The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  Later, at the proof stages, I then repeat this process of intensifying and thus enhancing the dramatic effect once, twice or three times. In the end I find myself enjoying a kind of hunt for another sentence, or just a word, which can be cut without affecting my precise meaning and at the same time might speed up the tempo. I really get my greatest satisfaction in my work from leaving things out. I remember that once, when I rose from my desk feeling pleased with what I had done, my wife said I seemed to be in a cheerful mood today. “Yes,” I replied proudly, “I’ve managed to cut a whole paragraph and make the action move faster.” So if my books are sometimes praised for sweeping readers along at a swift pace, it does not come from any natural heated or agitated approach to the work of writing, but is entirely the result of my system of always cutting unnecessarily slack passages—anything at all that, like radio interference, might distract the reader’s attention. If I have mastered any kind of art, it is the art of leaving things out. I do not mind throwing eight hundred of a thousand written pages into the waste-paper basket, leaving me with only two hundred to convey what I have sifted out as the essence of the work. So if anything at least partly accounts for the success of my books, it is my strict discipline in preferring to confine myself to short works of literature, concentrating on the heart of the matter. Since my ideas have always been European and not nationalist, it was a great pleasure for me when I heard of publishers from other countries wanting to bring out my works in French, Bulgarian, Armenian, Portuguese, the Spanish of Argentina, Norwegian, Latvian, Finnish and Chinese. Soon I had to buy a large cupboard to house all the different copies of my foreign editions, and one day, in the statistics of the Co-opération Intellectuelle published by the League of Nations in Geneva, I saw that I was the most translated writer in the world—although true to my usual form, I thought this report was probably mistaken. Another day a letter came from my Russian publisher, saying he wanted to bring out a collected edition of all my books in Russian, and asking if I would agree to having an introduction written by Maxim Gorky. Would I agree! As a schoolboy, I had surreptitiously read Gorky’s stories under my desk; I had loved and admired him for years. But I would never have imagined that he had ever heard my name, let alone read anything of mine, and certainly not that my work could seem important enough to such a great master for him to write a foreword to it. On another occasion an American publisher turned up at my house in Salzburg with a recommendation—as if I would have needed that!—proposing to take on my entire work and publish it book by book. This was Benjamin Huebsch of Viking Press, who has been my most reliable friend and adviser ever since. Now that my original homeland has been crushed underfoot by Hitler’s jackboots, he has made sure that I still have a literary home even though my real German and European one is lost to me. Public success of that kind was dangerously likely to confuse a man who, until then, had believed more in his good intentions than his skill and the influence his work might have. In itself all publicity disturbs a man’s natural equilibrium. In normal circumstances your name means no more than the band on a cigar—a means of recognition, an outward object of little importance that is only loosely linked to the real subject, the Self. But in the case of success that name, so to speak, swells to a larger dimension. It frees itself from the man who bears it and becomes a power, a force, something independent, a commodity, capital. And then, with a violent backlash, it turns in on its bearer as a force that begins to influence, dominate and change him. Happy, self-confident natures unconsciously start identifying themselves with the influence they exert. A title, a position, a medal or decoration, and the publicity that now goes with their names can enhance their self-confidence, tempting them to feel that special recognition is their right in contemporary society and their country, and they instinctively puff themselves up to make themselves personally influential in the outside world. However, a man who naturally distrusts himself tends to feel that outward success of any kind makes it his duty, in what to him is a difficult situation, to change as little as possible.

