The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  At the time I happened to witness an incident characteristic of the new Russia, one that revealed Gorky’s entire dilemma to me. For the first time, a Russian warship had anchored off Naples on a training exercise. The young sailors, who had never been in an international metropolis before, sauntered down the Via Toledo, gazed at all the novelties they saw with their wide, curious peasant eyes, and couldn’t get enough of it. Next day a group of them decided to come over to Sorrento to visit ‘their’ writer. They did not give advance notice of their arrival; in their Russian notion of fraternity they took it for granted that their writer would always have time to see them. Suddenly there they were outside his house, and they had been right—Gorky didn’t keep them waiting, but invited them straight in. However—Gorky himself told this story with a smile next day—these young men, in whose minds the cause of Communism reigned supreme, started by addressing him sternly. “What are you doing here?” they asked as soon as they were in his attractive, comfortable villa. “You’re living a bourgeois life! Why don’t you come back to Russia?” Gorky had to explain to them as best he could. But the well-intentioned young men didn’t really mean to rebuke him. They had just wanted to show that they were not going to kowtow to a famous man, they wanted to find out his real opinions. They sat down at their ease, drank tea, talked, and when they left they embraced him each in turn. Gorky told this story with wonderful verve, delighted by the free and easy manners of the new generation, and not in the least upset by their strictures. “How different we were in our youth,” he kept saying, “either cowed or indignant, but never so sure of ourselves.” His eyes shone all evening. And when I said to him, “I think you’d really have liked to go home with them,” he paused and looked at me keenly. “Now how did you know that? To be honest, right up to the last moment I was wondering whether to just leave everything here, my books and papers, my work, and sail off into the blue for a couple of weeks with those young sailors on their ship. I would have seen Russia again. You forget the best of yourself when you’re abroad. None of us has yet done any good work in exile.”

  But Gorky was wrong to call Sorrento exile. After all, he could go home any day, and indeed he did. He was not banished with his books into personal exile, as Merezhkovsky was—I met that tragically embittered man in Paris—or as we are today, those of us who can say, with Grillparzer, that we have “two foreign homes and yet no native land”,5 not at home in borrowed languages, driven where the wind wills. On the other hand, I visited a real exile in Naples during the next few days—Benedetto Croce. For decades he had been the intellectual mentor of the young, his country’s honours had been heaped on him as a senator and government minister, until his opposition to Fascism brought him into conflict with Mussolini. He resigned from office and withdrew into seclusion, but that did not satisfy his intransigent enemies. They wanted to break his spirit and if necessary even discipline him. A band of students, who in contrast to the old days are now the storm-troops of reaction everywhere, attacked his house and broke the windows. But that stocky little man, who looked like a comfortable bourgeois with his clever eyes and little pointed beard, was not to be intimidated. He did not leave the country, he stayed in his house behind the rampart of his books, although he had had invitations to go to American and other foreign universities. He went on editing his journal Critica in the same spirit as before, he continued to publish his books, and so great was his authority that censorship, imposed on Mussolini’s orders and usually implacable, stopped short at him, although it affected all his pupils and like-minded colleagues. It took particular courage for an Italian and even a foreigner to visit him, since the authorities knew perfectly well that he spoke frankly and without dissimulation in the citadel of his book-lined rooms. He was living, as it were, in an airtight space like a kind of sealed gas bottle, in the middle of his forty million countrymen. As I saw it, this hermetic isolation of a single man in a city and a country of millions had something both magnificent and ghostly about it. I did not know at the time that this was in fact a considerably milder form of the destructive intellectual violence to be brought to bear against those like us later, and could not help marvelling at the lively mind and intellectual force that this man, already old, preserved in his daily struggles. But he laughed. “Oh, resistance keeps you young. If I were still a senator, my ideas would have turned lazy and slipshod long ago. Nothing is worse for a thinking man than lack of any opposition. Now that I’m on my own, without any young people around me, I’m forced to rejuvenate myself.”

  But several more years had to pass before I understood that trials are a challenge, and if they do not break your spirit, then persecution fortifies you and isolation enhances your powers. Like all the important aspects of life, we never find out these things from other people’s experiences, only our own.

  I have never set eyes on Mussolini, the most important man in Italy, because I am always disinclined to approach political figures, even in my small native land of Austria, where it was quite an achievement to have avoided meeting any of the leading statesmen, neither Seipel nor Dollfuss nor Schuschnigg. Yet I ought really have felt in duty bound to see Mussolini who, as I knew from mutual friends, was one of the first and most enthusiastic of my readers in Italy. I should have offered my personal thanks for his spontaneous response to the first request I ever made of a statesman.

