The Civilization that Sleepwalked into its Demise

The subtitle of the book, Memoirs of a European, hints at how Zweig saw his place in the world. He was a Jew and an Austrian, but he considered himself a European before anything else. The Jewish dimension of his identity requires a word. In the 1780s, Kaiser Josef II had issued his Edicts of Toleration, pressing the Jews of the Habsburg lands—who had until then lived largely apart—to assimilate into German-Austrian culture. The process, conducted across generations, was substantially successful. By Zweig's time, the Jews of Vienna and the other western cities of the empire numbered among the Kaiser's most loyal subjects and his most culturally productive: in literature, music, and art, their prominence had become, during the late nineteenth century, something close to disproportionate. When Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) embarked on his campaign for a Jewish homeland, the assimilated Jews, like Zweig, characteristically did not see the appeal. Why have our own country when we can live here under good Franz Josef? Herzl's Zionism found a far more receptive audience among the Jews of the empire's eastern provinces, who were then migrating westward in large numbers and who had never undergone the assimilationist passage that distinguished Zweig's milieu from theirs. The rising antisemitism of those decades was directed principally at this population of Jews; yet it did not spare the assimilated Jews, who had, according to Zweig, long since ceased to think of themselves primarily as Jews at all.

Zweig was born into a wealthy family and thus was able to attend the Gymnasium, the most selective and prestigious of the secondary schools. One expects chapters about school to be tedious, and is surprised: the gap between Zweig's world and ours shows itself even in these unremarkable matters. Zweig is not a romantic glorifying the past: he acknowledges the school’s shortcomings without hesitation. The teachers, though better educated than their contemporary counterparts, were in the main uninspiring, and maintained with their pupils a distance that was formal to the point of coldness. School even then was mass instruction—a smaller mass than today's, but a mass all the same. The kind of intimate education a young aristocrat once received, a private tutor cultivating a master-and-apprentice bond around the boy's strongest subject, was simply not on offer at the Gymnasium, which served the upper class without quite serving the upper estate. After a few years, Zweig confesses, the stale lessons had lost him entirely.

Yet formal instruction was, for Zweig's generation, almost beside the point. One's peers can often have a stronger influence on a pupil’s education than teachers. Zweig and his classmates were interested in everything. He describes them sneaking into the Burgtheater—one one of Europe’s most illustrious theaters and an institution that has since degenerated into a subsidized amenity for the academic left—to see rehearsals for the newest plays. They sought out the newest literature and tracked down obscure poets their teachers had never heard of, who would only become famous decades later. Zweig captures with particular brilliance the aspirational, if at times competitive, intellectualism of adolescence—the quoting of newly discovered thinkers not to illuminate but to provoke curiosity, to send one’s peers off in pursuit of the same sources. Nietzsche, then largely unknown to the public, was a hero of Zweig's class. The point he is making is larger than the anecdotes. The decisive element in any education is the pupil himself. The finest school will achieve little with incurious students but even a mediocre school, one staffed with tired and tedious teachers, can produce great individuals.

Zweig's life as a writer began at school, where he published poems in newspapers under a pseudonym. After his graduation in 1900, he decided to study at the university to please his parents, who wanted their son to get a doctorate—titles being, in Austria, then and now, a serious matter. However, Zweig was not particularly interested in his studies and traveled to Berlin, where he met artists and took the measure of the wider world. He still managed to get his doctorate, largely thanks to his professors’ indulgence, who could see his talents and let him pass despite his mediocre academic work. That indulgent attitude is another part of The World of Yesterday that is completely lost to us. Our universities are managerial, bureaucratic institutions that leave no space for individuality. A Doctor of Philosophy today may have more facts at his disposal than Stefan Zweig ever did, and still it is fair to ask whether he is the better educated of the two.

