The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  Notable days in our lives have a brighter aura about them than the ordinary kind. So I now remember that first visit with great clarity. I climbed five narrow, winding flights of stairs in an unpretentious building in the boulevard Montparnasse, and even outside the door I felt a special kind of stillness; the noise in the street sounded hardly any louder than the wind blowing in the trees of an old monastery garden below the windows. Rolland opened the door and took me into his small room, which was crammed with books up to the ceiling. For the first time I saw his remarkably bright blue eyes, the clearest and at the same time kindest eyes I ever saw in any human being, eyes that drew colour and fire from his inmost feelings in conversation, darkly shadowed in sorrow, appearing to grow deeper when he was thinking, sparkling with excitement—those unique eyes, under lids that were a little overtired, easily became red-rimmed when he had been reading or staying up late, but could shine radiantly in a congenial and happy light. I observed his figure with a little anxiety. Tall and thin, he stooped slightly as he walked, as if the countless hours at his desk had weighed his head down; his very pale complexion and angular features made him look rather unwell. He spoke very quietly and was sparing of physical effort in general; he almost never went out walking, he ate little, did not drink or smoke, but later I realised, with admiration, what great stamina there was in that ascetic frame, what a capacity for intellectual work lay behind his apparent debility. He would write for hours at his small desk, which was piled high with papers; he would read in bed for hours, never allowing his exhausted body more than four or five hours of sleep, and the only relaxation in which he indulged was music. He played the piano very well, with a delicate touch that I shall never forget, caressing the keys as if to entice rather than force the notes out of them. No virtuoso—and I have heard Max Reger, Busoni and Bruno Walter playing in small gatherings—gave me such a sense of direct communication with the master composers he loved.

  His knowledge was very wide, putting most of us to shame; although he really lived only through his reading eyes; he had a fine command of literature, philosophy, history, and the problems of all nations at all times. He knew every bar of classical music; he was familiar with even the least-known works of Galuppi and Telemann, and with the music of sixth-rate or seventh-rate composers as well, yet he took a passionate interest in all events of the present day. The world was reflected in this monastic cell of his as if in a camera obscura. He had been on familiar terms with the great men of his time, had been a pupil of Renan, a guest in Wagner’s house, a friend of Jaurès. Tolstoy had written him a famous letter that would go on record as human appreciation of his literary works. Here—and this always rejoices my heart—I sensed a human and moral superiority, an inner freedom without pride, something to be taken for granted in a strong mind. At first sight, and time has proved me right, I recognised him as the man who would be the conscience of Europe in its time of crisis. We talked about his Jean-Christophe novels. Rolland told me that he had tried to make the work fulfil a triple purpose—conveying his gratitude to music, his commitment to the cause of European unity, and an appeal to the nations to stop and think. Now we must all do what we could in our own positions, our own countries, our own languages. It was time, he said, to be more and more on our guard. The forces working for hatred, in line with their baser nature, were more violent and aggressive than the forces of reconciliation, and there were material interests behind them which, of their very nature, were more unscrupulous than ours. I found such grief over the fragility of earthly structures doubly moving in a man whose entire work celebrated the immortality of art. “It can bring comfort to us as individuals,” he replied to me, “but it can do nothing against stark reality.”

  This was in 1913. It was the first conversation that showed me it was our duty not to confront the possibility of a European war passively and unprepared. When the crucial moment came, nothing gave Rolland such great moral superiority over everyone else as the way he had already, and painfully, strengthened his mind to face it in advance. Perhaps the rest of our circle had done something too. I had translated many works, I had promoted the best writers in the countries that were our neighbours, I had accompanied Verhaeren on a lecture tour all over Germany in 1912, and the tour had turned out to be a symbolic demonstration of Franco-German fraternity. In Hamburg Verhaeren and Dehmel, respectively the greatest poets of their time writing in French and German, had embraced in public. I had interested Reinhardt in Verhaeren’s new play; our collaboration on both sides had never been warmer, more intense or more unconstrained, and in many hours of enthusiasm we entertained the illusion that we had shown the world the way that would save it. The world, however, took little notice of such literary manifestations, but went its own way to ruin. There was a kind of electrical crackling in the structural woodwork as if of invisible friction. Now and then a spark would fly up—the Zabern Affair,6 the crises in Albania, the occasional unfortunate interview. Never more than a spark, but each one could have caused the accumulation of explosive material to blow up. We in Austria were keenly aware that we were at the heart of the area of unrest. In 1910 Emperor Franz Joseph passed the age of eighty. The old man, an icon in his own lifetime, could not last much longer, and a mystical belief began to spread among the public at large that after his death there would be no way to prevent the dissolution of the thousand-year-old monarchy. At home, the pressure of opposing nationalities grew; abroad Italy, Serbia, Romania and to some extent even Germany were waiting to divide up the Austrian empire. The war in the Balkans, where Krupp and Schneider-Creusot competed in trying out their artillery on ‘human material’, just as later the Germans and Italians tried out their aeroplanes during the Spanish Civil War, drew us further and further into the raging torrent. We kept waking with a start, but to breathe again and again, with a sigh of relief, “Not this time. Not yet, and let us hope never!”

