The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  Anyone reading that famous essay Au-dessus de la mêlée now will probably be unable to understand its immense influence at the time, for if it is read with a clear, cool mind, it will seem that everything Rolland proposed in it is to be taken for granted as the most natural thing in the world. But those words of his were written at a time of mass intellectual insanity which we can hardly imagine today. When that article appeared, the French ultra-patriots set up such an outcry that you might have thought they had accidentally picked up a piece of red-hot iron. Overnight, Rolland’s oldest friends boycotted him, booksellers dared not display the Jean-Christophe novels in their windows, the military authorities, who needed hate to motivate their forces, were already contemplating measures against him, pamphlet after pamphlet was published, arguing that: “What a man gives to humanity during war is stolen from his native land.” But as usual the outcry proved that the full weight of the blow had gone home. There was no stopping discussion about the proper attitude for intellectuals to adopt in war now. Every one of them was unavoidably confronted by the question.

  In writing these memoirs of mine, there is nothing I regret more than no longer having access to Rolland’s letters to me in those years. The idea that they may be destroyed or lost in this new Deluge weighs on my mind, a heavy responsibility. For much as I love his published works, I think it is possible that later his letters will be considered the finest and most humane utterances of his great heart and passionate intellect. Written to a friend on the other side of the frontier—and thus officially an enemy—in the deep distress of a compassionate mind, and with the full, bitter force of impotence, they represent perhaps the most powerful moral documents of a time when it was a massive achievement to understand what was going on, and keeping faith with your own convictions called in itself for great courage. Soon our friendly correspondence led to a positive suggestion—Rolland thought we might try inviting the major intellectual figures of all nations to a joint conference in Switzerland, to agree on the adoption of a common and more dignified attitude, perhaps even, in a spirit of solidarity, to draw up an appeal to the world for mutual reconciliation. Based as he was in Switzerland, Rolland would invite French and other foreign intellectuals to take part, while I, living in Austria, was to sound out German and Austrian writers and scholars, or rather those of them who had not yet compromised themselves by publicly disseminating the propaganda of hate. I set to work at once. The most outstanding and highly regarded German writer of the time was Gerhart Hauptmann. With a view to making it easier for him to agree—or disagree—I did not want to write to him directly. So I wrote to our mutual friend Walther Rathenau asking him to approach Hauptmann in confidence. Rathenau declined, whether with or without Hauptmann’s agreement I never found out, saying it was not yet time to talk about peace between intellectuals. That really put an end to the idea, for at the time Thomas Mann was in the opposite camp, and in an essay on Frederick the Great had just put forward the German legal standpoint. Rilke, who I knew was on our side, said that on principle he would not participate in any joint public action. Dehmel, once a socialist, was now signing his letters with childishly patriotic pride as ‘Lieutenant Dehmel’, and private conversations had shown me that I could not count on Hofmannsthal and Jakob Wassermann. So there was not much to hope for on the German side, and Rolland fared little better in France. In 1914 and 1915 it was still too soon, and for those not at the front the war still seemed too far away. We were alone.

  But not entirely alone. We had gained something from our correspondence—an initial idea of the few dozen people who, in their hearts, could be counted on and thought along the same lines as we did, whether they lived in neutral countries or those at war. We could draw each other’s attention to books, articles and pamphlets on both sides of the front, and we could be sure that where ideas had crystallised, new support might be attracted to them, hesitantly at first, but then more strongly as the pressure grew greater. This sense that we did not exist entirely in a void encouraged me to write more articles, so that the answers and reactions I received would bring those who felt as we did, in private or in hiding, out into the light of day. After all, I could write for any of the major newspapers of Germany and Austria, which meant reaching a wide circle of readers, and as I never wrote on the political subjects of the day I need not fear opposition on principle from the authorities. The influence of the liberal spirit of respect for literature was still very strong, and when I look now at the articles I managed to smuggle out to a wide public at the time, I have to say that I respect the magnanimity of the Austrian military powers. In the middle of the Great War, I was able to write enthusiastic praise of Bertha von Suttner, the founder of the pacifist movement, who denounced war as the worst of all crimes, and I also published an extensive study of Barbusse’s Le Feu in an Austrian newspaper. Of course we had to invent a certain technique for conveying these unfashionable views of ours to a wide audience in wartime. If I, writing in Austria, wanted to describe the horrors of war, and the indifference to them of those not at the front, I did it by dwelling on the suffering of a ‘French infantryman’ in an article on Le Feu, but hundreds of letters from the Austrian front showed me how clearly the Austrians themselves recognised their own plight. Or we might choose the device of appearing to disagree with each other in order to express our convictions. For instance, one of my French friends, writing in the Mercure de France, attacked my essay To Friends Abroad, but in what was supposed to be a denunciation he had printed the whole of it in French translation, down to the very last word, so he had successfully smuggled it into France, where anyone could now read it, which had been our real intention all along. These signals of understanding flashed from one side of the border to the other. Later, a little incident showed how well those for whom they were meant understood them. In 1915, when Italy declared war on its former ally Austria, a wave of hatred swept through our country. No one had a good word to say for any Italian. As it happened, the memoirs of a young Italian called Carlo Poerio of the time of the Risorgimento had just been published, and in them he described a visit to Goethe. I deliberately wrote an article entitled An Italian Calls on Goethe, to make the point, in the midst of all this outcry, that the Italians had always been on the best of terms with our own culture, and as Poerio’s memoirs had a foreword by Benedetto Croce I took my chance of writing a few words expressing my profound respect for Croce. At a time when, in Austria, no tribute was supposed to be paid to a writer or scholar from any enemy country, this was of course an obvious statement of intent, and it was understood as such well beyond the borders of the country. Croce, who was a minister in the Italian government at the time,1 told me later that a man in his ministry who did not himself read German had told him, in some dismay, that there was an article attacking him in the Austrian enemy’s major newspaper—it never entered his head that a mention of his minister could be anything but hostile. Croce got hold of the Neue Freie Presse, and was first surprised and then amused to find a tribute to him instead.

