The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  But the most tragic part of this Jewish tragedy of the twentieth century was that those who were its victims could not see what the point of it was, and knew they were not to blame. When their ancestors had been cast out in medieval times, at least they had known what they were suffering for—their faith and their law. As a talisman for their souls, they still had what today’s Jews lost long ago, an inviolable faith in their God. They lived—and suffered—in the proud delusion that, as Chosen People of the creator of the world and mankind, they were marked out for a great destiny and a special mission, and the promise of the word of the Bible was their commandment and law. When they were burnt at the stake, they held the holy scripture to their breasts, and the inner fire it gave them made the murderous flames seem less fierce. When they were hunted down all over the world they still had one last refuge in the Lord their God, and no earthly power, no emperor, king or Inquisition could drive them out of it. As long as their religion held them together they were still a community, and so a force to be reckoned with; when they were exiled and persecuted they thought they were atoning for their fault in deliberately cutting themselves off from all other nations on earth by their religion and their customs. However, the Jews of the twentieth century were not a community any more, nor had they been for a long time. They had no faith in common with each other, they felt their Jewish identity was a burden rather than a source of pride, and they were not aware of having any mission. They lived at several removes from the commandments of the books that had once been sacred to them, and they did not want to speak the old language they used to share. They were increasingly impatient to integrate with the lives of the peoples around them and become part of their communities, dispersing into society in general, if only to have some relief from persecution and rest instead of moving on. As a result they no longer understood each other, having become part of those other nations—they were more French, German, British and Russian than they were Jews. Only now, when they were all lumped together, swept up in the streets like dirt, bankers from their grand homes in Berlin, synagogue servers from the Orthodox communities, Parisian professors of philosophy, Romanian cabbies, layers-out of the dead and Nobel prize-winners, operatic divas, women hired as mourners at funerals, writers and distillers, men of property and men of none, the great and the small, observant Jews and followers of the Enlightenment, moneylenders and wise men, Zionists and those who had assimilated, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, the just and the unjust, and behind them the frantic crowd of all those who thought they had escaped the curse long ago, converts to Christianity and half-Jews. Only now were Jews forced, for the first time in centuries, to be a single community again. It was a long time since they had felt like that, a community of outcasts driven out again and again since the exile from Egypt. But why was this their recurrent fate and theirs alone? What was the reason for this pointless persecution, what was its aim? They were driven out of the lands where they had lived, but never given any land of their own. They were told: “Don’t live here with us”, but no one told them where they were to live. They were blamed for transgressions but offered no means of atonement. And so they looked at one another with burning eyes as they fled. Why me? Why you? Why you and I together when I don’t know you, I don’t understand your language, I don’t grasp your way of thinking, when we have nothing in common? Why all of us? No one could answer that question. Even Freud, with the most lucid intellect of the time, to whom I talked a great deal at the time, could see no sense in this nonsense and no way out of it. But perhaps it is the ultimate point of the existence of the Jews that, through their mysterious persistence in living on, they raise Job’s eternal question to God again and again, to keep that question from being quite forgotten.

  Nothing is quite such an eerie sensation as when something you thought long dead and buried suddenly approaches you again in its old form and figure. It was the summer of 1939, Munich with its brief delusion that we might have “peace for our time” was long gone, Hitler had already broken his sworn oath and attacked mutilated Czechoslovakia, Memel8 was occupied, the German press was whipping up feeling and vociferously calling for the annexation of Danzig and the Polish corridor. The awakening of Britain from its blind trust had been a bitter one. Even simple, uneducated people whose horror of war was purely instinctive were beginning to express great displeasure. All the English would speak to you of their own accord, although they are usually so reserved—the porter in our block of flats, the lift boy, our parlour maid as she did the housework. None of them had any clear idea of what had happened, but they all remembered one thing, obvious and undeniable—Chamberlain, as Prime Minister of Britain, had flown to Germany twice to safeguard peace, and no amount of concessions had been enough for Hitler. Harsher voices were suddenly being raised in Parliament, demanding: “Stop aggression!” You could sense preparations being made for—or rather, I should say against—the war that was on its way. Once again the pale barrage balloons went up, still looking as innocent as grey toy elephants—to hover over London, once again air-raid shelters were dug, and the gas masks already distributed were carefully checked. The situation now was just as tense as it had been a year ago, perhaps even more so, because this time the government had a determined and embittered population behind it, a nation that was not naive and innocent any more.

