know hardly one of the comrades of my adolescent years who did not at some time look pale and distracted—one because he was sick or feared he would fall sick, another because he was being blackmailed over an abortion, a third because he lacked the money to take a course of treatment without his family’s knowledge, a fourth because he didn’t know how to pay the alimony for a child claimed by a waitress to be his, a fifth because his wallet had been stolen in a brothel and he dared not go to the police. So youth in that pseudo-moral age was much more dramatic and on the other hand unclean, much more exciting and at the same time oppressive, than the novels and plays of the court writers describe it. In the sphere of Eros, young people were almost never allowed the freedom and happiness proper to them at their time of life, any more than they were permitted it at school and at home.

  All this has to be emphasised in an honest portrait of the time, because in talking to younger friends of the post-war generation, I often find it very hard to convince them that our young days were definitely not to be preferred to theirs. Certainly, we had more freedom as citizens of the state than the present generation, who are obliged to do military service or labour service, or in many countries to embrace a mass ideology, and are indeed generally at the mercy of the arbitrary stupidity of international politics. We could devote ourselves undisturbed to our artistic and intellectual inclinations; we could pursue our private lives in a more individual and personal way. We were able to live in a more cosmopolitan manner; the whole world was open to us. We could travel anywhere we liked without passes and permits; no one interrogated us about our beliefs, our origins, our race or religion. We certainly did—I do not deny it—have immeasurably more individual freedom, and we did not just welcome that, we made use of it. But as Friedrich Hebbel once nicely put it, “Sometimes we have no wine, sometimes we have no goblet.” Both are seldom granted to one and the same generation; if morality allows a man freedom, the state tries to remould him. If the state allows him freedom, morality will try to impose itself. We knew more of the world then, and knew it better, but the young today live their own youthful years more fully and are more aware of what they experience. Today, when I see young people coming out of their schools and colleges with heads held high, with bright, cheerful faces, when I see boys and girls together in free and easy companionship, competing with each other in studies, sport and games without false shame or bashfulness, racing over the snow on skis, rivalling each other in the swimming pool with the freedom known in the ancient world, driving over the countryside together in motor cars, engaging in all aspects of a healthy, untroubled life like brothers and sisters, without any internal or external pressure on them, I always feel as if not forty but a thousand years lay between them and those of us who had to look for any experience of giving and taking love in a hole-and-corner way in the shadows. I see genuinely happy expressions on their faces. What a great revolution in morality has taken place to the benefit of the young; how much freedom in life and love they have regained, and how much better they thrive both physically and mentally on this healthy new freedom! Women look more beautiful to me now that they are at liberty to display their figures; their gait is more upright, their eyes brighter, their conversation less stilted. What a different kind of confidence this new youth has acquired! They are not called upon by anyone else to account for what they do or do not do—they answer only to themselves and their own sense of responsibility, which has wrested control over
them from mothers and fathers and aunts and teachers, and long ago threw off the inhibition, intimidation and tension that weighed down on their own development. They no longer know the devious secrecy we had to resort to to get the forbidden pleasures that they now correctly feel are their right. They happily enjoy their youth with the verve, freshness, lightness of heart and freedom from anxiety proper to their age. But the best of that happiness, it seems to me, is that they do not have to lie to others, while they can be honest with themselves and their natural feelings and desires. It is possible that the carefree way in which young people go through life today means they lack something of our own veneration for intellectual subjects when we were young. It may be that through the easy give and take that is accepted now, they lose an aspect of love that seemed to us particularly valuable and intriguing, they lose a certain reticence caused by shame and timidity, and certain especially tender moments. Perhaps they do not even have any idea how the awe of what is banned and forbidden mysteriously enhances one’s enjoyment of it. But all this seems to me a minor drawback by comparison with the saving grace—the fact that young people today are free from fear and oppression, and enjoy in full what was forbidden us at their age, a sense of frank self-confidence.

  NOTES

  1 What is natural is vile.

  2 La Dame aux camélias, novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, on which Verdi’s famous opera La Traviata is based.

  3 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, 1832-1910, Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903.

  4 Strich—line or break. To be auf den Strich has gone into the German language as an expression for street-walking or being on the game.