The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography

Zweig’s term for the period of stability that preceded World War I is the “age of security” (23), and he details the way that, particularly during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, advancements in the areas of industry, technology, and art combined with the stability and durability of the Austrian state, guaranteed a comfortable standard of living for most citizens, and security for all. The rise of the “collective bestiality” of ideologies such as fascism and Nazism showed this world of security to be a “castle in the air” (27), and although living through World War I taught him that humanity is never safe from its demons, he cannot quite shake his commitment to the hopeful ideals of the 19th century.

Zweig’s father was born in a Jewish enclave in Moravia (a Habsburg province located in what is now the Czech Republic) and moved with his family to Vienna. He was part of a generation of Jewish businessmen who brought Habsburg-era industry into the modern era, and the industrialization of the Zweig family business was in many ways representative of his ethno-religious group as a whole.

His mother came from a much more prosperous family than his father, and although their marriage was happy, her relatives never stopped reminding Zweig that his mother’s was a “good” family. He and his friends found this kind of snobbery anathema, and he reflects here on the extent to which intellectual pursuits were actually a more important goal than wealth accumulation for Jewish Europeans of this era. Although many Jewish families rose to prominence in industries like banking, this was out of a desire to escape the financial and cultural trappings of the ghetto, and once they were economically secure, most families devoted themselves to higher intellectual pursuits.

Zweig came of age in Vienna, a city with a long, storied history. The seat of empire and the site of 1,000 years’ worth of cultural growth, Vienna was still the epicenter of European culture during Zweig’s youth, and he recalls it as a culinary mecca and a hub for the arts, music and theatre in particular. He remembers how much support for the arts there was among Viennese residents of Jewish descent, and describes the way that the Jewish bourgeoisie sought to fit in with the Viennese population at large through the creation of art that was distinctly Viennese, rather than Jewish. This cosmopolitanism was an important assimilationist strategy among a group of people who were still searching for both a homeland and a cultural identity.

He recalls the social cohesion of Austria fondly. Although the various provinces were populated by different groups (such as Czechs, Poles, etc.), there was a pervasive spirit of respect and harmony, and he does not remember experiencing antisemitism during this era. In retrospect, he is struck by the trust that the citizens of the Austro-Hungarian empire placed in their government, in the progressive ideals of the 19th century, and in stability itself. He thinks about how ill-prepared his generation was for the horrors of the 20th century.

Zweig notes that education was an important value in pre-war Viennese culture, and it was the goal of every bourgeois family to have at least one member with a doctoral degree. In spite of the cultural prominence of intellectualism, Zweig recalls his own school-age years as dull and marked by over-work and lack of physical activity. He locates the root of such dry curricular norms in the general anti-youth sentiment that dominated the “old empire” of Austria-Hungary. He describes the prejudicial treatment of youth in education, but also within the fields of medicine and business. He posits that there was no effort to encourage and engage young people because they were seen as inherently less important and less valuable than adults.

This did not mean that the Viennese schoolchildren of the era lacked an interest in learning. Zweig recalls being caught up in the world of Viennese arts and letters, and remembers reading Rilke and Nietzsche slyly when he was supposed to be studying. He and his classmates participated in the quintessentially Viennese cultural phenomenon of discussing art, literature, philosophy, and music for hours on end in coffeehouses, and there they supplemented their tedious school curriculum with everything that pre-war intellectual discourse had to offer. Zweig describes the thirst for knowledge among his age-mates as a kind of preternatural awareness of the impending changes of the new century, and as a desire to be in the vanguard of this great societal shift. Many of the popular artists, thinkers, and musicians during this era were young, and Zweig’s generation saw their own spirit reflected in these artistic and intellectual “gods.”

Although Zweig and his friends were moved by the promise of new literary and artistic movements, this era also marked the beginning of seismic political shifts. Various socialist movements rose to prominence, and although they were initially treated with alarmed skepticism by the government, both the Social Democratic Party and the Christian Socialist Party were eventually understood to be peaceful, and their marches did not result in the violence feared by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The German Socialists, however, were violent, and they targeted Slavs, Catholics, Jewish students, and other groups deemed impure by the nascent racist ideology that would one day lead to the Holocaust. And yet, Zweig recalls ignoring these political stirrings, so absorbed was he in the world of arts and letters.

Zweig reflects on the marked differences between present-day and pre-war attitudes toward sexuality. He observes that the modern age has ushered in new attitudes toward adolescent sexual development, and young people are afforded more freedom and privacy than they once were. When he was a young man in Vienna, society had cast off strict associations between sex and the devil, but sexuality remained a taboo topic. Zweig calls “the belief that you could moderate something by ignoring it” entirely “deluded” (91), and notes that any casual reader of Freud would understand that suppressing instincts only pushes them further below the surface.

Although in 1940 it is an understood and (relatively) accepted idea that women feel desire, during Zweig’s youth, it was not widely accepted, and as a result, women were monitored and kept busy from a very young age, lest they fall prey to “idle” or “indecent” urges. Zweig remembers the endless series of classes, piano lessons, language courses, and instructions in housekeeping that bourgeois girls had to sit through, and muses on how this created in young women from “good” families an infantilized naivete that was itself seen as alluring: Blushing, giggling young women who knew nothing of sexuality possessed a social capital that “hussies” who rode bicycles did not.

Young men were accepted as sexual beings to some degree, although any exploration of their sexuality had to be conducted in private. Zweig recalls that the early marriages that allowed for societally sanctioned sex were unpopular in Viennese society because no man from a “good” family would allow his daughter to wed a suitor not deemed old enough to be knowledgeable and responsible. He recalls the affairs that bourgeois young men had with waitresses, coffeehouse workers, dancers, and artists. In the countryside, it was common for young men of means to engage in clandestine sexual relationships with young women from the working classes, resulting in “illegitimate” offspring.

These attitudes toward sexuality made it a difficult time to be a young person, and he argues that the present-day understanding of sexual desire provides a better atmosphere for young people to grow up in.