The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  In Salzburg, of course, close to the border, you saw things more clearly. For a start, there was constant coming and going over the narrow river that marked the border. Young people slipped across it by night and were given training; agitators crossed the border in cars or with their alpenstocks looking like ordinary tourists and organised themselves into cells in all classes of society. They began recruiting supporters, while threatening that those who did not accept the one true faith at the right time would be sorry for it later. The police and the civil servants were intimidated. More and more clearly, I began to detect a certain insecurity in people’s behaviour as they started to waver. Your own small personal experiences of life are always more persuasive than anything else. A friend of my youth lived in Salzburg, a very well-known writer with whom I had been in close and cordial contact for thirty years. We were on first-name terms, we had dedicated books to each other, we met every week. One day I saw my old friend walking along the street with a gentleman I didn’t know, and noticed that he immediately stopped in front of a display window that could hardly mean much to him, pointing something in it out to this gentleman with an air of uncommon interest, while he kept his back turned to me. How odd, I thought; he must have seen me. But it could be just coincidence. Next day he suddenly phoned me—could he come round to my home for a chat that afternoon? I said yes, rather surprised, for in the usual way we always met at the coffee house. It turned out that he had nothing particular to say, in spite of this hasty arrangement to visit me. I immediately realised that although he wanted to keep up his friendship with me, in future he would rather not appear too familiar with me in this small city, in case he was suspected of being a friend to Jews. That put me on my guard, and I soon noticed that a number of acquaintances who often used to visit me had stayed away lately. They were in a dangerous position.

  I was not thinking of leaving Salzburg for ever at this time, but I did make up my mind more readily than usual to spend the winter abroad, so that I could avoid all these little tensions. But I had no idea that when I left my pleasant house in October 1933 that I was already, in a way, saying goodbye to it.

  I had meant to spend the next January and February working in France. I loved that beautiful and intellectual country as a home from home, and I never felt like a foreigner there. Valéry, Romain Rolland, Jules Romains, André Gide, Roger Martin du Gard, Duhamel, Vildrac, Jean-Richard Bloch—these leading lights of literature were my old friends. My books had almost as many readers in France as in Germany; no one thought of me as a foreign writer, a stranger. I loved the people, I loved the country, I loved the city of Paris and was so familiar with it that every time my train came into the Gare du Nord I felt I was coming home. This time, however, I had travelled earlier than usual because of the special circumstances, and I did not really want to be in Paris until after Christmas. Where should I go in the meantime? Then it occurred to me that I had not been in England for almost quarter-of-a-century, not since my student days. Why always Paris, I asked myself? Why not ten days to two weeks in London, seeing the museums, the city, the country again with new eyes? So I took the express train to Calais instead of Paris, and got out at Victoria Station on an appropriately foggy November day, thirty years after my last visit, and was quite surprised, on my arrival, to be driving to my hotel in a car instead of a horse-drawn cab. The cool, soft grey fog was the same as ever. I hadn’t set eyes on the city itself yet, but even over three decades my sense of smell had recognised that curiously acrid, dense, damp atmosphere that wraps itself around you when you come close.

  I brought no great amount of luggage with me, and no great expectations either. I had hardly any close friends in London, and in literary terms there was little contact between us Continental writers and our British counterparts. They led a rather carefully demarcated life of their own, having its own sphere of influence within a tradition not accessible to the rest of us—of all the many books from all over the world that found their way to my desk at home, I cannot remember ever feeling that a book by an English author was like a present from a colleague. I had once met Shaw at Hellerau, Wells had visited my house in Salzburg, and my own books had all been translated into English but were little known there. Britain had always been the country where they made the least impression. And while I was on terms of personal friendship with my American, French, Italian and Russian publishers, I had never met anyone from the firm that published my books in Britain. So I was prepared to feel as much a stranger there as thirty years ago.

