Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

And not only were the cities more beautiful, their inhabitants too were more attractive and healthier, thanks to sporting activities, better nutrition, shorter working hours and a closer link with nature. People had discovered that up in the mountains winter, once a dismal season to be spent gloomily playing cards in taverns or feeling bored as you sat around in overheated rooms, was a source of filtered sunlight, nectar for the lungs that sent blood coursing deliciously just beneath the skin. The mountains, the lakes and the sea no longer seemed so far away. Bicycles, motor cars, electric railways had shrunk distance and given the world a new sense of space. On Sundays thousands and tens of thousands, clad in brightly coloured sportswear, raced down the snowy slopes on skis and toboggans; sports centres and swimming baths were built everywhere. You could see the change clearly in those swimming baths—while in my own youth a really fine figure of a man stood out among all the bull-necked, paunchy or pigeon-chested specimens, nowadays athletically agile young men, tanned by the sun and fit from all their sporting activities, competed cheerfully with each other as they did in classical antiquity. Only the most poverty-stricken stayed at home now on a Sunday; all the young people went walking, climbing or competing in all kinds of sports. When they went on holiday they did not, as in my parents’ time, find somewhere to stay near the city, or at the most no further away than the Salzkammergut. Their curiosity about the world had been aroused; they wanted to see if it was as beautiful everywhere, or maybe beautiful in a different way in other places, and while once only the privileged few travelled abroad, now bank clerks and small tradesmen went away to Italy or France. Foreign travel had become cheaper and more comfortable, but above all a new bold, adventurous attitude made travellers willing to venture further afield, less thrifty, less anxious—indeed, anxiety was something to be ashamed of. That whole generation was determined to be more youthful; unlike young people in the world of my parents, everyone was proud of youth. Suddenly beards disappeared, first in the younger men, then shaved off by their elders, imitating them so as not to be thought of as old. Youthful freshness was more desirable than dignity. Women threw away the corsets that had constricted their breasts, stopped fearing fresh air and sunlight and gave up sunshades and veils; they shortened their skirts so that they could move more freely when they played tennis, and they were not shy about showing a well-turned pair of legs. Fashions became more and more natural, men wore breeches, women dared to ride astride, and the sexes stopped concealing themselves from each other. There was more freedom as well as more beauty in the world.

It was the health and self-confidence of the generation after ours that also laid claim to freedom for itself in manners and morals. For the first time, you saw young girls enjoying excursions and sporting activities in open and confident friendship with young men, and without a governess going along as chaperone. They were no longer timid and prudish; they knew what they wanted and what they did not. Escaping the anxious authority of their parents, earning their own living as secretaries or clerks, they took control of their own lives. This new, healthier freedom led to a clear decrease in prostitution, the sole permitted erotic institution of the old world, and prudery of every kind now seemed old-fashioned. Increasingly, the wooden partitions in swimming baths that used to divide the gentlemen’s and ladies’ pools from each other were taken down. Women and men were not ashamed to show their figures any more. In those ten years there was more freedom, informality and lack of inhibition than there had been in the entire preceding century.

For the world was moving to a different rhythm. A year—so much could happen in a year now! Inventions and discoveries followed hard on each other’s heels, and each in turn swiftly became a general good. For the first time the nations all felt in common what was for the benefit of all. On the day when the Zeppelin [1] This Zeppelin was the fourth model of the rigid airships developed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin through the last years of the nineteenth century; the first took to the air in 1900. The one described by Zweig, LZ 4, landed at Echterdingen near Stuttgart in 1906 to satisfy the requirements of the German army, which was thinking of buying it. But it then tore away from its moorings in the air and was wrecked. Luckily there was no one inside it at the time. rose in the air for its first flight, I was on my way to Belgium and happened to be in Strasburg where, to shouts of jubilation from the crowd, it circled the Münster as if bowing to the thousand-year-old cathedral while it hovered in the air. That evening, at the Verhaerens’, news came that the airship had crashed in Echterdingen. Verhaeren had tears in his eyes, and was badly upset. Belgian though he was, this German catastrophe did not leave him unmoved; it was as a European, a man of our time, that he felt for our common victory over the elements as well as this common setback. When Blériot made the first cross-Channel flight in an aeroplane, we rejoiced in Vienna as if he were a hero of our own nation; pride in the triumphs of our technology and science, which succeeded one another by the hour, had led for the first time to a European sense of community, the development of a European identity. How pointless, we said to ourselves, frontiers were if it was child’s play for any aircraft to cross them, how provincial and artificial were customs barriers and border guards, how contrary to the spirit of our times that clearly wished for closer links and international fraternity! This upward surge of feeling was no less remarkable than the upward rise of aircraft; I feel sorry for all who did not live through these last years of European confidence while they were still young themselves. For the air around us is not a dead and empty void, it has in it the rhythm and vibration of the time. We absorb them unconsciously into our bloodstream as the air carries them deep into our hearts and minds. Perhaps, ungrateful as human beings are, we did not realise at the time how strongly and securely the wave bore us up. But only those who knew that time of confidence in the world know that everything since has been regression and gloom.

That world was a wonderful tonic, its strength reaching our hearts from all the coasts of Europe. At the same time, however, although we did not guess it, what delighted us was dangerous. The stormy wind of pride and confidence sweeping over Europe brought clouds with it. Perhaps the upward movement had come too fast, states and cities had made themselves powerful too swiftly—and an awareness of having power always leads states, like men, to use or misuse it. France was extremely wealthy, yet it wanted still more, it wanted another colony although it did not have enough people for the old ones, and it almost went to war over Morocco. Italy had its eye on Cyrenaica; [2] Cyrenaica, a region of modern Libya occupied by Italy in 1911. Austria annexed Bosnia; Serbia and Bulgaria advanced on Turkey; and Germany, although inactive for the moment, was flexing its claws to strike in anger. All the states were suffering a rush of blood to the head. Everywhere, and at the same time, the productive wish for consolidation at home began to develop, like an infectious illness, into a greedy desire for expansion. High-earning French industrialists agitated against their German counterparts, who were also rolling in riches, because both Krupp and Schneider-Creusot wanted to be able to supply more artillery. The Hamburg shipping industry, which earned huge dividends, was vying with shipping based in Southampton, Hungarian and Bulgarian agriculture were in competition, one group of companies was set against all the rest—the economic situation had maddened them all in their frantic wish to get their hands on more and more. If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is not one sensible reason to be found, nor even any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved, it was not really about drawing minor borderlines; I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism that had built up during those forty years of peace, and now demanded release. Every state suddenly felt that it was strong, and forgot that other states felt exactly the same; all states wanted even more, and wanted some of what the others already had. The worst of it was that the very thing we loved most, our common optimism, betrayed us, for everyone thought that everyone else would back down at the last minute, and so the diplomats began their game of mutual bluff. In four or five instances, for instance in Agadir and in the Balkan Wars, it was still only a game, but the great coalitions drew closer and closer together and became increasingly militant. Germany introduced a war tax in the middle of peacetime, France extended its term of military service. Finally the accumulated head of steam had to be released. And the weather over the Balkans showed the way the wind was blowing as the clouds approached Europe.