  I do not mean to say that I didn’t enjoy my success. On the contrary; it pleased me a great deal, but only in so far as it confined itself to what was separate from myself—my books and the mere letters of my name traced on them. Once, when I happened to be in a bookshop in Germany, I was touched to see a schoolboy who came in, did not recognise me, asked for a copy of The Tide of Fortune and paid for it out of his meagre pocket-money. It gratified my vanity when the conductor who asked for my passport in the sleeping car of the train treated me respectfully once he had seen my name, or an Italian customs officer, realising that he had read a book of mine, kindly refrained from treating my baggage roughly as he checked through it. And there is something seductive for an author in the mere quantitative effect his work has on the world around him. By chance I was travelling to Leipzig on the same day as a new book of mine was on its way out of that city for delivery. I felt remarkably excited to see how much human labour I had kept busy, without knowing it, on something that I had spent three or four months setting down on three hundred sheets of paper. Workmen were packing the copies of the book into huge crates, others were groaning under the weight as they took them down to the trucks, to be loaded on to the freight cars of the trains that would transport them to all four quarters of the compass. Dozens of girls had collated the pages in the printing works, the typesetters, binders, shippers and wholesale booksellers had been at work from morning to night, and I calculated that these books, stacked up like piles of bricks, might almost be enough to build a handsome street. I never arrogantly despised the material side of success. In the early years of my career I had never dared to think that I would earn real money with my books, let alone being able to base a whole lifestyle on them. Now they were suddenly bringing in large and ever-increasing sums of money, and it seemed—and who could foresee the future in our times?—as if they would relieve me of all anxiety. I could indulge my youthful passion for collecting autograph manuscripts, and many of the finest and most valuable of those wonderful relics found their way into my possession, where I cared for them lovingly. In return for what, by comparison, must be called my own rather ephemeral books, I could acquire manuscripts of immortal works, manuscript documents by Mozart and Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Balzac. I would be putting on ridiculous airs if I were to say I was indifferent to my unexpected success, or even disliked it.

  But I am being honest when I say that I enjoyed success only as long as it related to my books and my literary name. When it was transferred to my physical presence it was a nuisance. Nothing in me has been stronger since my early youth than an instinctive wish to stay free and independent. And I felt that anyone’s personal freedom suffers from misrepresentation by photographic publicity. However, the work on which I had embarked simply out of inclination threatened to become not just a career but a business. Mail arrived by every post, stacks of letters, invitations, requests, questions, and all these missives had to be answered. If I went away for a month, I had to spend two or three days when I came back making my way through the accumulated mass and disposing of it before I could get the ‘business’ running smoothly again. Without my wanting it, the marketability of my work had made my books into a kind of industry that called for order, supervision, punctuality and skill if it was going to be run successfully—all of those being admirable virtues, but unfortunately alien to my nature, and they threatened to disturb my mind and my dreams in the most dangerous way. The more I was asked to take part in literary events, give readings, appear at official occasions, the more reluctant I felt to agree. I have never overcome this near-pathological dislike of letting my person stand in for my reputation. Today I instinctively still sit in the last, most inconspicuous row of seats in a large hall, at a concert or a theatrical performance, and I hate nothing so much as having to show my face on a platform or some other public place. I feel a deep need for anonymity in all areas of life. Even as a boy, I could never understand those writers and artists of
an earlier generation who liked to attract attention in the street with their velvet jackets and heads of waving hair, locks dangling down over their foreheads, like my dear friends Arthur Schnitzler and Hermann Bahr, or who sported showy beards and whiskers or extravagant clothes. I feel sure that making his own likeness widely known must unconsciously tempt anyone to feel, in Werfel’s phrase, like a “mirror man”, assuming a certain style not natural to him in everything he does, and with this change in his outward attitude he generally loses his warmth of heart, sense of liberty, and inner freedom from care. If I could begin again today, I would make sure to have my works published under another name, a pseudonym, and then I could enjoy those two happy conditions, literary success and personal anonymity, at the same time. Life in itself is so attractive and full of surprises—why not lead a double life?

  NOTES

  1 The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a huge covered arcade built in Milan in the latter part of the 19th century.

  2 The song of the Italian Fascist party. Mussolini had commissioned new lyrics to be set to an older melody.

  3 Probably not referring to Auber’s opera of that name, but the character on which it was based, an early nineteenth-century guerrilla regarded as a Robin Hood character who adopted the nickname Fra Diavolo—Brother Devil. The emergent Fascists may have seen themselves as modern versions of this hero of the people.

  4 Matthias Erzberger, 1875-1921, a centrist politician, handled negotiations on the German side in November 1918. He was murdered by right-wing extremists in 1921.

  5 We know this period of German history today as the Weimar Republic, but although it was a republic it also retained the older German term Reich, to be adopted later on by Hitler in the Third Reich.

