Zweig The World Of Yesterday Quotes

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

Art can bring us consolation as individuals,” he said, “but it is powerless against reality.

Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.

Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.

Aber jeder Schatten ist im letzen doch auch Kind des Lichts, und nur wer Helles und Dunkles, Krieg und Frieden, Aufstieg und Niedergang erfahren, nur der hat wahrhaft gelebt.

Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.

My today and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one, but several existences, each one different from the others.

I had learned and written too much history not to know that the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be. I knew that the same voices which yelled “Heil Schuschnigg” today would thunder “Heil Hitler” tomorrow.

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.

in the general throng, many a fool receives decorations and titles.

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 taken for granted - which is hardly imaginable now - and toleration was not, as it is today, deplored as a weakness and debility, but was praised as an ethical force.

Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind.

But since those days in Vienna I had been aware that Austria was lost, not yet suspecting, to be sure, how much I had lost thereby.

On the day I lost my passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that losing one’s native land implies more than parting with a circumscribed area of soil.

happiness would prevail where trees were planted.

Live and let live” was the famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me to be more humane than all the categorical imperatives, and it maintained itself throughout all classes.

It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.

For a society is always most cruel to those who disclose and reveal its secrets, when through dishonesty society itself has outraged Nature.

And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him.

IF I TRY TO FIND some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security.

In the last analysis it seems likely that they were wiser than I, all those friends in Vienna, because they suffered everything only when it really happened, whereas I had already suffered the disaster in advance in my fantasy, and then again when it became reality.

For tradition also and always means inhibition.

¡Cómo vivían al margen de todas las crisis y los problemas que oprimen el corazón, pero a la vez lo ensanchan!

Mr. Zweig always encouraged his friends to set down their reminiscences, not necessarily for publication but for the pleasure and benefit of their children, their families. In his opinion every life includes inner or external experiences worthy of record.

War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness. It needs stimulated emotions, enthusiasm for its own cause and hatred for the adversary.

Art always reaches its peak where it becomes the life interest of a people.

And it is only delusion, and not knowledge, that bestows happiness.

For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths.

Wie ich heimschritt bemerkte ich mit einemmal vor mir meinen eigenen Schatten so wie ich den Schatten des anderen Krieges hinter dem jetzigen sah. Er ist durch all diese Zeit nicht mehr von mir gewichen dieser Schatten er überhing jeden meiner Gedanken bei Tag und bei Nacht vielleicht liegt sein dunkler Umriß auch auf manchen Blättern dieses Buches. Aber jeder Schatten ist im letzten doch auch Kind des Lichts und nur wer Helles und Dunkles Krieg und Frieden Aufstieg und Niedergang erfahren nur der hat wahrhaft gelebt.

Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.

Αλλά η κοινωνία φέρεται πάντα χωρίς έλεος σε κείνους που προδίδουν το μυστικό της κι αποκαλύπτουν πως, με την υποκρισία της, αμαρτάνει ενάντια στην ίδια της την φύση.

his jest implies: “Anybody who wants to be a real musician must be able to set even a menu to music.

the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be.

The Minister-President or the richest magnate could walk the streets of Vienna without anyone turning around, but a court actor or an opera singer was recognized by every salesgirl and every cabdriver.

Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was xenophobia; morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of the foreigner. The world was on the defensive against strangers, everywhere they got short shrift. The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveler, before and during every journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and full face, one’s hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible; fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers; furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of good standing, had to be shown; letters of recommendation were required, invitations to visit a country had to be procured; they asked for the addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires, and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out,

It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.

The newspapers recommended preparations which hastened the growth of the beard, and twenty-four- and twenty-five-year-old doctors, who had just finished their examinations, wore mighty beards and gold spectacles even if their eyes did not need them, so that they could make an impression of “experience” upon their first patients.

Making music, dancing, the theater, conversation, proper and urbane deportment, these were cultivated here as particular arts. It was not the military, nor the political, nor the commercial, that was predominant in the life of the individual and of the masses.

There is always a mysterious conflict in every artist; if life treats him roughly he longs for peace and calm, but if he comes into safe harbour he longs to be back in the turmoil.

