The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  That was how everyone felt, and so did I that day. The next day too was a happy one. The newspapers all rejoiced, rates shot up on the Stock Exchange, friendly messages came from Germany for the first time in years. There was some idea in France of putting up a monument to Chamberlain. But that was only the flame flaring brightly for the last time before it finally went out. Over the next few days, the depressing details seeped through—how complete capitulation to Hitler had been, how shamefully Czechoslovakia, which had been promised help and support, had been abandoned to its fate, and in the next week it was already obvious that capitulation to Hitler had not been enough. Even before the ink of the signatures on the agreement was dry, it was being breached in every point. Goebbels was shouting it to the rooftops that Britain had been up against the wall in Munich. The bright light of hope had gone out. But it had shone for a day or so, warming our hearts. I cannot forget those days, and would not wish to.

  Although I was in England, paradoxically enough, from the moment when we realised what had actually happened in Munich I mingled with few of my English acquaintances. It was my fault for avoiding them, or rather avoiding conversation with them, although I found myself admiring them more than ever. They were generous to the refugees who came flooding over now, and gave evidence of great helpfulness and sympathy. But a kind of wall grew up between them and us, keeping us on separate sides. We had been through what was coming on an earlier occasion, and they had not. We understood what had happened and would happen—but they refused to understand it, to some extent against their better judgement. In spite of everything they tried to persist in the delusion that a man’s word was his bond, a treaty was a treaty, and they could negotiate with Hitler if they were only reasonable and talked to him on a human level. Pledged to keep the law by hundreds of years of their democratic tradition, leading circles in British society could not or would not see that a new technique of deliberate and cynical amorality was being built up next door, and the new Germany was breaking all the rules of the game usual in dialogue between law-fearing nations as soon as those rules got in their way. To the clear-thinking and far-sighted British, who had given up ideas of adventure long ago, it seemed unlikely that a man like Hitler who had risen to such a high position so fast would go to extremes. They persisted in hoping and thinking that he would turn against other enemies first, preferably Russia, and in the interim period some kind of agreement with him could be reached. We, on the other hand, knew that terrible things were to be expected as a matter of course. We all had the image of a murdered friend or a tortured comrade in our minds, and so our eyes were colder, sharper, more unsparing. We had been cast out, hunted, deprived of our rights; we knew that no pretext was too ridiculous or mendacious when it came to robbery and violence. So we spoke different languages, those who had gone through trials and those who had been spared them, the emigrants and the British. I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that apart from a vanishingly small number of English people, we were alone in the country at that time in cherishing no illusions about the extent of the danger. As in Austria in the past, in England now I was fated to look ahead with painful clarity, torment in my heart, and see the inevitable approaching, except that here it was not for me, as a foreigner and a guest suffered to stay in the country, to issue warnings.

  So those of us already branded with the mark of war had only ourselves to talk to when the bitter foretaste of what was coming seared our lips, and our hearts were tormented by anxiety for the country that had taken us in like brothers. However, the friendly hours I spent with Sigmund Freud in those last months before the catastrophe showed me, memorably, how even in the darkest days a conversation with an intellectual man of the highest moral standards can bring immeasurable comfort and strength to the mind. For months the idea that Freud, then eighty-three years old and unwell, was still in Hitler’s Vienna weighed on me, until that wonderful woman Princess Maria Bonaparte,7 his most faithful pupil, managed to get him out of the city now reduced to servitude and bring him to London. It was a happy day in my life when I read in the newspaper that he was in the British Isles, and I saw the most revered of my friends, whom I had already thought lost, return from the realm of Hades.

  I had known Sigmund Freud—the great, stern figure who deepened and expanded our knowledge of the human mind like no one else of our time—in Vienna when he was still considered a dogged and awkward loner. Fanatical in his pursuit of truth, but also well aware that every truth has its limitations—he once said: “Nothing is one hundred percent true, just as there’s no one hundred per cent proof alcohol!”—he had alienated himself from the academic caution of the University by his tenacity in venturing into areas of the conscious and unconscious mind hitherto unexplored, indeed avoided fearfully, for the subject was in a sphere that, at the time, was decidedly taboo. The optimistically liberal world somehow sensed that this man of uncompromising intellect, with his theories of depth psychology, was implacably undermining its own belief in the gradual suppression of instinctive drives through reason and progress, and his pitiless technique of revelation would endanger its way of ignoring what was uncomfortable. However, not only did the University and the coterie of old-fashioned neurologists band together against this inconvenient outsider—so did the whole world, or the whole of the old world, the old way of thinking, moral conventions, the entire epoch that feared him as a man who would reveal secrets. Gradually a medical boycott formed against him, he lost his practice, and since it was impossible to provide scientific refutation of his theses and even the boldest of the problems he formulated, attempts were made to deal with his theories of the meaning of dreams in the typical Viennese way by treating them ironically or turning them into a joke, a comical parlour game. Only a small circle of faithful friends and students assembled around the solitary man for the weekly discussion evenings in which the new science of psychoanalysis first took form. Long before I myself was aware of the extent of the intellectual revolution slowly gathering pace as a result of the first works of Freud, which laid the foundations of psychoanalysis, that extraordinary man’s strong, morally unshakeable attitude had won me over. Here at last was the kind of man of science who was the ideal model for a young man, cautious in every statement he made until he had final proof of it and was absolutely certain, but not to be moved by the opposition of the whole world once he felt that a hypothesis was a valid certainty. He was a modest man himself, but would fight firmly for every point in his doctrines, and faithful until his death to the inherent truth that he defended in his scientific findings. I can think of no man more intellectually fearless. Freud would never shrink from saying what he thought, even if he knew that his clear, implacable approach was going to disturb and upset others. He never tried to make the least concession—even a formal one—to ease his difficult position. I am certain that Freud would have been able to express four-fifths of his theories without encountering any academic resistance if he had been prepared to put them in a more discreetly veiled form, to say ‘eroticism’ instead of ‘sexuality’, ‘Eros’ instead of ‘the libido’, and if he had not always insisted on setting out all his conclusions clearly but had just hinted at them. However, where his ideas and the truth were concerned, he was intransigent; the more resistance he met the more firmly determined he was. If I look around for an example of moral courage—the only form of heroism on earth that does not ask other people to make sacrifices—I always see before me the handsome, virile clarity of Freud’s face, with his calm dark eyes looking straight at you.

