The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  Then, however, bands of young men suddenly turned up in the neighbouring border towns of Reichenhall and Berchtesgaden, places that I visited almost every week. These gangs were small at first, and then grew larger and larger. The young men wore jackboots and brown shirts, and each sported a garishly coloured armband with a swastika on it. They marched and held meetings, they paraded through the streets, singing songs and chanting in chorus, they stuck up huge posters and defaced the walls with swastikas. For the first time, I realised that there must be financial and other influential forces behind the sudden appearance of these gangs. Hitler was still delivering his speeches exclusively in Bavarian beer cellars at the time, and he alone could not have fitted out these thousands of young men with such expensive equipment. Stronger hands must be helping to propel the new movement forwards. For the uniforms were sparkling neat and clean, and in a time of poverty when genuine army veterans were still going around in their shabby old uniforms, the ‘storm troops’ sent from town to town and city to city could draw on a remarkably large pool of brand new cars, motorbikes and trucks for transport. It was also obvious that these young men were getting tactical training from military leaders—were being drilled, in fact, as paramilitaries—and also that the regular German army itself, the Reichswehr, for whose secret service Hitler had acted as a spy, was providing regular technical instruction in the use of equipment readily supplied to it. It so happened that I had an opportunity of observing one of these combat training exercises. Four trucks suddenly roared into one of the border villages where a perfectly peaceful meeting of Social Democrats was being held. All the trucks were full of young National Socialists armed with rubber truncheons, and they overwhelmed the meeting, which was not expecting them, by dint of sheer speed. I had seen just the same thing in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. It was a method they had learnt from the Fascists, but they executed it with much greater military precision, systematically carrying it out down to the last detail, as you might expect of the Germans. A whistle gave the signal, and the SA4 men jumped swiftly out of their trucks, bringing rubber truncheons down on anyone who got in their way. Before the police could intervene, or the workers at the meeting could group together, they had jumped back into the trucks and were racing away. What surprised me was the practised way in which they jumped out of the vehicles and back in again, both times following a single sharp whistle signal from their leader. You could see that the muscles and nerves of every one of these young men had been trained in advance, so that he knew how to move and over which wheel of the vehicle he must jump out to avoid getting in the way of the man behind him and thus endangering the whole manoeuvre. It was not a matter of personal skills. Each of those movements had had to be practised in advance, dozens or even hundreds of times, in barracks and on parade grounds. From the first, as anyone could see at a glance, this gang had been trained in methods of attack, violence and terrorism.

  Soon we heard more about these underground manoeuvres in Bavaria. When everyone else was asleep, the young men stole out of their houses and assembled for nocturnal ‘field exercises’. Army officers either still serving or demobilised from the Reichswehr, paid by the state or by the mysterious figures who financed the Nazi Party, drilled the troops. The authorities paid little attention to these strange nocturnal manoeuvres. Were they really asleep or turning a blind eye? Were they indifferent to the movement, or actually encouraging it in secret? In any case, even those who surreptitiously supported National Socialism were first surprised, then shocked by the brutality and speed with which it suddenly asserted itself. One morning the authorities woke up to find Munich in Hitler’s hands, all the government offices closed, the newspapers forced at gunpoint to hail, in triumphant tones the revolution that had taken place. Like a deus ex machina coming down from the clouds to which the unsuspecting Republic was vaguely looking up, General Ludendorff appeared, the first of many who though they could outwit Hitler and whom he outwitted instead. The famous putsch5 that was supposed to conquer Germany began in the morning and, as we all know, had been put down by midday (I am not setting out to write a book about international history here). Hitler fled, and was quickly arrested. That seemed to be the end of his movement, In that year, 1923, the swastikas, storm troops, and the name of Adolf Hitler almost lapsed into oblivion. No one thought of him as a potential political force any more.

