1. Austria

“The World of Yesterday”, Stefan Zweig.

Not being overly familiar with continental authors I had not heard of Stefan Zweig until I began researching books to read for Austria.  His harrowing memoir, The World of Yesterday, seemed the ideal entry into a European reading list: charting the demise of old nineteenth century Vienna and the Hapsburg empire and the rise of 1930s nationalism.  He wrote The World of Yesterday when living in exile in Britain (his Austrian citizenship having been stripped thanks to his Jewish background). He committed suicide during World War II, just a few days after sending The World of Yesterday to his publisher.

Zweig is the ultimate europhile metropolitan elite: as the well-educated son of an industrialist you get the sense he never worried much financially (although he does lose much in post WW1 Austria), he travels Europe freely, he is on friendly terms with intellectuals and high-powered men across the continent, he can even ask a favour of Mussolini.  And he loses a lot when that stable and peaceable period is shattered, twice in his lifetime.

He tells the story of twentieth century Austria and – through his travels – of Europe itself; beginning in the sleepy and secure world of pre-WWI Vienna, before charting the “volcanic eruptions” of the First World War, Nazism and the World War II.  His wonderfully written and hugely readable account dwells on how these great historical events touched his own personal experiences. These range from amusing coincidences to chillingly foreboding experiences of European peace disintegrating: passing trainloads of German weaponry on a train journey back from Belgium in 1914, having Austrian police turn up to search his house in 1934 for no other reason, we and he assume, than that he is a prominent Jew in Salzburg.

Reading this book as my country prepares for Brexit I was struck by many of the parallels – the security felt before the eruption of Brexit and Trump, the shattering of illusions about global progress and partnership, the unease that comes with uncertainty and feeling out of step with a prevailing political current.

Yet what comes across most strongly is Zweig’s humanism, his open-mindedness to all of these different countries and cultures and his ultimate belief in European togetherness.  It reminds you what a century of turmoil Europe has gone through, largely of its own making of course: from the first world war, decline of established aristocracies in Germany, Britain, Austria, to the political, moral and economic upheaval of the 1920s and 30s, to the Second World War – where Zweig’s account leaves us – and everything to come: Communism, the European Union and all the challenges still to face.  

Zweig’s belief and love for the continent is infectious.  Particularly the earlier chapters and their ode to old Vienna in the “age of security” he felt was destroyed by the First World War.  He paints the city – and Austria itself – as a vestige of artistic and cultural appreciation, a favourable contrast from the militarism of Prussian Germany, and contentedly unambitious and stable after hundreds of years of Hapsburg rule.  His veneration of the Viennese coffee house makes me want to book a plane ticket immediately:

“[T]he Viennese coffee house is an institution of a particular kind, not comparable to any other in the world.  It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join for the price of a cheap cup of coffee.  Every guest, in return for that small expenditure, can sit there for hours on end, talking, writing, playing cards, receiving post, and above all reading an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.  A Viennese coffee house of the better sort took all the Viennese newspapers available, and not only those but the newspapers of the entire German Reich, as well as the French, British, Italian and American papers, and all the major literary and artistic international magazines…So we knew everything that was going on in the world at first hand, we heard about every book that came out, every theatrical performance wherever it took place and we compared reviews in all the newspapers.  Perhaps nothing contributed so much to the intellectual mobility and international orientation of Austrians as the fact that they could inform themselves so extensively at the coffee house of all that was going on in the world and at the same time could discuss it with a circle of friends.”

All this is shattered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which Zweig hears from the newspaper boys as he is holidaying in Baden.  Zweig himself did not fight (although he provides a haunting reminiscence of travelling by hospital train with soldiers injured fighting in Poland), his experience of the depravity of war is largely in watching fellow writers participate in a jingoistic, nationalistic narrative which is so alien to his worldview and which he found almost as tragic as the killing itself.  There are touching stories within this however, such as the reception to Zweig’s wartime appeal to writers in enemy countries: “one of my French friends, writing in the Mercure de France, attacked my essay ‘To Friends Abroad’, but in what was supposed to be a denunciation he had printed the whole of it in French translation, down to the very last word, so he had successfully smuggled it into France, where anyone could now read it, which had been our real intention all along”; or the welcome he received in a former enemy country when he visited for the first time after the war:

“You are Austrian? he asked. Was he going to show me the door, I wondered. But when I said yes, he was positively delighted. ‘Ah, che piacere! Finalmente!’ – Oh, what a pleasure! At last. That was my welcome to Italy, and further confirmation of the impression I had gained in the war that all the propaganda and incitement to hatred had caused only a short fit of feverish mental illness, but fundamentally had never touched the great majority of Europeans.”  

When political relations between countries break down, these personal connections between citizens become all the more important.

Perhaps I found these anecdotes even more affecting because any civilised touchpoints between my own country and Europe feel so poignant at the moment – whether it is the exchange of letters between German and British politicians and celebrities, or my own experience of visiting EU countries and being told “we will miss the British”.

Things never remain this rosy, of course, and neither was Zweig’s fate.  Even though he himself escaped the Nazis, he is ever aware that his books did not.  His matter of fact description of how books and culture were burnt contrasts deeply with the earlier account of Austria’s deep appreciation for literature, art and music – no matter its author – earlier in the century:

“the German students…seized copies of our books from the bookshops, and marched with this loot, banners waving, to an open square.  Here the books were either literally pilloried, publically nailed to a wooden post in the Medieval manner – medieval customs were back in fashion …- or as the burning of human beings was not, unfortunately, allowed, they were burnt to ashes on huge pyres while the students chanted patriotic slogans.”

The later chapters are a downbeat and melancholic reflection and reading them it is perhaps easier to understand why Zweig took his own life: to watch the continent and country that he loved voluntarily rip itself apart for a second time, throw off bonds of friendship and veneration of art for the sake of a divisive ideology, is not something many people would seek to live through.  It is a reminder of how fragile a thing is peace and cooperation between peoples, and yet how important it is for the flourishing of nations and individuals.

Zweig is not a faultless narrator, his appreciation of those who are not so economically privileged is fleeting, and his account of the times does not seek to analyse or help you understand the forces which shaped that tragic history.  He wrote with no notes (all his personal effects being left in Austria) and certainly writes from a nostalgic rather than objective point of view.

Perhaps if it were not a time of such uncertainty, if fascists did not once again roam the streets of Europe and politicians did not speak so unthinkingly of division rather than togetherness, this book would not have had such an impact on me as it did.  But it is one of those times, a time of uncertainty when the world – and especially Europe – could go one way or the other and Zweig’s account reminds us how important it is to preserve that which unites us. His most striking parallel with our own times, and with certain elements of Brexit Britain in particular perhaps, is his excoriation of the war-like leaders who lead the continent to destruction:

“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 conjured up.”