The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  GOING HOME TO AUSTRIA

  FROM THE LOGICAL POINT OF VIEW the most foolish thing I could have done after the defeat of Germany and Austria was to go back to what was now only a grey, lifeless shadow of the old Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Its new outline on the map was uncertain. The Czechs, Poles, Italians and Slovenians had taken back their lands, leaving a mutilated torso bleeding from all its arteries. Of the six or seven million inhabitants who were now required to describe themselves as German Austrians, two million freezing, hungry people crowded into the capital. The factories that used to bring wealth to the country were now in foreign territory, the railway network was a mere remnant of its former self, the national bank’s reserves of gold had been seized, and it still had to pay off the huge burden of the war loan. The frontiers were not yet finally drawn because the peace conference had hardly begun and Austrian liabilities had not been fixed. There was no bread, no coal, no oil. Revolution or some other catastrophic outcome appeared inevitable. For all practical purposes, it looked as if the country could not exist independently in its new form, artificially imposed on it by the victorious states, and it did not want to be independent either. So said all the parties with one accord, Socialist, Clerical, and National. As far as I know, this paradoxical situation was unique of its kind: a country forced to be independent when it bitterly rejected the whole idea. Austria wanted either to be reunited with its old neighbour states, or to unite with Germany, whose people were of the same origin. It did not want to be reduced to the humiliating condition of beggary in its new, truncated form. The neighbour states, however, were not anxious for any economic alliance with Austria as it now was, partly because it was so poverty-stricken, partly for fear that the Habsburgs might return. Meanwhile the Allies would not hear of union with Germany in case that strengthened their defeated German enemy. So it was decreed that the German-Austrian Republic must stay as it was. A country that did not want to exist was told—for the first time in the course of history!—that it must.

  Today I myself can hardly explain what made me go back there of my own free will, at the worst time a country ever knew. But we of the pre-war period had grown up, despite everything and anything, with a strong sense of duty. We thought that now more than ever, in this hour of its greatest need, we should be in our native land and with our families. It somehow seemed to me cowardly to avoid the tragedy now brewing at home for the sake of comfort, and—especially as the author of Jeremiah—I felt that I had a responsibility to be there and put my writing to the service of overcoming national defeat. I had not been needed in Austria during the war, but now the war was lost it seemed to me the right place to be, and in addition my opposition to the prolongation of hostilities had given me a certain moral authority, especially among the young. And even if there was nothing I could do, at least I would have the satisfaction of sharing in the general suffering that was foretold.

  A journey to Austria at that time called for the kind of preparations you would make for an expedition to the Arctic. You had to equip yourself with warm clothing and woollen underwear, because everyone knew there was no coal on the Austrian side of the border—and winter was coming. You had your shoes soled; once across the border the only footwear available was wooden clogs. You took as much food and chocolate with you as Switzerland would allow you to take out of the country, to keep from starving until you were issued with your first ration cards for bread and fats. Baggage had to be insured for as high a sum as possible, because most of the baggage vans were looted, and every shoe or item of clothing was irreplaceable. Only when I went to Russia ten years later did I make similar preparations. For a moment I hesitated as I stood on the platform of the border station at Buchs, where I had been so happy to arrive more than a year earlier, wondering whether to turn back at the last minute after all. I felt that this was a crucial moment in my life. But finally I decided to do the difficult thing, with all that it entailed, and I boarded the train.

  On my arrival a year before, reaching that Swiss border station of Buchs had been an uplifting experience. Now, on the return journey, I was to have a equally memorable experience in Feldkirch. Even as I got out of the Swiss train I noticed that the border officials and police officers seemed curiously expectant. They took no special notice of us, and just glanced casually at our papers; obviously they were waiting for something more important. At last I heard the bell announcing that a train was coming from the Austrian side of the border. The policemen stood to attention, all the border officials came out of their shelters, and their wives, who had obviously been told something in advance, crowded together on the platform. I particularly noticed an old lady in black with her two daughters among the waiting crowd. Judging by her bearing and her dress, she must be a member of the aristocracy. She was visibly moved, and kept dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

