The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  This dislike of school was not just my personal attitude; I can’t remember one of my school friends who did not hate the way in which our best interests and intentions were inhibited, bored and suppressed on the scholastic treadmill. Only much later did I realise that negligence on the part of the state authorities was not to blame for this loveless, soulless method of educating the young, but that it expressed a definite if carefully concealed intention: the world ahead of us, or set in authority over us, with its mind entirely bent on its fetish of security, did not like young people, or rather it habitually distrusted them. Proud of its systematic ‘progress’ and good order, bourgeois society extolled leisurely moderation in all aspects of life as the sole effective human virtue; any haste in leading us forward was to be avoided. Austria was an old state ruled by an old emperor, governed by old ministers, a state that, having no ambition, hoped only to preserve itself intact by rejecting all radical changes in Europe. Young people, who instinctively always want such swift and radical changes, were therefore regarded as a suspect element that had to be neutralised or kept down as long as possible. So there was no reason to make our schooldays pleasant for us; we could earn any rise in the world only by waiting patiently. When everything was constantly being put off in this way, the meaning of age was quite different from what it is today. A grammar-school boy of eighteen was treated like a child, punished if he was caught smoking a cigarette, had to put up a docile hand if he wanted to leave his place in class to answer the call of nature. Even a man of thirty was still considered immature, and a forty-year-old was not yet regarded as ready for a position of responsibility. When there was once an astonishing exception, and Gustav Mahler was appointed director of the Court Opera at the age of thirty-eight, horrified murmurs of astonishment ran through the whole of Vienna at the notion of entrusting the highest artistic institution in the country to ‘such a young man’ (no one stopped to think that Mozart had completed all his works at the age of thirty-six, and Schubert his at thirty-one). At the time this distrust of any young person as ‘not quite reliable’ was rife in all circles of society. My father would never have taken a young man into his business, and anyone unfortunate enough to look particularly young had to overcome suspicion wherever he went. Almost incredible as it may seem today, youth was an obstacle in every profession, only age was an advantage. While in today’s entirely different atmosphere men of forty will try hard to look as if they were thirty, and sixty-year-olds to look forty, while these days youth, energy, drive and self-confidence are a recommendation, in that age of security anyone who wanted to get ahead in life had to try all conceivable methods of looking older than his age. Newspapers advertised methods of encouraging your beard to grow, young doctors of twenty-four or twenty-five who had only just qualified as physicians sported heavy beards and wore gold-rimmed glasses even if they had perfect eyesight, just to impress their patients by looking experienced. They wore long, black frock coats and cultivated a measured tread and, if possible, a slight embonpoint in order to achieve that desirably staid appearance, and if they were ambitious they took a good deal of trouble to dissociate themselves from the suspect immaturity of youth, at least in their outward appearance. In our sixth and seventh years at school we ourselves refused to carry the school satchels that branded us schoolboys, and carried briefcases instead. All that now appears enviable—the freshness of youth, its self-confidence, daring, curiosity and lust for life—was suspect at that time, which set store solely on all that was well established.

  Only that odd attitude can explain the way the state exploited its schools as an instrument for maintaining its authority. Above all, we were to be brought up to respect the status quo as perfect, our teachers’ opinions as infallible, a father’s word as final, brooking no contradiction, and state institutions as absolute and valid for all eternity. A second cardinal principle of educational theory, one that was also adopted in the family, was that young people should not have too easy a time. Before they were allowed rights of any kind they were supposed to learn that they had duties, above all the duty of total obedience. From the first it was to be impressed upon us that we had not yet done anything in life, we had no experience, we must be grateful for anything we were allowed, and we had no right to ask questions or make demands. In my day, this stupid method of intimidation was applied from early childhood on. Maidservants and silly mothers would terrify children of three or four by threatening to fetch ‘the policeman’ if they didn’t stop being naughty at once. Even as grammar-school boys, if we brought home a bad mark in some unimportant subject we were threatened with being taken away from school and sent to learn a trade—returning to the proletariat being the worst threat imaginable in bourgeois society—and if young people, in an honest desire for education, sought enlightenment from adults on the serious problems of the day, they were fobbed off with a lofty, “You wouldn’t understand that yet”. This technique was used everywhere—at home, at school, by the state. It was always being impressed on a boy that he was not grown up yet, didn’t understand anything, had no option but to listen, believing all he was told, although he must never join in a discussion himself, let alone contradict anyone. For the same reason the poor devil of a teacher at his high lectern at school was to remain unapproachable and aloof, restricting all our thoughts and endeavours to the curriculum. It made no difference whether we were happy at school or not. The sole purpose of school in the spirit of those times was not so much to bring us on as to hold us back, not to help us to shape our minds but to fit us into the established mould with as little resistance as possible, not to enhance our energies but to discipline them and level them out.

