Stefan Zweig's 'The World of Yesterday'.
There is so much one could write about this extraordinary memoir: the roll-call of twentieth-century personalities that Stefan Zweig met and knew, the searing honesty of his reflections on the callow but very fortunate youth he was when he came into contact with ‘the real world’ (even before the events that were to turn Europe and much of the rest of the world upside down), music, education, gender relations, the role of women, the array of countries he visited and his assessment of their benefits and drawbacks, his views on Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism. This is a remarkable life, beautifully told.
But what struck me most about it, page after page, was the uncanny similarity between the accelerating slide to geopolitical disaster he describes and the chaotic situation we are living through today. I ended up reading ‘The World of Yesterday’ as a long cautionary note about The World of Today.
Zweig was born in 1881, an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist, pacifist - and victim of the volcanic changes that took place in the first 40 or so years of the twentieth century. ‘Against my will,’ he writes, ‘I’ve been witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the whole of history.’ Looking around, we might be forgiven for thinking that, hyperbole apart, brutality again reigns supreme while reason is stuffed away at the back of the spice rack.
Analysing the reasons for the catastrophic world wars that marked the first half of the twentieth century, Zweig lays much of the blame at the door of nationalism. He writes that he’s ‘experienced revolution, hunger, devaluation, terror, epidemics, emigration, fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the pestiferous plague of nationalism’.
From ‘America First’ to Brexit and the right-wing mobilisation of nationalist sentiment, we’re presently assailed by similar forces, designed to tear apart the fragile arrangements that keep centrifugal tendencies in check. He talks of the ‘thin layer’ of liberal impulses, so susceptible to the collapse of conciliation, and the ‘invasion of politics by brute force’. Ring any bells?
He writes that, ‘In spite of everything we all persisted with the illusion that one’s word was one’s word, that an agreement was an agreement and that one could negotiate with Hitler if one talked with him sensibly … The new Germany was overturning all the rules of the game as far as relations with other countries were concerned, as well as any legal frameworks that didn’t suit it.’ As Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu make a diabolical habit of saying one thing and doing another, riding roughshod over international law and apparently free to do so, the parallels are obvious. ‘Hitler turned lies into an everyday occurrence’, says Zweig. More chilling parallels.
Another theme is the rapidity with which everything can fall apart, how a settled and peaceful life can be turned upside down practically without warning. On the very eve of what was to become the First World War, the beaches and restaurants were full, then they were shared with soldiers carrying rifles, and then they were empty.
And Zweig experienced this calamity not once but twice. Here he is on events as Hitler came into power: ‘To tell the absolute truth I have to admit that in Germany and Austria in 1933 and 1934 we didn’t think that a hundredth or even a thousandth of what would happen a few weeks later was possible’. Part of the reason for this, Zweig tells us, is that no-one took the looming threats seriously. In particular, Hitler was a figure of fun who everyone took for a buffoon and who would disappear from the stage once he was rumbled for what he was: a narcissistic rabble-rouser whose flame would soon burn out once reason prevailed. ‘Our belief in reason, that its use would help us avoid all the madness at the last moment, was our only mistake … Our idealism, our optimism, rooted in decades of progress, led us to underestimating and badly misjudging the oncoming danger’. More bells ringing?
In a final echo of today Zweig writes unbelievingly of how quickly and profoundly cruelty and brutality can be normalised, with barely a shrug of the shoulders from the international community. ‘In 1938', he says, ‘our world was already more used to inhumanity, anarchy and brutality than for hundreds of years. While in the before times what happened in the unfortunate city of Vienna would have been enough to provoke international ostracism, in 1938 the world’s conscience either remained silent or grumbled a little before forgetting and forgiving’.
It’s impossible to read these words without thinking of what’s been going on in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon since October 7th 2023 (well, since long before that but hopefully the point is taken). Blind eye after blind eye has been turned by leaders across the world as the genocidal regime run by Benjamin Netanyahu, and apparently supported by a good majority of the Israeli population, has murdered tens of thousands of men, women and children and displaced (again and again) tens of thousands more.
No-one who reads ‘The World of Yesterday’ can say we haven’t been warned about the dangers of ignoring evil when it’s staring us in the face. The evil that, in the end, did for Stefan Zweig. A few days after finishing the manuscript he and his second wife committed suicide in the city of Petrópolis in Brazil.
