The World of Yesterday

"You most certainly must. This is another forced exile; Stefan Zweig ended up in Brazil, where he committed suicide. The World of Yesterday is a very vivid memoir of pre-World War I Austria. He then came back after the First World War to an utterly changed Austria. The world he knew had vanished. It’s a classic, and maybe we can end with a passage from it: “From the standpoint of reason, the most foolish thing I could do after the collapse of the German and Austrian arms was to go back to Austria, that Austria which showed faintly on the map of Europe as the vague, gray and inert shadow of the former Imperial monarchy. The Czechs, Poles, Italians, and Slovenes had snatched away their countries; what remained was a mutilated trunk that bled from every vein. Of the six or seven millions who were forced to call themselves ‘German-Austrians'”—when the First Republic was first declared, they wanted to call it German Austria but that was forbidden by the Allies because they didn’t want Germany, having been defeated, to get another large slice of land—”two starving and freezing millions crowded the capital alone; the industries which had formally enriched the land were on foreign soil, the railroads had become wrecked stumps, the State Bank received in place of its gold the gigantic burden of the war debt. Boundary lines were still unsettled, the peace conference, having scarcely begun; reparations had not been fixed, there was no flour, bread or oil. There appeared to be no solution other than a revolution or some other catastrophe. According to all human prevision, it was impossible for the country—an entity created artificially by the victors—to exist independently and, in the unanimous opinion of all parties, socialist, clerical and nationalist, it had no wish to exist independently. It was the first instance in history, as far as I know, in which a country was saddled with an independence which it exasperatedly resisted.”"

"You really, really should read it, not because of the Vienna Circle, but just as a work of literature. It is a beautiful book. As a chess player, I first came across Zweig’s novella The Royal Game , which is a wonderful short story about chess . It’s a great book, but The World of Yesterday is regarded by many Zweigians as his masterpiece. It’s an autobiography, but it’s also a biography of Vienna, really. And it’s incredibly poignant, because the day after he dispatched the manuscript in 1942—by which time he had left Vienna for the UK and then gone to the States, before reaching his final destination in Brazil—he and his wife killed themselves. Yes, it does. Some of it predates the Vienna Circle. It’s about the world of Klimt and Schiele, for example, the world of Mahler and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler. It certainly is. Klimt and Schiele are a bit before the Circle. Schiele died incredibly young – he was only 28 – in 1918, so before the Circle got going. The book portrays Vienna in its golden era and the passing stars in it are people like Klimt and Schiele, Mahler, and of course Freud. The book is also important for me in relation to the discussion we had earlier about the backgrounds of the Vienna Circle members. Zweig was from a similar background. He was middle-class and Jewish but wasn’t observant. In one sense, he was established and successful and he saw himself as part of German high culture. Beethoven was one of his gods, as he was for so many Viennese. Wittgenstein described Beethoven as his god. “Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was the most amazing place…It can be compared to Athens in 400 BC, or Florence during the Renaissance” Zweig was bourgeois, successful and established – and, yet, vulnerable. The book is suffused with a sense of foreboding about what’s around the corner. Of course, he was writing about his past from the vantage point of knowing what was to happen – not surprisingly, the book is nostalgic for the earlier, fin-de siècle Vienna, and the Vienna of the 1910s and 20s. I should add that he doesn’t just paint a golden picture of Vienna. He describes Vienna during the Great Depression and how miserable it was for a very large chunk of the Viennese population. While explaining how bad things got after the hyperinflation of the 1920s, he notes that a shoelace came to cost as much as an entire luxury shop with a stock of 2,000 pairs of shoes. And repairing a broken window became more expensive than building the whole house had once been. It’s very vivid. It’s a wonderful depiction of just how crazy hyperinflation had become in the mid-1920s. I think it’s absolutely essential. And that’s what I didn’t understand before I began to write the book. I came to believe that the attack on metaphysics is not just philosophical, but political . I’ve always believed that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, unlike Frege’s anti-Semitism, was deeply embedded in his philosophy, which makes him, in some ways, a much more reprehensible figure—and certainly a much more pernicious philosopher, in my view. And there’s definitely a connection between some of the pseudo-metaphysics and Romanticism of the far right and logical empiricism’s attack on metaphysics. Well, obviously, they had their philosophical objections. But what was driving that emotionally was a fear of fascism. And for very good reasons. The far right had all these metaphysical propositions at the heart of its philosophy: the connection with the ‘ Heimat ’ – the homeland; the idea of a group, the Volk , that was somehow more than the sum of the individuals; the idea of a spirit, and a movement of history. All these notions and sentiments, which were part of that metaphysical tradition, were deeply threatening on a personal level to members of the Vienna Circle. You’re right. Hegel was a target. It would be going too far to say they were Marxists, with one or two exceptions, including, again, Otto Neurath. He’d spent some of his career working on command economies. In World War I , he had spent time looking at how you could set up a command economy and why that might be more successful, he argued, than one based on free markets. That’s a proposition that we now regard as absurd, I think. Most of the rest of the Circle, with the notable exception of Schlick, were people of the left, rather than Marxists. You might call them socialists, but not Marxists. Yes, with the exception of Neurath who, I think, might have signed up to the movement-of-history aspect of Marx… Yes. Marx has a sort of analytic approach to why society is bound to progress and eventually end up in the proletarian revolution. That is an empirical claim, as Popper famously pointed out. If Marxism is a science, which Marx himself claimed it to be, then, Popper said, it had to make these verifiable or, as he would put it, falsifiable claims. And, as Popper pointed out, Marx made many claims that turned out to be false. It was science in Popperian terms. It was just bad science. That’s right. Popper’s point was that Marx had come up with this hypothesis, this theory. It might be based on sound reasoning. Maybe you look at his premises and you think that they make sense. You can see how he reached his conclusions. But then you look at the predictions, and many of them turn out to be false. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So, in that sense, you’re right. It may have been a perfectly reasonable theory, which has nonetheless been falsified and so needs to be rejected. Or you can take the approach that Popper was even more critical of: namely, you reinterpret Marxism in a way that is never falsifiable. You explain every exception away, so that nothing is falsifiable. And if you do that, Popper says, you’re not engaging in a genuine scientific enterprise."