  Such psychological or rather unpsychological pressure on the young can take effect in only one of two ways—it will either paralyse or stimulate them. The case histories in psychoanalysts’ files show us how many inferiority complexes are the result of this absurd method of education; it may be no coincidence that the inferiority complex was revealed by men who had been through our old Austrian schools themselves. Myself, I owe to that pressure a passion for freedom that manifested itself early, one that the youth of today can hardly feel to the same extent, and with it a hatred for all that is authoritarian, all dictums issued from on high, and it has accompanied me all my life. Over the years my aversion to everything dogmatically established has become purely instinctive, and I had almost forgotten where it came from. But one day, when I was on a lecture tour and found out that I was to speak in the great auditorium of a university, standing at a raised lectern while the audience occupied benches below just as we schoolboys used to, I was suddenly overcome by uneasiness. I remembered how I had suffered all through my schooldays from being addressed from on high in that unfriendly, authoritarian, doctrinaire manner, and I was overwhelmed by a fear that speaking from a raised lectern might make me seem just as impersonal as our teachers did in the past. My sense of inhibition made that lecture the worst I ever gave.

  Up to the age of fourteen or fifteen we coped with school reasonably well. We joked about the teachers, we learnt our lessons with cold curiosity. But then came the time when school bored and disturbed us more and more. A strange phenomenon had quietly taken place—after entering grammar school at the age of ten, we boys had intellectually overtaken the curriculum after the first four of our eight years of secondary education. We instinctively felt that there wasn’t much of importance left for us to learn from it, and in many of the subjects that really interested us we even knew more than our poor teachers, who had never opened a book for their own interest since finishing their university studies. And another difference became more and more obvious daily—on the school benches where, in reality, only the seats of our trousers sat, we heard nothing new, or nothing that we felt was worth knowing, while outside there was a city full of thousands of things to stimulate our minds—a city of theatres, museums, bookshops, a university, music, a place where every day brought new surprises. So our pent-up thirst for knowledge, our intellec
tual, artistic and sensuous curiosity, finding no nourishment at school, ardently concentrated on all that was going on outside it. At first only two or three of us discovered that we had these artistic, literary and musical interests, then a dozen, and finally it was almost everyone.

  For enthusiasm is infectious among young people. It passes from one to another in a school class like measles or scarlet fever, and by trying to outdo one another as fast as possible novices, in their childish vanity and ambition, will spur one another on. It is more or less a matter of chance what direction that enthusiasm takes; if there is a stamp-collector in the class he will soon infect a dozen with the same mania; if three boys wax lyrical about ballerinas then their classmates will be standing at the stage door of the Opera daily. Three years after ours, another whole class at our school was obsessed with football, and before us a class had been enthusiastic fans of socialism and Tolstoy. The fact that I happened to be in a year with other boys whose imagination turned to the arts may have decided my entire career.

  In itself this enthusiasm for the theatre, literature and art was perfectly natural in Vienna; the Viennese daily paper devoted a particularly large amount of space to cultural events, and wherever you went you heard adults discussing the Opera or the Burgtheater; you saw the pictures of famous actors on display in all the stationery shops; sport was still considered a rather violent occupation and a grammar-school boy felt he ought to be ashamed of indulging in it; and the cinematograph, with its mass-market ideals, had not yet been invented. There was no opposition to be feared at home either: the theatre and literature were among the ‘innocent’ passions by comparison with playing cards or chasing girls. After all, my father, like all Viennese fathers, had been an enthusiastic theatre-goer himself in his youth, and had attended a performance of Lohengrin conducted by Richard Wagner with as much delight as we went to the premieres of works by Richard Strauss and Gerhart Hauptmann. It was only natural for us, as grammar-school boys, to throng to any premiere. How ashamed we would have been, meeting our luckier colleagues, if we couldn’t have described every detail of a first night at school next morning! If our teachers had not been entirely indifferent to us they would surely have noticed that on the afternoon before the premiere of a major work—for which we had to begin queuing at three to get the only available places, standing room only—two-thirds of their pupils were mysteriously away sick. And if they had paid close attention, they would also have realised that the covers of our Latin grammars in fact concealed the poems of Rilke, and we were using our mathematics exercise books to copy out the best poems from books that we had borrowed. Every day we invented new means of exploiting the tedium of lessons for our own reading. While a master was giving his tired old account of Schiller’s Naive and Sentimental Poetry, we read other things under the table, works by Nietzsche and Strindberg, whose names the good old man had never heard. It had come over us all like a fever; we had to know everything, acquire knowledge of all that was going on in every area of the arts and sciences. We crowded in with the university students in the afternoons to hear lectures, we went to all the art exhibitions, we went to the lecture theatres of the Department of Anatomy to watch dissections. Our curious nostrils sniffed at everything and anything. We stole into the rehearsals of the Philharmonic Orchestra, we rummaged around the second-hand bookshops, we looked at the booksellers’ display windows every day for instant information on what had just been published. And most of all, we read; we read everything we could lay hands on. We borrowed books from all the public libraries, and lent anything we could find to one another. But our best cultural source for all novelty was the coffee house.