  I do not mean to overestimate these small, isolated attempts of ours. Of course they had no influence at all on the course of events. But they helped us ourselves and many unknown readers. They alleviated the dreadful isolation and despair in which a man with genuinely humane feelings in the twentieth century found himself, and now, twenty-five years later, finds himself again—just as powerless, if not more so, against all-powerful opposition. I was well aware at the time that I could not rid myself of the real burden with these little protests and devious literary ruses. Gradually, the plan of a book began to take shape in my mind. It was to be a book in which I did not just make a few points, but set out in detail my attitude to the time and its people, to catastrophe and war.

  But for a literary discussion of war as a whole, there was something I still lacked: I had never seen it at first-hand. I had now been anchored to the War Archive office for almost a year, and the reality, war in its true and terrible aspect, was in progress far away and ou
t of sight. I had more than once been offered an opportunity to visit the front; major newspapers had asked me three times to go there as a war reporter for them. But any account I wrote in that capacity would have committed me to presenting the war in an exclusively positive, patriotic light, and I had sworn to myself—an oath that I kept after 1940 as well—never to write a word approving of the war or denigrating any other nation. Now, by chance, an opportunity did offer itself. The great Austrian-German offensive had broken through the Russian lines at Tarnów in the spring of 1915, conquering Galicia and Poland in a single determined advance. The War Archive wanted the originals of all the Russian proclamations and placards to be collected for its libraries from the Austrian-occupied area before they could be torn down or otherwise destroyed. The Colonel, who happened to know about my collecting methods, asked if I would handle the assignment. I naturally set out at once, and an all-purpose permit was made out enabling me to travel by any military train and move freely wherever I liked, without being dependent on any particular authority or directly subordinate to an office or a superior. Producing this document led to some odd incidents—I was not an officer, only an acting sergeant major, and I wore a uniform without any distinguishing marks on it. But when I showed my mysterious permit it aroused great respect, for the officers at the front and the local officials alike suspected that I must be some kind of general-staff officer travelling incognito or carrying out a secret mission. As I avoided the officers’ messes and stayed only in hotels, I also had the advantage of being outside the huge army machine, and could see what I wanted to without needing ‘guidance’.

  My real task of collecting the proclamations was not difficult. Whenever I went to a Galician town, to Tarnów, Drohobych or Lemberg, there would be several Jews at the station, known as ‘factors’, whose professional business it was to supply anything a visitor might want. It was enough for me to tell one of these jacks-of-all-trades that I would like to get the proclamations and placards from the Russian occupation, and the factor would scurry off quick as a weasel, passing on the job in some mysterious way to dozens of sub-factors, and three hours later, without moving a step myself, I would have the material all collected and as complete as it could possibly be. Thanks to this excellent organisation I had time to see a great deal, and I did. Above all, I saw the wretched state of the civilian population, whose eyes were still darkened by the horror of what they had experienced. I saw the misery of the Jews in their ghettos, something of which I had entertained no idea, living eight or twelve to a room on the ground floor or in the basement of a building. And I saw the ‘enemy’ for the first time. In Tarnów, I came upon the first transport carrying Russian prisoners of war. They sat penned up in a large rectangular space on the ground, smoking and talking, guarded by two or three dozen middle-aged Tyrolean reservists, most of them bearded, looking as ragged and unkempt as the prisoners, a far cry from the smart, clean-shaven soldiers in their neat uniforms pictured at home in the illustrated papers. There was nothing at all martial or draconian in their manner. The prisoners showed no inclination to escape, and the Austrian reservists obviously had no idea of strictly observing their guard duties. They sat with their prisoners in a comradely fashion, and the fact that they could not communicate in each other’s languages amused both sides inordinately. They exchanged cigarettes and laughed. One Tyrolean reservist took photographs of his wife and children out of his dirty old wallet and showed them to the ‘enemy’, who all in turn admired them, asking questions with their fingers—was this particular child three or four years old? I had an irresistible feeling that these simple, even primitive men saw the war in a much clearer light than our university professors and writers; they regarded it as a misfortune that had befallen them, there was nothing they could do about it, and anyone else who was the victim of such bad luck was a kind of brother. This was a consoling realisation to accompany me on my entire journey, past towns that had been shot to pieces and shops that had obviously been looted, because bits of furniture lay about in the middle of the street like broken limbs and gutted entrails. And the well-cultivated fields among the war-torn areas made me hope that within a few years all traces of the destruction would have disappeared. Of course at the time I could not yet guess that, just as quickly as the traces of war would disappear from the face of the earth, so too the memory of its horrors could be blotted out of human memory.

