The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  I went back to Zurich after a few days in Geneva to begin discussions of the rehearsals for my play. I had always loved that city for its beautiful position by the lake, overshadowed by the mountains, and no less for its fine if rather conservative cultural tradition. But because of the way peaceful Switzerland nestled among the states now at war, Zurich was no longer as tranquil as it had been. Overnight, it had become the most important city in Europe, a meeting place for all intellectual movements, although also of a wide variety of profiteers, speculators, spies and propagandists, who were regarded with justified distrust by the native population when they took a sudden fancy to the place. You heard any number of languages in the restaurants, cafés, trams and streets of Zurich; you met acquaintances whom you liked and others whom you disliked, and you found yourself willy-nilly in the midst of a torrent of discussions. For the lives of all these people, cast up here by Fate, depended on the outcome of the war. Some were here on government business, others had been persecuted and exiled, but they had all had been torn away from their real lives and were now at the mercy of chance. As none of them had any homes, they were always looking for friendly company, and because it was beyond their power to influence military and political events they discussed them day and night, in a kind of intellectual fever that was both stimulating and tiring. After keeping our mouths shut at home for months and years, it was really hard to avoid wanting to speak out; we felt an urge to write, to publish, now that we could think and write again uncensored for the first time. Everyone was strung up to a high pitch, and as I have shown in the case of Guilbeaux, even mediocrities became more interesting than they had ever been before or would ever be again. Writers and politicians of many different languages and shades of opinion met here. It was in Zurich that Alfred H Fried, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, published his Die Friedenswarte—The Peace Watch; Fritz von Unruh, formerly a Prussian officer, read from his dramas; Leonhard Frank wrote his provocative Der Mensch ist gut—Mankind is Good; Andreas Latzko created a sensation with his Menschen im Kriege—Humanity at War; and Franz Werfel came to give a lecture. I met men of all nationalities in the old Hotel Schwerdt where I was staying, like Casanova and Goethe before me in their time. I saw Russians who went on to play a part in the Revolution and whose real names I never discovered, Italians, Catholic priests, intransigent socialists and equally intransigent members of the German war party. Among the Swiss, the excellent Pastor Leonhard Ragaz and the writer Robert Faesi ranged themselves beside us. I met my translator Paul Morisse in the French bookshop, I saw the conductor Oskar Fried in the concert hall—everyone was there, everyone passed by, you heard all kinds of opinions, from the wisest to the most absurd, people waxed angry and enthusiastic. Journals were founded, controversial opinions voiced, conflicts were resolved or intensified, groups formed or dispersed. I never met such a varied and impassioned mixture of people and opinions in so concentrated a form, as if it were under a head of steam, as in those days in Zurich—or rather nights, when our discourse went on until the lights were being switched off in the Café Bellevue or the Café Odeon, and then we quite often went on to wherever one or another of us was staying. No one in this enchanted world took any more notice of the landscape, the mountains, the lakes and their gentle calm. We lived for the newspapers, the latest news and rumours, opinions, discussions. And strangely enough, we experienced the war more intensely here than in our native lands which were actually at war, because it felt like an objective problem, separate from any national interest in victory or defeat. It was not seen from any political standpoint in Zurich, only from the European angle as a cruel, violent event that would change not just a few frontiers on the map, but the form and future of our world.

  As if I already had some inkling of my own future fate, I was most moved by those of the people here who had no homeland, or even worse, had not just one but two or three, and privately still did not feel sure where they belonged. There was one young man with a small brown beard, whose keen, dark eyes were hidden behind glasses with noticeably thick lenses, and who usually sat alone in a corner of the Café Odeon. I was told that he was a very talented English writer. When I was introduced to James Joyce a few days later, he firmly denied any connection with England. He was Irish, he said. He did write in the English language, but his thinking was not English, nor did he want it to be. “I would like,” he told me, “a language above other languages, a language serving them all. I can’t express myself entirely in English without making myself part of a certain tradition.” I didn’t quite understand this. I did not know that he was already writing Ulysses at the time. He had lent me his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the only copy he possessed, and his little play Exiles. I thought at the time that I would like to help him by translating it. The better I came to know him, the more his fantastic knowledge of languages amazed me. All the words of every idiom seemed to be stored behind that curving, almost chiselled brow, which shone as smoothly as porcelain in electric light, and he played on those words brilliantly. One day, when he asked me how I would render a difficult sentence from the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in German, we tried to work it out together in both German and Italian. He had four or five alternatives in each language for every word, including some dialect words, and understood every nuance of their meaning and weight. There was always a certain bitterness about him, but I think this irritability was in fact what gave him the strength to be so vigorous and creative. His resentment of Dublin, England and certain people had taken the form of dynamic energy that was set free only in his writing. However, he appeared to be happy enough with his own dour disposition; I never saw him laugh, or look really cheerful. He always seemed like some dark, concentrated force, and when I met him in the street, with his narrow lips pressed firmly together, always walking fast and as if towards some particular destination, I sensed the defensive isolation of his nature even more strongly than in conversation. I was not at all surprised when, later, he wrote that extremely original book,5 entirely of its own kind. It fell into our times like a meteor.

