MINDS AT EASE

how does an advanced society, wealthy, cultured and cosmopolitan, become lost? How does it become polarised by class and race, perverted by extremism, governed by the dishonest and the wicked? How does a civilisation cease to be civilised?

Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday, is subtitled Memoirs of a European. It details the death of a world that occurs all of a sudden, and apparently by accident, and then the death of a second world, the replacement for the first, that happens slowly, and deliberately. “I have seen great mass ideologies grow before my eyes and spread,” Zweig writes. “Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general.”

Published in 1942, the year of Zweig and his wife Lotte’s double suicide, The World of Yesterday describes first the author’s adventures as a young literary man in fin de siècle Europe, during what he calls the Golden Age of Security, before World War I. That was a world unlike our own in many respects but the important ones: it was a world at peace during an age of reason. And then it wasn’t.

“We lived well,” Zweig writes of his youth and young manhood. “We lived with light hearts and minds at ease.” And then, after the summer of 1914, they didn’t.

A wealthy, middle-class, Austrian Jew, Zweig was born in 1881 in, as he puts it, “the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy,” which had ruled central Europe, in one guise or another, for 700 years. Zweig grew up in Vienna, “an international metropolis for 2,000 years”, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and epicentre of high culture — music especially but also theatre and poetry — from

which, he tells us, he eventually “had to steal away like a thief in the night”.

Zweig became world famous in the Twenties and Thirties as a writer of fiction, plays, biographies and journalism. His books sold in their millions across Europe and America. He was a leading member of the international literati. He describes encounters with Yeats, Rodin, Brecht, Joyce, and friendships with Freud, Rilke, Richard Strauss, Maxim Gorky. To judge from his memoir, there may have been something a little insufferable about him, something pompous and self-serving. He was a reactionary, certainly, although even a revolutionary might admit he had much to react against.

Creepily, he collected the manuscripts of famous literary works and other artistic ephemera — Beethoven’s desk, etc — and as the above list suggests, he was an epic name-dropper. He is at pains, always, to advertise his social position and popularity. He doesn’t do jokes. (Confoundingly, Wes Anderson was moved to make the very funny The Grand Budapest Hotel based on his reading of the very unfunny The World of Yesterday, which only confirms the essential mystery of comic inspiration.) A decade ago, when Zweig’s stock began to rise again in the Anglophone world after many years in which he’d been mostly forgotten, Michael Hofmann wrote a demolition of him for the London Review of Books: “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He is the Pepsi of Austrian writing.”

Maybe so, but The World of Yesterday is instructive, all the same. And rather than the long sections of celebrity hobnobbing, it is the passages describing life in the periods immediately before the two world wars that I found striking when recently I picked the book up again.

The beginning of the last century was, like the beginning of this one, a period of rapid technological and scientific advance, from air travel to the mass media to the splitting of the atom. “Inventions and discoveries followed hard on each other’s heels,” writes Zweig. The future seemed dazzling, his own especially. Then Europe tore itself apart, and smashed the world to pieces.

One imagines, because one has heard it said many times before, that societies sleepwalk towards disaster. That right-thinking people don’t see the signs until it’s too late. The somnambulant metaphor works for Zweig’s description of the run-up to WWI. No-one could have foreseen the almost surreal turn of events in which the assassination of an unloved, otherwise insignificant Habsburg heir sparked four years of horror, resulting in millions dead and whole countries ruined. (Although clever old Zweig, despite being completely unprepared, managed to see out much of the war in relative comfort, in neutral Switzerland, “a delightful place of inexhaustible variety”. Prost!)

But sleepwalking doesn’t work as a description of the behaviours of many public figures, and the public, in the years that led to WWII. The failings of leadership that led to the chaos in the aftermath of WWI, and then to the conditions in which fascism could flourish, through the Twenties and into the Thirties, have been well documented.

Zweig, writing of those years between the wars, inadvertently shows his hand in ways both prim and preposterous — his faint praise for modernism; his tight-arsed observations on the fabled nightlife of Weimar Berlin (“the worst sink of iniquity in the world”) — but he is sharp on the mounting horror of life as a Jew in central Europe. As early as 1923, he describes watching Nazi thugs attacking Social Democrats with rubber truncheons on Austria’s border with Germany. “The orderly German nation,” he writes, “did not know what to do with its liberty, and was already looking impatiently for someone to take it away again.”

For a continent to destroy itself once may be regarded as a misfortune; to destroy itself twice looks like carelessness. To yet again allow what is euphemistically called “populism” — a cover for racism, thuggery, demagoguery — to take hold, as is happening today, in Europe, America, across the world? What’s that called?

“How little they knew, stumbling along in security and prosperity and comfort,” Zweig writes of his parents and grandparents, with their bourgeois lives in comfortable turn-ofthe-century Vienna, “that life can… be turned upside down; how little they guessed in their touching liberal optimism that every new day dawning outside the window could shatter human lives.”

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