"Stefan Zweig: if you see Warhol as the product of the popularisation of Freudian ideas in America after the war – partly through consumer marketing, partly through PR, as opposed to straight analysis – then Zweig is at the heroic beginnings of the whole enterprise. Rorschach studied in Switzerland at the institute where Jung taught, and part of the success of his test in America was that he combined Jungian and Freudian ideas. Zweig meanwhile grew up in the world Freud inhabited: turn-of-the-century Vienna, a totally unchanged bourgeois stronghold, apparently unshakable. Zweig calls it the age of security. Everybody grew up knowing exactly what to expect from their lives and believing in the progressive creed that everybody was getting richer, happier, that history was moving everybody forward, lifting people to the same level. “In the 19th century inkblots took over from silhouettes as the parlour game” So it’s about growing up as a Jewish writer in Vienna, going from this amazing generation of cultural genius through both World Wars, Nazism, every possible horror and upheaval. And it’s bookended by two meetings with Freud, the first when Zweig was a young man, and Viennese society was so repressed that women weren’t even allowed to mention trousers (they had to call them “his unmentionables”), the second when they’re both in exile in London, following the Anschluss in 1938, when Germany and Austria were united. Very sweet natured, as well as being the most fantastic celebration of high culture. He meets Rilke, he meets Rodin in his studio, and so on. He writes it in 1942 and he says – I paraphrase – “oh, people are so much more confident now”. Men and women growing up are so much freer than we were, partly of course thanks to Freud. He celebrates how much more he’s been able to learn from his own life than his parents had been able to in theirs. It’s amazingly graceful and light. And then almost immediately after finishing it he commits suicide. Yes, very tragic. But if you think about it, all the things that he said about the fight against repression, which was coupled in turn-of-the-century Vienna with huge industries in pornography and prostitution, resonate with Warhol and contemporary America in a way that’s very interesting and quite depressing."

"I don’t know if I’d agree with that, but it is a gripping read, written just before he committed suicide in Brazil. What I like about his memoir are the passages about Vienna. His father was in textile manufacturing and his mother came from quite a wealthy family. As a young man, he wanted to write poetry . Describing his theatre-going and his passion for culture he says, “You were not truly Viennese without a love for culture, a bent for enjoying and assessing the prodigality of life as something sacred.” Zweig mentions the intellectual drive of the Jews, which he felt dated back thousands of years and brought them to a peak of achievement in that period in Vienna in the interwar years. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He also wrote vividly about witnessing the outbreak of the First World War . A pacifist, he notes the excitement, the exhilarated men and women out in the streets craving to rush off to battle. He doesn’t tell you much about himself or his wife, but describes people, particularly fellow authors, in a very generous manner. He was a good friend of Roth’s, and tried to convince him to drink less. He also knew Rilke and Herzl and Schiele, and describes Freud. When he travelled he met people like the French writer Romain Rolland, and was convinced that the future lay in pan-Europeanism. He also talked about being Jewish. The title of his book, The World of Yesterday , refers to the world of security before World War One. People’s lives were steadily improving until the 28th of June 1914 and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. He says that at that time, “to the German I am a Jew masked as a German. To the Jew I am a German faithless to Israel.” He was in this uncomfortable position because he wasn’t a Zionist. Many middle class Austrian Jews felt that a Jewish homeland in Palestine was a good option for East European Jews, who had had such a hard time, but for themselves, who felt truly German and belonged to the German culture, it made no sense. The World of Yesterday was written in a rush when Zweig was really desperate. He hated America and was deeply depressed. So he writes it in that kind of state of mind."