  It happened like this. One day I had an express letter from a friend in Paris, saying that an Italian lady wanted to visit me in Salzburg on important business, and could I see her at once? She called on me the very next day, and what she had to tell me was indeed shocking. Her husband, a distinguished medical doctor of humble social origin, had been educated at the expense of Matteotti.6 When Matteotti, leader of the Socialists, was murdered by the Fascists, world opinion, already weary with all the demands on it, had reacted once more against a single crime. All Europe had risen in indignant protest. His loyal friend the doctor had been one of the six brave men who dared to carry Matteotti’s coffin openly through the streets of Rome. Soon after that, ostracised and under threat, he had gone into exile. But the fate of Matteotti’s family weighed on his mind. In memory of his benefactor, he tried to smuggle Matteotti’s children out of Italy to safety abroad. However, in the attempt he himself had fallen foul of spies or agents provocateurs, and had been arrested. As everything calling Matteotti to mind was an embarrassment to Italy, the outcome of a trial on those grounds would not have been too bad for him, but by devious means the public prosecutor had associated his trial with another going on at the same time, and that case was concerned with an attempt to blow up Mussolini with a bomb. So this doctor, who had won the highest honours serving his country on the battlefields of the Great War, was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour.

  Naturally his young wife was extremely distressed. Something, she said, must be done to overturn the sentence, which her husband could not survive. An appeal must go out to all the literary names in Europe to unite in loud protest, and she was asking me to help her. My immediate reaction was to advise her against trying to get anywhere with protests. I knew how threadbare such demonstrations had worn since the war. I did my best to explain that no country, for reasons of national pride, was going to let outsiders change the decisions of its judiciary, and that European protests in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti7 in America had had the opposite of the desired effect. I urged her not to do anything of that kind, pointing out that she would only make her husband’s situation worse, because Mussolini would never—indeed, could never—recommend leniency if foreign attempts were made to force his hand. But I was genuinely shocked myself, and promised to do my best. It so happened that the next week I was going to Italy, where I had friends in influential positions. Perhaps they could quietly do something to help her husband.

  I approached my friends on my very first day in the country. But I could see how fear had already eaten into all minds. As soon as I mentioned the doctor’s name everyone looked awkward and said No, he was so
rry, but he had no influence, it was impossible to do anything. I went from one to another. I came home feeling ashamed and afraid the man’s poor wife might think I hadn’t done all I could. Nor, as a matter of fact, had I. There was still one possibility—the direct approach. I would write to the man in whose hands the decision lay, Mussolini himself.

  I did that. I sent him a perfectly honest letter. I was not, I wrote, going to begin with flattery, and I ought also to say at once that I did not know the doctor personally or the extent of what he had done. But I had seen his wife, who was certainly innocent of any crime, and she too would suffer the full rigour of the court’s sentence if her husband spent all those years in the penitentiary. I did not intend to criticise the verdict in any way, but I could well imagine that it would save the young woman’s life if her husband were allowed to serve his sentence not in the penitentiary, but on one of the island penal colonies where wives and children are allowed to live with exiles.

  I took the letter, addressed it to His Excellency Benito Mussolini, and put it in the usual Salzburg postbox. Four days later I heard from the Italian Embassy in Vienna. His Excellency, said the Embassy, thanked me for my letter, said that he would do as I asked, and in addition to commuting the doctor’s sentence had taken it upon himself to shorten its length. At the same time I had a telegram from Italy confirming that the doctor, as I had asked, had been moved to a penal colony. Mussolini himself had granted my request with a single stroke of his pen, and in fact the convicted doctor soon received a full pardon. No letter in my life has ever given me so much delight and satisfaction, and if I ever think of my own literary success, it is this instance of it that I remember with especial gratitude.

  It was good to travel in those years of the last calm before the storm, but it was good to come home as well. Something odd had been quietly going on. A remarkable change had come over the little city of Salzburg, with its 40,000 inhabitants, which I had chosen for the sake of its romantic seclusion. In the summer season it was now the artistic capital not only of Europe but of the whole world. During the worst of the post-war period, and with a view to doing something for the actors and musicians out of work during the summer, Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal had staged a few works in the Domplatz outside Salzburg Cathedral, including the famous open-air production of Everyman. Audiences came from the immediate vicinity at first. Then some operatic productions were added to the programme. They went down very well indeed. Gradually the world began to take notice. The best conductors, singers and actors were eager to come, glad of a chance to perform in front of an international public instead of just their limited home audiences. Suddenly the Salzburg Festival was a worldwide attraction, amounting to a kind of modern Olympic Games of art in which all nations competed to display their finest achievements. No one wanted to miss these extraordinary productions. Over the last few years kings and princes, American millionaires and glamorous film stars, music-lovers, artists, writers and social snobs had met in Salzburg. Never before in Europe had there been such concentrated thespian and musical perfection as in this little city in little Austria, a country that had been dismissed as unimportant for so long. Salzburg flourished. In summer everyone from Europe and America who sought after the performing arts at their best came there, and you met them in its streets wearing the local traditional costume—short linen trousers and jackets for the men, colourful dirndls for the women. Tiny little Salzburg suddenly dictated world fashion. Visitors competed for hotel rooms, the procession of cars driving to the Festival theatre was as magnificent as the vehicles that used to drive to the Imperial Court Ball, the railway station was always crowded. Other towns and cities tried to divert this profitable stream to themselves, but they all failed. Salzburg was and would remain a place of pilgrimage for European lovers of art during this decade.