  6 Hugo Stinnes, 1870-1924, German industrialist and tycoon, who as Zweig describes it here took advantage of the galloping inflation in Germany to do some clever deals involving foreign currency.

  7 Franz Grillparzer, 1791-1872, Austrian dramatist.

  8 Balzac, Dickens and Dostoevsky; see above, page 326.

  9 Literally Great Moments of Mankind; it was translated into English as The Tide of Fortune.

  THE SETTING SUN

  FOR EUROPE, AS I SHALL ALWAYS remember gratefully, that decade from 1924 to 1933 before one man destroyed our world was a relatively peaceful time. Simply because our generation had suffered so much, we regarded this period of relative calm as an unexpected gift. We all had a sense that we must catch up with everything that the terrible years of the war and its immediate aftermath had stolen from our lives—happiness, freedom, the chance to concentrate on things of the mind. We worked harder, yet with a sense of relief; we moved freely, we experimented, we discovered Europe all over again. There was never so much travelling as in those years—was it the impatience of the young to make up for what they had missed when countries were cut off from each other? Or was it, perhaps, a dark foreboding, a sense that we must take our chance to break out of confinement before the barriers began coming down again?

  I travelled a great deal myself at that time, but my travels were not the same as in my younger days. I was no longer a stranger when I went abroad; everywhere I went I had friends, publishers and readers; I was travelling as the author of my books, not as an interested but anonymous tourist. That meant a number of advantages. I could give more forceful and effective support to the idea of the intellectual union of Europe that had dominated my life for years. With that in mind, I delivered lectures in Switzerland and the Netherlands, I spoke in French at the Palais des Arts in Brussels, in Italian in the historic Sala dei Dugento in Florence, which Michelangelo and Leonardo had known in their time, I spoke English in America on a lecture tour taking me from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This was a different kind of travelling; wherever I went, I met the most distinguished men of every nation without having to seek them out. While I had looked up to these figures with veneration in my youth, I would never have dared to write them a line, but now they were my friends. I moved in circles that usually haughtily excluded foreigners; I saw the palaces of the Faubourg St Germain, the palazzi of Italy, all the private collections. I no longer had to wait at the book-borrowing counters of public libraries to ask for a volume; head librarians personally showed me their carefully guarded treasures. I was a guest of antiquarian booksellers like Dr Rosenbach of Philadelphia, men who sold to the dollar millionaires and whose shops I had timidly passed by when I was only a collector in a small way. For the first time I had a glimpse of life in the higher echelons of society, and with it the pleasant, comfortable feeling that I did not have to ask anyone’s permission to gain entry; everything came to me of its own accord. But was this really a better way of seeing the world? I found myself thinking nostalgically of the travels of my young days, when no one was expecting me, and everything seemed more interestingly mysterious because I was on my own. I did not want to abandon my old way of travelling. When I went to Paris I made sure not to let even my best friends, like Roger Martin du Gard, Jules Romains, Duhamel and Masereel, know I was there on the very first day. First I wanted to wander through the streets as I had in my student days, at liberty and with no appointment to meet anyone. I sought out the old cafés and little restaurants that I used to frequent; I played at being back in my youth. Similarly, when I wanted to work I went to some unexpected, even unlikely places, small provincial towns like Boulogne or Tirano or Dijon. It was wonderful to be unknown, staying in small hotels after establishments that were too luxurious for my liking, alternating between them, choosing light or shade as I liked. And in spite of all that Hitler took from me later, even he was unable to spoil or destroy my pleasant awareness that I had lived a truly European life as a free man, exactly as I liked, for another decade.