  As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. That atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes of the kind that I am going to recount here. To be honest, I did not believe that war was coming at the time. But I twice had what might be called a waking dream of it, and woke with my mind in great turmoil. The first time was over the ‘Redl Affair’, which like many of those episodes that form a backdrop to history is not widely known.

  Personally I knew Colonel Redl, the central character in one of the most complex of espionage dramas, only slightly. He lived a street away from me in the same district of Vienna, and once, in the café where this comfortable-looking gentleman, who appreciated the pleasures of the senses, was smoking his cigar, I was introduced to him by my friend Public Prosecutor T. After that we greeted each other when we met. But it was only later that I discovered how much secrecy surrounds us in the midst of our daily lives, and how little we really know about those who are close to us. This colonel, who looked very much the usual capable Austrian officer, was in the confidence of the heir to the throne. It was his important responsibility to head the army’s secret service and thwart the activities of their opposing counterparts. It came out that during the crisis of the war in the Balkans in 1912, when Russia and Austria were mobilising to move against each other, the most important secret item in the hands of the Austrian army, the ‘marching plan’, had been sold to Russia. If war had come, this would have been nothing short of disastrous, for the Russians now knew in advance, move by move, every tactical manoeuvre for attack planned by the Austrian army. The panic set off among the General Staff of the army by this act of treachery was terrible. It was up to Colonel Redl, as the man in charge, to apprehend the traitor, who must be somewhere in the very highest places. The Foreign Ministry, not entirely trusting the competence of the military authorities, also let it be known without first informing the General Staff—a typical example of the jealous rivalry of those organisations—that they were going to follow the mat
ter up independently, and to this end gave the police the job of taking various measures, including the opening of letters from abroad sent poste restante, regardless of the principle that such correspondence was strictly private.

  One day, then, a post office received a letter from the Russian border station at Podvolokzyska to a poste-restante address code-named ‘Opera Ball’. On being opened, it proved to contain no letter, but six or eight new Austrian thousand-crown notes. This suspicious find was reported at once to the chief of police, who issued instructions for a detective to be stationed at the post-office counter to arrest the person who came to claim the suspect letter on the spot.

  For a moment it looked as if the tragedy was about to turn into Viennese farce. A gentleman turned up at midday, asking for the letter addressed to ‘Opera Ball’. The clerk at the counter instantly gave a concealed signal to alert the detective. But the detective had just gone out for a snack, and when he came back all that anyone could say for certain was that the unknown gentleman had taken a horse-drawn cab and driven off in no-one-knew-what direction. However, the second act of this Viennese comedy soon began. In the time of those fashionable, elegant cabs, each of them a carriage and pair, the driver of the cab considered himself far too good to clean his cab with his own hands. So at every cab rank there was a man whose job it was to feed the horses and wash the carriage. This man, fortunately, had noticed the number of the cab that had just driven off. In quarter-of-an-hour all police offices had been alerted and the cab had been found. Its driver described the gentleman who had taken the vehicle to the Café Kaiserhof, where I often met Colonel Redl, and moreover, by pure good luck, the pocketknife that the cabby’s unknown fare had used to open the envelope was found still in the cab. Detectives hurried straight off to the Café Kaiserhof. By then the gentleman described by the cabby had left, but the waiters explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he could only be their regular customer Colonel Redl, and he had just gone back to the Hotel Klomser.

  The detective in charge of the case froze. The mystery was solved. Colonel Redl, the top espionage chief in the Austrian army, was also a spy in the pay of Russia. He had not only sold Austrian secrets and the army’s marching plan, it also instantly became clear why, over the last year, the Austrian agents he sent to Russia had been regularly arrested, tried and found guilty. Frantic telephone conversations began, finally reaching Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of General Staff of the Austrian army. An eyewitness of this scene told me that on hearing the first few words he turned white as a sheet. Phone calls to the Hofburg palace ensued, discussion following discussion. What should be done next? The police had now made sure that Colonel Redl could not get away. When he was leaving the Hotel Klomser, and was giving the hotel porter some instructions, a detective unobtrusively approached him, offered him the pocketknife and asked, in civil tones, “Did you happen to leave this pocketknife in your cab, Colonel?” At that moment Redl knew that the game was up. Wherever he turned, he saw the familiar faces of secret policemen keeping watch on him, and when he returned to the hotel, two officers followed him up to his room and put a revolver down in front of him, for by now a decision had been reached in the Hofburg—the end of an affair showing the Austrian army in such an ignominious light would be best hushed up. The two officers stayed on duty outside Redl’s room in the Hotel Klomser until two in the morning. Only then did they hear the sound of the revolver being fired inside the room.