  Slowly, I might almost say majestically, the train rolled into the station—a special train, not the usual shabby, rain-washed passenger train but a train of broad, black saloon cars. The locomotive stopped. A perceptible movement ran through the watching ranks, but I still had no idea why. Then, behind the plate glass window of the train, I recognised Emperor Karl standing very erect beside his black-clad wife Empress Zita. It gave me a shock—the last emperor of Austria, heir to the Habsburg dynasty that had ruled the land for seven hundred years, was leaving his domains! Although he had refused to abdicate formally, the Republic had allowed him—or rather, forced him—to leave the country with all due honour. Now he stood at the window of the train, a tall, grave man, looking for the last time at the mountains, the buildings and the people of his land. I was witnessing a historic moment—and it was doubly shattering for a man who had grown up in the tradition of the empire. The first thing I had sung in school was the national anthem, and later I had taken a military oath promising “obedience on land, at sea and in the air” to the man in civilian clothing who was now looking out of the train, grave and thoughtful. I had seen the old emperor many times in the now legendary magnificence of the great festive occasions, I had seen him on the wide flight of steps outside Schönbrunn Palace, surrounded by his family and the glittering uniforms of his generals, receiving the homage of eighty thousand Viennese schoolchildren standing on the huge green expanse of grass, their reedy voices rising movingly in chorus as they sang Haydn’s Gott erhalte.1 I had seen him in his magnificent uniform at the court ball, attending performances at the Théâtre Paré, and again in Ischl, off hunting in a green Styrian hat. I had seen him, head devoutly bowed, walking in the Corpus Christi procession to St Stephen’s Cathedral—and on his catafalque on the misty, wet winter’s day in the middle of the war when the old man was laid to rest in the Capuchin vault. To us, the word ‘Emperor’ had been the quintessence of all power and riches, the symbol of an enduring Austria, and from childhood we learnt to speak it with veneration. And now here was the old man’s heir, the last Austrian Emperor, an exile leaving the country. The celebrated Habsburg dynasty that, century after century, had passed on the imperial orb and crown from hand to hand ended with this man. All of us there felt that we were witnessing a tragic moment in history. The police and the soldiers seemed to be in some difficulty and looked away in embarrassment, unsure whether or not to give him the old salute of honour, the women dared not look up, no one said a word, and so we suddenly heard the quiet sobbing of the old lady in mourning, who had come Heaven knows how far to see ‘her’ emperor for the last time. Finally the engine driver gave his signal. Everyone instinctively jumped, and the moment that would never return had come. The locomotive started with a laboured jolt, as if it too had to summon up its strength, and slowly the train moved away. The officials respectfully watched it go. Then, with that touch of awkwardness you see at funerals, they turned back to the shelters where they transacted their business. At that moment the Austrian Monarchy that had lasted for nearly a thousand years came to its real end. I knew that I was going back to another Austria, another world.

  As soon
as the train had disappeared into the distance, we were told to change from the neat, clean Swiss carriages into their Austrian counterparts. You only had to set eyes on those carriages to know in advance what had become of the country. The conductors showing us to our seats looked thin, hungry and shabbily clothed. Their worn-out uniforms hung loose on their stooped shoulders. The leather straps for pulling the windows up and down had been cut off; every scrap of leather was valuable. Bayonets or sharp knives had been hacking at the seats as well, and whole chunks of upholstery had been ruthlessly cut away by some unscrupulous person who, anxious to get his shoes mended, was carrying off any leather he could find. The ashtrays had been stolen as well for the sake of their small nickel and copper content. Soot and cinders from the poor-quality brown coal used to heat engines these days were blown in through the broken windows by the late autumn wind, leaving black marks on the floor and walls of the compartment, but at least the stink of it took the edge off the sharp smell of iodoform that reminded me how many sick and wounded men must have travelled in these skeletal carriages during the war. The mere fact that the train was on the move at all was a miracle, if a tedious one. Whenever the wheels, which needed lubricating, screeched a little less shrilly we were afraid that the worn-out engine was giving up the ghost. It took four or five hours to travel a distance that used to be covered in an hour, and once twilight came on it was pitch dark inside the train. The light bulbs had been smashed or stolen, so if you were searching for anything you had to grope about with the aid of matches, and the only thing that kept you from freezing was the fact that six to eight people had been sitting close together from the start of the journey. But further passengers crowded in at the very first station, and then more and more, all tired already after waiting for hours. The corridors were crammed full, people even perched on the steps up to the carriages, and in addition they were all anxiously clutching their luggage and their food parcels. No one dared let go of anything for as much as a minute in the dark. In the middle of peacetime I had gone back to what I had thought were the past horrors of war.