  During those months I had been out of London, and had gone out into the country, to Bath. I had never in my life felt more painfully aware of mankind’s helplessness in the face of world events. There was I, an alert, thinking human being, remote from anything political, dedicated to my work, quietly and persistently toiling away to give form and meaning to my years of life in my books. And there, somewhere out of sight, were a dozen other people entirely unknown to me, on whom I had never set eyes, a few men in Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, in Downing Street in London, and those ten or twenty people, few of whom had ever shown any evidence of particular intelligence or skill, were talking and writing and telephoning and coming to agreements that the rest of us knew nothing about. They made decisions in which we took no part—we never did come to know the details of them—and in the end they determined the course of my own life and the lives of every one else in Europe. My fate was in their hands, not my own. They destroyed us or spared us, powerless as we were, left us our liberty or forced us into servitude; they decided, for millions, whether it would be war or peace. And there I sat, like everyone else, in my own room, defenceless as a fly, powerless as a snail, while matters of life and death were at stake along with my own private person and my future, the ideas developing in my brain, my plans already made or yet to be made, my waking and sleeping, my will, my possessions, my entire being. There I sat staring into space like a condemned man in his cell, walled in, chained up in this senseless, powerless waiting and waiting, while my fellow prisoners to right and left asked questions, consulted each other, chattered, as if any of us knew or could know what was going to happen to us and why. The telephone rang; it was a friend calling to ask what I thought. The newspaper came, and confused me even more. There was talking on the radio, one voice contradicting another. I went out into the street, and the first person I met asked me whether I thought there was going to be war or not, although I had no more idea than he did. And I myself asked other people questions, and talked and chattered as well, although I knew perfectly well that all the knowledge and experience I had gathered over the years, all the foresight I had acquired, was nothing by comparison with the decision of those dozen or so strangers. I knew that for the second time within twenty-five years I faced my fate powerless, and there was nothing I could do of my own free will. Pointless ideas came into my aching head. In the end I couldn’t bear being in the big city any more, because the posters up on every street corner with the shrill words on them leapt at me like fierce dogs, and because I found I was trying to guess the opinions of every one of the thousands of people passing by simply from looking at them. B
ut we were all thinking the same—we were thinking purely in terms of Yes or No, Black or Red, in this crucial game on which my whole life was staked, the last years still before me, the books I had not yet written, everything that I had felt until now was my task in life and gave meaning to life itself.

  But the ball on the roulette wheel of diplomacy went on rolling this way and that, at a slow and nerve-racking pace. This way and that, back and forth, black and red, red and black. Hope and disappointment, good news and bad news, and still there was never a final outcome. Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.

  I had a task ready to hand. For years I had been steadily accumulating material in preparation for a major, two-volume account of Balzac and his work. However, I had never found the courage to get down to such a huge, long-term project. Now my lack of courage in facing current events gave me the courage to start it. I went to Bath—Bath because that city, where much of England’s glorious literature, above all the works of Fielding, was written, soothes the eye more reliably than any other city in England, giving the illusion of reflecting another and more peaceful age, the eighteenth century. But what a painful contrast there was between the landscape around it, blessed with gentle beauty, and the growing turmoil of the world and my thoughts! Just as the month of July had been more beautiful in Austria in 1914 than any I can remember, that August of 1939 in England was glorious. Once again the soft, silken blue sky was like God’s blessing over us, once again warm sunlight shone on the woods and meadows, which were full of a wonderful wealth of flowers—there was the same sense that all was at peace on earth while its people armed for war. And once again, such madness seemed incredible in the face of those meadows flowering on in luxuriant bloom, the peace that the valleys around Bath breathed as if enjoying it themselves. The delightful scene was mysteriously reminiscent of the landscape of Baden in 1914.

  And once again I would not believe it. I prepared, as I had before, for a summer trip abroad. The PEN Club Congress was to be held in Stockholm in the first week of September 1939, and my Swedish friends had invited me as an honorary guest, since I no longer represented any nation. My kind hosts had a timetable planned ahead for me which would occupy every midday, every evening, every hour in the next couple of weeks. I had booked a passage by sea long ago. And then the threatening announcements of imminent mobilisation came thick and fast. By all the dictates of reason, I ought at this point to have packed up my books and manuscripts in a hurry before leaving Britain, a country likely to be at war, because as a foreigner in England I was likely to be seen as an enemy alien if war came, and then I would be threatened by every imaginable curtailment of my freedom. But something odd in me refused to obey the dictates of reason and save myself. It was half defiance—I was not going to take to flight again and again, since Fate looked like following me everywhere—and half just weariness. “We’ll meet the time as it meets us,” I said to myself, quoting Shakespeare. And if it does want to meet you, I told myself, then don’t resist. Close as you are to your sixtieth year, it can’t get at the best part of your life anyway, the part you have already lived. I stuck to that decision. There was also something else I wanted to do as soon as possible, to put my life in order. I was going to marry for the second time,9 and I did not want to lose a moment, in case I was separated from my future wife over a long period by internment or some other unpredictable measure. So that morning—it was 1st September, a public holiday—I went to the registry office in Bath to apply for a marriage licence. The registrar looked at our papers, was very friendly and efficient, and like everyone else at that time he understood our wish to marry as quickly as possible. The ceremony was set for next day, and he picked up his pen and began writing our names in the register in handsome, rounded characters.