  Next day a brief obituary of the highly regarded officer Colonel Redl, who had died suddenly, appeared in the evening papers. But too many people had been involved in tracking him down for the secret to be kept. Gradually, moreover, details that explained a great deal in psychological terms came to light. Unknown to any of his superiors or colleagues, Colonel Redl’s proclivities had been homosexual, and for years he had been a victim of blackmailers who finally drove him to this desperate means of extricating himself from their toils. A shudder of horror passed through the entire army. Everyone knew that if war came, this one man could have cost the country the lives of hundreds of thousands, bringing the monarchy to the brink of the abyss. Only then did we Austrians realise how very close we had been to world war already during the past year.

  That was the first time I felt terror take me by the throat. Next day I happened to meet Bertha von Suttner, the generous and magnificent Cassandra of our times. An aristocrat from one of the first families in the land, in her early youth she had seen the horrors of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 come close to their hereditary castle in Bohemia. With the passion of a Florence Nightingale, she saw only one task in life for herself—preventing a second war, preventing war in general. She wrote a novel entitled Die Waffen nieder—Lay Down Your Arms—which was an international success; she organised countless pacifist meetings, and the great triumph of her life was that she aroused the conscience of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. He was induced to make up for the damage his invention had done by setting up the Nobel Peace Prize to foster international understanding. She came towards me in a state of great agitation. “People don’t realise what’s going on,” she cried out loud in the street, although she usually spoke in quiet, kindly and composed tones. War was so close, and they were hiding everything from us and keeping it secret as usual. “Why don’t you young people do something? It’s more your business than anyone’s! Resist, close ranks! Don’t keep leaving everything to a few old women like us. No one listens to us!”

  I told her that I was going to Paris, and perhaps we could try to draw up a joint manifesto there.

  “Why ‘perhaps’?” she urged me. “Things look worse than ever, the wheels have begun turning.” Uneasy as I was myself, I had difficulty in calming her down.

  But it was in France that a second, personal episode was to remind me how prophetically the old lady, who was not taken very seriously in Vienna, had foreseen the future. It was a very small incident, but it made a powerful impression on me. In the spring of 1914 I had left Paris, with a woman friend, to spend a few days in Touraine, where we were going to see the grave of Leonardo da Vinci. We had walked along the banks of the Loire in mild, sunny weather, and were pleasantly weary by evening. So we decided to go to the cinema in the rather sleepy town of Tours, where I had already paid my respects to the house in which Balzac was born.

  It was a small suburban cinema, not at all like our modern picture palaces made of chromium and shining glass. Only a hall perfunctorily adapted for the purpose, and full of labourers, soldiers, market women, a crowd of ordinary people enjoying a gossip and blowing clouds of Scaferlati and Caporal tobacco smoke into the air, in defiance of a No Smoking sign. First on the screen came a newsreel—‘News From All Over the World’. A boat race in England; the people talked and laughed. Then a French military parade, and again the audience took little notice. But the third item was entitled: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Visits Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna’. Suddenly I saw on the screen the familiar platform of the Westbahnhof in Vienna, an ugly railway station building, along with a few policemen waiting for the train to come in. Then a signal was given, and old Emperor Franz Joseph walked past the guard of honour to welcome his guest. As the old Emperor appeared on the screen, stooping slightly and not entirely steady on his feet as he passed the line of men, the audience in Tours smiled kindly at the old gentleman with his white side whiskers. Then there was a picture of the train coming in, the first, the second and the third carriages. The door of the saloon car was opened, and out stepped Wilhelm II, the ends of his moustache bristling, wearing the uniform of an Austrian general.

  At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified.
For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst. It was only a second, a single second. All was forgotten once other pictures were shown. The audience laughed heartily at the comedy that now followed, slapping their knees loudly with delight. Only a second, yes, but it showed me how easy it could be to whip up bad feeling on both sides at a moment of serious crisis, in spite of all attempts to restore understanding, in spite of our own efforts.

  The entire evening was spoilt for me. I couldn’t sleep. If it had happened in Paris, it would have made me just as uneasy, but it would not have shaken me so much. However, seeing how far hatred had eaten into the kindly, simple people here in the depths of the provinces made me shudder. In the next few days I told the story of this episode to many friends. Most of them didn’t take it seriously. “Remember how we French mocked stout old Queen Victoria, and two years later came the Entente Cordiale with Britain. You don’t know the French; they don’t feel deeply about politics.” Only Rolland saw it in a different light. “The simpler the people, the easier it is to win them over. Things have looked bad since Poincaré was elected. His journey to Petersburg will not be a pleasure jaunt.” We talked for a long time about the International Socialist Congress that had been fixed for that summer in Vienna, but here too Rolland was more sceptical than most. “Who knows how many will stand firm once the posters ordering mobilisation go up? We have entered a time of mass emotion, crowd hysteria, and we cannot see yet what power it will have if war comes.”