Zweig’s ‘World of Yesterday’

Its hard to comprehend the horrors that Europe went through in the early 20^th century. The generation that was born in first few years of the century, was the fortunate one. They were too young to fight in the First World War and too old for the Second. Stefan Zweig’s memoir ‘The World of Yesterday’ captures intimately, the transition that Europe went through in a span of a few decades. The Austria of his childhood was one of affluence and high culture. The news of the theatre and the Opera were the most tracked and discussed topics. Women were still under the shadow of Victorian norms, the corset was a part of their dress code and sex was a taboo topic.

The middle of her body laced into a wasp’s shape in a corset of stiff whalebone, blown out like a huge bell from the waist down, the neck closed in up to the chin, legs shrouded to the toes, the hair towering aloft with countless curls, locks, and braids under a majestically swaying monstrosity of a hat, the hands encased in gloves, even on the warmest summer day, this long since archaic being, the “lady,” in spite of the jewelry with which she was bespangled, in spite of the perfume which surrounded her, the costly laces, the ruchings and other adornments, was an unhappy, pitifully helpless person.

At first glance one is aware that a woman, once she is encased in such a toilette, like a knight in armor, could no longer move about freely, gracefully and lightly. Every movement, every gesture, and consequently her entire conduct, had to be artificial, unnatural and affected in such a costume. The mere make-up of such a “lady” – to say nothing of her social education – the putting on and taking off of these robes, was a troublesome procedure and quite impossible without the help of others. ….. But this nonsense had a secret reason. The true lines of the body of a woman had to be so completely hidden that even her bridegroom at the wedding banquet could not have the faintest idea whether his future life-partner was straight or crooked, whether she was fat or lean, short-legged, bow-legged, or long-legged. This “moral” era by no means regarded as impermissible the building up of the bosom, the hair, or the use of a bustle for reasons of deception or as an adaptation to the common ideal of beauty. The more of a “lady” a woman was to be, the less was her natural form to be seen. Fundamentally, the mode, with this as its obvious motive, merely obeyed the general moral tendency of the time, whose chief care was dissembling and concealment.

After the First World War, this same Vienna and Berlin went through an economic depression and a radical period of lascivious living became the norm. From his descriptions, I was reminded of the TV series Babylon Berlin and Jason Lutes’s fantastic comic ‘Berlin’.

I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions. All values were changed, and not only material ones; the laws of the State were flouted, no tradition, no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world. Bars, amusement parks, honky-tonks sprang up like mushrooms. What we had seen in Austria proved to be just a mild and shy prologue to this witches’ sabbath; for the Germans introduced all their vehemence and methodical organization into the perversion. Along the entire Kurfürstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they were not all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without any shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had never known such orgies as the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eyes of the police. In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold particularly in the bourgeois

With Hitler’s rise to power, Zweig being a Jew, ends up leaving Europe. His books get included in the Nazi book-burnings. After a stint in the US, Zweig and his wife move to Brazil, where they eventually decide to take their own lives. For someone who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Gorky, Rilke, Rolland, Rodin, Shaw, Dali, Yeats and Freud and lived a rich life immersed in ideas and a liberal outlook, his end was devastating. Zweig also visited India and the lasting impression from his trip to the country was the caste system and the concerns of racial purity and ritual pollution that kept everyone on their toes!