The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  But now a third symbolic flower appeared—the blue cornflower, Bismarck’s favourite and the symbol of the German National party, which—not that anyone realised it at the time—was deliberately revolutionary, and worked with brute force for the destruction of the Austrian Monarchy, anticipating Hitler’s dreams by aiming to set up a Greater Germany under Prussian and Protestant leadership. While the Christian Socialist party had its roots in Vienna and the country, and the Socialists in the industrial centres, the German Nationalists had their adherents almost solely in the Bohemian and Alpenland border areas; they were weak in numbers, but made up for their insignificance by ferocious aggression and mass brutality. Their few deputies became the terror and—in the old sense of the word—the shame of the Austrian parliament; Hitler, himself an Austrian from the border of the country, adopted their ideas and methods as his point of departure. He took on board the clarion cry, “Away from Rome!” thought up by Georg von Schönerer,10 whom thousands of nationalist Germans had followed obediently in his time, infuriating the Emperor and the clergy by converting from Catholicism to Protestantism. Hitler also adopted his anti-Semitic theory of race—In der Rass’ liegt die Schweinerei,11 said a famous example—and above all, he took over Schönerer’s use of ruthless storm troopers to strike out at random, and with it the principle where by a small group intimidates a numerically superior but humane and passive majority through terrorism. What the SA men did for National Socialism, breaking up gatherings with rubber truncheons, attacking opponents by night and striking them down, was done for the German Nationalists in Austria at this time by the student groups which established a unparalleled, violently terrorist regime, under cover of academic immunity, and were ready to march with military organisation in any political action when they were called upon to do so. Grouped in so-called fraternities, their faces battered, drunk and brutal, they dominated the university hall because they did not just wear bands and caps like the other students, but were also armed with hard, heavy sticks. Ever provocative, they struck out now at Slavonic students, now at Jews, now at Catholics and now at Italians, driving the defenceless out of the university. During every ‘casual stroll’, as the student parades on Saturdays were called, blood was shed. The police, who thanks to the old privilege of the university could not enter its hall, watched helplessly from the sidelines as these cowardly thugs went on the rampage. Police officers had to confine themselves to carrying away the injured and bleeding who were flung down the steps and into the street by the violent nationalists. Whenever the tiny but loud-mouthed party of German Nationalists wanted to do something by force, it sent in this student storm troop; when Count Badeni,12 with the consent of the Emperor and parliament had decided on the Language Ordinance that was intended to make peace between the nations of Austria, and would probably have extended the life of the monarchy itself by decades, this handful of young thugs moved in to occupy the Ringstrasse. The cavalry were sent in, swords were drawn, guns were fired. But in that tragically weak if touchingly humane and liberal era, so great was the horror of any violent tumult and bloodshed that the government gave way in the face of the German Nationalist terrorists. The Prime Minister resigned, and the Language Ordinance, a measure which had been backed by true loyalists, was annulled. The advent of brutality into politics chalked up its first success. When the underlying rifts between races and classes, mended so laboriously during the age of conciliation, broke open they widened into ravines and clefts. In fact, in that last decade before the new century, war waged by everyone against everyone else in Austria had already begun.

  We young men, however, wholly absorbed in our literary ambitions, noticed little of these dangerous changes in our native land; our eyes were bent entirely on books and pictures. We took not the slightest interest in political and social problems; what did all this shrill squabbling mean in our lives? The city was in a state of agitation at election time; we went to the libraries. The masses rose up; we wrote and discussed poetry. We failed to see the writing on the wall in letters of fire. Like King Belshazzar before us, we dined on the delicious dishes of the arts and never looked apprehensively ahead. Only decades later, when the roof and walls of the building fell in on us, did we realise that the foundations had been undermined long before, and the downfall of individual freedom in Europe had begun with the new century.

  NOTES

  1 The World in Pictures—this was the title of a seventeenth-century educational work with illustrations by the Czech John Commenius, and came to be used for educational picture books in general.

  2 To me, famous people were like gods who did not talk, walk or eat like other human beings.

  3 Eduard Hanslick, an influential nineteenth-century Austrian writer on music. Zweig is alluding to, but slightly misquoting, the title of his best-known work, Vom Musikalich-Schönen—On the Musically Beautiful.

  4 Latin tag meaning, roughly speaking—Our business is involved. Or as Zweig paraphrases—It’s our turn now.

  5 A note to the original German of Zweig’s text reads: “Where August Oehler, who died young, is concerned, Stefan Zweig’s memory is at fault.”

  6 Thou sacred art, in many a dismal hour: the opening of the words of Schubert’s famous song An die Musik—To Music. The text was by Schubert’s friend Franz von Schober.

  7 Victor Adler, 1852-1918, founded the Austrian Social Democratic Party in 1889.

  8 The Prater: the large and famous public park in Vienna; the Hauptallee is the main avenue through it.

  9 Julius Streicher, 1885-1945, was editor and founder of the notoriously anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

  10 Georg von Schönerer, 1842-1921, founder of the Austrian Pan-German Party. It lasted little more than two decades, but Hitler and German National Socialism were influenced by its anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic stance.