  But I was wrong. After a few days I felt extraordinarily well at ease in London. Not that the city itself had changed very much, but I myself had changed. I was thirty years older, and after the years of the Great War, and then the post-war years of ever-increasing tension, I longed to live a quiet life again and hear nothing about politics. Of course there were political parties in Britain too. As successors to the old Whigs and Tories, there were the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties, but their discussions were nothing to do with me. I am sure various groups and trends also existed in literary life, controversies and covert rivalries, but I was outside all that. The real advantage was that at last I felt I was in a civil, courteous, calm and friendly society again. Nothing had poisoned my life in recent years so much as the sense of hostility and tension around me at home, in country and city alike, feeling forced to defend myself all the time, constantly drawn into arguments. The British were not in the same state of agitation, there was a greater degree of decent, law-abiding behaviour in public life than in our Continental countries, where morality itself had been impaired by the great fraud practised on us by inflation. The British lived more quietly, were more content, thought more about their gardens and their little hobbies than about their neighbours. You could breathe, think and reflect here. But what really kept me going was a new book.

  It came about like this. My Marie Antoinette had just been published, and I was reading the proofs of my book on Erasmus, in which I tried to paint an intellectual portrait of the humanist who, although he understood the absurdity of his times more clearly than those who made it their business to set the world to rights, was tragically unable to do anything about it in spite of his fine mind. After finishing this book, which presented my own views in veiled form through the person of Erasmus, I meant to write a novel that I had been planning for a long time. I had had enough of biographies. But then, on only my third day in London, I was in the British Museum, attracted to the place by my old passion for autograph manuscripts and looking at those on public display. They included the handwritten account of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Instinctively I found myself wondering what Mary Stuart was really like. Had she or had she not been implicated in the murder of her second husband? As I had nothing to read in the evening, I bought a book about her. It was a paean of praise, defending her as a saint. The book was shallow and foolish. Next day my incurable curiosity led me to buy another book, which claimed almost exactly the opposite. The case was beginning to interest me. I asked for the title of a really authoritative work on Mary. No one could recommend one, and so by diligent searching and making my own enquiries I was involuntarily drawn into making comparisons. Without really knowing it, I had begun a book about Mary Stuart that kept me in libraries for weeks on end. When I returned to Austria early in 1934, I had decided to go back to London, a city that I had grown to love, to finish the book in peace and quiet there.

  Back in Austria, it took me only two or three days to see how the situation had deteriorated in my few months away. Returning from the quiet, secure atmosphere of England to a country shaken by fevered conflicts was like being in New York on a hot July day, and suddenly stepping out of an air-conditioned room into the sultry heat. National Socialist pressure was beginning to wear down the nerves of those in religious and bourgeois circles. They felt the economic thumbscrews turn, while subversive German influence was exerted more and more harshly. The Dollfuss government, trying to keep Austria independent and prese
rve the country from Hitler, sought with increasing desperation for some last kind of support. France and Britain were too far away, and at heart too indifferent to Austria; Czechoslovakia was still full of old rancour and rivalries with Vienna—only Italy was left. At the time Italy was trying to establish an economic and political protectorate over Austria, so as to secure itself the Alpine passes and Trieste. But Mussolini asked a high price for that protection. Austria was to accept the Fascist line, there must be an end of the Austrian parliament, and with it Austrian democracy. That was going to be impossible without the elimination or disenfranchisement of the Social Democrats, the strongest and best-organised political party in Austria. The only way to break it was by brutal violence.

  Dollfuss’s predecessor, Ignaz Seipel, had already set up an organisation, known as the Heimwehr,14 to carry out this terrorist operation, At first glance the Heimwehr was the least impressive body imaginable, its members being small provincial lawyers, demobilised army officers, shady characters of various kinds, unemployed engineers—all of them mediocrities who had suffered disappointment in life and hated one another heartily. Finally a leader was found for them in the shape of young Prince Starhemberg, who had once sat at the feet of Hitler and denounced the Republic and democracy. Now he featured as Hitler’s antagonist, strutting about with his paramilitaries and promising that heads would roll. What exactly the Heimwehr proposed to do on the positive side was not at all clear. In fact its only aim was to get its snout in the trough, and the only power behind it was Mussolini’s strong fist propelling it forward. Claiming to be patriotic Austrians, its members failed to notice that in accepting the bayonets supplied by Italy, it was sawing off the branch it was sitting on.

