The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  Along with many stimulating conversations, perhaps comparable only to my conversations with Hofmannsthal, Valéry and Count Keyserling, along with the way he broadened my horizons from being purely literary to include the history of my time, I owe Rathenau his suggestion that I should look beyond Europe. “You can’t understand Great Britain when all you know is the island itself,” he told me. “And you can’t understand our continent until you have gone beyond it at least once. You’re a free agent, use your freedom! Literature is a wonderful profession, because haste is no part of it. Whether a really good book is finished a year earlier or a year later makes no difference. Why don’t you go to India and America?” This casual remark made an impression on me, and I decided to take his advice at once.

  India had a stranger and more oppressive effect on me than I had expected. I was shocked by the poverty of the emaciated figures I saw there, the joyless gravity of their dark glances, the often cruel monotony of the landscape, and most of all the rigid distinction between classes and races. I had already seen a sample of that on the voyage. Two charming girls, black-eyed and slender, well-educated and well-mannered, modest and elegant, were travelling on our ship. On the very first day I noticed that they kept away from the rest of us, or perhaps were kept away by some invisible barrier. They did not come to the shipboard dances, they did not join in conversation, but instead sat on their own reading books in French and English. Only on the second or third day did I discover that they were not avoiding the English passengers of their own accord, the English passengers kept aloof from them because they were ‘half-castes’, although these delightful girls were the daughters of a Parsee businessman and a Frenchwoman. They had been on absolutely equal terms with everyone else for the last two or three years at their boarding school in Lausanne and then their finishing school in England, but a cool, invisible and yet cruel form of social ostracism set in as soon as they began their voyage home to India. This was the first time I had experience of the menace of delusions of racial purity, a plague that has affected our world more disastrously than the real plague ever did in earlier centuries.

  This first encounter with it alerted my eye from the start. Feeling rather ashamed of it, I enjoyed the respectful awe—no longer felt, and it is our own fault—shown to a European as a kind of white god when he went on a tourist expedition ashore, like the one I made to Adam’s Mount in Ceylon, inevitably accompanied by twelve to fourteen servants. Anything less would have been beneath a European’s dignity. I couldn’t shake off the uncomfortable feeling that future decades and centuries were bound to bring change and reversal to this absurd state of affairs, but in our comfortable and apparently secure Europe, we dared not begin to imagine that. Because of these observations I did not see India in a rosy, romantic light, as did Pierre Loti and his like; I saw it as a warning, and during my travels I did not gain most from the wonderful temples, the weather-worn old palaces, the Himalayan landscapes, but from the people I met, people of another kind and from another world than those whom a writer used to meet in the interior of Europe. Anyone who travelled beyond Europe at that time, when we were more cautious about money and Cook’s Tours were not yet so well organised, was almost always a man whose position gave him a certain standing—a merchant who travelled was not a small shopkeeper with modest horizons but a big businessman; a doctor was a true research scientist; an entrepreneur was like the conquistadors of the past, adventurous, generous, reckless—even a writer was likely to have a high degree of intellectual curiosity. In the long days and nights of my journey, which were not yet filled by the chatter of the radio, I learnt more about the forces and tensions that move our world from these people than from a hundred books. A change in distance from my native land brought about a change in my standards. On my return I began to see many small things that used to occupy my mind unduly as petty, and Europe no longer seemed to me the eternal axis of the universe.

  One of the men whom I met on my travels in India has had an incalculable if not openly visible influence on the history of our time. Travelling on a river boat along the Irrawaddy from Calcutta to Indochina, I spent hours every day with Karl Haushofer, on his way to Japan with his wife to take up the post of German military attaché. An upright, thin man with a bony face and sharply aquiline nose, he gave me my first insight into the extraordinary qualities and disciplined mind of a German officer of the general staff. In Vienna, of course, I had already mingled at times with military men—pleasant and even amusing young fellows whose families were usually not very prosperous, and had joined the army to get the best they could out of military service. However, you sensed at once that Haushofer came from a cultivated upper-middle-class family—his father had published quite a number of poems, and I think had been a university professor—and his education was wide even outside military life. Commissioned to study the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese war on the spot, both he and his wife had familiarised themselves with the language and even the literature of Japan. I saw him as another example of the way in which if any branch of knowledge, including the military, is understood in a broad sense it must inevitably reach beyond its narrow specialist area and touch all other branches. On board the river boat he worked all day, following every detail of the voyage with his field glasses, writing diaries or reports, studying encyclopedias; I seldom saw him without a book in his hands. He was very observant and good at describing what he had seen. In conversation with him, I learnt a great deal about the mysteries of the East, and once home I stayed in friendly touch with the Haushofer family. We corresponded, and visited each other in Salzburg and Munich. Serious lung trouble kept him in Davos and Arosa for a year, and while he was not serving in the army he was able to devote himself to science, but during the First World War he took over a military command. After the defeat of Germany I often thought of him with great sympathy; I could only imagine how he must have suffered, after spending years building up a German position of power and perhaps, in his discreet manner, the war machine itself, when he saw Japan, where he had made many friends, side with the victorious enemy.

