The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  When the war broke out, therefore, the first thing he did was hurry to the barracks and volunteer. I can imagine the mirth of the recruiting sergeants and their men as his stout form, panting for breath, made its way up the steps. They sent him straight away again. Lissauer was in despair, but now, like other writers, he wanted at least to serve Germany with his pen. As he saw it, everything the German newspapers and military communiqués said was Gospel truth. His country had been attacked, and the worst offender—this was how they had staged the scenario in Wilhelmstrasse6—was Lord Grey, the perfidious British Foreign Minister. Lissauer vented his belief that Britain was chiefly to blame for opposition to Germany and for the war in a Hymn of Hate For England, a poem—I do not now have it before me—which in cutting, succinct verse raised the writer’s abhorrence of that country to an eternal oath never to forgive England for its ‘crime’. Disastrously, it was soon obvious how easy it is to set the forces of hatred working, for here the stout, deluded little Jew Lissauer was anticipating Hitler. His poem had all the effect of a bomb thrown into an ammunition depot. Perhaps no poem made the rounds of Germany as quickly as his notorious Hymn of Hate, not even The Watch on the Rhine.7 The Kaiser was enthusiastic, and gave Lissauer the Order of the Red Eagle; the poem was printed in all the newspapers, schoolteachers read it to their pupils, army officers at the front recited it to their men until everyone knew the litany of hatred by heart. But even that was not enough. The little poem, set to music and arranged for a chorus, was performed in theatres; soon there was not a single one of the seventy million Germans populating the country at the time who did not know the Hymn of Hate For England from the first line to the last, and not long after that so did the whole world—if with rather less enthusiasm. Overnight, Ernst Lissauer had won the most fiery reputation that any poet ever did in that war. Later, it was to burn him like the shirt of Nessus. For no sooner was the war over, businessmen were beginning to trade again and politicians were genuinely making efforts to achieve a rapprochement, than they did all they could to disown a poem calling for eternal hostility to England. And to absolve themselves of any blame, they pilloried poor Lissauer, the ‘England-hater’, as the man solely responsible for the crazy hysteria of hatred that in point of fact was shared by everyone in 1914. All who had praised him then now turned ostentatiously away from him. The papers stopped printing his poems, and when he appeared among his literary colleagues a dismayed silence fell. Finally, deserted by one and all, he was exiled by Hitler from the Germany he loved with every fibre of his heart and died a forgotten man, a tragic victim of that one poem that had raised him so high, only to dash him down to the depths again.

  But they were all like Lissauer. These poets and professors, the sudden patriots of that time, were honest about what they felt and thought they were acting honourably. I do not deny it. However, after a very short time it was obvious what terrible harm their praise of the war and orgies of hatred had done. All the bellicose nations were in an overheated frame of mind anyway in 1914; the worst rumours were rapidly turned into the truth, the most ridiculous slanders were believed. Germans swore in dozens that just before the outbreak of war they had seen, with their own eyes, cars laden with gold driving from France to Russia. On the third or fourth day horror stories of eyes put out and hands cut off, anecdotes that promptly emerge in every war, filled the newspapers. How little the poor innocents who spread such lies knew that the technique of accusing enemy soldiers of every imaginable atrocity is as much a part of war as ammunition and aircraft, or that similar stories are regularly brought out of storage in the first few days of any conflict. War cannot be conducted with reason and proper feeling. It requires an exaggerated emotional state, enthusiasm for one side and hatred for the other.

  It is not in human nature for strong emotion to be prolonged for ever, in either an individual or a nation, and the military organisations understand that. They therefore need artificial incitement, agitation administered like a constant drug, and it was supposed to be the intellectuals—the writers and authors, the journalists—who did their country the service of whipping up feeling in this way, with a good or a guilty conscience, either honestly or as a matter of professional routine. They had beaten the drum of hate and beaten it loud and long, until the ears of every impartial person rang with the sound and their hearts were afraid. Almost everyone in Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Belgium obediently served this war propaganda, and thereby served the mass delusion and mob hatred of war instead of resisting it.