  The man who had fled to London from his native land, to which he had brought fame all over the world and for all time, was old and had been severely ill for some while. But he was not a bowed, exhausted figure. I had been secretly a little afraid of finding Freud embittered or with his mind disturbed when I saw him again, after all the terrible trials he must have endured in Vienna, but I found him more at ease and happier than ever. He took me out into the garden of his suburban London house. “Did I e
ver live better anywhere?” he asked, with a bright smile playing around the corners of his once severe mouth. He showed me his beloved Egyptian statuettes, which Maria Bonaparte had rescued for him. “I’m home again, as you see.” The big folio pages of the manuscript on which he was working lay open on his desk. At eighty-three he still wrote every day in the same clear, round hand, and his mind was as lucid and untiring as in his prime. His strong will had overcome everything—sickness, old age, exile, and for the first time the kindliness stored up in his nature during the long years of conflict flowed freely. Age had only made him milder, and the trials he had undergone more understanding. He sometimes indulged in affectionate gestures in a way I had never seen in him before, because he was a reserved man. He would put an arm around my shoulders, and there was a warmer expression in his eyes behind his flashing glasses. In all those years, a conversation with Freud had always been one of my greatest intellectual pleasures. You were learning from him and admiring him at the same time; you felt, with every word he spoke, that you were understood by that great mind, which never condemned anyone, and could not be shocked by any confession or thrown off balance by anything anyone said. To him, his will to see others clearly and help them to understand their own feelings equally clearly had long ago become the instinctive purpose of his life. But I never felt how irreplaceable those long conversations were, or felt it more gratefully, than in that dark year, the last of his life. As soon as you entered his room, it was as if the lunacy of the outside world had vanished. All that was particularly cruel became abstract, confusions were clarified, the present meekly took its place in the great cyclical phases of transient time. I truly felt, at last, that I really knew that genuinely wise man who rose above himself, regarding pain and death not as a personal experience but an impersonal subject for study and observation. His death was no less of a great moral achievement than his life. Freud was very ill at the time with the disease that was soon to take him from us. It was obviously hard for him to talk with the plate he wore in his mouth, and you felt ashamed of receiving every word he spoke because articulating it was such a strain. But he never let one word go unspoken. It meant much to his steel-hard mind to show his friends that his will was still stronger than the lesser torments his body gave him. Mouth distorted with pain, he wrote at his desk until the very last few days, and even when his sufferings kept him from sleeping at night—and his wonderfully deep, healthy sleep had been the source of his strength for eighty years—he refused sleeping pills or painkilling injections. He did not want the clarity of his mind to be impaired for a single hour by such palliatives, he prefered to suffer and stay fully conscious, he would rather think while in pain than not think at all. His was a heroic mind to the very last moment. His death was a terrible struggle, and the longer it lasted the more uplifting it was. As time went by, death cast its shadow more and more clearly over his face. Death hollowed his cheek, chiselled the line of his temples beside his brow, twisted his mouth sharply, silenced his lips. But Death the dark strangler could not prevail over his eyes and the impregnable watchtower from which his heroic spirit looked out at the world. Eyes and mind remained clear to the last. Once, on one of my last visits to him, I took Salvador Dalí, in my view the most talented painter of the new generation, who venerated Freud. While I was talking to Freud, Dalí did a sketch of him. I never dared show it to Freud, because Dalí had prophetically shown death in his face.

  That struggle by the strongest will and most penetrating mind of our time against its downfall grew more and more cruel. Only when he himself clearly recognised—he, to whom clarity had always been the prime virtue of thought—that he would not be able to write or think any more did he act as a Roman hero would, and allow the doctor to put an end to his pain. It was a fine conclusion to a fine life, a memorable death even among the many deaths of that murderous time. And when we, his friends, lowered his coffin into English earth, we knew that we had given that earth the best of our own native land.