How Lilliputian all those anxieties were, how serene that time!

One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.

and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to co-operate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture.

Γιατί μόνο η ψευδαίσθηση, κι όχι η γνώση, μας κάνει ευτυχισμένους.

I had sworn to myself – an oath which I still kept in 1940 – never to write a single word that affirmed war or disparaged another nation.

Only the man who could look into the future without worry could thoroughly enjoy the present.

what is culture, if not to wheedle from the coarse material of life, by art and love, its finest, its most delicate, its most subtle qualities?

It is from this unusual attitude alone that we can understand how the State exploited the schools as an instrument for the maintenance of its authority.

Destiny always knows how to find the way to a man whom it needs for its secret purposes, even if he desires to hide himself.

In the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.

What one’s muscles have missed can be made up later; the élan toward the intellectual, the soul’s inner grasping power, is set in motion in those decisive formative years, and only he who has learned early to spread his soul out wide may later hold the entire world within himself.

Homeward bound I suddenly noticed before me my own shadow as I had seen the shadow of the other war behind the actual one. During all this time it has never budged from me, that irremovable shadow, it hovers over every thought of mine by day and by night; perhaps its dark outline lies on some pages of this book, too. But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.

I regarded it more as an honor than a disgrace to be permitted to share this fate of the complete destruction of literary existence in Germany with such eminent contemporaries as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Freud, Einstein, and many others whose work I consider incomparably more important than my own,

And only decades later, when roof and walls fell in upon us, did we realize that the foundations had long since been undermined and that together with the new century the decline of individual freedom in Europe had begun.

While in its incessant fear and prudishness [society] was constantly tracking down the indecent in all forms of life, literature, art, and dress, in order to avoid every possible incitement, it was actually forced to think constantly of the indecent.

I am not one to compare long melodies as did Mozart. I can’t get beyond short themes. But what I can do, is to utilize such a theme, paraphrase it and extract everything that is in it, and I don’t think there’s anybody today who can match me at that.

that the whole nation, tired of war, actually only longed for order, quiet, and a little security and bourgeois life. And, secretly it hated the republic, not because it suppressed this wild freedom, but on the contrary, because it held the reins too loosely.

I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument.

But only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination.

Carlyle’s axiom that the true university of these days is a good collection of books has remained valid as far as I am concerned, and even today I am convinced that one can become an excellent philosopher, historian, philologist, lawyer, or what you will, without having attended a university or even a Gymnasium.

Balzac has incomparably described how the example of Napoleon electrified an entire generation in France. To Balzac the brilliant rise of the insignificant Lieutenant Bonaparte to the rank of emperor of the world meant not only the triumph of an individual, but the victory of the idea of youth. That one did not have to be born a prince or a duke to achieve power at an early age, that one might come from any humble and even poor family and yet be a general at twenty-four, ruler of France at thirty and of the entire world, caused hundreds, after this unique success, to abandon petty vocations and provincial abodes. Lieutenant Bonaparte had fired the minds of an entire generation of youth. He drove them to aspire to higher things, he made the generals of the Grande Armée the heroes and careerists of the comédie humaine. It is always an individual young person who achieves the unattainable for the first time in any field, and thus encourages all the youngsters around him or who come after him, by the mere fact of his success.

In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave.

Es precisamente el apátrida el que se convierte en un hombre libre, libre en un sentido nuevo; sólo aquel que a nada está ligado, a nada debe reverencia.

After all, shadows themselves are born of light.

irrefragable

Niets heeft zozeer als deze academische hoogmoed de Duitse intellectuelen ertoe verleid Hitler te blijven zien als de agitator van de bierhallen.

Hermitage

L’arte raggiunge sempre la sua vetta là dove diviene ragione di vita per tutto un popolo.

I giorni solenni dell’esistenza hanno in sé una luminosità più intensa di quelli consueti.

The more naïve a people are, the easier it is to get around them.

In Germany, in France, in Italy, in Russia, and in Belgium, they all obediently served the war propaganda and thus the mass delusion and mass hatred, instead of fighting against it.