They were found holding hands.
There is so much one could write about this extraordinary memoir: the roll-call of twentieth-century personalities that Stefan Zweig met and knew, the searing honesty of his reflections on the callow but very fortunate youth he was when he came into contact with ‘the real world’ (even before the events that were to turn Europe and much of the rest of the world upside down), music, education, gender relations, the role of women, the array of countries he visited and his assessment of their benefits and drawbacks, his views on Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism. This is a remarkable life, beautifully told.
But what struck me most about it, page after page, was the uncanny similarity between the accelerating slide to geopolitical disaster he describes and the chaotic situation we are living through today. I ended up reading ‘The World of Yesterday’ as a long cautionary note about The World of Today.
Zweig was born in 1881, an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist, pacifist - and victim of the volcanic changes that took place in the first 40 or so years of the twentieth century. ‘Against my will,’ he writes, ‘I’ve been witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the whole of history.’ Looking around, we might be forgiven for thinking that, hyperbole apart, brutality again reigns supreme while reason is stuffed away at the back of the spice rack.
Analysing the reasons for the catastrophic world wars that marked the first half of the twentieth century, Zweig lays much of the blame at the door of nationalism. He writes that he’s ‘experienced revolution, hunger, devaluation, terror, epidemics, emigration, fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the pestiferous plague of nationalism’.
From ‘America First’ to Brexit and the right-wing mobilisation of nationalist sentiment, we’re presently assailed by similar forces, designed to tear apart the fragile arrangements that keep centrifugal tendencies in check. He talks of the ‘thin layer’ of liberal impulses, so susceptible to the collapse of conciliation, and the ‘invasion of politics by brute force’. Ring any bells?
He writes that, ‘In spite of everything we all persisted with the illusion that one’s word was one’s word, that an agreement was an agreement and that one could negotiate with Hitler if one talked with him sensibly … The new Germany was overturning all the rules of the game as far as relations with other countries were concerned, as well as any legal frameworks that didn’t suit it.’ As Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu make a diabolical habit of saying one thing and doing another, riding roughshod over international law and apparently free to do so, the parallels are obvious. ‘Hitler turned lies into an everyday occurrence’, says Zweig. More chilling parallels.
Another theme is the rapidity with which everything can fall apart, how a settled and peaceful life can be turned upside down practically without warning. On the very eve of what was to become the First World War, the beaches and restaurants were full, then they were shared with soldiers carrying rifles, and then they were empty.
And Zweig experienced this calamity not once but twice. Here he is on events as Hitler came into power: ‘To tell the absolute truth I have to admit that in Germany and Austria in 1933 and 1934 we didn’t think that a hundredth or even a thousandth of what would happen a few weeks later was possible’. Part of the reason for this, Zweig tells us, is that no-one took the looming threats seriously. In particular, Hitler was a figure of fun who everyone took for a buffoon and who would disappear from the stage once he was rumbled for what he was: a narcissistic rabble-rouser whose flame would soon burn out once reason prevailed. ‘Our belief in reason, that its use would help us avoid all the madness at the last moment, was our only mistake … Our idealism, our optimism, rooted in decades of progress, led us to underestimating and badly misjudging the oncoming danger’. More bells ringing?
In a final echo of today Zweig writes unbelievingly of how quickly and profoundly cruelty and brutality can be normalised, with barely a shrug of the shoulders from the international community. ‘In 1938', he says, ‘our world was already more used to inhumanity, anarchy and brutality than for hundreds of years. While in the before times what happened in the unfortunate city of Vienna would have been enough to provoke international ostracism, in 1938 the world’s conscience either remained silent or grumbled a little before forgetting and forgiving’.
It’s impossible to read these words without thinking of what’s been going on in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon since October 7th 2023 (well, since long before that but hopefully the point is taken). Blind eye after blind eye has been turned by leaders across the world as the genocidal regime run by Benjamin Netanyahu, and apparently supported by a good majority of the Israeli population, has murdered tens of thousands of men, women and children and displaced (again and again) tens of thousands more.
No-one who reads ‘The World of Yesterday’ can say we haven’t been warned about the dangers of ignoring evil when it’s staring us in the face. The evil that, in the end, did for Stefan Zweig. A few days after finishing the manuscript he and his second wife committed suicide in the city of Petrópolis in Brazil.
They were found holding hands.
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