  He soon turned out to be one of the first to think systematically and on a large scale of a reconstruction of German power. He was editing a geopolitical journal and, as so often happens, I did not understand the true meaning of this new movement at first. I genuinely believed it merely studied the interplay of international forces, and even the word Lebensraum,4 as a term for “living-space” for the nations (I think he coined the term), was something that I understood only in Spengler’s5 sense, as the relative energy released by every nation at some point in the cycle of time, and changing from epoch to epoch. And there seemed to me nothing wrong about Haushofer’s demand for closer study of the individual qualities of nations, and the construction of a permanent educational apparatus of a scientific nature. I thought that these investigations were solely meant to bring different nations together. Perhaps—I cannot say—Haushofer’s original intentions had not been political. At least, I read his books with great interest (he once, incidentally, quoted me) and with no suspicion of anything amiss; I heard his lectures praised as uncommonly instructive by all impartial people, and no one accused him of putting his ideas to the service of a new policy of power and aggression, designed solely to give a new form of ideological justification to the old demands for a Greater Germany. One day, however, when I happened to mention his name, someone said, “Ah, Hitler’s friend!” in a tone suggesting that everyone knew it. I couldn’t have been more surprised. For one thing, Haushofer’s wife was certainly not ‘racially pure’, and his very talented and agreeable sons could never have satisfied the Nuremberg Laws affecting Jews; in addition, I could not see any direct intellectual link between a highly cultivated scholar whose mind ranged widely, and a ferocious agitator obsessed with German nationalism in its most narrow and brutal sense. But one of Haushofer’s pupils had been Rudolf Hess, and he had forged the link. From the first, Hitler, who in himself was far from open to other pe
ople’s ideas, had an instinct for appropriating everything that could be useful to his personal aims. So for him, the be-all and end-all of geopolitics was to further National Socialist policies, and he drew on as much of that branch of science as could serve his purpose. The National Socialist method was always to shore up its obviously selfish instinct for power with ideological and pseudo-moral justifications, and with this concept ‘living-space’ at last found a philosophical cover for its naked will to aggression. The catchphrase was so vaguely defined as to be apparently innocuous, but it meant that any successful annexation, even the most autocratic, could be justified as an ethical and ethnological necessity. So my old travelling companion—whether knowingly and willingly I do not know—was to blame for the fundamental change for the worse in Hitler’s idea of his aims, which had previously been confined to national and racial purity—a change that was to affect the rest of the world. The theory of ‘living-space’ degenerated into the slogan, “Germany is ours today, tomorrow the whole world”—as obvious an example of the way a single, succinct phrase can turn the immanent power of words into action and disaster as the demand of the encyclopédistes to let reason reign supreme, which led to terror and mass emotionalism, the very opposite of reason. Haushofer himself, so far as I know, never held a prominent position in the Party and may not even have been a Party member. I do not by any means see him, like today’s ingenious journalists, as a demonic ‘grey eminence’ behind the scenes, hatching dangerous plans and whispering them in the Führer’s ear. But there is no doubt that the theories of Haushofer, rather than anything thought up by Hitler’s most deranged advisers, were responsible for the aggressive policy of National Socialism, whether deliberately or not giving it universal instead of strictly national proportions. Only posterity, with better documentation than is available to us today, will be able to see him in the correct historical light.

  After this first overseas journey my second, to America, followed a little later. It too was for no other purpose than to see the world and, if possible, a little of the future that lay ahead of us. I believe I really was one of the few writers at the time to have travelled there not to make financial or journalistic capital out of the United States, but just to compare my rather vague idea of the New World with the reality.

  That vague idea, I am not ashamed to say, was extremely romantic. To me, America meant Walt Whitman, the land of new rhythm, the coming brotherhood of the whole world. Before making the crossing I reread the wild, long lines of the great Camerado,6 a flowing torrent like a cataract, and so I entered Manhattan with an open-minded sense of fraternity instead of the European’s usual arrogance. I remember how the first thing I did was to ask the hotel receptionist where Walt Whitman’s grave was, so that I could visit it. My question had the poor man, an Italian, in great difficulty; he had never even heard the poet’s name.