  Outside Innsbruck the train’s stertorous breathing suddenly faltered, and for all its huffing and puffing it could not get up a slight incline. The railwaymen anxiously ran up and down in the dark with their smoking lanterns. It was an hour before an auxiliary engine came puffing up, so that in all it took us seventeen hours instead of seven to get to Salzburg. There were no porters at the station, and finally a few ragged soldiers offered help in carrying my baggage to a cab, but the cab horse was so old and undernourished that it seemed to be leaning on the shafts for support rather than pulling the vehicle along between them. I could not find it in my heart to ask this poor ghost of a creature to do yet more by adding the weight of my baggage to the cab, and deposited it in the station’s left luggage office, though with many misgivings. Would I ever see it again?

  I had bought a house in Salzburg during the war; my alienation from my old friends because of our very different attitudes to the hostilities had put me off the idea of living in large, crowded cities. Later, too, I found that wherever I went a secluded way of life was good for my work. The geographical position of Salzburg and the surrounding landscape made it seem the best of all small Austrian cities for my purposes. It was near the Austrian border, two and a half hours by rail from Munich, five hours from Vienna, ten hours from Zurich and Venice, and twenty from Paris, so it was a good point of departure for Europe in general. At the time, of course, its Festival had not yet made it both famous and a popular summer resort for the great and the good—and the snobbish—or I would not have chosen it as a place to work in. It was still a sleepy, old-fashioned, romantic little city on the slopes where the Alps fell gently away to the plain among low mountains and foothills. The small wooded hill on which I lived was like the last wave of the mighty mountain range rolling in. Inaccessible by car—you could reach it only by an arduous climb up a path with over a hundred steps in it—it repaid you for your trouble with an enchanting view from the terrace of the house over the rooftops, gables and many towers of Salzburg. Beyond that I could gaze at the panorama of the beautiful Alpine chain—and also, admittedly, at the Salzberg near Berchtesgaden, where a then entirely unknown man by the name of Adolf Hitler was soon going to take up residence opposite me. The house itself proved to be as romantic as it was impractical. Built in the seventeenth century as an archbishop’s hunting lodge, and adjoining a mighty fortified wall, it had had two rooms added to it at the end of the eighteenth century, one on the right and one on the left. There was wonderful old wallpaper, and a painted ball, one of a set, which Emperor Franz had rolled down the long corridor of this house of ours2 during a game of bowls when he visited Salzburg in 1807. Several old documents on parchment conveying the property rights to various owners bore visible witness to its distinguished past.

  Our guests were enchanted later by the fact that this little castle—its long façade did make it look rather grand, although there were only nine rooms because it had no depth—was a curiosity from the old days, but at the time its historical origin presented problems. We found our home almost uninhabitable. Rain was dripping happily away into the rooms, every time it snowed the corridors were flooded, and it was impossible to get the roof properly repaired because carpenters had no timber for rafters and plumbers no lead for gutters. We laboriously covered the worst holes with roofing felt, and when more snow fell there was nothing for it but for me to climb on the roof myself and shovel it away before it came through. The telephone gave trouble; the engineers had had to use iron instead of copper wire for the connection. As no one delivered goods up there, we had to bring the least little thing up the hillside ourselves. But worst of all was the cold, because there was no coal available for miles around. Wood from the garden was too green, hissed like a snake instead of giving any heat, and spat and crackled rather than burning properly. As a makeshift we used peat, which at least provided an appearance of warmth, but for three months I did most of my work in bed, writing with fingers blue with cold, and after each sheet of paper that I filled I had to put my hands back under the covers to warm them. However, even this inhospitable dwelling had to be defended, for as well as the general shortages of food and fuel, housing was short in that disastrous year. No new buildings had been erected in Austria for four years, many houses were in a dilapidated state, and now suddenly countless demobilised soldiers and prisoners of war were streaming back and had nowhere to go, so that a family had to be accommodated in every available room. Officials from committees came to see us, but we had voluntarily given up two of our rooms already, and the inhospitable chill of our house which at first had seemed so hostile now came in useful. No one else wanted to climb those hundred steps of the path just to freeze up here.