...κάθε σκιά είναι θυγατέρα του του φωτός, και μόνο αυτός που έζησε τη λάμψη και το σκότος, τον πόλεμο και την ειρήνη, το μεγαλείο και την παρακμή , αυτός και μόνο αυτός έζησε αληθινά.

In this manner I had convinced myself more vividly than by mere strolling about how much room, how much opportunity there was in this young country for anyone willing to work, and that impressed me.

It was always the same, the whole pack throughout history who called cautious people cowards, humane people weak, only to be at a loss themselves in the hour of disaster that they had rashly conjured up. Because the pack were always the same. They had mocked Cassandra in Troy, Jeremiah in Jerusalem, and I had never before understood the tragedy of those great figures as I did now, in a time so like theirs.

They did not know, those innocents who spread such lies, that the accusation of every possible cruelty against the enemy is as much war materiel as are munitions and planes, and that they are systematically taken out of storage at the beginning of every war. War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness. It needs stimulated emotions, enthusiasm for its own cause and hatred for the adversary.

the criminals, the warmongers must be the other fellows; we had taken up arms in self-defense against a villainous and crafty enemy, who had “attacked” peaceful Austria and Germany without the slightest provocation.

Inflation, unemployment, the political crises and, not least, the folly of lands abroad, had made the German people restless; a tremendous desire for order animated all circles of the German people, to whom order had always been more important than freedom and justice. And anyone who promised order – even Goethe said that disorder was more distasteful to him than even an injustice – could count on hundreds of thousands of supporters from the start.

Publicity in itself, of whatever nature, connotes a disturbance of the natural equilibrium of a man. Under normal circumstances, the name a human being bears is no more than the band is to a cigar: a means of identification, a superficial, almost unimportant thing that is only loosely related to the real subject, the true ego. In the event of a success the name begins to swell, so to say. It loosens itself from the human being that bears it and becomes a power in itself, a force, an independent thing, an article of commerce, a capital asset; and psychologically again with strong reaction it becomes a force which tends to influence, to dominate, to transform the person who bears it.

He who in the opera knew Gustav Mahler’s iron discipline, which extended to the minutest detail, or realized the Philharmonic’s matter-of-fact energetic exactitude, today is rarely satisfied by any musical or theatrical performance.

L'ammirare esteticamente il talento in ogni sua forma porta irresistibilmente ad analizzare se stessi, per vedere se nel proprio fisico ancora misterioso o nell'anima ancora semisvelata non vi sia traccia o possibilità di quella sublime essenza.

ποτέ στην Αυστρία δεν είχαμε αγαπήσει τόσο την τέχνη όσο τον καιρό εκείνο του χάους, γιατί, έχοντας νιώσει την προδοσία του χρήματος, καταλάβαμε πως το μόνο πράγμα στο οποίο μπορούμε να στηριζόμαστε ήταν οι αιώνιες αξίες που είχαμε όλοι μέσα μας.

everybody had a ready-made phrase: “That cannot last long.” But I remembered a conversation with my publisher in Leningrad on my short trip to Russia. He had been telling me how rich he had once been, what beautiful paintings he had owned and I asked him why he had not left Russia immediately on the outbreak of the revolution as so many others had done. “Ah,” he answered, “who would have believed that such a thing as a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Republic could last longer than a fortnight?” It was the self deception that we practice because of reluctance to abandon our accustomed life.

It is generally assumed that getting rich is a Jew’s true and typical aim in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting rich, to a Jew, is only an interim stage, a means to his real end, by no means his aim in itself. The true desire of a Jew, his inbuilt ideal, is to rise to a higher social plane by becoming an intellectual.

The natural elements of sunlight, water and air were not permitted to touch a woman’s bare skin. At the seaside, women made their laborious way through the water in heavy bathing costumes, covered from neck to ankles. Young girls in boarding schools and convents even had to take baths in long white garments, forgetting that they had bodies at all.

