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

between the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century, which was essentially Victorian, and the more liberal uninhibited attitudes of the present, we come closest, perhaps, to the heart of the matter by saying that in the nineteenth century the question of sexuality was anxiously avoided because of a sense of inner insecurity. Previous eras which were still openly religious, in particular the strict puritanical period, had an easier time of it. Imbued by a genuine conviction that the demands of the flesh were the Devil’s work, and physical desire was sinful and licentious, the authorities of the Middle Ages tackled the problem with a stern ban on most sexual activity, and enforced their harsh morality, especially in Calvinist Geneva, by exacting cruel punishments. Our own century, however, a tolerant epoch that long ago stopped believing in the Devil and hardly believed in God any more, could not quite summon up the courage for such outright condemnation, but viewed sexuality as an anarchic and therefore disruptive force, something that could not be fitted into its ethical system and must not move into the light of day, because any form of extramarital free love offended bourgeois ‘decency’. A curious compromise was found to resolve this dilemma. While not actually forbidding a young man to engage in sexual activity, morality confined itself to insisting that he must deal with that embarrassing business by hushing it up. Perhaps sexuality could not be eradicated from the polite world, but at least it should not be visible. By tacit agreement, therefore, the whole difficult complex of problems was not to be mentioned in public, at school, or at home, and everything that could remind anyone of its existence was to be suppressed.
    We, who have known since Freud that those who try to suppress natural instincts from the conscious mind are not eradicating them but only, and dangerously, shifting them into the unconscious, find it easy to smile at the ignorance of that naive policy of keeping mum. But the entire nineteenth century suffered from the delusion that all conflicts could be resolved by reason, and the more you hid your natural instincts the more you tempered your anarchic forces, so that if young people were not enlightened about the existence of their own sexuality they would forget it. In this deluded belief that you could moderate something by ignoring it, all the authorities agreed on a joint boycott imposed by means of hermetic silence. The churches offering pastoral care, schools, salons and the law courts, books and newspapers, fashion and custom all on principle avoided any mention of the matter, and to its discredit even science, which should have taken on the task of confronting all problems directly, also agreed to consider that what was natural was dirty, naturalia sunt turpia . 1 Science capitulated on the pretext that it was beneath its dignity to study such indecent subjects. Wherever you look in the books of the period—philosophical, legal, even medical—you find that by common consent every mention of the subject is anxiously avoided. When experts on criminal law met at conferences to discuss the introduction of humane practices to prisons and the moral damage done to inmates by life in jail, they scurried timidly past the real central problem. Although in many cases neurologists were perfectly well acquainted with the causes of a number of hysterical disorders, they were equally unwilling to tackle the subject, and we read in Freud how even his revered teacher Charcot admitted to him privately that he knew the real cause of these cases but could never say so publicly. Least of all might any writer of belles-lettres venture to give an honest account of such subjects, because that branch of literature was concerned only with the aesthetically beautiful. While in earlier centuries authors didnot shrink from presenting an honest and all-inclusive picture of the culture of their time, so that in