  It was a few years before he surfaced again, and this time the growing wave of discontent quickly raised him on its crest. Inflation, unemployment, political crises and not least the folly of the outside world had aroused the ire of the German people. A great desire for order was felt in all quarters of a nation to which good order had always seemed more important than liberty and justice. And a man promising order—Goethe himself had said that he hated disorder even worse than injustice—had hundreds of thousands of supporters behind him from the first.

  But we still did not notice the danger. Those few writers who had really gone to the trouble of reading Hitler’s book did not look seriously at his programme, but laughed at his pompous prose style instead. The great national newspapers, instead of warning us, kept soothing their readers daily by assuring them that National Socialism, which could finance its agitation only with money provided by heavy industry and by audaciously running up debts, must inevitably collapse tomorrow or the next day. And perhaps the outside world never understood the real reason why Germany underestimated and made light of Hitler and his increasing power in all those years—not only has Germany always been a class-conscious country, but within its ideal class hierarchy it has suffered from a tendency to overrate and idolise the values of higher education. Apart from a few generals, the high offices of state were filled exclusively by men who had been to university. While Lloyd George in Britain, Garibaldi and Mussolini in Italy and Briand in France had risen to their offices from the ranks of the common people, it was unthinkable for the Germans to contemplate a man who, like Hitler, had not even left school with any qualifications, let alone attended any university, who had slept rough in men’s hostels, living a rather shady and still mysterious life at that time, could aspire to the kind of position that had been held by Freiherr von Stein, Bismarck and Prince Bülow. More than anything, it was the high value they set on education that led German intellectuals to go on thinking of Hitler as a mere beer-hall agitator who could never really be dangerous. By now, however, thanks to those who were invisibly pulling strings for him, he had long ago recruited powerful assistants in many different quarters. Even when he had become Chancellor on that January day in 1933, the vast majority, including some who had helped him to rise to that position, still thought that he was just a stopgap and National Socialism would be only a transient episode.

  It was now that Hitler’s cynically brilliant technique first revealed itself on the grand scale. He had been making promises to all and sundry for years, and gained important supporters in all the political parties, each of whom thought that he could exploit the mysterious powers of this ‘unknown soldier’ for his own ends. But the same technique that Hitler later used in international politics, when he swore alliances and the loyalty of Germany on oath to the very powers that he intended to annihilate utterly, triumphed for the first time. He was such a master of the art of deceit by making promises to all sides that, on the day he came to power, there was rejoicing in totally opposite camps. The monarchists in Doorn6 thought he was going to prepare the way for the Kaiser’s return, but equally happy were the Wittelsbach7 monarchists in Munich, believing that Hitler was their man. The German Nationalists hoped he would do their work for them—their leader Hugenberg8 had concluded an agreement which guaranteed him the most important office in Hitler’s cabinet, and thought that had given him a foot in the door of power, but of course he was forced to resign after the first few weeks in spite of the sworn agreement. The captains of heavy industry felt that Hitler would provide relief from the Bolshevik threat; the man they had been secretly financing for years was now in power. At
the same time the impoverished lower middle class, to whom he had promised, at hundreds of meetings, relief from their state of serfdom to interest payments, drew a great breath of enthusiasm. Small shopkeepers remembered his undertaking to close down the big department stores, their most dangerous competitors—a promise that never came to anything—and Hitler was particularly welcome to the army, because his thinking was militaristic and he abused pacifism. Even the Social Democrats regarded his ascent in a friendlier way than might have been expected, hoping that he would eliminate their arch-enemies, the Communists now coming up so uncomfortably close behind them. The most varied parties, holding diametrically opposite opinions, regarded this unknown soldier who had promised the earth to every class, every party, every tendency as their friend—even the Jews of Germany were not especially uneasy. They reasoned that a ministre jacobin was by definition not a real Jacobin any more, and a Chancellor of the German Reich would of course divest himself of the vulgarities of an anti-Semitic agitator. After all, what violent actions could he carry out in a state where the law was firmly established, the parliamentary majority was against him, and every citizen was assured of his liberty and equal rights by the solemn wording of the constitution?