  The consequences were devastating. At this point, when propaganda had not yet become ineffective in times of peace, in spite of thousands of disappointments people of all nations still thought that everything they saw in print was true. And so the pure, fine, sacrificial enthusiasm of the first few days gradually turned into an orgy of the worst and most stupid emotionalism. Battles against France and Britain were fought in Berlin and Vienna, on the Ringstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, all of them considerably more agreeable battlefields than the real front. Any notices in French and English put up in shops had to be taken down, a ‘Convent of the Englischen Fräulein’ had to change its name because of public indignation, since it was not understood that in this context the adjective englisch meant ‘angelic’ rather than ‘English’. Modest tradesmen stuck or stamped the slogan Gott strafe England—God punish England—on their envelopes, society ladies swore never to speak a word of French again, and wrote to the newspapers saying so. Shakespeare was exiled from German theatres, Mozart and Wagner from French and British concert halls, German professors explained that Dante had really been of Germanic birth, the French claimed Beethoven as a Belgian—in fact the cultural treasures of enemy countries were unscrupulously plundered as if they were supplies of grain or metal ore. As if it was not enough for thousands of the peaceful citizens of those countries to be killing each other at the front daily, behind the lines the famous dead of the hostile nations, who had rested quietly in their graves for hundreds of years, were abused and vilified. Mental confusion grew worse all the time. The cook at the stove, who had never left her town and hadn’t opened an atlas since she was at school, was sure that Austria could not survive without the acquisition of Sandshak (a small border village somewhere in Bosnia). In the street, cabbies disputed the amount of war reparations to be demanded of France, fifty billion or a hundred billion, without knowing how much a billion was. There was no town, no social group that did not fall victim to the terrible hysteria of hatred. Priests preached from their pulpits, the Social Democrats who had branded militarism the greatest of all crimes only a month before made if anything more noise than anyone else to avoid incurring Kaiser Wilhelm’s accusation of being men with no fatherland. It was the war of a naive generation, and the greatest danger of all in it was the still-intact belief of the nations in the justice of their own cause alone.

  Gradually, in those first weeks of the war in 1914, it became impossible to have a reasonable conversation with anyone. The kindest and most friendly acquaintances seemed to be drunk on the smell of blood. Friends whom I had always known as inveterate individualists, even intellectual anarchists, became rabid patriots overnight, and from patriotism they moved on to an insatiable desire to annex land. Every conversation ended either in such stupid phrases as, “If you don’t know how to hate then you don’t know how to love properly either”, or in outright suspicion. Friends with whom I had never quarrelled in years accused me to my face of being no true Austrian any more and said I should go over to France or Belgium. They even cautiously suggested that opinions such as my view that war was a crime ought to be brought to the notice of the authorities, for ‘defeatists’—a word recently coined in France—were committing the worst of crimes against the fatherland.

  All I could do was withdraw into myself and keep quiet while everyone else persisted in a feverish state of turmoil. It was not easy. For even life in exile—as I have come to know only too well—is not as bad as life alone in one’s own country. In Vi
enna, my old friends were estranged from me, and this was no time to look for new ones. Only with Rainer Maria Rilke did I sometimes have conversations in which he showed profound understanding. We had managed to get Rilke to come and work for our out-of-the-way War Archive as well. With his over-sensitive nervous system, which meant that dirt, smells and noise caused him actual physical nausea, he would have been a useless soldier. I can never help smiling when I think of him in uniform. One day there was a knock on my door, and there stood a soldier, looking hesitant. Next moment I started up in alarm. It was Rilke—Rainer Maria Rilke in military disguise! He looked pathetically clumsy, his collar constricting him, upset by the thought of having to salute any officer by clicking the heels of his boots. And as in his urge for perfectionism he wanted to carry out even this pointless formality precisely in accordance with the rules, he was in a state of constant dismay. “I’ve had this uniform since I was at cadet school,” he told me in his quiet voice. “I thought I’d said goodbye to it for ever. And now I’m wearing it again forty years on!” Luckily there were helping hands to protect him, and thanks to a kindly medical examiner he was soon discharged. He came back to my room once, in civilian clothes again, to say goodbye to me. I might almost say that the wind blew him in, he always moved so very quietly. He wanted to thank me for trying, through Rolland, to save his library in Paris, where it had been confiscated. For the first time he no longer looked young; it was as if the idea of the horrors of war had exhausted him. “Ah, to go abroad!” he said. “If only one could go abroad! War is always a prison.” Then he left, and I was all alone again.

