by Stefan Zweig
Fortunately my mother was spared long experience of such brutal humiliation. She died a few months after the occupation of Vienna, and I cannot refrain from recording an incident connected with her death. It seems to me important to mention such details for the benefit of posterity, who will surely consider these things impossible. My mother, aged eighty-four, was found unconscious one morning. The doctor who was called in said at once that she was unlikely to live through the next night, and found a nurse, a woman of about forty, to stay beside her deathbed. Neither my brother nor I, her only children, were in the city, and of course we couldn’t come back; even returning to see our dying mother would have been considered a crime by the representatives of German culture. A cousin said he would spend the evening there, so that at least one of the family was with her when she died. This cousin of ours was a man of sixty at the time, not in good health himself, and in fact he died a year later. When he began improvising himself a bed for the night in the next room, the nurse came in and said—to her credit, looking ashamed of it—that under the new German laws she was afraid that meant she couldn’t stay with her patient overnight. My cousin was Jewish, and as a woman under fifty she wasn’t allowed to spend a night under the same roof as a Jew, even to care for a dying woman. By the standards of the Streicher mentality, any Jew’s first thought was bound to be to commit an act of ‘racial disgrace’ with her.5 Of course, she said, this prohibition was terribly embarrassing to her, but she was obliged to obey the law. So my sixty-year-old cousin had to leave the apartment that evening, just to enable the nurse to stay with my dying mother. It will perhaps be understandable that I thought my mother lucky not to have to live among such people any longer.
The fall of Austria brought a change in my private life which at first seemed to me entirely unimportant, a mere formality. I lost my Austrian passport and had to apply to the British authorities for a white substitute document, a passport for a stateless person. In my cosmopolitan reveries I had often secretly thought what a fine thing it would be, how very much in accordance with my own feelings, to be stateless, owing no obligation to any country and for that very reason belonging to them all without distinction. But yet again I was forced to recognise how inadequate the human imagination is, since we understand our strongest feelings only when we have suffered them in person. Ten years earlier, when I happened to meet Dmitri Merezhkovsky in Paris and he was bewailing the fact that his books were banned in Russia, I had tried to console him—rather thoughtlessly, given my own inexperience—by making light of that fact, which was as nothing compared to their distribution all over the world. I understood his grief that his words could now appear only in translation, in a changed and diluted medium, much better when my own books disappeared from the German language. And only at the moment when, after some time spent in the applicants’ waiting room, I was admitted to the British office dealing with these matters, did I really understand what exchanging my passport for a document describing me as an alien meant. I had had a right to my Austrian passport. It had been the duty of every Austrian consular official or police officer to issue it to me as an Austrian citizen with full civil rights. But I had had to ask for the favour of receiving this English document issued to me as an alien, and it was a favour that could be withdrawn at any time. Overnight I had gone down another step in the social scale. Yesterday I had still been a foreign guest with something of the status of a gentleman, spending his internationally earned money here and paying his taxes, but now I was an emigrant, a refugee. I had been placed in a lower although not dishonourable category. From now on I also had to ask specially for every foreign visa stamped on that sheet of white paper, since all countries were suspicious of the kind of person I had suddenly become, without rights or a native land, someone who could be turned out at will and deported back to his birthplace if he was a nuisance or outstayed his welcome. I kept thinking of something a Russian exile had said to me years before: “A man used to have only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport too, or he won’t be treated as a man.”
And indeed, perhaps nothing more graphically illustrates the monstrous relapse the world suffered after the First World War than the restrictions on personal freedom of movement and civil rights. Before 1914 the earth belonged to the entire human race. Everyone could go where he wanted and stay there as long as he liked. No permits or visas were necessary, and I am always enchanted by the amazement of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I travelled to India and America without a passport. Indeed, I had never set eyes on a passport. You boarded your means of transport and got off it again, without asking or being asked any questions; you didn’t have to fill in a single one of the hundred forms required today. No permits, no visas, nothing to give you trouble; the borders that today, thanks to the pathological distrust felt by everyone for everyone else, are a tangled fence of red tape were then nothing but symbolic lines on the map, and you crossed them as unthinkingly as you can cross the meridian in Greenwich. It was not until after the war that National Socialism began destroying the world, and the first visible symptom of that intellectual epidemic of the present century was xenophobia—hatred or at least fear of foreigners. People were defending themselves against foreigners everywhere; they were kept out of everywhere. All the humiliations previously devised solely for criminals were now inflicted on every traveller before and during a journey. You had to be photographed from right and left, in profile and full face, hair cut short enough to show your ears; you had to have fingerprints taken—first just your thumbs, then all ten digits; you had to be able to show certificates—of general health and inoculations—papers issued by the police certifying that you had no criminal record; you had to be able to produce documentary proof of recommendations and invitations, with addresses of relatives; you had to have other documents guaranteeing that you were of good moral and financial repute; you had to fill in and sign forms in triplicate or quadruplicate, and if just one of this great stack of pieces of paper was missing you were done for.
