The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography

Between 1924 and 1933 there was a renewed sense of pan-European identity among his circle of friends, and he enjoyed traveling throughout Europe (and even the United States) giving lectures about the importance of the “intellectual union” of Europeans and meeting with some of the best minds of the era. He even travelled to the “new” Russia. Russian people felt familiar to him because he’d read so much Russian literature. He recalls the frenetic pace of life in the capital, and the juxtaposition between the crumbling façades of “Old Russia” and the new construction and technologies of the Soviet state. He visited Tolstoy’s grave and met the Russian writer Maxim Gorky. He was warned, however, that all was not as it seemed in Russia. He did not speak the language and his guides, certainly chosen by the government, would have been given instructions to share only glowing reports of Soviet progress. His telephone would have been tapped. He would have been followed. He kept this in mind as he travelled, and his understanding of the role that extremist ideology had played in the formation of the Soviet state tempered some of the awe he felt during his time there.

During these years, Salzburg became something of a cultural center. The Salzburg Festival was established, bringing a large program of musical and artistic events each summer. Zweig recalls enjoying the high-culture atmosphere of the festival and the influx of artists and musicians it brought to his once-sleepy town. Zweig added to his collection of manuscripts and artistic memorabilia, such as important as pieces of Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketchbook and manuscripts by Mozart, Goethe, and Beethoven.

In thinking back to the rise of Nazism, Zweig argues that it is all too easy to miss the warning signs of societal upheaval. He originally heard of Hitler as an anti-Jewish agitator, but at the time he was one of many such men and Zweig dismissed him. When he began to see groups of young men, marching in jack boots and brown shirts with Swastika armbands, he realized that there was money and organization behind this movement. He attributes the early dismissals of Hitler and his movement to a particularly German orientation toward formal education: In that rigidly classed society, people with university educations occupied places of privilege and Hitler, who had not achieved any such distinctions, was easily dismissed as “rabble.”

And yet, Hitler rose to power in part because he had secured support among many different political factions and groups of citizens. When rumors began to swirl about concentration camps being established and the extra-judicial killing of innocent civilians, it began to dawn on people that something catastrophic had begun. Zweig realizes now that the true evil of National Socialism was that it did not unleashed all of its horrors at once, but rather asked Europe to swallow its changes “one pill at a time” (390). Hitler tested the waters before implementing new policies and, although he certainly used the Jewish population of Germany (and Europe as a whole) as scapegoats for all societal ills, the hatred in his rhetoric and the anti-Jewish measures he took were, at first, incremental. As a Jewish intellectual, Zweig started to come under fire.

Richard Strauss, then 70 years old and widely considered the greatest living German musician, asked Zweig to provide the libretto for a new opera. Zweig and Strauss agreed that it would be an operatic rendition of The Silent Woman and the two men set to work. Strauss held the office of President of the Reich Chamber of Music in Hitler’s government. Works by Jewish musicians and writers were by that time banned and there was some question about whether Strauss’s opera would be allowed to be performed. There was a general unwillingness, even in Hitler’s government, to interfere with the work of a legend like Strauss, and ultimately Hitler himself read the libretto and gave his permission for the opera to be staged. Almost immediately after its first showing, he revoked that permission, and the opera was not staged again in Germany during Zweig’s lifetime.

Zweig visited London after the controversy over his libretto, and when he returned to Austria, it was clear that the situation there had deteriorated tremendously. His home in Salzburg was located next to the German border and near the home of Hitler himself. For these reasons, Zweig had already seen evidence of potential conflict to come, and he was better equipped than those in Vienna to understand the danger Hitler posed not only to Germany but also to Austria. Against the backdrop of a possible alliance with Mussolini and a possible invasion by Germany, Zweig’s house was searched by the authorities on the false pretense that he’d been hiding weapons. He realized that his life was in danger and he chose to go into exile. He returned to London.

Zweig spent 1934 to 1940 in England. During those years, he kept to himself and did not try to enter public life or mingle with other writers. He was frustrated with the misinformed opinions he heard about Hitler’s harmlessness, but he refrained from argument. He realized that Hitler’s “Greater Germany” project was acutely dangerous, and that once Austria fell, the rest of the continent would be in danger.

He traveled in the United States during this period, and felt a spirit of national unity there in spite of the country’s many ethnic groups. In South America, too, he was moved by what he saw as a shared commitment to intellectualism across countries. He felt this spirit particularly in Brazil, and had a premonition that he could be happy in that country. While traveling he briefly visited Franco’s Spain, where he saw the seeds of a wider war being planted, and he wondered who was funding all of these conflicts. Austrians were in denial about the precarity of their country’s position on the world stage. Zweig understood that Hitler, who lived in Vienna as a young, poor man, wanted to march into it victorious. Because Zweig better understood Hitler’s incrementalist strategy than many of his compatriots, he knew they were more susceptible to Hitler’s doctrines than they themselves believed.

On March 13, 1938, Austria fell to the Germans. Zweig notes that at this point, Hitler’s plan revealed itself in all of its brutality: Jewish homes were ransacked, people were taken away in the night, Jewish citizens were no longer allowed to sit on public park benches, and Zweig’s own mother was forced to die without the company of a single relative, for the nurse hired to watch over her deathbed was not allowed to spend the night in the home of a Viennese citizen of Jewish descent. It was no longer possible to see Nazism as a “sane” alternative to bolshevism. It was clear that Hitler meant to create a pan-European state without Jewish citizens.

After Austria fell, all of Europe was on edge, and Zweig felt hope only after Chamberlain’s meeting with Mussolini and Hitler. Although he’d been wary of appeasement as a strategy with someone as power-hungry as Hitler, it seemed as though perhaps it had worked this time. Later, it was revealed that part of Czechoslovakia had been sacrificed to save the rest of Europe, and Zweig realized that Hitler would not stop there.

During this tumultuous period, Zweig found comfort in his friendship with Sigmund Freud. Freud was quite elderly by the time the war broke out, but he still possessed a clarity of mind that Zweig found inspiring, and the two had many inspiring conversations. Both men embodied the kind of Jewish identity that Zweig thinks characterized the European Jewish population at this time: Europeans of Jewish descent had, in many cases, lived in Europe so long as to identify first as Europeans, second as members of their chosen professions, and so on. For Zweig, Freud, and others, “Jewishness” was one small piece of cultural identity among many others. It was Nazism that lumped all Jewish people together, and Zweig saw this as a distinct kind of identity loss.

Although the rising tide of war was increasingly difficult to ignore and he should have left England sooner, it was not until Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany that he chose to leave. It was with a heavy heart and a great sense of despair that he realized that war would once again destroy his beloved Europe, and that the entire continent would never be the same again.