The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography

“It seems to me a duty to bear witness to our lifetime, which has been fraught with such dramatic events, for we have all, I repeat, witnessed these vast transformations, been forced to witness them.”

Bearing witness is a critical motif within Zweig’s memoir, and it runs through the entirety of the text. Indeed, the memoir itself can be seen as an act of bearing witness to history.

“If I try to find some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security.”

The False Promise of Security is another key idea within the first portion of the text, and he stresses how much this illusion shielded Europeans from the threats facing them at the beginning of the 20th century.

“In its liberal idealism, the 19th century was honestly convinced that it was on the direct and infallible path towards the best of all possible worlds.”

In this passage, he speaks to the way that progress in the areas of industry, economics, health, equality, the arts, and medicine masked the simultaneous progression of dangerous, extremist ideologies such as National Socialism. Because Europe seemed to be advancing by leaps and bounds, it was easy to ignore the fact that nefarious ideas had taken root and were being nurtured by various factions within society.

“But in those days of ‘enlightened’ liberalism, only an education regarded as academic and leading to university really counted, and as a result it was the ambition of every ‘good’ family for at least one son to have some kind of doctoral degree.”

This quote speaks to the cultural importance of intellectual development in Viennese society as a whole, but in particular among the bourgeois Jewish families who made up Zweig’s social world. It is interesting to contrast Zweig’s great dedication to a life of the mind with his disdain for formal education: Although he remains devoted to intellectual growth, it becomes a lifelong conviction for him that such growth happens outside of traditional classrooms and institutions of learning.

“I had long ago given my heart to literature, so none of the professionally taught academic branches of knowledge really interested me in themselves.”

Looking back to his youth, Zweig hints at his ultimate career trajectory. Literature has risen to the top of his interests, and it will become a lifelong passion for him. This passage recalls his earlier recollection of sneaking literary texts into his dry, uninteresting school lessons to read them in secret while he was supposed to be studying other topics.

“Of course I had no intention of ‘studying’ in Berlin. I called in at the university there, as I had in Vienna, only once or twice.”

This quote speaks to Zweig’s characterization, for as devoted as he is to the intellect and the world of ideas, he does not see the university as an institution capable of nurturing his love for learning. He was much more interested in learning about the world of arts and letters through participation in the various intellectual circles he found in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris.

“Just as I began writing these lines, German armies and German tanks were rolling in, like a swarm of grey termites, to destroy utterly the divinely colorful, blessedly light-hearted lustre and unfading flowering of its harmonious structure.”

The shadow of war and conflict looms over this text, and in this moment he describes the beginnings of World War II. This passage is also representative of the way that he constantly puts the past in dialogue with the present. This is an attempt not only to paint a picture of “the world of yesterday,” but to contextualize that world within the framework of everything that he now knows about the sources of the conflicts that so ruptured the security of the 19th century.

“Until the Great War, in fact, my life was somehow still governed by the idea that everything was only temporary.”

This passage speaks to Zweig’s pre-war peripatetic cosmopolitanism and the extent to which the war put an end to pan-European identity. Zweig and others of his generation had their entire lives derailed by a war that changed what it meant to be European. They had to re-invent themselves along new axes of identification after World War I.

“Did the time move faster than it does today, when it was crammed with incidents that will change our world utterly for centuries?”

In this passage Zweig examines his reasons for writing his memoir. He happened to be born during an era of unprecedented upheaval, and so many of the events of his youth and early adulthood changed his world irrevocably. This memoir is an attempt to come to terms with those changes and depict them for future generations.

“The National Socialist method was always to shore up its obviously selfish instinct for power with ideological and pseudo-moral justifications, and with this concept of ‘living space’ at last found a philosophical cover for its naked aggression.”

Here, Zweig discusses the beginnings of National Socialism, a political philosophy that would ultimately reveal itself as Hitler’s genocidal plan to create an ethnically pure “Greater Germany.” Part of Zweig’s goal in writing this memoir is to show the insidious spread of extremist ideologies, which take root slowly and show their true colors only incrementally.

“I had never loved our old world more than in those last years before the First World War; I never hoped more for a united Europe; I never believed more in its future than at that time, when we thought there was a new dawn in sight. But its red hue was really the firelight of the approaching international conflagration.”

In spite of warning signs, Zweig and his compatriots were dedicated to the idea of pan-European identity. Cosmopolitanism remained one of his most important values and because of how much he cherished it, he and so many people of his generation were unprepared for the rising tide of extremism that threatened a united Europe.