  Then came the Reichstag fire,9 parliament vanished from the scene, Goering let his wolf pack off the leash, and all at once the rule of law in Germany was over. We were horrified to hear that concentration camps were being set up in the middle of peacetime, and secret cells where innocent people were murdered without the formality of a trial had been built in the barracks. This could only be an initial outburst of senseless rage as the new regime took power, we told ourselves, such things cannot last long in the twentieth century. But it was only the beginning. The world began to pay attention, and at first would not believe anything so incredible. However, it was in those days that I saw the first refugees arriving in Austria. They had climbed over the Salzburg mountains by night, or swum the river marking the border. Starving, ragged and distressed, they stared at us, and with them a panic flight from inhumanity had begun. Refugees were to spread over the whole earth. But still I did not guess, when I saw these exiles, that their pale faces heralded my own fate, and we would all be victims of this one man’s raging lust for power.

  It is difficult to rid yourself, in only a few weeks, of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place. With our rooted ideas of justice, we believed in the existence of a German, a European, an international conscience, and we were convinced that a certain degree of inhumanity is sure to self-destruct in the face of humane standards. I am trying to be as honest as possible here, so I must admit that in 1933 and 1934, none of us in Germany and Austria would have contemplated the possibility of one hundredth part, one thousandth part of what was about to break over us a little later. However, it was obvious from the first that those of us who were freelance, independent writers must expect a certain amount of unpleasantness in the way of difficulties and hostility. Immediately after the Reichstag fire I told my publisher that the end of any future for my books in Germany was imminent. I shall never forget his astonishment. “But who on earth would ban your books?” he asked, baffled. This was early in 1933. “You’ve never written a word criticising Germany, you’ve never dabbled in politics.” Obviously, a week after Hitler had come to power the idea of monstrous events such as the burning and public execration of books, to become fact a few months later, was still beyond the comprehension of broad-minded people. National Socialism, with its unscrupulous methods of deception, took care not to show how radical its aims were until the world was inured to them. So it tried out its technique cautiously—one dose at a time, with a short pause after administering it. One pill at a time, then a moment of waiting to see if it had been too strong, if the conscience of the world could swallow that particular pill. And as the conscience of Europe—to the detriment and shame of our civilisation—was quick to say that it was not taking sides, because all these violent acts were perpetrated within the borders of Germany, the doses administered were stronger and stronger, until at last all Europe fell victim to them. Hitler never had a more brilliant idea than this tactical approach—gradually sounding out opinion and then putting more and more pressure on Europe, where increasing moral weakness was soon to be military weakness as well. He had privately decided long before on an operation to eliminate all free speech and every independent book from Germany, and he did it by the same means, feeling his way forward first. No law was immediately passed banning our books—that came two years later. Instead, he quietly tested the waters to see how far he could go, leaving the first attack to a group not officially responsible, the National Socialist students. Just as “public anger” was cited as the reason for implementing the boycott of Jews, a measure on which Hitler had decided long before, a quiet hint was dropped that the students might like to hold a public demonstration to express their “indignation” at the existence of our books. And the German students, glad of any chance to display their reactionary attitudes, obediently banded together at every university, seized copies of our books from the bookshops, and marched with this loot, banners waving, to an open square. Here the books were either literally pilloried, publicly nailed to a wooden post in the medieval manner—medieval customs were back in fashion, and I have a copy of one of my books through which a nail was driven at the time, retrieved after its execution by a student friend who gave it to me—or as the burning of human beings was not, unfortunately, allowed, they were burnt to ashes on huge pyres while the students chanted patriotic slogans. It is true that at the last minute Goebbels as Minister of Propaganda had decided, after long hesitation, to bestow his blessing on the book-burning, but it was still only semi-official, and nothing shows more clearly how little as yet Germany identified itself with such actions than the fact that the general public drew no conclusions at all from the burning and ostracism of the books. Although booksellers were warned not to display any of our works in their windows, and hardly any newspaper would mention them now, none of it had any effect on the genuine reading public. As long as no threat of being imprisoned or sent to a concentration camp faced readers, my books sold almost as many copies in 1933 and 1934 as before, in spite of all the difficulties and harassment. Hitler’s great scheme for “protecting the German people” by declaring the printing, sale and distribution of our books a crime against the state had yet to become law. When it did, its object was to alienate us by force from the hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of Germans who are still happier to read us than the writers of Blut und Boden10 literature who have now come to prominence. Our readers would have liked to stay loyal to us.

