The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  In addition, while the people of Austria lost any idea of financial standards as values plummeted, many foreigners had realised that they could fish profitably in our troubled waters. During the period of galloping inflation, which went on for three years at ever-increasing speed, only one thing had any stable value inside the country, and that was foreign currency. While the Austrian crown was dissolving like jelly in your fingers, everyone wanted Swiss francs and American dollars, and large numbers of foreigners exploited the economic situation to feed on the twitching corpse of the old Austrian currency. Austria was ‘discovered’, and became disastrously popular with foreign visitors in a parody of the society season. All the hotels in Vienna were crammed full with these vultures; they would buy anything, from toothbrushes to country estates; they cleared out private collections of antiquities and the antique dealers’ shops before the owners realised how badly they had been robbed and cheated in their time of need. Hotel receptionists from Switzerland and Dutch shorthand typists stayed in the princely apartments of the Ringstrasse hotels. Incredible as it may seem, I can vouch for it that for a long time the famous, de luxe Hotel de l’Europe in Salzburg was entirely booked by unemployed members of the English proletariat, who could live here more cheaply than in their slums at home, thanks to the generous unemployment benefit they received. Anything that was not nailed down disappeared. Word gradually spread of the cheap living and low prices in Austria. Greedy visitors came from further and further afield, from Sweden, from France, and you heard more Italian, French, Turkish and Romanian than German spoken in the streets of the city centre of Vienna. Even Germany, where the pace of inflation was much slower at first—although later it would be a million times worse than in Austria—took advantage of the falling value of the Austrian crown in relation to its own mark. As Salzburg was on the border I had a good opportunity of observing these raids on us every day. Germans crossed from the neighbouring towns and villages of Bavaria in their hundreds and thousands, pouring into the small city. They had their suits made and their cars repaired here, they went to the pharmacist and the doctor in Salzburg, big firms in Munich sent their letters and telegrams from Austria so as to profit by the difference in postage. Finally, at the urging of the German government, a border checkpoint was set up to prevent German citizens from buying everything cheap in Salzburg, where you could get seventy Austrian crowns for a single German mark, instead of in their shops at home, and all goods coming out of Austria were firmly confiscated by the customs office. However, there was one item that couldn’t be confiscated: the beer you had already consumed. And every day the beer-swilling Bavarians worked out, from the rate of exchange, whether the devaluation of the crown enabled them to drink five, six, or even ten litres of beer in and around Salzburg for the price they would pay for a single litre at home. No greater temptation could be imagined, and whole troops of visitors came over the border from nearby Freilassung and Reichenhall, complete with their wives and children, to indulge in the luxury of pouring as much beer down their throats as their bellies would hold. The railway station was in pandemonium every evening, crowded with hordes of intoxicated, bawling, belching and expectorating Germans. Many of them, having overestimated their capacity, had to be wheeled to the carriages on the trolleys generally used to transport baggage before the train took them back to their own country, to the accompaniment of bacchanalian shouting and singing. These cheerful Bavarians, of course, had no idea that a terrible vengeance lay in store for them. For when the crown stabilised, while the fall of the mark assumed astronomical dimensions, the Austrians travelled over from the same station to get drunk on the cheap in their own turn, and the same spectacle was repeated, although in the opposite direction. This beer war in the midst of two inflationary periods is among my strangest memories, because it clearly illustrates in miniature the entire crazy character of those years in perhaps its most graphic and grotesque aspect.

  Strangest of all is the fact that today, with the best will in the world, I cannot remember how we managed to keep house in those years, when everyone in Austria had to raise the thousands and tens of thousands of crowns and in Germany the millions of marks they needed every day just to survive, and had to do it again and again. But the mysterious fact was that, somehow, we did manage. We got used to the chaos and adapted to it. Logically, a foreigner who did not see those days at first hand would probably imagine that at a time when an egg cost as much in Austria as the price of a luxury car in the past, and later fetched four billion marks in Germany—roughly the basic value of all the buildings in the Greater Berlin area before inflation—women would be rushing through the streets tearing their hair, shops would be empty because no one could afford to buy anything, and the theatres and other places of entertainment would have no audiences at all. Astonishingly, however, it was just the opposite. The will for life to go on proved stronger than the instability of the currency. In the midst of financial chaos, daily life continued almost unchanged. Individuals, of course, felt a great deal of change—the rich were impoverished when their money in banks and government securities melted away, speculators grew rich. But regardless of individual fates, the flywheel of the mechanism kept on turning in the same old rhythm. Nothing stood still. The baker made bread, the cobbler made boots, the writer wrote books, the farmer cultivated the land, trains ran regularly, the newspaper lay outside your door every morning at the usual time, and the places of entertainment in particular, the bars and the theatres, were full to overflowing. For with the daily loss in value of money, once the most stable aspect of life, people came to appreciate true values such as work, love, friendship, art and nature all the more, and in the midst of disaster the nation as a whole lived more intensely than ever before, strung to a higher pitch. Young men and girls went walking in the mountains and came home tanned brown by the sun, music played in the dance halls until late at night, new factories and businesses were founded everywhere. I myself do not think I ever lived and worked with more intensity and concentration than I did in those years. What had been important to us before mattered even more now. Art was never more popular in Austria than at that time of chaos. Money had let us down; we sensed that what was eternal in us was all that would last.

