The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  But after a while my ambitions as a collector went further. I felt it was no longer enough to have just a gallery of autograph manuscript pages of great literature and music, a reflection of a thousand creative methods. Simply enlarging my collection did not tempt me any more. In my last ten years as a collector I set out to refine it. While it had once been enough for me to own manuscript sheets showing writers or musicians in the process of creation, my efforts now went into finding autographs that would illustrate their work at their most inspired and successful creative moments. So I looked not just for the manuscript of any of a writer’s poems, but for one of his finest, if possible one of those works that begin to form when inspiration first finds earthly expression on the page in ink or pencil, and then go on and on into eternity. Bold and presumptuous it may have been, but I wanted to have those manuscripts—relics of the immortals illustrating what made them immortal in the first place.

  So the collection was really in constant flux; I removed from it, sold or exchanged all the autograph pages that did not quite come up to the highest standards as soon as I had succeeded in finding a more significant and characteristic example, one that—how shall I put it?—had a touch of eternity about it. And strange to say, in many cases I succeeded, because there were very few other collectors trying to acquire these important items as persistently and with as much expert knowledge as I did. So first I had a portfolio and finally a whole display case, fitted with metal and asbestos to ward off the depredations of time, containing the original manuscripts of works, or extracts from works, that are part of the enduring manifesto of creative mankind. I now have to live a nomadic life, and I do not have the catalogue of that collection, dispersed long ago, here with me, so I can enumerate only at random the items in it showing how earthly genius became immortal.

  I had a page from Leonardo’s sketch book, with his comments on his drawings in mirror writing beside them; Napoleon’s army orders to his soldiers at Rivoli, jotted down on four pages in a barely legible hand; I had an entire proof copy of a novel by Balzac, every sheet of it a battlefield of corrections, illustrating with extraordinary clarity his titanic struggle for perfection from change to change—fortunately there is a photocopy of it kept safely in an American university. There was a first and previously unknown draft of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, on which he worked for a long time before presenting it to his beloved Cosima Wagner, a Bach cantata, an aria from Gluck’s Alceste, and one from Handel, whose music manuscripts are the rarest of all. I always looked for a writer’s or musician’s most characteristic works, and I usually found them—Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder, Chopin’s Barcarole, Schubert’s immortal An die Musik, the imperishable melody of the Austrian national anthem from Haydn’s Emperor Quartet. In some cases I even managed to expand an isolated creative illustration into an entire picture of the range of an individual artist’s creativity. I had, for instance, not just a sheet clumsily written by Mozart at the age of eleven, but also evidence of his mature composition of lieder in the immortal Veilchen, a setting of Goethe, and to illustrate his dance music the manuscript of the minuet paraphrased by Figaro in Non piú andrai. From Le Nozze di Figaro itself I had Cherubino’s aria—and another aspect of Mozart in his delightfully indecent letters to his girl cousin, never then printed in full for public consumption, as well as a scabrous canon, and finally an aria from La Clemenza di Tito, written just before Mozart’s death. My picture of Goethe ranged just as widely. I had the first page of a translation from Latin that he had done at the age of nine, the last of a poem written in his eighty-second year not long before his death, and in between a fine illustration of the poet at the height of his powers—a double folio sheet from Faust—as well as a manuscript on the natural sciences, many poems, and drawings from various periods of his life. Those fifteen manuscript pages added up to a survey of Goethe’s entire career. With Beethoven, whom I revere most of all, I could not, admittedly, manage to build up such a complete and rounded picture. As with Goethe, my publisher Professor Kippenberg, my adversary who outbid me here, one of the richest men in Switzerland, was the collector of an unparalleled treasury of Beethoven works. But apart from his youthful notebook, the song Der Kuss, and fragments of the incidental music to Egmont, I did succeed in visually presenting at least one moment in his life, the most tragic of all, more completely than any museum on earth can do. Through a lucky chance, I was able to acquire all the furniture left in his room and auctioned after his death, when it was bought by Councillor Breuning. The outstanding item was his huge desk, complete with pictures in the desk drawers of the two women he had loved, Countess Giulietta Guicciardi and Countess Erdödy, the money box that he kept beside his bed to the last, the small portable desk on which he wrote his last letters and compositions in bed, a white lock of his hair, cut off on his death, the invitation to his funeral, the last laundry list he had written in a shaky hand, the inventory of his house contents for the auction sale, and the subscription got up by his Viennese friends to provide for his cook Sali, who was left without any means of financial support. And since chance is always kind enough to play into the hands of a true collector, soon after I had acquired all these things from the room where he died I also had an opportunity to buy the drawings done of him on his deathbed. From contemporary accounts of these drawings I knew that a young painter who was a friend of Schubert’s, Josef Teltscher by name, had tried to draw Beethoven on 26th March 1827 when he was in his death throes, but had been asked to leave by Breuning, who felt that such a thing was inappropriate. The drawings were lost for a hundred years until, at a small auction sale in Brünn, several dozen sketchbooks by this minor artist were being sold off cheap, and the sketches of Beethoven were suddenly found in them. Coincidence tends to follow coincidence, and one day a dealer called me to ask if I was interested in the original of the death-bed drawing of Beethoven. I said that as a matter of fact it was already in my hands, but then it turned out that the new drawing being offered to me was the original on which Danhauser’s famous lithograph of Beethoven on his deathbed was based. And so now I had everything recording that final memorable and truly immortal last moment of the composer’s life.