Ze [Florence Nightingale] organiseerde ontelbare pacifistische congressen en de triomf van haar leven was dat ze Alfred Nobel, de uitvinder van het dynamiet, zo op het geweten werkte dat hij als compensatie voor het onheil dat hij met zijn uitvinding van het dynamiet had aangericht, de Nobelprijs voor de vrede en een beter internationaal begrip instelde.

It is difficult to rid yourself, in only a few weeks, of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place. With our rooted ideas of justice, we believed in the existence of a German, a European, an international conscience, and we were convinced that a certain degree of inhumanity is sure to self-destruct in the face of humane standards.

It lies in human nature that deep emotion cannot be prolonged indefinitely, either in the individual or in a people, a fact that is known to all military organizations. Therefore it requires an artificial stimulation, a constant “doping” of excitement; and this whipping up was to be performed by the intellectuals, the poets, the writers and the journalists, scrupulously or otherwise, honestly or as a matter of professional routine. They were to beat the drums of hatred and beat them they did, until the ears of the unprejudiced hummed and their hearts quaked. In Germany, in France, in Italy, in Russia, and in Belgium, they all obediently served the war propaganda and thus the mass delusion and mass hatred, instead of fighting against it.

But the coffeehouse was still the best place to keep up with everything new. In order to understand this, it must be said that the Viennese coffeehouse is a particular institution which is not comparable to any other in the world. As a matter of fact, it is a sort of democratic club to which admission costs the small price of a cup of coffee. Upon payment of this mite every guest can sit for hours on end, discuss, write, play cards, receive his mail, and, above all, can go through an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines. Perhaps nothing has contributed as much to the intellectual mobility and the international orientation of the Austrian as that he could keep abreast of all world events in the coffeehouse, and at the same time discuss them in the circle of his friends. For, thanks to the collectivity of our interests, we followed the orbis pictus of artistic events not with two, but with twenty and forty eyes. What one of us had overlooked was noticed by another, and since in our constant childish, boastful, and almost sporting ambition we wished to outdo each other in our knowledge of the very latest thing, we found ourselves actually in a sort of constant rivalry for the sensational.

We certainly did—I do not deny it—have immeasurably more individual freedom, and we did not just welcome that, we made use of it. But as Friedrich Hebbel once nicely put it, “Sometimes we have no wine, sometimes we have no goblet.” Both are seldom granted to one and the same generation; if morality allows a man freedom, the state tries to remould him. If the state allows him freedom, morality will try to impose itself.

Maar zelfs tussen betrouwbare mensen verveelde ik me steeds meer bij de onvruchtbaarheid van de eeuwige discussies en de zelfverkozen verzuiling in radicale, liberale, anarchistische, bolsjewistische en onpolitieke groepen; voor het eerste leerde ik werkelijk het eeuwige type van de professionele revolutionair waarnemen, die zich door zijn oppositionele positie boven zijn onbeduidendheid uitgetild voelt en zich vastklampt aan het dogmatische omdat hij in zichzelf geen houvast heeft.

Se non si ha la propria terra sotto i piedi - anche questo però deve essere sperimentato per essere compreso - ci si tiene meno diritti, si perde sicurezza, si diventa diffidenti verso se stessi. Non esito a confessare che dal giorno in cui dovetti vivere con documenti o con passaporti effettivamente stranieri non mi sono più sentito completamente legato a me stesso. È rimasta per sempre distrutta una parte della mia naturale identità con il mio io originario. Sono divenuto molto più riservato di quanto sia nella mia indole; io, il cosmopolita di un giorno, ho oggi incessantemente l’impressione di dover render grazie per ogni boccata d’aria che respirando tolgo a un altro popolo. Si capisce che a mente lucida riconosco l’assurdità di simili fisime, ma quando mai la ragione può qualcosa contro un sentimento istintivo? Poco mi è servito avere educato per quasi mezzo secolo il mio cuore a battere da cosmopolita, da citoyen du monde: il giorno in cui perdetti il mio passaporto, scopersi a cinquantott’anni che perdendo la patria si perde ben più che un circoscritto pezzo di terra.