  I will never forget what operatic performances were like in those days of our greatest need. You groped you way through dimly lit streets, for street lighting was feeling the effects of the fuel shortage, you paid for your seat in the gallery with a bundle of banknotes that would once have allowed you to hire a luxurious box for a year. You sat in your overcoat, because the auditorium was unheated, and pressed close to your neighbours for warmth—and the theatre itself, once brilliant with uniforms and expensive gowns, was so dismal and grey! No one knew whether it would still be possible for the opera to keep going next week if money went on falling in value and there were no coal deliveries. Everything seemed doubly desperate in this scene of former luxury and imperial extravagance. The musicians of the Philharmonic sat in the pit, also grey shadows of themselves, emaciated and exhausted by deprivation, and we in the audience looked like ghosts in this now ghostly theatre. But then the conductor raised his baton, the curtains parted, and it was more wonderful than ever before. The singers and musicians gave of their best, for they all felt that this might be the last time they performed in the theatre they loved. And we listened with bated breath, more receptive than ever, knowing that for us, too, this might be the last time. Thousands of us, hundreds of thousands, lived like this. We all strained ourselves to the limit in these weeks and months and years on the brink of downfall. I never felt the will to live in a nation and in myself as strongly as I did then, when the end of everything, life and survival itself, was a stake.

  Yet in spite of everything I would find it hard to explain to anyone how our poor, plundered, unhappy country did survive at that time. To our right was Bavaria, where a Communist Republic of People’s Councils was now governing, to the left Hungary had turned Bolshevik under Béla Kun,4 and it s
till seems to me astonishing that revolution did not also spread to Austria. There was no shortage of explosive material to set it off. Demobilised soldiers walked the streets half-starved, in torn clothes, looking bitterly at the shameless luxury in which war profiteers lived and at the results of inflation; a battalion of Red Guards was already drawn up and armed in the barracks, and there was no well-organised opposition. Two hundred determined men could have seized power over Vienna and the whole of Austria at that time. But nothing too drastic happened. Only once did an ill-disciplined group try a coup, and it was easily countered by four or five dozen armed police officers. So the miraculous became reality—this impoverished country, cut off from its former factories, coal mines and oilfields, its now worthless paper currency falling like an avalanche, asserted itself. Perhaps that was even due to its weakness, because the people were too enfeebled and hungry to fight for anything, or perhaps it was because of the characteristic, secret strength of the Austrians, their innate tendency to be conciliating. For in this darkest hour, and in spite of their deep differences, the two main political parties, Social Democrats and Christian Socialists, came together in a coalition government. Each made concessions to the other to prevent a catastrophe that would have carried all Europe away with it. Slowly, conditions began to consolidate, some kind of order imposed itself, and to our own surprise an incredible thing happened—the mutilated state went on existing, and later was even ready to defend its independence when Hitler came to carry off the soul of this loyal nation, ready as it had bravely been to make sacrifices in its time of deprivation.