  I felt that it was more of an honour than a disgrace to share the fate of total literary annihilation in Germany with such eminent contemporaries, including Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Freud and Einstein, and many others whose work I regard as far more important than my own. And I dislike putting on airs of martyrdom so much that I mention my inclusion in our common destiny only with reluctance. But strangely enough, it was given to me to place the National Socialists, even Adolf Hitler in person, in a particularly awkward situation. Of all the literary names now cast into outer darkness, mine was to be the frequent subject of great agitation and endless debates in high places, indeed the highest, the company at the Berchtesgaden villa. So I can count, among the most pleasing moments of my life, the modest satisfaction of having caused great annoyance to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man of the modern age.

  In the first days of the new regime I had already, although innocently, been responsible for a certain amount of uproar. At the time a film based on my novella Burning Secret, and bearing the same title, was being shown all over Germany. No one took the faintest offence. However, on the day after the Reichstag fire, for which the National Socialists tried, unsuccessfully, to blame the Communists, people gathered in front of the cinema posters and advertising for Burning Secret, nudging one another, winking and laughing. Soon the Gestap
o discovered the reason for their mirth. The same evening, policemen raced around on motorbikes, further showings of the film were banned, and by next day the title of my novella Burning Secret had vanished without trace from all newspaper advertisements and all the advertising pillars where posters went up. Of course it was easy enough for the National Socialists to ban a single word that offended them, even to burn and destroy all our books, but in one particular instance they could not attack me without also injuring a man who was vitally necessary to their international prestige at this critical moment, the greatest and most famous musician in Germany, Richard Strauss, with whom I had just been collaborating on an opera.

  It was the first time I had worked with Richard Strauss. Hugo von Hofmannsthal had been his regular librettist ever since he wrote the texts for Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, and I had never met Richard Strauss personally. After Hofmannsthal’s death, however, he got in touch with me through my publishers, saying he wanted to begin a new opera and asking if I would be willing to write the libretto. I was very well aware of the honour of such a commission. Music and musicians had been part of my life ever since Max Reger had set my early poems. Busoni, Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Alban Berg were close friends of mine. But there was no creative musician of our time whom I would more willingly have served than Richard Strauss, last of the great line of German composers of genius running from Handel and Bach, by way of Beethoven and Brahms, and so to our own day. I agreed at once, and at our first meeting I suggested that Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman would make a good subject for an opera. It was a pleasant surprise to see how quickly and perceptively Strauss agreed to all my suggestions. I had not expected him to show such a ready understanding of literature, and his knowledge of the theatre was amazing. Even as I was outlining the course of the action, he saw it in dramatic terms and immediately adapted it to suit the limits of his own powers, which he understood with almost uncanny clarity. I have met many great artists in my life, but never before one who looked at himself with such impersonal and unswerving objectivity. At that first meeting Strauss frankly confessed that he knew a musician of seventy no longer had his former youthful powers of inspiration. He did not think, he said, that he could write symphonic works like Till Eulenspiegel and Tod und Verklärung today, for pure music needs a very high degree of creative freshness. But written text still inspired him. Given a subject in verbal form, he could illustrate it to the full dramatically, because he found that musical themes spontaneously developed from situations and words, so in his later years he had turned exclusively to opera. He knew that opera as an art form was played out, he added. Wagner represented such a mighty mountain peak that no one could rise any higher. “However,” he added with a broad Bavarian smile, “I found a solution by going around the mountain instead.”