  Another who lived like an amphibian between two worlds was Ferruccio Busoni, Italian by birth and education, German by choice. From my youth on I had loved his work more than that of any other virtuoso. When he gave a piano recital, a wonderfully dreamy light came into his eyes. His hands tirelessly made music of unique perfection, while above those hands his handsome head, tilted slightly back, listened intently to the music he himself was creating, his expression full of feeling. He always seemed to be transfigured at such moments. How often, spellbound, I had seen that luminous face as the musical notes entered into me, softly arousing feeling with silver clarity. Now I saw him again. His hair had gone grey, and his eyes were shadowed by grief. “Where do I belong?” he once asked me. “When I wake up in the middle of a dream at night, I know I was speaking Italian in my dream. And then, when I write, I think in German.” His pupils were now scattered all over the world—perhaps shooting each other—and at this time he dared not go on with his real work, his opera Doctor Faust, because he felt too disturbed. He wrote a small, light, musical one-act work to free himself, but the cloud hovering above him did not lift all through the war. I seldom heard that wonderfully whole-hearted musical laughter of his that I had liked so much before. And once I met him late at night in the railway station restaurant, where he had been sitting alone drinking two bottles of wine. As I passed he called me over. “Anaesthetic!” he said, indicating the bottles. “Not getting drunk. But sometimes I need to anaesthetise myself or I couldn’t bear it. Music can’t always do it, and I can work only at good times.”

  The situation was hardest, however, for the Alsatians, who were torn both ways, and among the Alsatians it was hardest of all for those who, like René Schickele, were French at heart but wrote in German. The war was really about their territory, and the scythe sheared right through their hearts. They were being pulled in two directions at the same time as attempts were made to force them to ack
nowledge Germany or France, but they hated being confronted with an ‘either … or’ dilemma, when it was impossible for them to decide. Like all of us, they wanted fraternity between France and Germany, they were in favour of reconciliation rather than alienation, and so they felt for both and suffered for both.

  And all around was the throng of those whose loyalties were divided—mixed marriages, the English wives of German army officers; French mothers of Austrian diplomats; families where sons were fighting on opposing sides, and where parents on both sides were waiting for letters. Here, what little they had was confiscated; there, they lost their jobs. All these people between two camps had taken refuge in Switzerland to escape the suspicion they attracted in both their old and their new countries. Afraid of compromising those on both sides, they avoided speaking either French or German, and stole about like shadows, their lives distressed and disrupted. The more truly European someone’s way of life was in Europe, the harder he was hit by the fist shattering the continent.