  Every foray down to the city was a distressing experience at the time. For the first time I saw, in the yellow, dangerous eyes of the starving, what famine really looks like. Bread was nothing but black crumbs tasting of pitch and glue, coffee was a decoction of roast barley, beer was yellow water, chocolate a sandy substance coloured brown. The potatoes were frozen. Most people trapped rabbits so as not to forget the taste of meat entirely. A young lad shot squirrels for Sunday lunch in our garden, and well-nourished cats and dogs seldom came back if they wandered far from home. The only fabric on sale was treated paper, a substitute for a substitute. Almost all the men went around dressed in old uniforms, even Russian uniforms, collected from a depot or a hospital, clothing in which several people had died already. You often saw trousers made of old sacks. Every step you took along the streets, where the shop windows were as empty as if they had been looted, mortar was crumbling away like scabs from the ruinous buildings, and obviously undernourished people dragged themselves to work with difficulty. It was deeply upsetting. Country people on the plain were better off for food. The general breakdown of morale meant that no farmer would dream of selling his butter, eggs and milk at the legally fixed ‘maximum prices’. He kept what
he could in store and waited for buyers to come and make him a better offer. Soon there was a new profession—hoarding. Unemployed men would and go from farm to farm with a couple of rucksacks, even taking the train to particularly productive areas, and bought up food at illegal prices. They then sold it on in cities for four or five times what they had paid. At first the farmers were happy with all the paper money coming in for their butter and eggs, and they in turn hoarded the banknotes. But as soon as they took their fat wallets to town to buy things for themselves, they discovered, to their discomfiture, that they had asked only five times the price for their food they sold, but meanwhile the price of the scythes, hammers and pots and pans they wanted to buy had risen by twenty or fifty times. After that they tried direct exchange for manufactured objects, bartering in kind. Humanity had already cheerfully reverted to the cave-dwelling age in trench warfare, and was now rejecting thousands of years of conventional financial transactions and going back to primitive exchange. A grotesque style of trading spread through the whole of Austria. Town-dwellers took what they could spare out into the country, Chinese porcelain vases, carpets, swords and guns, cameras and books, lamps and ornaments. If you walked into a farmhouse near Salzburg, you might see, to your surprise, an Indian statue of the Buddha staring at you, or a rococo bookcase containing leather-bound books in French of which the new owners were inordinately proud. “Genuine leather! France!” they would boast with a broad grin. Real goods were in demand, not money. Many people had to get rid of their wedding rings or their leather belts just to keep body and soul together.

  Finally the authorities intervened to put an end to this under-the-counter trading, which did no one any good except those who were well off already. Cordons were set up in province after province, and goods were confiscated from the hoarders transporting them by rail or bicycle and handed over to the rationing offices in urban areas. The hoarders struck back by organising a Wild-West kind of nocturnal transport, or bribing the officials in charge of the confiscations, who had hungry children at home themselves. Sometimes there were actual battles with knives and revolvers, which after four years at the front these men could handle expertly, just as they knew the fieldcraft of taking cover when in flight. The chaos grew worse by the week, and the population more and more agitated, for financial devaluation was more obvious every day. The neighbour states had replaced the old Austrian banknotes with their own currencies, leaving tiny Austria with almost the entire burden of redeeming the old crown. As the first sign of distrust among the people, coinage disappeared, for a small copper or nickel coin still represented something more real than mere printed paper. The state might crank up the printing presses to create as much artificial money as possible, in line with the precepts of Mephistopheles,3 but it could not keep pace with inflation, and so every town and city and finally every village began printing its own ‘emergency currency’, which would not be accepted in the neighbouring village, and later on, when it was recognised, correctly, that it had no intrinsic value at all, was usually just thrown away. An economist with a gift for the graphic description of all the phases of the inflation that began in Austria and then spread to Germany would, I think, have been able to write a book far more exciting than any novel, for the chaos took increasingly fantastic forms. Soon no one knew what anything cost. Prices shot up at random; a box of matches could cost twenty times more in a shop that had raised the price early than in another, where a less grasping shopkeeper was still selling his wares at yesterday’s prices. His reward for honesty was to see his shop cleared out within the hour, for one customer would tell another, and they all came to buy whatever there was to be bought, regardless of whether they needed it or not. Even a goldfish or an old telescope represented ‘real value’, and everyone wanted real value rather than paper. Most grotesque of all was the discrepancy between other expenses and rents. The government banned any rise in rents in order to protect tenants—who were the majority—but to the detriment of landlords. Soon the rent of a medium-sized apartment in Austria for a whole year cost its tenant less than a single midday meal. In effect, the whole of the country lived more or less rent-free for five to ten years—since even later landlords were not allowed to give their tenants notice. This crazy state of chaos made the situation more absurd and illogical from week to week. A man who had saved for forty years and had also patriotically put money into the war loan became a beggar, while a man who used to be in debt was free of it. Those who had observed propriety in the allocation of food went hungry, those who cheerfully ignored the rules were well fed. If you knew how to hand out bribes you got on well, if you speculated you could make a profit. Those who sold in line with cost price were robbed; those who calculated carefully still lost out. There were no standards or values as money flowed away and evaporated; the only virtue was to be clever, adaptable and unscrupulous, leaping on the back of the runaway horse instead of letting it trample you.