T. S. Eliot writes that culture is what makes life worth living. Zweig drives that point home with his haunting memoirs, and his own life. He committed suicide together with his wife shortly after finishing his memoirs. European culture had been irrevocably lost to him, and life without culture was not worth living. The act of writing the memoirs was a heroic attempt to preserve European culture, which was preserved only in his memories at the time. For to Zweig, culture is eternal, even when everything else is fallen apart.
My cultural background is as far different from Zweig’s as the east is from the west, but my life experience parallels his in many aspects. Like Zweig, I’ve lived in different countries on different continents, in vastly different cultures and subcultures; Like him, I know what it feels like to be “homeless” and everywhere “a stranger”; Like Zweig, I’ve also witnessed against my will the “terrible defeat of reason”, estrangement and suspicion of friends due to differences in ideologies. Perhaps only self-doubt has kept us from proclaiming that the world has gone mad.
Much of Zweig’s world of yesterday has been “swept away without trace”, and yet, so much of it resembles the world of today that I wonder whether history is repeating itself.
Excerpt from Zweig’s Preface:
Each one of us, even the smallest and the most insignificant, has been shaken in the depths of his being by the almost unceasing volcanic eruptions of our European earth. I know of no preeminence that I can claim, in the midst of the multitude, except this: that as an Austrian, a Jew, an author, a humanist, and a pacifist, I have always stood at the exact point where these earthquakes were the most violent. Three times they have overthrown my house and my existence, severed me from the past and all that was, and hurled me with dramatic force into the void … But l do not regret this. The homeless man becomes free in a new sense; and only he who has lost all ties need have no arrière-pensée. And so I hope at least to be able to fulfill one of the chief conditions of any fair portrayal of an era; namely, honesty and impartiality.
For truly I have been detached, as rarely anyone has in the past, from all the roots and from the very earth which nurtures them. I was born in 1881 in a great and mighty empire, in the monarchy of the Habsburgs. But do not look for it on the map; it has been swept away without trace. I grew up in Vienna, the two-thousand-year-old super-national metropolis, and was forced to leave it like a criminal before it was degraded to a German provincial city. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, was burned to ashes in the same land where my hooks made friends of millions of readers. And so I belong nowhere, and everywhere am a stranger, a guest at best. Europe, the homeland of my heart’s choice, is lost to me, since it has tom itself apart suicidally a second time in a war of brother against brother. Against my will I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of banality in the chronicle of the ages.
I have seen the great mass ideologies grow and spread before my eyes – Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all else that arch-plague nationalism which has poisoned the flower of our European culture. I was forced to be a defenseless, helpless witness of the most inconceivable decline of humanity into a barbarism which we had believed long since forgotten … But paradoxically, in the same era when our world fell back morally a thousand years, I have seen that same mankind lift itself, in technical and intellectual matters, to unheard-of deeds, surpassing the achievement of a million years with a single beat of its wings. … Not until our time has mankind as a whole behaved so infernally, and never before has it accomplished so much that is godlike.
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References:
- Zweig, Stefan. “The World Of Yesterday” Internet Archive. January 01, 1970. Accessed July 20, 2018. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176552