While the Austrian crown was dissolving like jelly in your fingers, everyone wanted Swiss francs and American dollars, and large numbers of foreigners exploited the economic situation to feed on the twitching corpse of the old Austrian currency. Austria was ‘discovered’, and became disastrously popular with foreign visitors in a parody of the society season. All the hotels in Vienna were crammed full with these vultures; they would buy anything, from toothbrushes to country estates; they cleared out private collections of antiquities and the antique dealers’ shops before the owners realised how badly they had been robbed and cheated in their time of need. Hotel receptionists from Switzerland and Dutch shorthand typists stayed in the princely apartments of the Ringstrasse hotels. Incredible as it may seem, I can vouch for it that for a long time the famous, de luxe Hotel de l’Europe in Salzburg was entirely booked by unemployed members of the English proletariat, who could live here more cheaply than in their slums at home, thanks to the generous unemployment benefit they received. Anything that was not nailed down disappeared. Word gradually spread of the cheap living and low prices in Austria. Greedy visitors came from further and further afield, from Sweden, from France, and you heard more Italian, French, Turkish and Romanian than German spoken in the streets of the city centre of Vienna.

În general, se presupune că îmbogățirea reprezintă țelul suprem tipic al evreului. Nimic mai fals. Îmbogățirea înseamnă pentru el numai o treaptă intermediară, un mijloc spre adevăratul scop. Ceea ce vrea cu adevărat evreul, idealul său imanent, este desăvârșirea intelectuală, promovarea într-o categorie culturală superioară. Chiar la evreimea ortodoxă răsăriteană, la care atât slăbiciunile, cât și calitățile întregii rase se manifestă mai pregnant, își găsește o expresie plastică această supremație a voinței de spiritualitate asupra factorului material nud: cel cucernic, învățatul în ale Bibliei valorează de o mie de ori mai mult în ochii comunității decât bogatul. Chiar și cel mai înstărit își va mărita fiica mai degrabă cu un învățat sărac lipit pămâtului decât cu un negustor. Această întâietate dată celor spirituale se manifestă la fel de intens în toate straturile; chiar și cel mai sărac neguțător ambulant, care-și târăște marfa prin ploi și zloată, va încerca cu prețul celor mai grele sacrificii să-și dea cel puțin un fecior la învățătură, și pentru întreaga familie este un titlu de onoare să aibă printre membrii ei pe cineva care a devenit un intelectual de vază, un profesor, un savant, un muzician, ca și când aceasta ar înnobila-o prin performanța lui. Instinctiv, ceva din firea evreului caută să se debaraseze de ceea ce este moralmente dubios, respingător și meschin, inerent oricărui negoț, oricărei simple afaceri și să se ridice în sfera mai pură, imaterială a valorilor spirituale, ca și când ar vrea - ca să vorbim ca Wagner - să scape, el și tot neamul lui, de blestemul banilor.

Antes de 1914, la Tierra era de todos. Todo el mundo iba adonde quería y permanecía allí el tiempo que quería. No existían permisos ni autorizaciones; me divierte la sorpresa de los jóvenes cada vez que les cuento que antes de 1914 viajé a la India y América sin pasaporte y que en realidad jamás en mi vida había visto uno. La gente subía y bajaba de los trenes y de los barcos sin preguntar ni ser preguntada, no tenía que rellenar ni uno del centenar de papeles que se exigen hoy en día. No existían salvoconductos ni visados ni ninguno de estos fastidios; las mismas fronteras que hoy aduaneros, policías y gendarmes han convertido en una alambrada, a causa de la desconfianza patológica de todos hacia todos, no representaban más que líneas simbólicas que se cruzaban con la misma despreocupación que el meridiano de Greenwich. Fue después de la guerra cuando se empezó a trastornar el mundo.

The first moment, while the idea was still a dream of vague outline, was decidedly the happiest in Herzl’s short life. As soon as he began to fix his aims in actual space, and to unite the forces, he was made to realize how divided his people had become among various races and destinies—the religious on the one hand, the free thinkers on the other, here the socialist, there the capitalistic Jews—all competing eagerly with one another in all languages, and all unwilling to submit to a unified authority. In the year 1901, when I saw him for the first time, he stood in the midst of this struggle and perhaps he was even struggling with himself; he did not have sufficient faith in its success to relinquish the position that fed him and his family. He still had to divide himself between his petty journalistic duties and the task which was his true life. It was still the feuilleton editor Theodor Herzl who received me in the beginning of 1901.