  11 In the race lies the disgrace. The general sense here is that the Jew’s racial origin makes him a swine, a disgrace.

  12 Count Kasimir Badeni, 1846-1909, Austrian politician and Prime Minister in 1895-1897, tried to bring in a ‘Language Ordinance’ giving equal status to German and Czech as languages in the affairs of Bohemia, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time. German was generally the preferred language of the educated, and his proposed measure encountered violent opposition.

  EROS MATUTINUS

  DURING THOSE EIGHT YEARS at grammar school, one very personal fact affected us all—starting as children of ten, we gradually became sexually mature young people of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Nature began to assert its rights. These days, the awakening of puberty seems to be an entirely private matter, to be dealt with for themselves by all young people as they grow up, and it does not at first glance appear at all suitable for public discussion. For our generation, however, the crisis of puberty reached beyond its own real sphere. At the same time, it brought an awakening in another sense—it taught us to look more critically, for the first time, at the world of the society in which we had grown up and its conventions. Children and even adolescents are generally inclined to conform respectfully to the laws of their environment at first. But they submit to the conventions enjoined upon them only as long as they see everyone else genuinely observing them. A single instance of mendacity in teachers or parents will inevitably make the young turn a distrustful and thus a sharper eye on their surroundings as a whole. And it did not take us long to discover that all those authorities whom we had so far trusted—school, the family, public morality—were remarkably insincere on one point—the subject of sexuality. Worse than that, they wanted us, too, to dissimulate and cover up anything we did in that respect.

  The fact is that thirty or forty years ago, thinking on such subjects was not what it is in the world of today. Perhaps there has never been such a total transformation in any area of public life within a single human generation as here, in the relationship between the sexes, and it was brought about by a whole series of factors—the emancipation of women, Freudian psychoanalysis, cul
tivation of physical fitness through sport, the way in which the young have claimed independence. If we try to pin down the difference between the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century, which was essentially Victorian, and the more liberal uninhibited attitudes of the present, we come closest, perhaps, to the heart of the matter by saying that in the nineteenth century the question of sexuality was anxiously avoided because of a sense of inner insecurity. Previous eras which were still openly religious, in particular the strict puritanical period, had an easier time of it. Imbued by a genuine conviction that the demands of the flesh were the Devil’s work, and physical desire was sinful and licentious, the authorities of the Middle Ages tackled the problem with a stern ban on most sexual activity, and enforced their harsh morality, especially in Calvinist Geneva, by exacting cruel punishments. Our own century, however, a tolerant epoch that long ago stopped believing in the Devil and hardly believed in God any more, could not quite summon up the courage for such outright condemnation, but viewed sexuality as an anarchic and therefore disruptive force, something that could not be fitted into its ethical system and must not move into the light of day, because any form of extramarital free love offended bourgeois ‘decency’. A curious compromise was found to resolve this dilemma. While not actually forbidding a young man to engage in sexual activity, morality confined itself to insisting that he must deal with that embarrassing business by hushing it up. Perhaps sexuality could not be eradicated from the polite world, but at least it should not be visible. By tacit agreement, therefore, the whole difficult complex of problems was not to be mentioned in public, at school, or at home, and everything that could remind anyone of its existence was to be suppressed.

  We, who have known since Freud that those who try to suppress natural instincts from the conscious mind are not eradicating them but only, and dangerously, shifting them into the unconscious, find it easy to smile at the ignorance of that naive policy of keeping mum. But the entire nineteenth century suffered from the delusion that all conflicts could be resolved by reason, and the more you hid your natural instincts the more you tempered your anarchic forces, so that if young people were not enlightened about the existence of their own sexuality they would forget it. In this deluded belief that you could moderate something by ignoring it, all the authorities agreed on a joint boycott imposed by means of hermetic silence. The churches offering pastoral care, schools, salons and the law courts, books and newspapers, fashion and custom all on principle avoided any mention of the matter, and to its discredit even science, which should have taken on the task of confronting all problems directly, also agreed to consider that what was natural was dirty, naturalia sunt turpia.1 Science capitulated on the pretext that it was beneath its dignity to study such indecent subjects. Wherever you look in the books of the period—philosophical, legal, even medical—you find that by common consent every mention of the subject is anxiously avoided. When experts on criminal law met at conferences to discuss the introduction of humane practices to prisons and the moral damage done to inmates by life in jail, they scurried timidly past the real central problem. Although in many cases neurologists were perfectly well acquainted with the causes of a number of hysterical disorders, they were equally unwilling to tackle the subject, and we read in Freud how even his revered teacher Charcot admitted to him privately that he knew the real cause of these cases but could never say so publicly. Least of all might any writer of belles-lettres venture to give an honest account of such subjects, because that branch of literature was concerned only with the aesthetically beautiful. While in earlier centuries authors did not shrink from presenting an honest and all-inclusive picture of the culture of their time, so that in Defoe, the Abbé Prévost, Fielding and Rétif de la Bretonne we can still read unvarnished descriptions of the true state of affairs, the nineteenth century saw fit only to show the ‘sensitive’ and sublime, nothing embarrassing but true. Consequently you will find scarcely a fleeting mention in the literature of that era of all the perils and dark confusions of young city-dwellers of the time. Even when a writer boldly mentioned prostitution, he felt he should refine the subject, presenting a perfumed heroine as the Lady of the Camellias.2 So we are faced with the strange fact that if young people today, wanting to know how their counterparts of the last couple of generations made their way through life, open the novels of even the great writers of that time, the works of Dickens and Thackeray, Gottfried Keller and Bjørnson,3 they will find—except in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who as Russians stood outside the pseudo-idealism of Europe—accounts of nothing but sublimated, toned-down love affairs because the pressures of the time inhibited that whole generation in its freedom of expression. And nothing more clearly illustrates the almost hysterical over-sensitivity of our forebears’ moral sense and the atmosphere in which they lived, unimaginable today, than the fact that even this literary restraint was not enough. Can anyone now understand how such a down-to-earth novel as Madame Bovary could be banned by a French court on the grounds of indecency? Or how Zola’s novels, in my own youth, could be considered pornographic, or so well-balanced a writer of neoclassical epic works as Thomas Hardy could arouse indignation in England and America? Reserved as they were on the subject, these books had given away too much of the truth.