  My first impression was very striking, although New York did not yet have its present captivating nocturnal beauty. The foaming cascades of light in Times Square were still to come, and so was the city’s dream-like starry firmament shining up at the real sky by night with billions of artificial stars. The general layout of the city and its traffic were not as bold and generous as today; the new architecture was still uncertainly trying its hand at a few high-rise buildings, and only a tentative beginning was being made on the astonishingly lavish and tasteful displays in store windows. But to look down from Brooklyn Bridge, always swaying slightly, at the harbour, and wander through the stony ravines of the avenues was discovery and excitement enough, although admittedly after two or three days it gave way to another and stronger feeling, a sense of great loneliness. I had nothing to do in New York, and at the time a man with no occupation was more out of place there than anywhere. The city did not yet have cinemas where you could amuse yourself for an hour, or comfortable little cafeterias; there were not as many art galleries, libraries and museums as today, and culturally everything was still far behind Europe. After I had spent two or three days dutifully seeing the museums and the main sights, I drifted like a rudderless boat along the icy, windy streets. Finally the sense that I was pointlessly wandering the streets became so strong that I could overcome it only by tricking myself into seeing it as more attractive. I invented a game to play. I told myself that I was wandering around here all alone, one of the countless emigrants who didn’t know what to do with themselves and had only seven dollars in their pockets. You are voluntarily doing, I said to myself, what they do from necessity. Imagine that you are obliged to earn your bread after three days at the latest. Look around and see how you could start out in life here as a stranger, with no connections or friends, so you must look for a job at once. I began going from employment bureau to employment bureau, studying the notes tacked to their doors. A baker was wanted here, an assistant clerk with a knowledge of French and Italian there, a bookshop assistant somewhere else. This last was a chance for my imaginary self. So I climbed an iron spiral staircase three floors up, asked about the pay, and compared it with the newspaper ads quoting prices for a room in the Bronx. After two days of job-hunting I had, in theory, found five posts with which I could have earnt my living, so I had convinced myself better than by merely strolling around of how much space and how many possibilities this young country held for everyone willing to work. That impressed me. In my wanderings from agency to agency, imagining myself working in the various businesses, I had also gained an insight into the country’s wonderful freedom. No one asked about my nationality, my religion, my origin, and what was more—an amazing thing to imagine in our modern world of fingerprints, visas and police permits—I had travelled without a passport. But there was work waiting for people to do it, and that was all that counted. Fabulous as it now seems, a contract could be instantly agreed without today’s inhibiting intervention of state formalities and trade unions. Thanks to my job-hunting, I learnt more about America in those first few days than in later weeks, when travelling in comfort as a tourist I saw Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Chicago, spending a few companionable hours in Boston with Charles Loeffler, who had composed music for some of my poems, but otherwise always alone. Only once did a surprise interrupt the total anonymity of my existence. I remember that moment clearly. I was strolling down a broad avenue in Philadelphia; I stopped outside a large bookshop to get a sense of something familiar to me from the names of the authors at least. Suddenly I gave a start. There were six or seven German books on display to the left of the bookshop window, and my own name jumped out at me from one of them. I gazed as if I were under a spell, and began thinking. So something of my Self, the Self now drifting unknown and apparently aimlessly through strange streets, had been here before me, known to no one, noticed by no one. The bookseller must have written my name on an order form to get that book travelling over the ocean for ten days. For a moment my sense of isolation was dispelled, and when I visited Philadelphia again two years ago, I kept looking for that bookshop without meaning to.

  I did not have the courage to reach San Francisco—Hollywood had not yet been invented. But there was at least one other place where I could have the view of the Pacific Ocean that I longed for, a view that had fascinated me since, as a child, I had read accounts of the first circumnavigation of the world. It was a place now gone, a place that no mortal eye will ever see again—the last mounds of earth from the Panama Canal, which was then being built. I had travelled in a small ship past Bermuda and Haiti. Our literary generation had been educated by Verhaeren to admire the technical marvels of our time with the same enthusiasm as our forefathers admired the buildings of Roman antiquity. Panama itself was an unforgettable sight, a river bed excavated by diggers, glaring ochre-yellow burning the eye even through dark glasses, air like the fires of hell teeming with millions upon millions of mosquitoes. You could see their victims in endless rows in the cemetery. How many had fallen victim to this project, begun by Europe and to be completed by America? Only now, after thirty years of disasters and disappoi
ntments, was it really taking shape. A few months before the final work on the sluices was done, then a finger pressing an electric button, and after thousands of years the two oceans would flow into each other again for ever. I was one of the last of my time to have seen them before they joined, in the full and conscious awareness that this was a historic moment. That view of its greatest creative act was a good way to say goodbye to America.

  NOTES

  1 Zweig means Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, premiered in Munich in 1910. The composer left a tenth symphony unfinished when he died.

  2 A scandal concerning accusations of homosexuality in high places.

  3 Queen Luise of Prussia, 1776-1810, wife of King Friedrich Wilhelm III.

  4 Lebensraum was of course a notorious Nazi term for territory that Hitler planned to annex to Germany.

  5 Oswald Spengler, 1880-1936, whose most famous book was The Decline of the West. In it, he proposed the theory that nations and whole continents follow a natural cycle of growth, maturity and decline.

  6 As I Lay With My Head in Your Lap Camerado, Walt Whitman, 1867.