I was still in the Gymnasium when this short pamphlet, penetrating as a steel shaft, appeared; but I can still remember the general astonishment and annoyance of the bourgeois Jewish circles of Vienna. What has happened, they said angrily, to this otherwise intelligent, witty and cultivated writer? What foolishness is this that he has thought up and writes about? Why should we go to Palestine? Our language is German and not Hebrew, and beautiful Austria is our homeland. Are we not well off under the good Emperor Franz Josef? Do we not make a decent living, and is our position not secure? Are we not equal subjects, inhabitants and loyal citizens of our beloved Vienna? Do we not live in a progressive era in which in a few decades all sectarian prejudices will be abolished? Why does he, who speaks as a Jew and who wishes to help Judaism, place arguments in the hands of our worst enemies and attempt to separate us, when every day brings us more closely and intimately into the German world?

Op de scholen werden naar Russisch voorbeeld 'scholierenraden' ingesteld om de leraren te controleren, de 'leerplannen' werden afgeschaft, want de kinderen moesten en wilden alleen leren wat hun aanstond. Tegen elke bestaande vorm werd gerevolteerd om het plezier van het revolteren, zelfs tegen de wil van de natuur, tegen de eeuwige polariteit van de geslachten. De meisjes lieten hun haar knippen, zo kort dat je hun 'Bubi'-kapsels niet van die van de jongens kon onderscheiden, jongemannen schoren snorren en baarden af om meisjesachtiger te zijn, homoseksualiteit en lesbiennendom werden, niet uit innerlijke noodzaak maar als protest tegen de ouderwetse, legale, 'normale' vormen van liefde de grote mode. Elke uitdrukkingsvorm van het bestaan deed zijn best radicaal en revolutionair voor de dag te komen, natuurlijk ook de kunst.[...] Overal werd het element van de toegankelijkheid uitgebannen, de melodie in de muziek, de gelijkenis in het portret, de verstaanbaarheid in de taal. De lidwoorden 'de', 'het' en 'een' werden uitgeschakeld.

In itself all publicity disturbs a man’s natural equilibrium. In normal circumstances your name means no more than the band on a cigar—a means of recognition, an outward object of little importance that is only loosely linked to the real subject, the Self. But in the case of success that name, so to speak, swells to a larger dimension. It frees itself from the man who bears it and becomes a power, a force, something independent, a commodity, capital. And then, with a violent backlash, it turns in on its bearer as a force that begins to influence, dominate and change him. Happy, self-confident natures unconsciously start identifying themselves with the influence they exert. A title, a position, a medal or decoration, and the publicity that now goes with their names can enhance their self-confidence, tempting them to feel that special recognition is their right in contemporary society and their country, and they instinctively puff themselves up to make themselves personally influential in the outside world. However, a man who naturally distrusts himself tends to feel that outward success of any kind makes it his duty, in what to him is a difficult situation, to change as little as possible.

The Nazis no longer resorted to hypocritical pretexts about the urgency of opposing and eliminating Marxism. They did not just rob and steal, they gave free rein to every kind of private vengeful instinct. University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while shouting “Heil Hitler!” in chorus. They rounded up innocent citizens in the streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight. They broke into apartments and tore the jewels out of the ears of trembling women—it was the kind of thing that might have happened when cities were plundered hundreds of years ago in medieval wars, but the shameless pleasure they took in the public infliction of pain, psychological torture and all the refinements of humiliation was something new. All this has been described not by one victim but by thousands, and a more peaceful age, not morally exhausted like our own, will shudder some day to read what horrors were inflicted on that cultured city in the twentieth century by a single half-deranged man. For in the midst of his military and political victories, that was Hitler’s most diabolical triumph—one man succeeded in deadening every idea of what is just and right by the constant attrition of excess. Before

saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own.