  So all of a sudden I was living in my home town and at the same time in the middle of Europe. Once again, Fate had granted a wish of mine that I myself had hardly dared to imagine—our house on the Kapuzinerberg became a European meeting-place. Whom did we not entertain there? Our visitors’ book would be better evidence than just my memory, but it, the house, and much more besides fell victim to the National Socialists. We spent so many happy hours with all our guests, sitting on the terrace and looking out at the beautiful and peaceful landscape, never guessing that directly opposite, on the mountain in Berchtesgaden, a man lived who would destroy it all. Romain Rolland stayed with us, and Thomas Mann. Among the guests whom we welcomed to our house were H G Wells, Hofmannsthal, Jakob Wassermann, van Loon, James Joyce, Emil Ludwig, Franz Werfel, Georg Brandes, Paul Valéry, Jane Adams, Shalom Asch and Arthur Schnitzler. Musicians included Ravel and Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Bruno Walter, Bartók, and there were many other guests—painters, actors and scholars from all over the world. We passed many pleasant, cheerful hours in good conversation at our house every summer. One day Arturo Toscanini climbed the steep steps of the path up to the house, and that was the beginning of a friendship that made me love, understand and enjoy music more than ever before. For years I attended his rehearsals, and again and again I saw his impassioned struggle to achieve the perfection that appears both a miracle and entirely natural in his public concerts. (I once wrote an article in which I tried to describe those rehearsals, a model to every artist of the instinctive urge to go on and on until a performance is absolutely faultless.) It was wonderful confirmation that music is not just, as Shakespeare says, the food of love, but nourishment for the soul, and seeing all the arts competing for attention here, I blessed the fate that brought me close to them so often. Those were rich, colourful summer days, when art and the beauty of the landscape complemented each other! And whenever I thought of the little city of Salzburg as it had been immediately after the end of the Great War, dilapidated, dismal and ruinous, and of our own house when we were freezing cold and struggling to keep the rain from coming through the roof, I felt how much these years of blessed peace had done for my life. We were justified in believing in the world and humanity again.

  Many welcome and famous guests visited our house in those years, but even in the hours when I was alone I was surrounded by a magic circle of distinguished figures from the past whose shades and whose traces I had gradually managed to summon. I have already mentioned my collection of autograph manuscripts, and it now contained examples in the handwriting of the greatest masters in history. I had started my collection in an amateurish way as a boy of fifteen, and in all these years, thanks to a great deal of experience, more money than when I first began and even greater passion, I had turned a mere assortment of separate items into an organic structure, transforming it, I think it is fair to say, into a genuine work of art in itself. When I began I had set out only, as beginners do, to bring together names—famous names. Then, out of psychological curiosity, I had collected more and more manuscripts, original drafts or fragments of works, which also gave me an insight into the creative methods of a much-loved master. The most profound and mysterious of the countless insoluble riddles of the world is surely the mystery of creation. You cannot eavesdrop on Nature here; she will not show you the final secret of how the earth was created and how a little flower grows, how a poem or a man comes into being. Pitilessly, inflexibly, Nature draws a veil over that last secret. Even the poets and musicians cannot account for the moment of inspiration in retrospect. Once the act of creation is complete, the creative artist does not know where it came from or how it grew to fruition. Artists can never, or almost never, explain how, in their heightened state of consciousness, words come together to form a verse, or single notes to make a melody that will echo through the centuries. Nothing can give an idea of the incomprehensible process of creation except, to some slight extent, handwritten pages, particularly those that are covered with corrections and not yet ready to go to press, and the still tentative first drafts from which the final form of a work will emerge. The second and more knowledgeable stage in my collecting activities was to bring t
ogether such autograph pages and corrected versions by all the great writers, philosophers and musicians, evidence of their creative struggles in their work. It was a pleasure to hunt them up at auctions, and a labour of love to track them down in the most remote hiding-places. At the same time there was a kind of science in it, for as well as my collection of autograph manuscripts I had gradually made another, comprising all the books that had ever been written on the subject, all the catalogues of autograph manuscripts that had ever been printed, over four thousand in all, an unparalleled library of manuals, for even dealers in antiquities and manuscripts cannot spend so much time and love on a single specialised branch of the subject. I think I am justified in saying—as I would never venture to say of my achievements in literature or any other sphere of life—that in my thirty or forty years of collecting I had become the leading authority in the field of autograph manuscripts, and knew where every important autograph page now was, who owned it, and how it had come into the owner’s hands. I had become a true expert who could tell at first glance if a manuscript sheet was genuine, with more experience in assessing such autographs than most professionals.