The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online Page A

their lives away remote from all true bitterness, from the malice and force of destiny; they knew nothing about all those crises and problems that oppress the heart but at the same time greatly enlarge it. How little they knew, stumbling along in security and prosperity and comfort, that life can also mean excess and tension, constant surprise, 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. Even in their darkest nights they never dreamt how dangerous human beings can be, or then again how much power they can have to survive dangers and surmount trials. We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.
NOTES
    1 Zweig is referring to the ban imposed by Hitler’s anti-Semitic regime on Jews in ‘the intellectual professions’. They were no longer, for instance, allowed to practise as lawyers and doctors.
    2 The wine of the new season’s vintage.
    3 The National Socialist regime, dating from Hitler’s accession to power as Chancellor in 1933.
    4 Karl Lueger, 1844-1910, leader of the Austrian Christian Socialist party. Although he did hold anti-Semitic opinions, he was generally regarded as a good mayor of Vienna. Zweig returns to him later in this chapter.

EROS MATUTINUS
    D URING THOSE EIGHT YEARS at grammar school, one very personal fact affected us all—starting as children of ten, we gradually became sexually mature young people of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Nature began to assert its rights. These days, the awakening of puberty seems to be an entirely private matter, to be dealt with for themselves by all young people as they grow up, and it does not at first glance appear at all suitable for public discussion. For our generation, however, the crisis of puberty reached beyond its own real sphere. At the same time, it brought an awakening in another sense—it taught us to look more critically, for the first time, at the world of the society in which we had grown up and its conventions. Children and even adolescents are generally inclined to conform respectfully to the laws of their environment at first. But they submit to the conventions enjoined upon them only as long as they see everyone else genuinely observing them. A single instance of mendacity in teachers or parents will inevitably make the young turn a distrustful and thus a sharper eye on their surroundings as a whole. And it did not take us long to discover that all those authorities whom we had so far trusted—school, the family, public morality—were remarkably insincere on one point—the subject of sexuality. Worse than that, they wanted us, too, to dissimulate and cover up anything we did in that respect.
    The fact is that thirty or forty years ago, thinking on such subjects was not what it is in the world of today. Perhaps there has never been such a total transformation in any areaof public life within a single human generation as here, in the relationship between the sexes, and it was brought about by a whole series of factors—the emancipation of women, Freudian psychoanalysis, cultivation of physical fitness through sport, the way in which the young have claimed independence. If we try to pin down the difference