  The Social Democratic party had a better idea of where the real danger lay. It did not really have any reason to fear open conflict. It had its own weapons—if it called a general strike it could cripple all the railways, the waterworks and the electricity plants. But it also knew that Hitler was just waiting for what he could call a Red Revolution, because that would give him a pretext for moving into Austria as its ‘saviour’. So the Social Democrats preferred to sacrifice a large part of their civil rights and even the Austrian parliament in order to come to a reasonable compromise. In view of the predicament in which Austria found itself in the looming shadow of Hitler, all sensible people supported such an arrangement. Even Dollfuss himself, a glib and ambitious but very realistic man, seemed inclined to accept the agreement. Young Starhemberg, however, with his friend Major Fey, who played a notable part in the assassination of Dollfuss, insisted that the Schutzbund15 must hand in its weapons, and every trace of democratic and bourgeois freedom must be annihilated. The Social Democrats opposed these demands, and threats passed back and forth between the two camps. It could be sensed that a decision was in the air now, and in this mood of general tension I could not help thinking apprehensively of Shakespeare’s words: “So foul a sky clears not without a storm.”16

  I was in Salzburg for only a few days, and soon went on to Vienna. And it was in those first days of February that the storm broke. The Heimwehr had attacked the municipal building in Linz where the workers had their headquarters, to seize the weapons that they assumed were stored there. The workers responded with a general strike, and Dollfuss in his own turn by calling for this artificially contrived ‘revolution’ to be put down by armed force. So the regular army closed in on the workers’ municipal buildings in Vienna with machine guns and artillery. There was bitter house-to-house fighting for three days, with democracy defending itself against Fascism for the last time until the Spanish Civil War. The workers held out for three days until falling to the superior technological force of their opponents.

  I was in Vienna during those three days, which makes me a first-hand witness of this deciding battle and with it the suicide of Austrian independence. But as I would like to be a truthful witness, I must paradoxically begin by admitting that I myself saw nothing at all of this revolution. A writer setting out to give as honest and graphic a picture as possible of the time in which he lives must also be brave enough to disappoint romantic expectations. And nothing strikes me as more characteristic of the form taken by revolutions today, and the methods they employ, than the fact that within the huge area of a modern metropolis they take place only in a very few parts of the city, and most of its population never sees anything. Strange as it may seem, I was in Vienna during those historic February days of 1934, and saw none of the crucial incidents going on there, nor did I know the least thing about them while they were in progress. Artillery was fired, buildings were occupied, hundreds of dead were carried away—and I never saw a single body. Every newspaper reader in New York, London and Paris knew more about what was really going on than those of us apparently well placed to witness it. And I later found more and more confirmation of the remarkable phenomenon whereby, in our days, you may be ten streets away from the scene of events which will have wide repercussions, and yet know less about them than people thousands of kilometres away. A few months later, when Dollfuss was assassinated in Vienna one day at twelve noon, I saw the news vendors’ placards in the streets of London at five-thirty that afternoon. I tried telephoning to Vienna at once; to my astonishment I was put through immediately, and discovered to my even greater amazement that in Vienna itself, five streets away from the Foreign Office, far less was known about the assassination than you could read on every street corner in London. So I can present only the negative, so to speak, of my experience of the Vienna revolution, by showing how little contemporaries see today of events that will change the face of the world and their own lives if they do not happen to be on the spot at the time. All I knew about it was this—I had an appointment to meet the choreographer of the Opera House, Margarethe Wallmann, in one of the cafés on the Ringstrasse. So I walked to the Ringstrasse, and thinking nothing of it was going to cross the road. A few men in makeshift old uniforms, carrying firearms, came up to me and asked where I was going. When I explained that I was on my way to the Café J, they let me pass. I had no idea why there were suddenly guardsmen in the street, or what they were actually planning to do there. In fact there had been bitter fighting with many shots fired in the suburbs for several hours that day, but no one in the city centre had any idea of it. Only when I got back to my hotel in the evening and went to pay my bill, because I was planning to travel back to Salzburg in the morning, did I hear from the clerk at the reception desk that he was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do that. The railways were on strike, he said, and there was trouble of some kind in the suburbs.