  To understand this, you have to know that the Viennese coffee house is an institution of a peculiar kind, not comparable to any other in the world. It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee. Every guest, in return for that small expenditure, can sit there for hours on end, talking, writing, playing cards, receiving post, and above all reading an unlimited number of newspapers and journals. A Viennese coffee house of the better sort took all the Viennese newspapers available, and not only those but the newspapers of the entire German Reich, as well as the French, British, Italian and American papers, and all the major literary and artistic international magazines, the Mercure de France as well as the Neue Rundschau, the Studio, and the Burlington Magazine. So we knew everything that was going on in the world at first hand, we heard about every book that came out, every theatrical performance wherever it took place, and we compared the reviews in all the newspapers. Perhaps nothing contributed so much to the intellectual mobility and international orientation of Austrians as the fact that they could inform themselves so extensively at the coffee house of all that was going on in the world, and at the same time could discuss it with a circle of friends. We sat there for hours every day, and nothing escaped us, for thanks to our collective interests we pursued the orbis pictus1 of artistic events not with just with one pair of eyes but with twenty or so; if one of us missed something, another would point it out to him, since, with a childish wish to show off, we were always vying with each other, showing an almost sporting ambition to know the newest, very latest thing. We were engaged in constant competition for new sensations. For instance, if we were discussing the works of Nietzsche, who was still frowned upon at the time, one of us might suddenly remark, assuming a superior air: “But Kierkegaard is better on the subject of egotism,” and at once we would all be jittery. “X knows about Kierkegaard and we don’t, who is he?” Next day we would all be racing off to the library to find the works of the dead Danish philosopher, for we felt it was a slur on us not to know something new when another boy did. Discovering and being right up to date with the very latest, most recent, most extravagant and unusual subject, one that had not yet been flogged to death—in particular not by the official literary critics of our worthy daily papers—was our passion, and I myself have indulged it for very many years. We were particularly keen to know all about what was not yet generally acknowledged, was difficult to get hold of, extravagant, new and radical; nothing was so abstruse and remote that our collective and avidly competitive curiosity did not want to entice it out of hiding. During our schooldays Stefan George and Rilke, for instance, had been published in editions of only two or three hundred copies in all, and at most three or four of those copies had found their way to Vienna; no bookseller stocked them, no official critic had ever mentioned the name of Rilke. But through a miracle of the will, our little band knew every verse and every line of those poets. We beardless boys, not yet fully grown, who had to spend our days on the school bench, were the ideal readers for a young poet: curious, with enquiring and critical minds, and enthusiastic about enthusiasm itself. In fact we had a boundless capacity for enthusiasm. For years, we adolescents did nothing during our lessons, on the way to and from school, in the coffee house, at the theatre and on walks but discuss books, pictures, music, philosophy. Anyone who performed in public as an actor or conductor, anyone who had published a book or wrote in a newspaper, was a star in our firmament. I was almost alarmed when, years later, I found in Balzac’s account of his youth the sentence: “Les gens célèbres étaient pour moi comme des dieux qui ne parlaient pas, ne marchaient pas, ne mangeaient pas comme les autres hommes.”2 That was exactly what we used to feel—to have seen Gustav Mahler in the street was an event to be reported to your friends next morning like a personal triumph, and when once, as a boy, I was introduced to Johannes Brahms and he gave me a kindly pat on the shoulder, I was in a state of total confusion for days over this extraordinary event. It is true that, aged twelve, I had only a very vague idea of exactly what Brahms had done, but the mere fact of his fame and his aura of creativity exerted astonishing power over me. A premiere of a work by Gerhart Hauptmann intrigued our entire class for weeks before rehearsals began; we approached actors and the players of bit parts to find out—ahead of anyone else!—the course of the plot and the exact cast
; we had our hair cut by the theatre barber (I do not shrink even from describing our absurdities), just to glean some secret piece of information about Wolter or Sonnenthal, and we particularly cultivated the company of a boy in a lower class, showing him all kinds of attentions, just because he was the nephew of a lighting inspector at the Opera and sometimes smuggled us in during rehearsals, and to tread that stage exceeded the awe felt by Dante when he climbed to the sacred circle of Paradise. So strongly did we feel the radiance of fame that even if it came at seventh hand, it still awed us; a poor old lady who was a great-niece of Franz Schubert appeared to us a supernatural being, and we looked respectfully at even Joseph Kainz’s valet in the street because he was lucky enough to be personally close to that most popular and brilliant of actors.