The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  The sight of Argentina was all the more delightful. Here was Spain again, its old culture preserved and kept safe in a new, wider land not yet fertilised with blood and poisoned by hatred. There was plenty of food, enough and to spare, and plenty of land to ensure food in the future. I felt a sense of great happiness, and a kind of new confidence. After all, cultures had emigrated from land to land for thousands of years, and when the axe had felled the tree its seeds had been saved to provide new blossom and new fruit. What generations had done before us was never entirely lost. You just had to learn to think in larger dimensions, to expect everything to be on a larger scale. I told myself that we ought not to think solely in terms of Europe, but begin looking further afield, not burying ourselves in a dying past but participating in its rebirth. From the warm welcome given to our Congress by the whole population of this new city of millions of inhabitants, I could tell that we were not really strangers here, a place where the belief in intellectual unity to which we had devoted the best part of our lives was still alive and well—in these days of new, faster transport, even the ocean did not separate us. A new task lay ahead instead of the old one—to build the sense of community we had always dreamt of, but on a larger scale and to a bolder concept. If I had given up Europe for lost with that last glimpse of the coming war, I began to have faith and hope again under the Southern Cross.

  I gained an equally powerful and no less promising impression of Brazil, a country on which Nature had lavished gifts and boasting the most beautiful city on earth, a country of such vast extent that it still cannot be crossed entirely by rail or road, and only just by air. The past was more carefully preserved here than in Europe itself; the brutalisation that followed in the wake of the First World War had not yet infected manners and morals this side of the ocean. People lived together more peacefully and with more courtesy here, and relations between different ethnic groups were not as hostile as we are used to in Europe. Man was not separated by man on the grounds of absurd theories of blood, race and origins. I felt, with a curious premonition, that I could live in peace in Brazil, a country with untold space for future development, whereas in Europe states fought and politicians argued fiercely over every little scrap of territory. Here the land was still waiting for people to come and live in it, make use of it, fill it with their presence. Here the civilisation created in Europe could continue and develop in new and different forms. My eyes, delighted by the vast variety of the beauties of this new nature, had a glimpse of the future.

  But travelling, even as far as to other worlds under other stars, did not allow me to escape Europe and my anxieties. It seems almost like Nature’s fierce revenge on mankind that all the achievements of technology through which we have taken her mysterious forces into our own hands simultaneously destroy the soul. The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening anywhere in the world at the hour and the second when it happened. However far I went from Europe, its fate came with me. Landing in Pernambuco by night, with the Southern Cross overhead and dark-skinned people around me in the street, I saw a newspaper placard with news of the bombing of Barcelona and the shooting of a Spanish friend of mine with whom I had spent several pleasant hours a few months before. Sitting in a Pullman car passing through Texas, between Houston and another oil town, I suddenly heard a voice shouting furiously in German. A fellow passenger, thinking nothing of it, had tuned the train radio to a German wavelength, and as the train rolled on through the Texas plain I had to listen to one of Hitler’s harangues. There was no getting away from it by day or night; I was forced to keep thinking with terrible anxiety about Europe, and within Europe about Austria. It may seem like petty patriotism that, considering the entire vast complex of danger extending from China to the Ebro and Manzanilla, I should be concerned with the fate of Austria in particular. But I knew that the fate of all Europe was linked to the fate of the little country that just happened to be my native land. Looking back, if I try to pick out the political mistakes made after the Great War, I would say that the worst of them was the refusal of European and American politicians alike to adopt Wilson’s clear, simple plan, hacking it about instead. His idea had been to grant the smaller nations liberty and independence, but he had correctly seen that such liberty and independence could be maintained only within an organisation of states both large and small linked under a supreme authority. Failure to create that supreme authority—which would have been a genuine League of Nations—implementing only the part of his plan that guaranteed small states their independence, meant not peace but constant tension, for nothing is more dangerous than the craving of small countries for prestige, and as soon as the first of those small states were created they began intriguing against each other, quarrelling over tiny areas of territory, Poles against Czechs, Hungarians against Romanians, Bulgarians against Serbs, and the weakest of all in this rivalry was tiny Austria facing the mighty power of Germany. A country whose rulers had once governed Europe, now partitioned and mutilated, Austria was, I repeat, the keystone in the wall. I knew something that the millions of people around me in the British capital could not see—with Austria, Czechoslovakia would be bound to fall, and then the Balkans would be open to Hitler. Thanks to the particular situation of Vienna, National Socialism would have in its hands a lever enabling it to take the whole of Europe apart. Only we Austrians knew how much ambition fuelled by resentment was driving Hitler on to Vienna. The city had seen him at his lowest point, and now he wanted to march into it in triumph. Whenever I had paid a quick visit to Austria and then went away again over the border, I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking: “Not yet.” And then I looked back as if for the last time. I could see disaster inevitably coming. Hundreds of times, every morning in all those years while others confidently picked up the newspaper, I was afraid of seeing a headline announcing the fall of Austria. How deluded I had been when I thought I had detached myself from its fate long ago! From a distance, I still suffered every day as I witnessed its fevered, long-drawn-out death agony—I suffered more than my friends still in the country who were deceiving themselves with patriotic demonstrations, assuring one another every day: “France and Britain won’t let Austria down, and anyway Mussolini would never let it happen.” They believed in the League of Nations and the peace treaties just as the sick believe in medicine with a pretty label. They lived happy and carefree, while I saw the situation more clearly, and my heart misgave me.