While it is easy to be nostalgic for the old world, an honest view also takes into account the defects. Franz Josef, who had come to the throne at eighteen to crush the national-liberal revolutionaries of 1848, was an old man by the century's end, and the empire had aged with him. Society came to be dominated by the old. Advancement in the imperial service required one condition: outlasting everyone else. Zweig recalls that the appointment of Gustav Mahler to direct the state opera was nearly a scandal on the grounds of his youth—he was thirty-eight. The formal elites were old, and they governed as old men in charge of large institutions tend to govern: conservatively, in the least attractive sense of the word. This rigidity extended into the domain of sexual morality. In a chapter entirely dedicated to the prudish character of that age, Zweig recounts the case of a woman, married at around thirty and entirely ignorant of the facts of the matter, who fled back to her family on her wedding night in tears because her husband had expected her to undress in front of him. Extreme, perhaps; but the tension between natural instinct and enforced repression had its entirely predictable consequences, among them a substantial underground market in prostitution.

Coinciding with this gerontocratic rule is another phenomenon: the feeling of an "end of history.” While Zweig viewed this positively in his opening chapter, I find it disquieting. We associate the phrase with the years after the Cold War, but the 1890s knew the feeling well. Major wars had been absent for some time; technological progress and political stability were improving the material lot of everyone, even dissolving the grievances of the proletariat. Zweig cites the proliferation of insurance schemes—against accidents, against illness, against every conceivable misfortune—as an index of civilizational progress. His judgment here, I think, is inverted. It was precisely this security, this sense that the future had been settled in advance, that fed the conservative gerontocracy he deplores in other chapters. A society persuaded that history has little reason to renew itself.

Excluded from power and impatient with stasis, the youth of that time grew rebellious. To Zweig's delight, the prewar years saw an eruption of avant-garde movements across the arts. His own rising fame as a writer brought him into contact with artists and thinkers across Europe. Travel, by then, had been made easy by the railways. For the cosmopolitan upper class to which Zweig belonged, Europe was already becoming a lived reality rather than a geographic abstraction. Europe was becoming a single place, and Zweig and his friends felt themselves Europeans in earnest. The petty nationalisms that had periodically disrupted earlier decades seemed to be receding. This sense of convergence, of a common civilization moving together into an open future, was the dominant mood of Zweig’s circle—until, in a moment, it was not.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would mark the beginning of the end to this buoyant European optimism but the significance of the event wouldn’t come to be appreciated until later. The shock passed quickly, the Archduke was forgotten, and ordinary life resumed even as, in the back rooms, the diplomatic games went on and the ultimatums were drafted. According to Zweig, decades of apparently serious crises that had ultimately resolved without catastrophe had produced a widespread conviction that this one too would pass. People had grown accustomed to apparent escalations that amounted to nothing. The peace had bred what we in our own century would call a "nothing ever happens" complacency. Zweig was in Belgium visiting friends when mobilization was announced. Even then he resisted belief—until he found himself racing to catch the last train back across the German border, arriving at a station already full of armed soldiers.

Zweig recalls in great detail the euphoria for war: the cheering crowds, the masses of young men volunteering in their thousands, eager to be part of a great adventure after decades of bourgeois tranquility. He certainly wasn’t hesitant to record his disgust at such a spectacle. Writers he had taken for friends set to producing the most vulgar war propaganda. Nationalistic sentiment led to an irrational loathing of the enemy nations. European unity was dissolved almost overnight into mutual loathing. Nations he had loved, peoples he had traveled among, became the enemy. That this happened so quickly, so completely was the revelation that never quite left him.

A pacifist and a cosmopolitan, Zweig found himself increasingly isolated. Judged unfit for military service, he was given a post as a war correspondent, in which capacity he saw the trains of the wounded returning from the Eastern Front, and was later sent to neutral Switzerland, where he remained until the war was over. Perhaps the most poignant scene in Zweig’s memoir takes place at Feldkirch train station, the first Austrian station one encounters coming from Switzerland. Zweig's train came to an abrupt halt as another train approached from the opposite direction: it was the Kaiser's private train. People had gathered on the platform to pay their respects. Karl, Kaiser for only two years and the last monarch of an eight-hundred-year-old line, was deposed by the social democrats and forced into exile. With him departed an unbroken dynastic line of eight hundred years and the end of a civilization.

