I finally got around to reading Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, and I found it to be even better than its reputation. It’s not just a memoir; it’s also a brilliant example of social science.
While Zweig is aware that the pre-1914 world had many flaws, he mourns the freedoms that had been lost by the early 1940s:
[P]erhaps nothing more graphically illustrates the monstrous relapse the world suffered after the First World War than the restrictions on personal freedom of movement and civil rights. Before 1914 the earth belonged to the entire human race. Everyone could go where he wanted and stay there as long as he liked. No permits or visas were necessary, and I am always enchanted by the amazement of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I travelled to India and America without a passport. Indeed, I had never set eyes on a passport. You boarded your means of transport and got off it again, without asking or being asked any questions; you didn’t have to fill in a single one of the hundred forms required today.
If only he could see the TSA! I like to tell young people that in the 1970s I would travel to Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean without any passport. Or that you could smoke on airplanes.
Today, I find travel to be less immersive because I am always tethered to current events by the internet. But even in 1942, Zweig observed the way that technology was intruding into our lives:
The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening anywhere in the world at the hour and the second when it happened.
Presumably he’s referring to the effect of radio.
Of course, these observations about travel are of trivial importance when compared to the devastation of the two world wars, which is the focus of Zweig’s memoir. Here he analyzes the mindset of German nationalists (and not just the Nazis):
But already certain groups were gaining ground in the country, knowing that they would recruit supporters only if they kept assuring defeated Germany that it had not been defeated after all, and all negotiations and concessions were treasonous.
Zweig’s memoir is the best piece of anti-nationalist literature that I have ever read.
Here he describes the way that a cancel culture mob can turn even a writer’s friends against him, even after reaching the pinnacle of artistic success at age 50:
Here was my house, and who could drive me out of it? There were my friends—could I ever lose them? I thought without fear of death and illness, but not the faintest inkling came into my mind of what still lay ahead of me. I had no idea that I would be driven out of my own home, a hunted exile who must wander from land to land, over sea after sea, or that my books would be burnt, banned and despised, my name pilloried in Germany like a criminal’s, or that the same friends whose letters and telegrams lay on the table before me would turn pale if they happened to meet me by chance. I did not know that everything I had achieved by hard work for thirty or forty years could be extinguished without trace . . .
Zweig is quite honest about how he failed to understand the significance of many historical events as they were actually occurring:
It is an iron law of history that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own times always fail to recognize them in their early stages.
I found that reading Zweig’s masterpiece helped me to better understand my own times. But it also put things into perspective. The losses I’ve experienced are trivial compared to those he faced during the first half of the 20th century.
PS. Here’s The Economist:
When George Orwell pondered the question of nationalism in the waning days of the second world war, he wrote of its dangers this way: “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakeably certain of being in the right.”
Plus ça change . . .
Happy Easter!
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Mar 31 2024 at 2:22pm
Or, as former co-blogger Arnold Kling would say, “Have a nice day.”
Nicely done, Scott.
Henry
Mar 31 2024 at 5:00pm
I’ve not read this book and probably should keep my yap shut, but this is the internet, and being uninformed is not a disqualification. The biggest flaw of the pre 1914 world is that it created the 1914 world. The war created immense human suffering, and the attendant political destabilization resulted in the ascendancy of regimes whose policies were truly monstrous. Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler were young men, and their ideas and outlooks were formed in the pre 1914 world.
Scott Sumner
Mar 31 2024 at 8:12pm
The author does point to some of the flawed cultural practices in the pre-1914 world, although his focus tends to be on non-political topics, such as the awkward relationship between the sexes prior to 1914.
Laurentian
Apr 1 2024 at 1:57pm
One could point out that the pre-2016 world created the post-2016 world as well.
Michael David Sandifer
Mar 31 2024 at 8:47pm
“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” – Charles de Gaulle
steve
Apr 1 2024 at 5:25pm
“Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakeably certain of being in the right.”
Now add in religion. When you believe that God is directing your leader, your actions, your beliefs then you are capable of about anything.
Steve
Robert Seber
Apr 2 2024 at 8:03am
As coincidence will have it, I also recently read The World Of Yesterday, and I really appreciate Scott’s praise of the book. It is indeed a masterful example of anti-nationalism, but I would phrase it in positive terms. It is a masterful example of humanism, the attitude that places humans above all attempts to categorize them.
Scott Sumner
Apr 2 2024 at 12:16pm
Very good observation.
Classical Liberal
Apr 2 2024 at 5:56pm
“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakeably certain of being in the right.”
