The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online

relationships, and I personally must confess that I never felt the slightest coldness or scorn for me as a Jew either in school, at the university, or in literature. Hatred between country and country, nation and nation, the occupants of one table and those of another, did not yet leap to the eye daily from the newspaper, it did not divide human beings from other human beings, nations from other nations. The herd instinct of the mob was not yet as offensively powerful in public life as it is today; freedom in what you did or did not do in private life was something taken for granted—which is hardly imaginable now—and toleration was not, as it is today, deplored as weakness and debility, but was praised as an ethical force.
    For I was not born into a century of passion. It was a well-ordered world with a clear social structure and easy transitions between the parts of that structure, a world without haste. The rhythm of the new speed had not yet transferred itself from machinery, the motor car, the telephone and the aeroplane to humanity. Time and age were judged by different criteria. People lived a more leisurely life, and when I try to picture the figures of the adults who played a large part in my childhood it strikes me how many of them grew stout before their time. My father, my uncle, my teacher, the salesmen in shops, the musicians in the Philharmonic at their music desks were all portly, ‘dignified’ men at the age of forty. They walked slowly, they spoke in measured tones, and in conversation they stroked their well-groomed beards, which were often already grey. But grey hair was only another mark of dignity, and a ‘man ofmature years’ deliberately avoided the gestures and high sprits of youth as something unseemly. Even in my earliest childhood, when my father was not yet forty, I cannot remember ever seeing him run up or down a staircase, or indeed do anything in visible haste. Haste was not only regarded as bad form, it was in fact superfluous, since in that stable bourgeois world with its countless little safeguards nothing sudden ever happened. Those disasters that did take place on the periphery of our world did not penetrate the well-lined walls of our secure life. The Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, even the Balkan Wars did not make any deep impression on my parents’ lives. They skimmed all the war reporting in the paper as indifferently as they looked at the sports headlines. And what, indeed, did anything that happened outside Austria have to do with them, what change did it bring to their lives? In the serene epoch of their Austria, there was no upheaval in the state, no abrupt destruction of their values. Once, when securities fell by four or five points on the stock exchange, it was called a ‘crash’ and discussed with furrowed brow as a catastrophe. People complained of high taxes more out of habit that from any real conviction, and by comparison with those of the post-war period the taxes then were only a kind of little tip you gave the state. The most precise stipulations were laid down in wills for ways to protect grandsons and great-grandsons from any loss of property, as if some kind of invisible IOU guaranteed safety from the eternal powers, and meanwhile people lived comfortably and tended their small worries like obedient domestic pets who were not really to be feared. When an old newspaper from those days happens to fall into my hands, and I read the excitable reports of some small local council election, when I try to remember the plays at the Burgtheater with their tiny problems, or think of the disproportionate agitation of our youthful debates on fundamentally unimportant matters, I cannot help smiling. How Lilliputian all those anxieties were, how serene that time! Thegeneration of my parents and grandparents was better off, they lived their lives from one end to the other quietly in a straight, clear line. All the same, I do not know whether I envy them. For they drowsed