The land Zweig returned to was barely recognizable. The train was run-down, overcrowded, and stripped of every spare piece of leather and metal. The country was in ruins, its people starving, and every material was scarce. Zweig's own house in Salzburg could not be heated due to the unavailability of coal. There are Austrian monarchists today who still console themselves with fantasies of how things might have gone “if only we had won the war,” but the First World War was not a war that could be won. The disaster was not that the Central Powers lost it; the disaster was that it was fought at all. Four years of war had turned imperial Austria and Germany—once the apogee of nineteenth-century civilization—into miserable, impoverished disasters. Hyperinflation soon followed. A population, once the wealthiest and most secure in its history, was reduced to bartering for survival. Families traded wealth accumulated over generations for meager amounts of food to stave off starvation. Yet, these economic troubles were only a minor aspect of the old order's demise. Something far more profound had been shattered: trust in authority. The illusion of competent elites and durable political systems crumbled. The question that followed—how could they have failed so completely to avert the cataclysm?—had no reassuring answer. The young, who had been handed this wreckage as their inheritance, did what the young do in such circumstances: they rejected everything the previous generation had used to legitimate itself, experimented with what had been forbidden, and declined to obey their elders.

The latter parts of the book take place in the interwar years, with Zweig's career reaching its peak and achieving worldwide fame and recognition. Read almost a century on, the comparison that feels most salient is not with his vanished Europe but with our own present. The interwar period, for all its obvious instability, still retained forms and institutions that connected it to what had preceded it. We have no such umbilical cord. For Zweig, the world of yesterday was living memory—recent, personal, concrete. For me, it is a foreign country, obscured by time and catastrophe.

Zweig is critical of his lost world at points, but it functions for him essentially as a utopia. And it is worth being precise about what kind of utopia it is, because Zweig was not a reactionary. When he mourns the world of yesterday, he mourns the fall of nineteenth-century liberalism—peace, widespread prosperity, the relatively free movement of people and ideas across a continent that shared, beneath its surface-level quarrels, a common cultural core. The difficulty is that these goods were historically inseparable from the gerontocratic conservatism and repressive social norms that he also criticizes. What Zweig seems reluctant to confront is the possibility that history cannot be arrested—that the very conditions that produced the world of yesterday were already generating its destruction. Truly great things are rarely created at the end of history. The greatest works of German and Austrian music were composed in the late nineteenth century, not the early twentieth; the cultural productivity Zweig celebrates was already in decline before the war that is usually blamed for killing it. The title, in this light, acquires a second meaning: it was, quite literally, the world of yesterday—not the world of the past, but a transient phenomenon, a narrow interval in time that had barely come into being before it was gone.

Many aspects of the world Zweig describes are, by any reasonable measure, superior to what has come after. Personally, I would welcome the return of the theater to its position at the center of cultural life and to enroll my children in a gymnasium of the kind Zweig attended. The general climate of intellectual curiosity and tempered optimism he depicts during the Belle Époque strikes me as something genuinely worth recovering, if such a thing were possible.

Would I prefer to live in the world of yesterday? My instinct is to say yes—and yet, it is an instinct I distrust. For I am a German man and German men are men of tragedy. Our national mythos is the Nibelungenlied, our old pagan religion foretells our defeat in an inevitable apocalypse that ends the world. Zweig, well-assimilated and admirable as he was, was not of this inheritance. I can love the world of yesterday and simultaneously understand its place in history: it was not built to last and the longing for it—however genuine—must be held at some distance from the practical work of living. In this spirit, let me end with a passage from Goethe’s Faust, encapsulating the German spirit as no other work has ever done:

Denn alles, was entsteht,

Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht.

For all that comes to be

Deserves to perish wretchedly.