  Of course I never considered myself the owner of these things, only their custodian for a certain time. I was not tempted by a sense of possession, of having them for myself, but I was intrigued by the idea of bringing them together, making a collection into a work of art. I was aware that in this collection I had created something that in itself was worthier to last than my own works. In spite of many offers, I hesitated to draw up a catalogue of my collection, because I was still in the middle of extending it, and the final structure needed many more names and items to bring it to perfection. I had thought carefully, and intended to leave my unique collection on my death to an institution that would agree to my condition, which was to spend a certain sum of money every year to continue adding to it along the lines I had devised. Then it would not have been a dead thing, but a living organism refining and adding to itself for fifty or a hundred years after my own lifetime, becoming an increasingly beautiful whole.

  But it is not granted to our much-tried generation to make such plans for the future. When the Hitler period began and I left my house, my pleasure in collecting was gone, and so was any certainty that something of what I had done would last. For a while I kept parts of the collection in safes and at friends’ houses, but then, remembering Goethe’s warning that museums and collections will ossify if they do not go on developing, I decided that instead, since I could not devote my own efforts to perfecting my collection, I would say goodbye to it. I gave part of it to the Viennese National Library when I left, mainly those items that I myself had been given as presents by friends and contemporaries. Part of it I sold, and what happened or is now happening to the rest of it does not weigh on my mind any more. I had enjoyed creating the collection more than I enjoyed the collection itself. So I do not mourn for what I have lost. For if there is one new art that we ha
ve had to learn, those of us who have been hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art and all collections, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy.

  So the years passed in work and travel, learning, reading, collecting, and the enjoyment of those pleasures. One November day in 1931, I woke up and I was fifty years old. That day was a hard one for our good white-headed Salzburg postman. Since the civilised custom of celebrating a writer’s fiftieth birthday at length in the papers was still practised in Germany and Austria, the old postman had a considerable number of letters and telegrams to haul up that steep path with all its steps. Before opening and reading them, I thought what this day meant to me. Your fiftieth year is a turning point; you look back uneasily to see how much of your path you have already trodden, and ask yourself privately if it still leads upward. I thought of the time I had lived through; I looked back at those fifty years as I looked from my house at the Alpine range and the valley gently falling away, and I had to admit that it would be perverse of me not to feel grateful. After all, I had been given far, far more than I had hoped or expected. My wish to develop and express myself through writing works of some literary merit had been granted beyond my wildest childhood dreams. Before me, printed by Insel Verlag as a fiftieth birthday present, was a bibliography of my published books in all their languages of translation, and it was a book in itself. No important language was missing, they were all there, Bulgarian and Finnish, Portuguese and Armenian, Chinese and Marathi. My words and ideas had reached readers in Braille, in shorthand symbols, in all kinds of exotic characters and idioms. My existence had had immeasurable influence beyond the confines of my own life. I had made friends with many of the finest people of our time; I had seen and enjoyed wonderful artistic performances, immortal cities and pictures, and the most beautiful landscapes in the world. I had remained free, independent of any official position or career, my work was a pleasure to me, and even better, it had given pleasure to others! What could go wrong? Here were my books, and who could do away with them? (Or so I asked myself at the time, innocent of any presentiment.) Here was my house, and who could drive me out of it? There were my friends—could I ever lose them? I thought without fear of death and illness, but not the faintest inkling came into my mind of what still lay ahead of me. I had no idea that I would be driven out of my own home, a hunted exile who must wander from land to land, over sea after sea, or that my books would be burnt, banned and despised, my name pilloried in Germany like a criminal’s, or that the same friends whose letters and telegrams lay on the table before me would turn pale if they happened to meet me by chance. I did not know that everything I had achieved by hard work for thirty or forty years could be extinguished without trace, that my whole life, firmly constructed on sound foundations at it seemed to be, could collapse in ruins, and after nearly reaching the summit I would be forced to begin again from the beginning, with my powers already weary and my mind disturbed. It was not, to be sure, a day for me to think of anything so absurd and nonsensical. I could be happy; I loved my work and so I loved life. I was free of care; even if I never wrote another line my books would provide for me. I seemed to have achieved a good deal; I had tamed Fate. By my own efforts, I had won back the security I had known in my parental home as a child, and then lost in the war. What did I have left to wish for?

