The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography

The drama that Zweig wrote while touring war-ravaged Austria-Hungary, called Jeremiah, was better received than he anticipated, given how at odds the book was with prevailing sentiment about the war. A theater in Zurich contacted Zweig about producing Jeremiah, and he was able to obtain a leave of absence from his position at the archive to travel there. His play had also caught the attention of a group of politically connected Catholic pacifists who firmly believed that the war’s conclusion could be brought about through reconciliation rather than military victory, and who had the ear of the Austrian emperor. Their hope was for Austria to shake off German influence and take the lead in reconciliation negotiations. Although these plans never came to fruition, Zweig recalls being heartened by the clandestine presence of such highly ranking pacifists within the Austrian government.

A weight was lifted from his shoulders as he crossed the border into Switzerland, and each time he has since passed through that small train station he has felt a similar sense of relief. Switzerland was calm, peaceful, and prosperous, and he was struck by how absurd it was that one on side of a border, young men were being carted off to die on battlefields, while mere feet away, they were free to live their lives as they pleased.

He was happy to see Romain Rolland while he was in Switzerland, and although the French Rolland should have been his enemy, their friendship was stronger than ever before. Rolland had been writing prolifically about the war, and Zweig wonders what became of those journals, which must be a startlingly detailed account of pacifist intellectualism during World War I. He was proud of the work that his friend was doing and felt an even stronger kinship with the man.

Switzerland at that time was a hotbed of intellectual activity and was full of transient Europeans and spies. Zweig met many anti-war figures, writers such as James Joyce, and others whom he thought were defined by a revolutionary zeal that faded during the post-war years. He confesses to being “naively” swayed by the promise of the Russian revolution, then in its infancy, and moved by its “honeymoon” idealism. America then entered the war, and for Zweig and many of his friends, the defeat of Germany and Austria seemed a foregone conclusion.

By the time Zweig returned to Austria, the war had ended, and in retrospect he regrets going back to the “grey, lifeless shadow of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy” (305). It was an exceedingly difficult period for Austria, no longer part of an empire and struggling not only economically and politically but also culturally: The Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles had all formed their own countries, and revolution “appeared inevitable.” Life in Austria was grim. Food was rationed, fuel almost impossible to come by. Warm clothes, shoes, and other necessities had to be brought in from Switzerland. On his way back into the country, Zweig recalls seeing the former emperor’s special train on its way out of Austria. He knew that he was witnessing history: the end of the empire’s thousand-year reign.

He’d purchased a house in Salzburg during the war, and there he was able to write in the peaceful seclusion of the countryside. Journeys into town were upsetting, for there was so little food that people shot squirrels and even ate cats. No one had proper clothing and it was common to see people dressed in military uniforms taken from the dead of multiple armies. Trading and bartering became common, as did hoarding and price gouging, and Zweig remembers foreigners descending on the country to profit from the post-war privation and economic inflation: Foreign currency was the only thing of stable value in Austria during those years. The formerly wealthy sold off valuable collections of art, antiques, and even furniture at drastically low prices to outsiders to afford food, and there was a spirit of desperation all over Austria.

Still, life went on, and Zweig cannot recall a greater period of literary production in his life. He is not sure how they were able to survive, but they did, and he remembers a great deal of hope and positivity among the general populace in Austria. He recalls how beautiful the opera was during that time, in spite of its cost and the unheated theater. He and others found refuge in art, and he was grateful to still have access to music and literature. The Social Democrats and the Christian Socialists formed a functional coalition, and Austria avoided the communist fate of many of its neighbors. And yet, there was also a sense of great disillusionment with a state that had fought so hard in a war that ultimately did little more than guarantee its own ruin.

The war reversed how Austrians understood the youth-age binary: Pre-war Austria had valued age over youth, but in the post-war period, young people felt a tremendous sense of betrayal by their parents’ generation, and the general sense was that youth, innovation, and progress would move the country forward. Old ideals were turned on their heads and everything “new” was embraced. Young women bobbed their hair, cubism and surrealism replaced representational artistic trends, experimental literature emerged, and Europeans embraced music from Africa and the Caribbean. It was the “golden age of all that was extravagant and uncontrolled” (325). Zweig felt at least some of this spirit of innovation and the need for new norms and new forms, and he decided not to let new editions of his previous works be published. He, too, would start over.