  My last journey to Austria had been for the sole reason that I felt one of those spontaneous fits of fear as the catastrophe came closer and closer. I had been in Vienna in the autumn of 1937 to visit my old mother, and a few weeks later—it must have been towards the end of November—I was walking home down Regent Street and bought a copy of the Evening Standard in passing. That was the day when Lord Halifax flew to Berlin to try negotiating personally with Hitler for the first time. The front page of that edition of the Evening Standard—I can still see it in my mind’s eye, with the text to the right of the page in big black letters—set out the various points on which Halifax hoped to come to an agreement. Among them was a paragraph on Austria. Reading between the lines I saw, or thought I saw, that Austria was soon to be handed over, because what else could a discussion of that subject mean? We Austrians knew that Hitler would never give way on that point. Oddly enough, this programmatic enumeration of points for discussion was printed only in the midday edition of the paper that I had bought, and had vanished without trace from all the subsequent afternoon editions. (I later heard a rumour that the Italian Embassy had leaked it to the paper, because there was nothing Italy feared more in 1937 than an agreement behind its back between Germany and Britain.) I don’t know how much of the content of the report—which probably went unnoticed by the vast majority—in that one edition of the newspaper
was fact and how much was not. All I know is that I was shocked by the idea of negotiations over Austria already being conducted by Hitler and Britain. I am not ashamed to say that my hands shook as they held the paper. True or false, that news agitated me more than any news item for years, because I could see that if even a fraction of it proved true it was the beginning of the end, the stone would come out of the wall and the wall would collapse. I turned round at once, boarded the next bus going to Victoria Station, and went to the Imperial Airways counter to ask if there was a seat available on a flight to Austria next morning. I wanted to see my old mother, my family and my homeland again. I was able to buy a ticket, and I quickly flung a few things into a case and flew to Vienna.

  My friends were surprised to see me back so suddenly and so soon. How they laughed when I told them my fears! Still the same old Jeremiah, they said sarcastically. Didn’t I know that the entire population of Austria was now one hundred per cent behind Schuschnigg? They talked at length about the great demonstrations by the Fatherland Front.2 But in Salzburg I had already seen that while most of those demonstrators wore the regulation party badge on the collars of their jackets for show, so as not to endanger their position, they had long ago hedged their bets by joining the National Socialists in Munich. I had read and indeed written too many stories not to know that the vast majority always go straight over to whichever side holds the balance of power at a given moment. I knew that the voices calling “Heil Schuschnigg!” today would be bellowing “Heil Hitler!” tomorrow. But everyone I spoke to in Vienna genuinely appeared not to have a care in the world. They invited each other to parties where evening dress was de rigueur, never guessing that they would soon be wearing the convict garb of the concentration camps; they crowded into the shops to do Christmas shopping for their attractive homes, with no idea that a few months later those homes would be confiscated and looted. For the first time I was distressed by the eternally light-hearted attitude of old Vienna, which I always used to love so much—I suppose I will dream of it all my life—a freedom from care once summed up by the Viennese writer Anzengruber3 in a line in Viennese dialect, “Es kann dir nix g’schehn—nothing can go wrong for you”. But perhaps in the last resort all my friends in Vienna were wiser than me, because they did not start suffering in earnest until disaster struck, whereas my own imagination had been through it all in advance, and then had to suffer it a second time in reality. None the less, I did not understand them and could not get them to understand me. After the second day I stopped warning anyone. Why upset people who didn’t want to be upset?