  But we grew up in this unhealthily musty air, drenched with sultry perfumes. The dishonest and psychologically unrealistic morality of covering up sexuality and keeping it quiet weighed down on us in our youth, and as, thanks to the solidarity maintained in this policy of hushing things up, there were no proper accounts available in literature and cultural history, it may not be easy for my readers to reconstruct what had actually happened, incredible as it might seem. However, there is one good point of reference; we need only look at fashion, because the fashions of a period, visibly expressing its tastes, betray its morality. It can be no coincidence that as I write now, in 1940, the entire audience in every town and village all over Europe or America bursts into wholehearted merriment when society men and women of 1900 appear on the cinema screen in the costumes of the time. The most naive of us today will smile at those strange figures of the past, seeing them as caricatures, idiots decked out in unnatural, uncomfortable, unhygienic and impractical clothing. Even we, who saw our mothers, aunts and girlfriends wearing those absurd gowns and thought them equally ridiculous when we were boys, feel it is like a strange dream for a whole generation to have submitted to such stupid costumes without protest. The men’s fashions of the time—high, stiff collars, one of them known as the ‘patricide’, so stiff that they ruled out any ease of movement, the black frock coats with their flowing tails, top hats resembling chimney pipes, also provoke laughter. But most ridiculous of all is a lady of the past in her dress, difficult to put on and hard to wear, every detail of it doing violence to nature. Her body is cut in two at a wasp-waist obtained by a whalebone corset, her skirts billow out in an enormous bell, her throat is enclosed right up to the chin, her feet covered to the toes, her hair piled up into countless little curls and rolls and braids, worn under a majestically swaying monster of a hat, her hands carefully gloved even in the hottest summer—this creature, long ago consigned to history, gives the impression of pitiable helplessness, despite the perfume wafting around her, the jewellery weighing her down and all the costly lace, frills and trimmings. You see at first glance that once inside such garments and invulnerable as a knight in his armour, a woman was no longer free, could not move fast and gracefully, but every movement, every gesture and indeed her whole bearing in such a costume was bound to be artificial and literally unnatural. Merely dressing to look like a lady—never mind all the etiquette of high society—just putting on such gowns and taking them off was a complicated procedure, and impossible without someone else’s help. First there were countless little hooks and eyes to be done up behind a lady’s back from waist to neck, a maid had to exert all her strength to tight-lace her mistress’s corset, her long hair—and let me remind the young that thirty years ago all Euro
pean women, with the exception of a handful of Russian women students, had hair that fell to their waists when they unpinned it—had to be curled, set, brushed and combed and piled up by a hairdresser called in daily and using a large quantity of hairpins, combs and slides, curling tongs and hair curlers, all this before she could put on her petticoats, camisoles, little bodices and jackets like a set of onion skins, turning and adjusting until the last remnant of her own female form had entirely disappeared. But there was a secret sense in this nonsense. A woman’s real figure was to be so entirely concealed by all this manipulation that even at the wedding breakfast her bridegroom had not the faintest idea whether his future companion for life was straight or crooked, plump or thin, had short legs or long legs. That ‘moral’ age thought it perfectly permissible to add artificial reinforcements to the hair, the bosom and other parts of the body, for the purposes of deception and to conform to the general ideal of female beauty. The more a woman was expected to look like a lady, the less of her natural shape might be shown; in reality the guiding principle behind this fashion was only to obey the general moral tendency of the time, which was chiefly concerned with concealment and covering up.