“There was a wonderfully carefree atmosphere in the world, for what was going to interrupt this growth, what could stand in the way of the vigor, constantly drawing new strength from its own momentum?”

This passage speaks to The False Promise of Security and the naive faith that so many Europeans had in progress and technological advancement. Because of the prevailing sense that Europe was progressing toward a kind of perfection, many people missed the warning signs of war.

“The stormy wind of pride and confidence sweeping over Europe brought clouds with it.”

This passage speaks to the simultaneous rise of new technology and extremist ideology in Europe. Although the beginning of the modern era was a time of unprecedented advancement, it also birthed extremist ideologies on both sides of the political spectrum, each of which posed a distinct threat to Europe.

“So my mind was instinctively distracted from my reading when the music abruptly stopped.”

In this passage, Zweig is reading quietly in Baden during the beautiful summer of 1914. The music “stopped” in the outdoor gallery where he was sitting because everyone gathered to read a communiqué: The archduke of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Sophie, had been shot in Sarajevo. This event marks the start of World War I, and the music’s abrupt end is a metaphor for the abrupt halt to life as everyone knew it in Europe before the war.

“The war of 1939 had intellectual values behind it. It was about freedom and the preservation of moral values, and fighting for ideas makes men hard and determined. In contrast, the war of 1914 was ignorant of the realities; it was still serving a delusion, the dream of a better world, a world that could be just and peaceful. And only delusion, not knowledge, brings happiness. That was why the victims went to the slaughter drunk and rejoicing, crowned with flowers and wearing oak leaves on their helmets, while the streets echoed with cheering and blazed with light, as if it were a festival.”

Here, Zweig argues that for those fighting against Nazism in World War II, a different set of values were at stake than for those who fought in World War I. Nazism was a clear evil and fighting against it a clear vote for integrity and humanism.

“I was sure in my heart from the first of my identity as a citizen of the world.”

This passage speaks to the importance of cosmopolitanism to Zweig. He defined himself first as a European intellectual and only second as a Viennese, Jewish, or Austrian citizen. This spirit of cosmopolitanism remained with him throughout his life, and he was devastated by the way war rendered it a bygone relic of a more innocent time.

“Rolland’s was the first French had that I had been able to take for three years, he was the first Frenchman I had spoken to for those three years, yet in that time we had come closer to each other than ever before.”

This passage speaks to the decline of the cosmopolitan spirit that Zweig so valued in the face of rising nationalism. Here, he is happy to once again shake the hand of a friend from another country and is overjoyed that nationalism has not ruined their friendship.

“At that point the Austrian monarchy that had lasted for nearly a thousand years came to its real end. I knew that I was going back to another Austria, another world.”

Zweig speaks these lines after seeing the former emperor’s train leave Austria. It is an important moment of “bearing witness” to history and speaks to the way that World War I forever altered the character of life in Europe as well as its national boundaries.

“For the first time I saw in the yellow, dangerous eyes of the starving, what famine really looks like.”

In this passage Zweig recalls the privation in post-war Austria and Germany. In many ways, this privation contributed to National Socialism’s popularity among the German population and the rise of the far-right ideology that led to World War II.

“But it was not over. We just didn’t know it. In our innocent gullibility we were all deceived, confusing our personal friendly feelings with those of the world.”

This passage underscores one of Zweig’s most important points: that on two separate occasions the people of Europe were ignorant of the dangers posed by nationalism. Here, he confuses the ability of friends to maintain their bonds with the ability of nations to maintain friendly relations in the face of nationalism.

“Everything had been old, lethargic, and rusty for too long. Now, putting on a sudden spurt, it wanted to be modern, indeed ultra-modern, right up to date with the latest technology. This haste made Moscow seem over-full, overpopulated, and as it were living in state of frantic confusion.”

This passage comes from Zweig’s account of his journeys through the “new” Soviet Russia. Although he is moved by Russia and its people, his appreciation is tempered by his distaste for the extremism of bolshevism.

“It is an iron law of history that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own time will always fail to recognize them in their early stages.”

This is one of the novel’s main messages. Zweig describes how Europe was twice fooled into thinking that rising nationalism and extremist ideologies posed no real danger to the continent. Zweig urges his readers to be on the lookout for extremism even in its earliest stages.

“It is difficult to rid yourself, in only a few weeks, of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place.”

Zweig was never able to come to terms with the damage that the war did to Europe and its values. He never gave up on cosmopolitanism and chose to end his life rather than wait to find out what kind of Europe would emerge from World War II.