  At this moment—it must have been about eleven o’clock—the door of the next room was flung open. A young civil servant hurried in, flinging his coat on at the same time. “The Germans have invaded Poland. This means war!” he cried out loud in the quiet room. The word fell on my heart like a hammer blow. But the hearts of our generation are used to blows of all kinds. “It doesn’t have to be war, not yet,” I said, with genuine conviction. The young man’s reply sounded almost bitter. “No!” he shouted forcefully. “We’ve had enough! We can’t let this start all over again every six months! There has to be an end to it now.”

  Meanwhile the other civil servant, the registrar who had begun writing out our marriage licence, thoughtfully put down his pen. After all, he said, we were foreigners, and in the case of war that automatically made us enemy aliens. He didn’t know whether it was still all right for him to marry us in such circumstances. He was sorry, but he would have to get instructions from London. Then came two days of waiting, hoping and fearing, two days of the most anxious suspense. On Sunday morning news came over the radio—Britain had declared war on Germany.

  It was a strange morning. We retreated in silence from the radio that had thrown the bombshell of that message into the room. A message that would outlast centuries, that was going to change our world entirely for ever, and with it the lives of every one of us. A message meaning death for thousands who heard it in silence, meaning mourning and unhappiness, despair and a threat to us all. It might be years and years before any creative impulses could return. War was here again, a war more terrible and far-reaching than any conflict had ever been on earth before. Once again an era had come to an end, and a new era was beginning. We stood in silence in the room, which was suddenly deathly quiet, and avoided looking at each other. Carefree birdsong came in from outside, the sound of the birds’ casual love-play carried to us on the mild wind, and the trees swayed in the golden light as if their leaves wanted to touch tenderly like lips. Our ancient Mother Nature, as usual, knew nothing of her children’s troubles.

  I went into my room and packed my things in a small suitcase. If what a highly placed friend had told me was true, we Austrians living in England would be seen in the same light as Germans and must expect the same restrictions on our movements. I might not be able to sleep in my own bed tonight. I had gone yet another step down in the social scale. For the last hour I had been not just a foreigner in this country but an enemy alien, forcibly banished to some place that did not appeal at all to my anxious heart. For a man who had been exiled from his home long ago by a Germany that branded him anti-German because of his racial origins and his ideas, could there be any situation more absurd than to be forcibly classified now, in another country and on the grounds of a bureaucratic decree, as a member of a community to which, as an Austrian, he had never belonged anyway? With a single stroke of the pen, the meaning of a whole life was turned upside down and meant nothing. I still wrote and thought in German, but all my ideas, every wish I had, belonged to the countries now in arms to fight for the freedom of the world. All other links, all that had been and was now past, everything was torn apart, broken to pieces, and I knew that I would have to begin again—yet again!—after this war was over. For the personal cause to which I had lent the force of my convictions for forty years, the peaceful union of Europe, had been wrecked. What I feared more than my own death, war waged by everyone against everyone else, had been unleashed for the second time. And a man whose impassioned efforts had gone into promoting human and intellectual reconciliation was made, at this moment which of all moments called for a steadfast joint stand, to feel useless and alone as never in his life before, suddenly thrust into outer darkness.

  Once again I walked down to the city of Bath for a last look at peace. It lay quiet in the noonday sunlight and seemed just the same as ever. People went their usual way, walking with their usual gait. They were in no haste, they did not gather together in excited talk. They looked casual and composed, in proper Sunday mood
, and for a moment I wondered: “Don’t they know what has happened yet?” But they were English, they were used to concealing their feelings. They didn’t need drums and banners, noise and music, to fortify them in their tough and unemotional resolution. How different it had been in those July days of 1914 in Austria, but then again, how different I myself had been at the time, young and inexperienced, not the man I was today, weighed down by memories! I knew what war meant, and as I looked at the crowded, shining shops I saw a sudden vision of the shops I had seen in 1918, cleared of their goods, cleaned out, empty windows looking back at you wide-eyed. I saw, as if in a waking dream, the long lines of careworn women waiting outside food shops, the grieving mothers, the wounded and crippled men, all the mighty horrors of the past came back to haunt me like a ghost in the radiant midday light. I remembered our old soldiers, weary and ragged, coming away from the battlefield; my heart, beating fast, felt all of that past war in the war that was beginning today, and as yet kept its horrors hidden from view. And I knew that yet again all the past was over, all achievements were as nothing—our own native Europe, for which we had lived, was destroyed, and the destruction would last long after our own lives. Something else was beginning, a new time, and who knew how many hells and purgatories we still had to go through to reach it?