One could, of course, replace Nationalism/Nationalist with Socialism/Socialist and Orwell’s quote would still ring true. It would just sound like Hayek had written it 🙂
David S
Apr 3 2024 at 4:46pm
The only thing I’m nostalgic for is America before zoning codes. 1870 would be a decent decade to pin the regulatory clock on a general consensus about concepts of the uses of private property rights—particularly in cities.
I sort of miss the 1990’s—but I wouldn’t want to relive or revive anything from that period except the experience of seeing Terminator 2 for the first time in a movie theatre.
Mark Brophy
Apr 3 2024 at 5:41pm
The 1916 Zoning Resolution in New York City was the first citywide zoning code in the United States. The zoning resolution reflected both borough and local interests, and was proposed after the Equitable Building was erected in Lower Manhattan in 1915.
The resolution was a measure adopted primarily to stop massive buildings from preventing light and air from reaching the streets below and established limits in building massing at certain heights, usually interpreted as a series of setbacks and, while not imposing height limits, restricted towers to 25% of the lot size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1916_Zoning_Resolution
Between 1900 and 1910, the number of garment workers employed near Fifth Avenue nearly doubled. Not only were lofts cheap to build, but the industry preferred to be located near the great retail stores, many of which were arrayed along Fifth Avenue.
At the opening of the 20th century, tens of thousands of garment workers began to clog the streets of Fifth Avenue, strolling and window-shopping, and meeting informally to discuss the vagaries of the trade. For property and business owners along Fifth Avenue, however, the workers constituted nothing short of an immigrant horde that had to be stopped. One man above all worked to remove the garment trade: Robert Grier Cooke, founder and president of the Fifth Avenue Association (FAA). Right around the time of the garment loft explosion, Cooke had announced ambitious plans to transform Fifth Avenue into a thoroughfare that would compare with “London’s Bond Street…the Rue de la Paix of Paris…or the Unter den Linden of Berlin.” When it was completed, the avenue would see the elimination of cars and advertisements on buildings, the installation of “islands of safety” and a lighting scheme that would make “the Great White Way a downtown side street by comparison.” Farther uptown, argued Cooke, Fifth Avenue held out the promise of gathering together “all the beautiful architecture of the city which is as yet unexpressed.” Clearly his plans were jeopardized by the garment industry, which he saw as the single greatest threat to the existence of Fifth Avenue.
In its efforts to rid the area of garment workers, the Fifth Avenue Association used boycotts and even pressured large lending institutions to refuse loans for construction of new lofts. More importantly, throughout 1915 and 1916, the FAA worked tirelessly to pass a zoning law to keep garment lofts from entering the area as part of its “Save New York” campaign.
https://garmentdistrict.nyc/history
MarkW
Apr 4 2024 at 6:46am
Before 1914 the earth belonged to the entire human race. Everyone could go where he wanted and stay there as long as he liked. No permits or visas were necessary, and I am always enchanted by the amazement of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I travelled to India and America without a passport.
Really not the entire human race, though. I understand that most of the millions of Europeans who emigrated to the US up to around 1920 never again saw the homelands or loved ones they left behind — it was simply too expensive for people of average means to make transatlantic trips. Frictionless travel was really only for the wealthy and only possible when global travel was slow and expensive. Now that it is fast and cheap, this would not be feasible. There is terrorism, of course, but also things like hit and run Chilean burglary gangs. Of course, we have frictionless travel within the US (and EU), but that is possible only because we have such highly integrated and cooperative criminal justice systems. Now we are vastly more free to move about the globe in that we can afford to do it, but a little less free in having to show our papers. Maybe that’s a bad deal for those in Stephan Zweig’s class, but it’s a pretty good deal for the masses.
Anders
Apr 4 2024 at 11:21am
He is a brilliant observer. The man without features (eigenschaften) easily ranks with Proust and Zola and whoever would be the American response, de Lillo?
He wrote as the empire was in certain decline. People explained that decline with a lack of national identity, leading to languour and license and overall hedonist anomia. Austria, as opposed to the rest, found solace in and fell victim to growing German nationalism and the militant Schlieffen plan and the foiled dream of German unity by the Austrians who had dominated the bizarre Holy German empire for centuries.
The liberalism of the time, more the result of default than design, became synonymous with descent into war and disintegration under the watch of a sybaritic, jewish dominated elite. Zweig was the spokesperson, Freud and Einstein sowed the seeds, Klimt und Mahler celebrated it, and the sickly, powerless Emperor let it happen.
Same by the way in France.
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