All this seems petty, and at first glance it may seem petty of me to mention it at all. But this pointless pettiness has cost our generation a great deal of valuable and irretrievable time. When I work out how many forms I have filled in over the last few years—declarations before making any journey, tax returns, certificates of foreign exchange, forms made out for crossing borders, applications for permits to stay in a country and travel out of it, registration forms for arrival and departure—when I think how many hours I have spent in the waiting rooms of consulates and government offices, facing officials friendly and unfriendly, bored or over-stressed; when I think of the time taken being searched and questioned at border crossing points, only then do I realise how much human dignity has been lost in this century. When we were young we dreamt of it trustingly as a century of liberty and the advent of an era of international citizenship. So much of our productivity, creativity and thought has been wasted by this unproductive and simultaneously soul-destroying fretfulness! Every single one of us has studied more official regulations than books to nurture the mind in these years. Your introduction to a foreign city or a foreign country was no longer, as it used to be, by way of its museums or its scenery, but through getting a permit at a consulate or police station. When we were together—and by ‘we’ I mean those of us who used to discuss the poetry of Baudelaire and hold impassioned conversations on intellectual problems—we found ourselves talking about affidavits and permits, and whether to apply for a long-term visa or a tourist visa. In the last decade, knowing a girl who works in a consulate and can cut the waiting time short has been more crucially important than the friendship of someone like Toscanini or Rolland. We have been constantly made to feel that we might have been born free, but we were now regarded as objects, not subjects, and nothing was our right but was merely a favour granted by the authorities. We have been repeatedly questioned, registered, issued with numbers, searched, rubber-stamped, and today, incorrigible representative of a freer age
that I am, the would-be citizen of a world republic, I regard every one of those rubber stamps in my passport as a brand, all those questionings and searches as demeaning. Yes, all these things are petty, mere pettiness, I know it, pettiness in a time when the value of human life has fallen even faster than the value of currencies. But only if we record these little symptoms will a later world be able to make a correct diagnosis of the circumstances and intellectual devastation of the world we knew between the two world wars.
Perhaps I had been over-indulged in the old days. Perhaps my sensitivity was gradually over-exacerbated by the abrupt reversals of the last few years. Every form of emigration inevitably, of its nature, tends to upset your equilibrium. You lose—and this too has to be experienced to be understood—you lose something of your upright bearing if you no longer have the soil of your own land beneath your feet; you feel less confident, more distrustful of yourself. And I do not hesitate to confess that since the day when I first had to live with papers or passports essentially foreign to me, I have not felt that I entirely belong to myself any more. Something of my natural identity has been destroyed for ever with my original, real self. I have become less outgoing than really suits me, and today I—the former cosmopolitan—keep feeling as if I had to offer special thanks for every breath of air that I take in a foreign country, thus depriving its own people of its benefit. If I think about it clearly, of course I know that is absurd, but when has reason ever had the upper hand of your own feelings? It has not been any help that for almost half-a-century I trained my heart to beat as the heart of a citizen of the world. On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders.
But I was not alone in this sense of insecurity. Unrest gradually began spreading all over Europe. The political horizon had been dark since the day Hitler marched into Austria, and those in Britain who had secretly prepared the way for him, hoping that would buy peace for their own country, began having second thoughts. From 1938 onwards every conversation in London, Paris, Rome, Brussels, in any town or village, far removed as it might initially seem from the subject, led to the inevitable question of whether and how war could be avoided or at least postponed. Looking back at all those months of the constant and growing fear of war in Europe, I remember only two or three days of real confidence, two or three days when I felt once more, and for the last time, that the clouds would pass over, and we would be able to breathe freely and in peace again. Perversely, those two or three days were the very ones that are now described as the most fateful in recent history—the days when Chamberlain and Hitler met in Munich.
I know that no one now likes to be reminded of that meeting, when Chamberlain and Daladier, with their backs to the wall and helpless, caved in to Hitler and Mussolini. But as I am trying to present the facts of the matter here, I must admit that everyone who lived through those three days in England felt that they were wonderful while they lasted. The situation at the end of September 1938 was dire. Chamberlain was just back from his second flight to see Hitler, and a few days later we knew what had happened. He had gone to Godesberg to grant Hitler, without reservation, everything that Hitler had previously demanded of him in Berchtesgaden. But what had seemed adequate to Hitler a few weeks earlier was no longer enough to satisfy his hysterical lust for power. The policy of appeasement and the principle of ‘try, try and try again’ had failed miserably; the epoch of trust and confidence came to an end in Britain overnight. Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Europe as a whole had to choose between bowing to Hitler’s will for power or taking up arms against him, with no other option. Britain seemed determined to fight. The country’s rearmament was not being hushed up any longer, but was shown openly, even ostentatiously. Workmen suddenly appeared and began digging in the London parks—Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, right opposite the German Embassy—building shelters for the air raids that were expected. The navy was mobilised; officers of the general staff kept flying between Paris and London to ensure that France and Britain coordinated their final preparations. Ships bound for America were besieged by foreigners wanting to get to safety in good time. Britain had not been so much on the alert since 1914. People were visibly more serious and thoughtful. You looked at the buildings and the crowded railway stations wondering, secretly, whether bombs would be dropping on them next day. And Londoners stood and sat behind closed doors to listen to the radio news. Invisibly, yet perceptibly in everyone at every moment, there was great tension throughout the country.