  Strange to say, the very fact that I could think of nothing left to wish for at that moment made me feel mysteriously uneasy. Would it really be a good thing, some impulse in me asked—not really my conscious self—for life to go on like this, so calm, well-regulated, financially profitable and comfortable, without any more tensions or trials? Isn’t it, I asked myself, wrong for your real self to be living this secure, privileged life? I walked thoughtfully around my house. Over the years it had become a beautiful place, just what I had wanted. But all the same, was I always going to live here, sitting at the same desk and writing books, one book and then another, earning royalties and yet more royalties, gradually becoming a dignified gentleman who has to think of his name and his work with decorous propriety, leaving behind everything that comes by chance, all tensions and dangers? Was I always to go on like this until I was sixty and then seventy, following a straight, smooth track? Wouldn’t it be better for me—so I went on daydreaming—if something else happened, something new, something that would make me feel more restless, younger, bringing new tension by challenging me to a new and perhaps more dangerous battle? There is always a mysterious conflict in every artist; if life treats him roughly he longs for peace and calm, but if he comes into safe harbour he longs to be back in the turmoil. On that fiftieth birthday of mine, then, I had in my heart only the perverse wish for something to happen that would tear me away from all that security and comfort again, would force me not just to go on as I was, but to start again. Was it fear of growing old, weary and apathetic? Or was it a mysterious foreboding that made me wish on that day for a harder life, for the sake of my further development? I don’t know.

  I don’t know. For what rose from the twilight of the unconscious mind at that strange hour was not a clearly expressed wish, certainly nothing to do with my conscious will, just a fleeting idea that brushed past me, perhaps not even my own idea but one rising from depths of which I knew nothing. But the dark power presiding over my life, an intangible power that had already done so much more for me than I would ever have had the audacity to wish for, must have sensed it. And that power was already obediently preparing to smash my life to its foundations, forcing me to reconstruct a harsher, harder life from its ruins and rebuild it from the ground up.

  NOTES

  1 The references are to works by Dostoevsky. White Nights is one of his short stories, and Raskolnikov the central character of Crime and Punishment, both set in St Petersburg.

  2 Georges Sorel, 1847-1922, French philosopher and revolutionary theorist.

  3 The central character of a novel by Ivan Goncharov 1812-1891, Oblomov can never make up his mind, take a decision or rouse himself from lethargy.

  4 Out of the East comes light.

  5 A line of verse by Grillparzer, see note above.

  6 Giacomo Matteotti, 1865-1924, of a wealthy family, was a prominent Socialist politician.

  7 Two anarchists of Italian extraction, found guilty of robbery and murder and executed in 1927. There was considerable doubt of their guilt—it was suspected that anti-immigrant prejudice had played a part at their trial—and mass demonstrations took place in Europe.

  INCIPIT HITLER1

  IT IS AN IRON LAW OF HISTORY that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own times always fail to recognise them in their early stages. So I cannot remember when I first heard the name of Adolf Hitler, one that for years now we have been bound to speak or call to mind in some connection every day, almost every second. It is the name of the man who has brought more misfortune on the world than anyone else in our time. However, I must have heard it quite early, because Salzburg could be described as a near neighbour of Munich, only two-and-a-half hours’ journey away by rail, so that we soon became familiar with its purely local affairs. All I know is that one day—I can’t now recollect the exact date—an acquaintance from Munich who was visiting us complained that there was trouble there again. In particular, he said, a violent agitator by the name of Hitler was holding meetings that became wild brawls, and was abusing the Republic and stirring up anti-Jewish feeling in very vulgar language.

  The name meant nothing in particular to me, and I thought no more about it. In the insecure German state of the time, the names of many agitators calling for a putsch kept emerging, only to disappear quickly from public attention, and they are now long forgotten. There was Captain Ehrhardt with his Baltic Brigade, there was Wolfgang Kapp, there were the Vehmic murderers, the Bavarian Communists, the Rhineland separatists, the leaders of the various bands known as Freikorps.2 Hundreds of these little bubbles of discontent were b
obbing about in the general fermentation of the time, leaving nothing behind when they burst but a bad smell which clearly showed how Germany’s still open wounds were festering and rotting. At some point the newsletter of the new National Socialist movement was among those that came into my hands. It was the Miesbacher Anzeiger, later to become the Völkischer Beobachter.3 But Miesbach was only a little village, and the newsletter was very badly written. Who would bother with that kind of thing?