Stefan Zweig's Nostalgia for the cosmopolitan life before the World Wars

 Austrian poet, biographer and playwright Stefan Zweig’s colorful memoir, The World of Yesterday, (1941), provides the often-missed but insightful details that allow a reader to walk around in the tumultuous universe that was Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. With a poet’s sense of depth, nuance and symbolic representation, he guides his reader through the daily practices of turn-of-the-century European education, youth, sexuality, dress, character and communication in order to show how the habitus of international culture coalesced in the configuration of the national identities. Those identities, when militarized with new technologies and ravaged by economic incongruities, would degenerate into what the author calls the “suicide” of Europe. His is a tragic and moving account of the pitfalls of globalized modernity, a reality that later generations would assume inevitable and accept without question. Zweig demonstrates how many of the assumptions of contemporary global culture were not necessary, obvious or even immutable. They could change in unpredictable and catastrophic ways.

 The author’s childhood in Vienna transpired in a world where ancient Habsburg imperial authority legitimized an authoritarian socio-scape in which old age was the cultural cornerstone and youth was generally considered suspect. Reading, theatre and the arts were the passions of young men who met in coffee houses to argue over socialism, poetry and Freud. At university, the best education occurred outside the classroom, on the streets of friendly Paris, easy-going Vienna and unbending Berlin. Zweig narrates his friendship with the most important artistic and literary figures of his day, including Rilke, Rolland, Yeats, Gorky and Rodin. Confronted with rabidly competitive nationalisms and new ideas about the survival of the fittest at the expense of the rest, the European community would collapse in 1914. The author took refuge in neutral Switzerland. The old sense of security he had known as a child in authoritarian Austria would never return. According to Zweig, post-war hyperinflation, not entirely accidental, humiliated the emerging nationalist leviathans. Never again would common people believe in the promises of modernity. Therein lie the seeds of Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism. Zweig calls Hitler, “the man who has brought more misfortune on the world than anyone else in our time,” (383). And Stefan Zweig was a Jew, the quintessential stateless being who would have no place on a planet that would ever-after sacrifice so many lives to the almighty state.

 Zweig’s World of Yesterday provides an experiential account of the transformations that historian C. A. Bayly will later analyze in his comprehensive study, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, (2004). The parallels are striking, and they validate Bayly’s observations of what must be considered strategically and culturally significant in the emergence of global modernity. In particular, Zweig observes the changing roles of religion and science; the importance of banking, private property and the state; the technologies of communication and war; the rise of seance and spiritualism; passports, fingerprints and border control, and even the emergence of the new “holy brotherhood of peacekeepers,” (Zweig, 173), the police. Zweig’s world seems to surface briefly in Vladislav Zubok’s remarkable volume, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, (2009). Zubok carefully details the resurgence of an earlier tradition of uniquely Russian high culture and intellectual endeavor, not unlike Zweig’s pre-war Austria, after the so-called Thaw of the Khrushchev years. That revived intelligentsia of the post-Stalinist Soviet Union would contribute to the glasnost after 1988, and the eventual collapse, in the 1990s, of the oddly archaic, hypermodern Soviet state. The young cohort of fellow searchers who evolved into the new Russian intelligentsia after 1953 were not dissidents. They were believers, devout admirers of Lenin, and as committed to socialism as they were to intellectual freedom. Zubok calls them, Zhivago’s children, fruit of a unifying cultural fermentation that outgrew the Soviet state. Half-way across the globe, because of what Zweig observes as rights that degenerate into mere favors, (435), a parallel situation is discernable in the work of Brodwyn Fischer, A poverty of Rights, Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro (2008). Fischer locates the favelas of Rio as a paradigmatic case. The Brazilian legal universe had created “a state of perpetual ambiguity… an idealized and rational legal universe” (Fischer, 9) that required a bureaucratic agility and legal knowledge that poor people never had or hoped to acquire. Far from the beating heart of war-torn Europe, in a city Zweig called the world’s most beautiful (426), state bureaucracy and institutionalized corruption would dance to the new global rhythm, without ever questioning it. The state and its machinery seemed obvious and even, preexistent in Rio. But they were, in fact, the imported trappings of a world system and the source of alienating humiliation for most citizens of multi-ethnic Rio de Janeiro.

 The most persuasive aspect of Zweig’s narrative is his astute poetic sensitivity to the experience of the cultural transformations that constituted modernity. He lets the reader live in the momentary freedom of an emerging world and feel the loss as that world dashes itself to pieces in a mad psychotic rage. The least persuasive aspect of his argument, though perhaps outside the scope of his work, is the absence of the economic and geopolitical aspects leading to two world wars. Perhaps, the whole point is that many of those economic and geopolitical “factors” came after the fact. He does mention the economic-industrial Achilles heel of Germany, (shared with Japan) which was limited access to raw materials. But he fails to elaborate on that point, leaving the impression that capitalist enterprise and global intrigue played only a secondary role in twentieth century global warcraft. Questions that need more attention include the emerging Bolshevism in the east and how that seemed like a legitimate answer, and why it became a reality (though, admittedly, a strained one) only there. New research might explore the emergence of similar cultural factors to those Zweig observes in the nation-states that would become the new global superpowers. How aware were world leaders (including bankers, policemen and industrialists) of the madness of world war at the time? Or might one speculate that, as capitalist principles dictate, many welcomed world wars as a way to shift the global balance of power, in permanent ways, to their benefit?