  And I had not yet seen the real horror of war in those first days; when I did, it was worse than my worst fears. Almost no regular passenger trains were running, so I travelled sometimes on open artillery carriages, sitting on the limber of a field gun, sometimes in one of those cattle trucks where exhausted men slept in the stench among and on top of each other, looking like cattle already butchered even as they were taken to the slaughter. But worst of all were the hospital trains, which I had to use two or three times. How different they were from those well-lit, white, clean hospital trains where the Archduchesses and high-born ladies of Viennese society had undergone training as nurses at the beginning of the war! What I now saw, shuddering, was ordinary freight carriages without real windows, only a narrow vent for air, and lit inside by oil lamps black with soot. Primitive stretchers stood side by side, all of them occupied by groaning, sweating men, pale as death, struggling for air in the dense stink of excrement and iodoform. The soldiers acting as medical orderlies were so exhausted that they swayed rather than walked; there was no sign of the immaculate white sheets of the official photographs. Men lay on straw or the hard stretchers, covered with bloodstained blankets, and in every carriage there were already two or three dead among their groaning, dying comrades. I spoke to the doctor who, as he admitted to me, had really been only a dentist in a small Hungarian town and had not done any surgery for years. He had already telegraphed ahead to seven stations for morphine, but it was all gone, and he had no cotton wool or clean bandages left to last the twenty hours before we reached the Budapest hospital. He asked me to assist him, because his staff were so tired that they couldn’t go on. I did my best, clumsily enough, but I could at least make myself useful by getting out at every station and helping to carry back a few buckets of water—impure, dirty water, meant for the locomotive, but now it was a blessing to help us at least wash the men a little and scour the blood off the carriage floors. And the soldiers of all imaginable nationalities, cast up together in this moving coffin, were in additional personal difficulty because of the Babel of different languages. Neither the doctor nor the medical orderlies knew Ruthenian or Croatian. The only man who could do anything at all to help was a white-haired old priest who, in the same way as the doctor feared running out of morphine, lamented his inability to perform his sacred duty because he had no oil for the sacrament of the Last Unction. He said he had never administered it to so many people in his life before as in this last, single month. And it was from him that I heard a comment I have never forgotten, uttered in his harsh, angry voice. “I am sixty-seven years old. I have seen a great deal. But I never thought humanity capable of such a crime.”

  The hospital train on which I travelled back came into Budapest early in the morning. I went straight to a hotel, first to get some sleep; the only place to sit in the train had been on my suitcase. I slept until about eleven, for I had been exhausted, and then quickly dressed to go and find some breakfast. But after taking only my first few steps I kept feeling that I ought to rub my eyes to see whether I was dreaming. It was one of those bright, sunny days that are still spring-like in the morning but are summer by midday, and Budapest was as beautiful and carefree as I had ever seen it. Women in white dresses promenaded arm-in-arm with officers, who suddenly looked to me as if they belonged to some army entirely different from the one I had seen only yesterday and the day before yesterday. With the smell of iodoform from the transport of wounded soldiers still clinging to my clothes, still in my mouth and my nostrils, I saw them buying little bunches of violets and presenting them gallantly to the ladies, I saw immaculate cars
being driven down the streets by immaculately shaved, well-dressed gentlemen. And all this eight or nine hours by express train away from the front line! But did anyone have a right to blame these people? Wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world for them to be alive and trying to enjoy their lives? Wasn’t it natural for them to seize on everything that they still could, a few nice clothes, the last happy hours, perhaps out of the very feeling that all this was under threat? It was precisely when you had seen what frail, vulnerable creatures human beings are, lives capable of being shattered in a thousandth of a second, together with all their memories and discoveries and ecstasies, that you understood how the prospect of a morning spent promenading by the shining river brought thousands out to see the sun, perhaps more keenly aware than ever before of themselves, their own blood, their own lives. I was almost reconciled to what had shocked me at first. But then, unfortunately, an obliging waiter brought me a Viennese newspaper. I tried to read it, and now revulsion did overcome me in the shape of real anger. I saw all those phrases about an inflexible will to victory, the low casualties among our own troops and the huge losses suffered by the enemy—the lies of wartime leapt out at me naked, gigantic and shameless. The ladies and gentleman casually parading in that carefree way were not the guilty ones, the guilty were those using words to stir up bellicose feeling. But we too were guilty if we did not do our best to counter them.