  I often mentioned the horrors of Hitler’s world and the war in those conversations with Freud. As a humane man, he was deeply distressed by that terrible outbreak of bestiality, but as a thinker he was not at all surprised. He had always been considered a pessimist, he said, because he denied the supremacy of culture over our instinctive drives, and current events confirmed in the most dreadful way—not that he was proud of it—his opinion that it is impossible to root the elemental, barbaric destructive drive out of the human psyche. Perhaps, he said, some means of at least suppressing such instincts in the communal life of nations might be found in centuries yet to come, but they would remain ineradicable forces in daily life and fundamental human nature, and maybe they were necessary to maintain a vital tension. In those last days of his life he was even more concerned with the problem of Jewish identity and the present tragedy. The scientist in him had nothing to suggest here, and his lucid mind knew no answer to the problem. He had recently published his study of Moses, presenting Moses himself as a non-Jew, an Egyptian, and by placing him in that category, a theory that would be hard to substantiate, he had offended devout Jews as much as the nationalists. He was sorry now, he said, that he had published the book in the middle of the most terrible hour in Jewish history—“Now that everything is being taken away from the Jews I come along and take away their great man as well.” I had to agree with him that every Jew had now become seven times more sensitive, for even in the middle of international tragedy they were the real victims, the victims everywhere because they had already been stricken before this blow fell, and wherever they went they knew that all evils would affect them first and to a greater degree, and that Hitler, a man more rabid with hatred than any other in history, was intent on humiliating them and would hunt them to the ends of the earth until they were underground. More and more refugees kept arriving week after week, month after month, and every week in more poverty and distress than the refugees who had arrived the week before. The first to leave Germany and Austria in haste had been able to save their clothes, their baggage, their household goods, and many of them even brought some money out. But the longer they had believed in Germany, the harder it was for them to tear themselves away from the country they loved and the worse it had been for them. First the Jews had been forbidden to work in their professions, to go to the theatre, the cinema, museums, and academics had been banned from visiting the libraries. They had stayed on out of either apathy or a sense of loyalty, timidity or pride. They would rather, they thought, be humiliated at home than lower themselves to the status of beggars abroad. Then they had been deprived of their domestic servants; radios and telephones had been removed from their homes, then those homes themselves had been confiscated, and they had been forced to wear the Star of David, so that everyone would avoid them in the street like lepers and they would be recognised as outcasts, to be avoided and abused. All their rights were cancelled, they suffered all kinds of mental and physical violence, inflicted on them with playful relish, and every Jew found that the old Russian proverb—“No one is safe from the beggar’s bag or from prison”—had suddenly come horribly true for them. Those who were left were thrown into concentration camps, where German discipline broke the spirit of even the proudest, robbed them of everything and expelled them from the country with only the clothes they wore and ten marks in their pockets. On reaching the border they had to beg at consulates for shelter in their lands, usually in vain, because what country wanted to take in destitute beggars who had lost everything? I will never forget the sight I saw one day in a London travel agency. It was full of refugees, nearly all of them Jewish, and they all wanted to go somewhere, anywhere. It didn’t matter what country, they would have gone to the ice of the North Pole or the blazing sands of the Sahara just to get away, move on, because their permits to stay where they were had run out and they had to move on with their wives and children, under strange stars, in a world where foreign languages were spoken, among people whom they didn’t know and who didn’t want t
o know them. I came upon a man there who had once been a very rich Viennese industrialist and also one of our most intelligent art collectors. I didn’t recognise him at first, he looked so old, grey and tired as he clung faintly to a table with both hands. I asked where he wanted to go. “I don’t know,” he said. “Who bothers about what we want these days? You go wherever they’ll still let you. Someone told me it might be possible to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.” It wrung my heart—an old, exhausted man with children and grandchildren, trembling with the hope of moving to a country he could hardly even have located on the map, just so that he could go on begging his way there, a stranger without any real aim left in life! Near us, someone else was asking with desperate eagerness how you got to Shanghai. He had heard that the Chinese would still let refugees in. They were all crowded together there, former university professors, bankers, businessmen, property-owners, musicians, all of them prepared to go anywhere, over land and sea, with the pitiful ruins of their lives, to do anything and put up with anything just to get away from Europe. They were like a company of ghosts. But what shook me most was the thought that these fifty tormented people represented only a tiny advance guard of the vast, scattered army of five, eight, perhaps as many as ten million Jews already setting out in their wake, millions of people who had been robbed and then crushed in the war, waiting for donations from charities, for permission from the authorities, for money to travel, a gigantic crowd, cruelly expelled and fleeing in panic from the forest fire started by Hitler, thronging the railway stations on all European borders, an entire disenfranchised nation forbidden to be a nation, but a nation all the same, wanting nothing so much, after two thousand years, as not to be made to go on wandering, to find quiet, peaceful ground on which they could venture to rest their feet.