  But radical upheaval was averted only outwardly and in the political sense; in the minds of the people a huge revolution took place in those first post-war years. Something had been crushed along with the armies—a belief in the infallibility of those authorities to which my generation had been brought up to be so subservient in our youth. But how could the Germans go on admiring their Kaiser, a man who had sworn to fight “to the last breath drawn by man and horse”, and then escaped over the border under cover of night and fog? Or their army commanders and politicians, or the writers who kept writing their patriotic verses, still rhyming Not with Tod and Krieg with Sieg?5 Only now, as the gunpowder smoke over the country dispersed, was the full terrible extent of the devastation inflicted by the war visible. How could moral commandments be considered still in force, when for four years murder and robbery had been committed in the name of heroism and the necessity of requisitions? How could a nation believe the promises of a state that simply annulled all its duty to its citizens when it liked? And now the same people, the same clique of old, allegedly experienced men, had outdone themselves, compounding the folly of the war by patching up a botched peace. Everyone knows now—and a few of us knew at the time—that the peace following the Great War had presented one of the greatest moral opportunities of history, if not the greatest. Wilson had known it. With far-ranging vision, he had sketched out a plan for true and enduring international understanding. But the old generals, the old statesmen, the old interests had mangled his great idea, tearing it into little scraps of paper. The great and sacred promise made to millions that this was the war to end wars, the one thing that had brought the soldiers, desperate, half-exhausted and already half-disillusioned, to draw on their last reserves of strength, was cynically sacrificed to the interests of the munitions manufacturers and the gambling of politicians, who triumphantly rescued their old, fateful tactics of secret treaties and negotiations behind closed doors from Wilson’s wise and humane demands. In so far as the eyes of the world were open, it saw that it had been betrayed. The mothers who had sacrificed their children were betrayed, so were the soldiers who came home as beggars, all those who had patriotically contributed to the war loan, everyone who had believed in the promises of the state. All of us who had dreamt of a new and better world, and now saw the old game, on which our lives, our happiness, our time and our possessions were staked, about to begin again, played by the same gamblers or new ones—we had all been betrayed. No wonder a whole young generation looked bitterly and scornfully at their fathers, who had allowed themselves to be deprived first of victory and then of peace, who had done everything wrong, had foreseen nothing, and had made the wrong calculations in every respect. Was it not understandable for the new generation to feel no respect whatsoever for their elders? None of these young people believed their parents, the politicians or their teachers. Every state decree or proclamation was read with distrust. The post-war generation emancipated itself, with a sudden, violent reaction, from all that had previously been accepted. It turned its back on all tradition, determined to take its fate into its own hands, moving forcefully away from the old past and on into the future. An entirely new world, a different order, was to begin with these young people in every area of life, and of course it all started with wild exaggeration. Anyone or anything not their own age was finished, out-of-date, done for. Instead of going away on holiday with their parents, children of eleven and twelve went hiking through the countryside in the Wandervögel 6 groups—organised and well-instructed in sexual matters—reaching Italy and the North Sea. Schools councils on the Russian model were set up, with young people keeping a sharp eye on the teachers and making their own changes to the curriculum, because children wanted to learn only what they liked. There was rebellion, purely for the fun of rebelling against everything once accepted, even against the natural order and the eternal difference between the sexes. Girls had their hair cut in such short bobs that they could not be told from boys; young men shaved off their beards to look more like girls. Homosexuality and lesbianism were very much in fashion, not a result of a young person’s instinctive drives but in protest against all the old traditional, legal and moral kinds of love. Every form of expression, of course including art, tried to be as radical and revolutionary as possible. The new painters declared everything done by Rembrandt, Holbein and Velázquez out of date, and embarked on the wildest of Cubist and Surrealist experiments. In every field, what could be understood was poorly esteemed—melody in music, a good likeness in portraiture, clarity in language. The definite article was omitted, sentence structure reversed, everything was written in abbreviated, telegraphese style, with excitable exclamations—and in addition all literature that was not ‘activist’, meaning based on political theory, was thrown on the garbage heap. Music persistently strove for a new tonality, splitting up the notes; architecture turned buildings inside out; in dance, Cuban and black American rhythms replaced the waltz; fashion, emphasising nudity, came up with more and more absurdities; Hamlet was acted in modern dress and tried to express explosive drama. A period of wild experimentation began in all fields of art, in an attempt to overtake all that had ever been done in the past in a single mighty bound. The younger you were and the less you had learnt, the more your freedom from tradition was welcomed—ultimately, this was youth triumphantly working off its grudge against the parental generation. But in the midst of this hectic carnival, nothing seemed to me a more tragi-comic spectacle than the way many intellectuals of the older generation, panic-stricken at the idea of being outstripped and considered outdated, aped an artificial wildness with desperate haste, trying to limp along and keep up with the most obvious deviations from the norm. Staid, grey-haired professors at the art academies added symbolic cubes and dice to their now unsaleable still lifes, because young curators—you had to be young now, the younger the better—were clearing all other pictures out of the galleries and putting them into store, on the grounds that they were too neoclassical. Authors who had written in good, clear German for years chopped up their sentences and went to extremes of ‘activism’; stout Prussians proudly bearing the honorary title of Privy Councillor lectured on Karl Marx; former court ballerinas danced half-naked with strange contortions to Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata or Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Everywhere, old age frantically pursued the latest fashion. Suddenly all that mattered was your desire to be young, promptly followin
g up yesterday’s latest topical trend with one even more topical, more radical and unprecedented.