  However, it is not a retrospective flourish but the plain truth when I say that on those last two days in Vienna, I looked at every one of the familiar streets, every church, every park and garden, every old nook and cranny of the city where I had been born with a desperate, silent farewell in my mind—“Never again.” I embraced my mother with the same secret knowledge that it was for the last time. I turned that farewell glance on everything I saw in the city and the country, knowing that it was goodbye for ever. I passed Salzburg, where the house in which I had worked for twenty years stood, without even getting out of the train. I could have seen my house on the hill, with all its memories of past years, from the carriage window, but I didn’t look. What was the point? I would never live there again. And as the train crossed the border I knew, like the patriarch Lot in the Bible, that all behind me was dust and ashes, the past transformed into a pillar of bitter salt.

  I thought I had anticipated all the terrible things that could happen when Hitler’s hate-fuelled dream came true and he made his triumphant entry into Vienna, the city that had rejected him as a poverty-stricken failure in his youth. But my ideas, indeed any imaginable human ideas, lagged far behind the inhumanity that discharged itself on 13th March 1938, the day when Austria fell victim to naked violence, and with Austria all Europe. The mask came off. Now that the other states had openly shown they were afraid, there was no need for any show of moral scruples to inhibit the regime’s brutality. What did Britain, France and the rest of the world matter? The Nazis no longer resorted to hypocritical pretexts about the urgency of opposing and eliminating Marxism. They did not just rob and steal, they gave free rein to every kind of private vengeful instinct. University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while shouting “Heil Hitler!” in chorus. They rounded up innocent citizens in the streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight. They broke into apartments and tore the jewels out of the ears of trembling women—it was the kind of thing that might have happened when cities were plundered hundreds of years ago in medieval wars, but the shameless pleasure they took in the public infliction of pain, psychological torture and all the refinements of humiliation was something new. All this has been described not by one victim but by thousands, and a more peaceful age, not morally exhausted like our own, will shudder some day to read what horrors were inflicted on that cultured city in the twentieth century by a single half-deranged man. For in the midst of his military and political victories, that was Hitler’s most diabolical triumph—one man succeeded in deadening every idea of what is just and right by the constant attrition of excess. Before this ‘New Order’ was ushered in, the world would have been horrified if a single human being had been murdered for no reason, and without recourse to the law. Torture had been considered unthinkable in the twentieth century, and expropriation was called, in plain language, robbery and theft. However, after a whole series of St Bartholomew’s Eve Massacres,4 of prisoners tortured to death in SA cells and behind the barbed wire of concentration camps, what was still considered wrong, what did earthly suffering mean? After the annexation of Austria in 1938, our world became inured to inhumanity, injustice and brutality as never before in hundreds of years. Once what happened in the unfortunate city of Vienna alone would have been internationally condemned, but in 1938 the conscience of the world kept quiet, or murmured just a little before forgetting and forgiving.

  Those days, when appeals for help cried out from our native land, when you knew your close friends were being taken away, tortured and humiliated, and you trembled for every helpless soul you loved, were among the most terrible of my life. And I am not ashamed to say—for a time like that perverts our hearts so much—that I was not horrified or plunged into grief when news came of the death of my old mother, who had been left behind in Vienna. On the contrary, I even felt a kind of relief to know that now she was safe from any suffering and danger. Aged eighty-four, almost stone deaf, she had been living in an apartment that was part of our family home, so that for the time being she could not be dislodged from it even under the new Aryan laws, and we had hoped to be able to bring her out of Austria in some way or other after a while. One of the first decrees issued for Vienna had hit her hard. At eighty-four she was not good on her legs, and when she took her little daily constitutional, after five or ten minutes’ walking with some difficulty she used to sit down and rest on a bench beside the Ringstrasse or in the park. Hitler had not been master of the city for a week before brutal orders were given that no Jew must sit on any public bench—one of those prohibitions obviously and exclusively designed for the sadistic purpose of maliciously tormenting people. For there was some kind of logic and perceptible point in robbing Jews, since the Nazis could feed their own forces and pay their hangers-on with the proceeds of the loot they had taken from factories, dwelling houses, villas, and other places now vacated. After all, Goering’s picture gallery owes its splendours mainly to that practice, in his case exerted on the grand scale. But forbidding an old lady or an exhausted elderly gentleman to rest for a couple of minutes on a bench was an idea reserved for the twentieth century and the man adored by millions as the gre
atest of his age.