  Next day the newspapers published rather vague reports of a Social Democrat riot, adding that it had been more or less put down. The facts were that the fighting was at its worst that day, and the government decided to back up the machine guns already in use by bringing in artillery against the workers’ municipal headquarters. But I never heard the cannon either. If all Austria had been occupied at the time, whether by the Socialists, the National Socialists or the Communists, I would have known as little about it as the population of Munich did when they woke up that morning in the past to discover from the Münchener Neueste Nachtrichten that their city was in Hitler’s hands. At the heart of the city everything went on as calmly and regularly as usual, while battle raged in the suburbs, and we foolishly believed the official bulletins telling us that the dispute had been settled and was now over. I had to go and look something up in the National Library, where the students were reading and studying as usual; all the shops were open, no one was in a state of agitation. Only on the third day, when it really was all over, did the truth begin to come out bit by bit. On the morning of the fourth day, as soon as the trains were running again, I went back to Salzburg, where two or three acquaintances whom I met in the street immediately bombarded me with questions about what had been going on in Vienna. And I, a ‘first-hand witness’ of the revolution, had to tell them honestly: “I’m afraid I don’t know. You’d better buy a forei
gn newspaper.”

  As it happened, I came to a decision about my own life next day, in connection with the following events. When I arrived back from Vienna that afternoon, I went home to my house in Salzburg, found stacks of proofs and letters waiting for me there, and worked until late into the night to catch up with them. I was still lying in bed next morning when there was a knock on the bedroom door. Our good old manservant, who would never usually wake me if I had not expressly asked him to do so at a certain hour, appeared with an expression of dismay on his face. Would I come downstairs, please, he said; there were some gentlemen from the police who wanted to speak to me. I was rather surprised, but I put on my dressing gown and went down to the ground floor. There stood four policemen in plain clothes, who told me they had a warrant to search the place, and I was to hand over all the weapons of the Republican Schutzbund that were hidden in the house.

  I must confess that I was taken too much aback at first to say anything. Weapons of the Republican Schutzbund in my house? It was absurd. I had never belonged to any party or bothered with politics at all. I had been away from Salzburg for months, and apart from all that, it would have been utterly ridiculous to set up a weapons depot in this particular house, which was outside the city and on top of a mountain, so that anyone carrying rifles or other firearms could easily be observed on his way up. So all I said, in cool tones, was: “Do by all means look around.” The four detectives went through the house, opened several cupboards, tapped some of the walls, but it was instantly obvious to me from their casual search that it was just for form’s sake, and none of them seriously thought there was a weapons depot there. After half-an-hour they told me their search was over, and left.

  I am afraid that the reason why this farce annoyed me so much calls for an explanatory historical note. In the last few decades, Europe and the world had almost forgotten how sacred personal rights and civil liberties used to be. Since 1933 searches, arbitrary arrests, the confiscation of property, forced exile from a man’s hearth and home, deportations and every other form of humiliation imaginable had become almost everyday events to be taken for granted. I know hardly any of my European friends who have not gone through something of the sort. But at the time, early in 1934, having your house searched was still a monstrous affront in Austria. There must be some reason why a man like me, who kept his distance from all politics and had not even exercised his right to vote for years, should have been singled out, and in fact this was a typically Austrian affair. The Salzburg Chief of Police had been obliged to take severe action against the National Socialists, who were disturbing the population with bombs and explosives night after night, and stern control of this kind showed courage on his part, because even then the Nazi Party was employing its terrorist technique. Government offices received threatening letters every day, saying that if they went on “persecuting” National Socialists they were going to pay for it, and sure enough—for when it came to exacting revenge, the Nazis always kept their word one hundred per cent—the most loyal Austrian civil servants were taken off to concentration camps the day after Hitler’s invasion. So the idea of searching my house was a way of showing publicly that they did not shrink from taking such security measures in the case of anyone at all. However, behind this intrinsically insignificant little episode I sensed the present gravity of the state of affairs in Austria, and saw what enormous pressure Germany was putting on us. I did not like my house any more after that official visit, and a certain presentiment told me that such episodes were only the tentative prelude to much farther-reaching measures. That same evening I began packing my most important papers, determined to live only abroad from now on, and departure meant more than leaving my house and property because my family loved the house as they loved their native land. But to me, personal liberty was the most important thing on earth. Without telling any of my friends or acquaintances what I was going to do, I travelled back to London two days later. The first thing I did there was to inform the Salzburg authority responsible that I had given up residence in that city for good. It was the first step towards cutting the link between me and my native Austria. But I had known, since those few days in Vienna, that Austria was a lost cause, although I did not yet guess how much I myself was losing.