Then came the historic session of Parliament when Chamberlain told the House of Commons that he had made another attempt to come to an agreement with Hitler, and yet again, for the third time, had proposed visiting him in Germany at any place he chose in the hope of lifting the threat of war. No answer had yet come. But in the middle of the meeting of Parliament—with timing that was only too dramatic—a telegram arrived to say that Hitler and Mussolini would agree to a conference in Munich. At that moment the Parliament of Britain ran wild—an almost unprecedented event in the country’s history. MPs leapt to their feet, shouting and applauding. The galleries echoed with jubilation. The honourable old House had not been in the grip of such an outburst of elation for years and years as it was at that moment. In human terms, it was a wonderful sight to see how genuine enthusiasm for the thought that peace could be preserved overcame the reserved, stiff-upper-lip attitude generally displayed by the British with such virtuoso skill. Politically, however, that outburst was a serious mistake, for the wild rejoicing in Parliament showed how much the country hated the thought of war, and how ready it was to make any sacrifice for the sake of peace, giving up its own interests and even its own prestige. The result meant that from the first Chamberlain was marked out as a man going to Munich not to fight for peace but to beg for it. But still no one guessed what kind of capitulation lay ahead. Everyone thought—I thought myself—that Chamberlain was going to Munich to negotiate, not to surrender. Then there were another two or three days of waiting on tenterhooks, days when the whole world seemed to hold its breath. Digging went on in the parks, work went on in the munitions factories, anti-aircraft guns were put in place, gas masks were handed out, the evacuation of children from London was considered and mysterious preparations made. No one really understood them, but everyone knew what they were for. Morning, noon, evening and night were passed again in waiting for the newspaper and listening to the radio. That terrible waiting for a Yes or No, with nerves torn to shreds, was like those moments in July 1914 all over again.
And then, suddenly, the oppressive storm clouds cleared as if blown away by a mighty gust of wind, hearts cast off their burden, minds were easy again. News came that Hitler and Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini had come to a complete understanding, and even better, that Chamberlain had succeeded in concluding an agreement with Germany which guaranteed the peaceful resolution of all possible future conflicts between the two countries. It seemed like a decisive victory for the persistent desire for peace shown by a Prime Minister who, in himself, was a dry-as-dust, insignificant statesman, and all hearts beat in gratitude to him at that first moment. The message of “peace for our time”6 was first heard on the radio, and it told our much-tried generation that we could live in peace and free of care once more and go on helping to construct a new and better world. Anyone who tries to deny in retrospect that he was bewitched by those magic words is a liar. Who could believe that a man coming home defeated would stage a triumphal procession? That morning, if the vast majority of Londoners had known precisely when Chamberlain would be arriving back from Munich, hundreds of thousands would have been waiting at the airfield in Croydon to welcome and applaud him as the man who, so we all thought at the time, had saved the peace of Europe and the honour of Britain. Then came the newspapers. They showed the photograph of Chamberlain, whose harsh-featured face usually bore an unfortunate similarity to the head of an angry bird, standin
g in the doorway of the aeroplane, proud and laughing, waving that historic piece of paper announcing “peace for our time”, bringing it home to his people like the most precious of gifts. By evening the cinemas were already showing the scene on newsreels. Audiences jumped up from their seats, shouting and cheering—almost embracing in the spirit of the new fraternity now expected to spread all over the world. Everyone in Britain and particularly London at the time found that an unforgettable day, a day to lift the heart.
I like to walk about the streets on such historic days so as to get an even stronger and more immediate idea of the atmosphere, literally breathing the air of the time. The workmen had stopped digging in the parks, and people stood around them laughing and talking, because the message of “peace for our time” had rendered the air-raid shelters superfluous. I heard two young men making fun of the shelters in the purest cockney, expressing a hope that they could be converted into underground public conveniences, since London didn’t have nearly enough of those. Everyone joined in the laughter, all the people there seemed refreshed, livelier, like plants after a heavy storm. They walked more erect than the day before, their shoulders were straight again, and there was a cheerful light in those usually cool English eyes. The buildings seemed less dismal now that the threat of bombs was gone, the buses looked smarter, the sun brighter, the spirits of thousands upon thousands were raised and strengthened by that one intoxicating phrase. I felt elated myself. I walked on without tiring, faster and faster, more relaxed. I too was borne up more strongly and cheerfully by the new wave of confidence. On the corner of Piccadilly I suddenly saw someone hastily coming towards me. He was a British civil servant whom I knew, but only slightly, and he was naturally a reserved and unemotional man. In normal circumstances we would just have passed the time of day politely, and it would never have occurred to him to accost me. Now, however, he came right up to me, eyes shining. “Well, what about Chamberlain, then?” he said, beaming with delight. “Nobody believed him, but he was right all along. He never gave way, and he’s saved peace.”