  One of those journeys was particularly exciting and instructive—it took me to the new Russia. I had been planning to go there in 1914, just before the war, when I was working on my book about Dostoevsky. Then the bloodstained scythe of war had cut me off from my plan, and since then certain reservations had held me back. For thinking men, the Bolshevik revolution had made Russia the most fascinating country of the post-war period, either enthusiastically admired or fanatically hated by those who knew nothing much about it. Thanks to propaganda and counter-propaganda, both of them equally ferocious, no one knew for certain what was going on there. But we did know that an experiment was being made with something entirely new, and it could determine the future shape of the world for better or worse. Shaw, Wells, Barbusse, the Romanian Istrati, Gide and many others had gone there, some coming home enthusiastic, others disappointed, and I would not have been a man with a mind ready to accept innovation if I too had not felt tempted to form an idea of Russia from the evidence of my own eyes. My books had been very widely distributed there, not just in the complete edition with Maxim Gorky’s introduction but also in small, cheap editions costing only a few copecks that reached the general public, so I could be sure of a welcome. What kept me from going, however, was that at the time travelling to Russia meant adopting some kind of partisan stance, forcing a visitor to endorse or condemn the new Russian society publicly. I had a deep dislike of anything dogmatically political, and I did not want to feel obliged to pass judgement on a vast country and a problem still unsolved after a brief survey of only a few weeks. In spite of my burning curiosity, I could not make up my mind to go to Soviet Russia.

  Then, in the early summer of 1928, I was invited to go to Moscow as a delegate representing Austrian writers on the centenary of Leo Tolstoy’s birth, and to speak in his honour at the evening of the festive celebrations. There was no reason for me to avoid such an occasion, since its non-partisan nature would mean there was nothing in the least political about my visit. Tolstoy, the apostle of non-violence, could hardly be presented as a Bolshevik, and I had an obvious right to speak on him as a writer—thousands of copies of my book on him had been distributed. It also seemed to me an important demonstration of European unity for writers of all n
ations to come together in paying a joint tribute to the greatest among them. So I accepted the invitation, and I had no cause to regret my decision. The journey to Russia through Poland was an experience in itself. I saw how quickly, these days, time can heal self-inflicted wounds. The same Galician towns that I had seen in ruins in 1915 now looked bright and new. I realised, yet again, that ten years are a good part of an individual human being’s life, but no more than the blink of an eye in the life of a nation. In Warsaw, there was no visible sign that armies, either victorious or defeated, had passed through the city twice, three, four times. The presence of elegant women made the cafés sparkle. The officers promenading down the streets, slender and well-groomed, looked more like expert actors playing soldiers in some court theatre than the genuine article. You felt a spirit of enterprise and confidence everywhere, together with legitimate pride that the new, strong Polish Republic was rising from the detritus of centuries. Our journey went on from Warsaw to the Russian border. The land was flat now and the soil sandy; the entire population of every village had assembled in colourful traditional costume at every station, for at the time only a single passenger train a day passed through Poland to the forbidden country over the border and sealed off from all others, so the sight of the shining carriages of an express train, linking the world of the East with the world of the West, was a great event. Finally we reached the border station of Nyegorolye. A banner the colour of blood was stretched above the tracks, with an inscription in the Cyrillic alphabet which I could not read. Someone translated it for me: “Workers of the world, unite!” In passing under that banner we had entered a new world, the empire of the proletariat, the Soviet Republic. As a matter of fact, the train in which we were travelling was far from proletarian. It turned out to be a sleeper train from the Tsarist period, more comfortable even than the de luxe trains of Europe because it was broader and its pace was more leisurely. I was passing through the Russian countryside for the first time, and oddly enough it did not seem strange to me. In fact everything appeared remarkably familiar—the wide, empty steppes with their slightly melancholy aura; the little huts; the small towns with their onion domes; the men half-peasant, half-prophet with their long beards, greeting us with wide, friendly smiles; the women in brightly coloured headscarves and white aprons selling kvass, eggs and cucumbers. How did I know all this? Solely from the masterpieces of Russian literature, from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Aksakov and Gorky, who had given us such wonderfully realistic descriptions of the lives of these people. Although I did not know the language, I thought I could understand what these Russians were saying—the simple men—touchingly simple—who stood foursquare, legs apart, wearing voluminous shirts; the young workers on the train playing chess, reading or arguing, their restless, active minds stimulated by the call to exert all their powers. Was it Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s love of the people that acted like a memory in me? However that may be, I was overwhelmed, even on the train, by an instinctive sympathy for the childish, touching simplicity of these Russians, whose minds were untaught but acute.