  A few weeks later, determined to get away from the dangerous crowd psychosis of the time, I moved to a countrified little suburb to begin waging my personal war against the betrayal of reason by the mass hysteria of the time.

  NOTES

  1 Empress Elisabeth was stabbed to death by an anarchist in 1898; Crown Prince Rudolf had already committed suicide with his mistress Mary Vetsera in 1889.

  2 Harpagon—the name of the miser in Molière’s play of the same name.

  3 Jean Jaurès, a French socialist politician opposed to the war, was assassinated by a nationalist on 31st July 1914.

  4 It should be remembered that Zweig wrote these comments, and died, before the end of the Second World War.

  5 Field Marshal Count Yorck, 1759-1830, a famous Prussian military commander. Baron vom Stein, 1757-1831, a reforming Prussian statesman.

  6 The street in Berlin where the Reich Chancellery stood.

  7 Die Wacht am Rhein—The Watch (or Guard) on the Rhine—a German patriotic song dating from the mid-19th century, when Germany feared that France would try to seize the left bank of the Rhine. It was much sung in the Franco-Prussian war and again in the Great War.

  THE FIGHT FOR INTERNATIONAL FRATERNITY

  WITHDRAWING INTO SECLUSION was no help in itself. The atmosphere remained oppressive. For that very reason, I was well aware that such merely passive conduct as refraining from joining in furious abuse of the enemy was not enough. After all, I was a writer, I had words at my disposal, and I therefore had a duty to express my convictions in so far as I could at a time of censorship. I tried to do that. I wrote an essay entitled To Friends Abroad, in which, rejecting outright the hatred for the enemy being trumpeted here at home; I addressed all my friends in other countries, saying that I would be loyal to them even if closer links were impossible at the moment, so that at the first opportunity I could go on working with them to encourage the construction of a common European culture. I sent it to the most widely read German newspaper. To my surprise, the Berliner Tageblatt did not hesitate to print it almost as I had written it, without savage cuts. Only one sentence—“if and when someone emerges victorious”—fell victim to the censor, because at the time no one was allowed to imply the faintest doubt that Germany would emerge from this World War as the natural victor. Even without that reservation of mine, the article brought me indignant letters from the ultra-patriotic, protesting that they did not understand how I could have anything to do with our villainous enemies at such a time as this. They did not hurt my feelings very much. I had never in my life wanted to convert anyone else to my own beliefs. It was enough for me to make them known and be able to do so in public.

  Fourteen days later, when I had almost forgotten the article, I received a letter with a Swiss stamp and the censor’s imprint on it, and the familiar handwriting told me that it was from Romain Rolland. He must have read the article, for he wrote: “I for one will never forsake my friends.” I realised at once that his few lines were designed to find out whether it was possible to exchange letters with an Austrian friend during the war. I replied to him at once. From then on we wrote regularly, and our correspondence continued for more than twenty-five years, until the Second World War, which turned out to be even more brutal than the First, cut off all communication between the countries of Europe.