  Meanwhile the time for the premiere of Jeremiah had come. It was a great success, and although the Frankfurter Zeitung sent a report back to Germany denouncing it, and saying that the American Ambassador and several prominent Allied figures had been in the audience, that did not trouble me much. We felt that the war, now in its third year, was losing impetus all the time, and opposition to persisting with it, on which only Ludendorff really insisted, was no longer as dangerous as in the first dreadful days when it had been glorified. The autumn of 1918 would have to bring a final decision. But I did not want to spend the time until then waiting about in Zurich, for my glance had become more observant and watchful. In my first enthusiasm on arriving in Switzerland, I had expected to find genuine like-minded comrades among all the pacifists and opponents of militarism there, people honestly determined to fight for a rapprochement in Europe. But I soon realised that among those who claimed to be refugees or martyrs to their heroic convictions, some dubious figures had smuggled themselves in. They were paid by German intelligence to question and observe others. Peaceful, stolid Switzerland, as we could all soon see from our own experience, was being undermined by secret agents from both sides working busily away like moles. The chambermaid who emptied your waste-paper basket, the telephonist, the waiter who served you noticeably slowly and at very close quarters, were all in the service of an enemy power. Indeed, one and the same man was often working for both sides. Suitcases were mysteriously opened, sheets of blotting paper photographed, letters disappeared on the way to or from the post office; elegant women smiled enticingly at you in hotel lobbies, strangely outspoken pacifists of whom we had never heard before suddenly turned up inviting us to sign proclamations, or asking hypocritically for the addresses of ‘reliable’ friends. A self-styled socialist offered me a suspiciously high fee to give a lecture to the working men of La Chaux de Fonds, who knew nothing about it. You always had to be on your guard. It was not long before I realised how small the number of those who could be regarded as absolutely reliable was, and as I did not want to get drawn into politics I mixed with fewer and fewer friends. But even with those who were reliable, I was getting bored by the uselessness of their never-ending discussions and their insistence on dividing people up into radical, liberal, anarchist, Bolshevik and apolitical groups. For the first time I really came to understand the eternal character of the professional revolutionary who feels that he is raised from his personal insignificance merely by adopting a stance of opposition, and clings to dogmatism because he has no resources of his own to support him. Staying much longer in this atmosphere of loquacious confusion would mean cultivating equally confused and insecure company, and endangering the moral certainty of my own convictions. So I withdrew. In fact none of those coffee-house conspirators ever embarked on a real conspiracy, and of all those who improvised identities for themselves as international politicians, not one understood how to come up with a policy when it was needed. When positive action began in the process of reconstruction after the war, they were still their old fault-finding, captious, negative selves, just as very few of the anti-war writers of those days wrote anything that was much good after the war. It had been the fever of the times speaking out of them, discussing, scoring political points, and like every group that has only temporary existence and does not owe its community to anything in real life, that whole circle of gifted and interesting people fell apart as soon as what it had been working against, the war, was over.

  I chose a small inn in Rüschlikon as the place for me. It was about half-an-hour’s journey from Zurich. There was a view from the top of a hill over the whole lake, and the towers of the city were very small and far away. Here I need see only the guests I invited, my real friends, and they came—Rolland and Masereel. Here I could do my own work and use the time that was still inexorably passing. The entry into the war of America made the defeat of Germany seem inevitable to all whose eyes were not dazzled and ears deafened by patriotic propaganda. When the Kaiser suddenly announced that from now on he was going to rule the country ‘democratically’, we knew that the game was up. I will frankly admit that we Austrians and Germans, in spite of our linguistic and intellectual affinities, were all impatient for the swift advent of what was now inevitable, and in many ways it came as a relief when Kaiser Wilhelm, who had sworn to fight to the last breath of every man and every horse, escaped over the border and Ludendorff, who had sacrificed millions of men to his idea of a victorious peace, disguised himself with a pair of blue-tinted glasses and took refuge in Sweden. For we believed—and the whole world believed with us—that this had been the war to end all wars, that the beast which had been laying our world waste was tamed or even slaughtered. We believed in President Woodrow Wilson’s grand programme, which was ours too; we saw the faint light of dawn in the east in those days, when the Russian Revolution was still in its honeymoon period of humane ideals. We were foolish, I know. But we were not alone. Anyone who lived through that time will remember how the streets of all the great cities echoed to cries of jubilation, hailing President Wilson as the saviour of the world, and how enemy soldiers embraced and kissed each other. There was never such trusting credulity in Europe as in those first days of peace. For now at last there was space on earth for the long-promised rule of justice and fraternity, now or never the hour for the united Europe of which we dreamt had come. Hell lay behind us, what could make us fear now? Another world was beginning. And as we were young, we told ourselves—It will be our world, the world of our dreams, better and more humane.

  NOTES

  1 Sacred egotism, a phrase coined by the Prime Minister of Italy in late 1914.

  2 Jouve was a French writer of the time, Masereel was a Belgian artist.

  3 In the original German text, Zweig cites this famous quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry V in English.

  4 Hernán Cortez, Spanish explorer of Mexico in the early part of the sixteenth century, burnt his ships on landing to prevent any mutiny among his men.

  5 Ulysses is obviously the work to which Zweig refers.