  The moment when that letter arrived was one of the happiest in my life. It was like a white dove flying to me out of an ark full of roaring, trampling, raging animals. I felt that I was not alone any more; at last I was in touch with a like-minded friend. I was fortified by Rolland’s great strength of mind, for I knew how wonderfully well he maintained a humanity transcending all borders. He had found the one appropriate path for a writer to tread at such a time, one that meant taking no part in destruction and killing but instead—following the great example of Walt Whitman, who had served as a nursing orderly in the American Civil War—actively bringing humane help to others. Living in Switzerland, and exempted from any kind of war service by his frail health, he had immediately made himself available to the Red Cross in Geneva, where he happened to be when war broke out, and he was employed day after day, in crowded rooms, in the fine work of that organisation. I did my best to pay public tribute to it in an article entitled The Heart of Europe. After the fierce fighting of the first few weeks, every kind of contact with the front had been lost. Soldiers’ families in all the European countries involved did not know whether their sons, brothers and fathers had fallen, were merely missing, or had been taken prisoner, and they had no idea where to turn for information, because none was to be expected from the ‘enemy’. In the midst of all the horror and cruelty, the Red Cross took on the task of relieving people at least of the agony of not knowing what had happened to their dear ones, which was the worst of their torments, by forwarding letters from prisoners now in enemy countries to their native lands. Of course the organisation, although set up decades before, had never expected to deal with a demand of such huge dimensions for its services, with the numbers of letters running into millions. More and more volunteer workers had to be taken on daily, even hourly, for every hour of waiting in torment was an eternity to the families at home. At the end of December 1914 the Red Cross had already handled thirty thousand letters, and more kept coming. In the end, twelve hundred people were crowded into the cramped premises of the Musée Rath, handling and answering the post that arrived every day. And working among them, instead of selfishly devoting himself to his own compositions, was the most humane of all writers, Romain Rolland.

  But he had not forgotten his other duty, the artist’s duty to express his convictions even in the face of opposition from his own country and the disapproval of the entire world now waging war. As early as autumn 1914, when most writers were competing to outdo each other in their diatribes of hatred, yapping and discharging their venom at one another, he had written that remarkable confession Au-dessus de la mêlée—Above the Turmoil—in which he opposed intellectual hostility between nations, and called for artists to be just and humane even in the middle of war. It was an essay that stirred up more controversial feeling than anything else written at the time, and gave rise to a whole series of articles supporting or attacking his propositions.

  For this was something on the credit side that distinguished the First World War from the Second—words were still powerful then. They had not yet been deva
lued by the systematic lies of propaganda. People still took notice of the written word and looked forward to reading it. In 1939 no writer’s expression of opinion had any effect at all, either for better or worse, nor has a single book, pamphlet, essay or poem touched the hearts of the public at large to this day, let alone influenced its thinking, but in 1914 a fourteen-line poem such as Lissauer’s Hymn of Hate was an event in itself. The same was true of the foolish Manifesto of Ninety-three German Intellectuals, and on the other side of Romain Rolland’s eight-page essay and Barbusse’s novel Le Feu—Fire. The moral conscience of the world was not yet as exhausted and drained as it is today; it reacted vehemently, with all the force of centuries of conviction, to every obvious lie, every transgression against international law and common humanity. A breach of law such as Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium which today, now that Hitler has made lying perfectly natural and disregard for humanity a law, would be unlikely to be seriously condemned, had the world in uproar from end to end at that time. Thanks to an outburst of universal moral indignation, the execution by firing squad of Nurse Cavell and the torpedoing of the Lusitania did Germany more harm than losing a battle. It was therefore not a hopeless prospect for my French friend to speak out at a time when the ear and mind were not yet flooded by the constant chatter of radio waves. On the contrary, the spontaneous manifesto of a great writer had an effect a thousand times greater than all the statesmen’s official speeches, which everyone knew were tactically and politically adapted to the expediency of the moment and at best contained only half the truth. The sense that a writer could be trusted as the best guarantor of independent opinion inspired far greater faith in the minds of that generation, even if they were to be severely disappointed. But as the military men also knew that writers were figures of authority, they themselves tried to recruit men of high moral and intellectual prestige for their own ends, to stir up feeling. Writers were expected to provide explanations of what was going on, evidence of it, affirmation, and eloquent appeals to the effect that all the wrong and evil was on the enemy side, and all the justice and truth on the side of their own nation. Rolland was not lending himself to such purposes. He did not see it as any task of his to heat the already sultry and overcharged atmosphere any further, but instead to cleanse it.