It’s very easy to read about Kaiser this, and Franz Ferdinand that, but this is by far the best window into what people were thinking in 1914 (and before) and what people felt about the likelihood and then onset of war. Everyone (including Zweig) was so confident that war couldn’t possibly break out in Europe. How could interest rates go on being 4% forever if war broke out! Interesting to think about our present feeling of how unlikely war seems, hard to tell if there’s a lesson there for us.
We thought railway workers would blow up the tracks rather than let their comrades be loaded into trains to be sent to the front as cannon fodder; we relied on women to refuse to see their children and husbands sacrificed to the idol Moloch; we were convinced that the intellectual and moral power of Europe would assert itself triumphantly at the critical last moment. Our common idealism, the optimism that had come from progress, meant that we failed to see and speak out strongly enough against our common danger.
But he shares a pertinent story about a surge of emotion in a French village when the German Kaiser appeared at the beginning of a film — this is the first time he realises that things are amiss! And there is definitely a lesson for us moderns here.
At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst.
Then when War broke out, Zweig expected dark moods, but people (in Austria, and presumably elsewhere) were enthusiastically dancing in the street. They thought it would be a quick trounce, and that their wise leaders were obviously right and obviously the winners. He contrasts this with 1939, when there was a very different response; everyone was grim and had fewer notions about heroism. Except in America! maybe? they were less involved in the Great War, and so you still read stories about sexy GIs going off to the Pacific…
Why did the masses not burn with the same enthusiasm in 1939 as in 1914? Why did they simply obey the call to arms with grave determination, silently, fatalistically? Wasn’t it the same as before, was there not even something higher and more sacred at stake in the war now being fought, which began as a war of ideas and was not just about borders and colonies? The answer is simple—they did not feel the same because the world in 1939 was not as childishly naive and gullible as in 1914.
It is only when Zweig leaves the city that he finds people with a more sensible view of the situation. During the war he goes to the eastern front (Russia) and notes that the peasants there saw it more clearly than the jingoistic urbanites back home. They saw that it was just a crap thing that had happened and that they shared with their poor “enemies” on the other side of the lines.
I had an irresistible feeling that these simple, even primitive men saw the war in a much clearer light than our university professors and writers; they regarded it as a misfortune that had befallen them, there was nothing they could do about it, and anyone else who was the victim of such bad luck was a kind of brother.
Zweig himself was incredibly mobile and connected during the war. He was in Belgium when it started, so he hopped on a train home and saw guns a-moving. Then he trained to Switzerland during the war, and just across the border the Swiss were enjoying luxuries in abundance while starving Austrians and Frenchmen murdered each other. And finally he trained home after the war (crossing paths with the departing Emperor!) and saw what a dump his home had become in four years of war. He’s also able to write to friends all over Europe, publish books and pamphlets[3] .
The absurdity of European wars was made physically evident to me by the close spatial proximity of conditions on the two sides—over there, on the Austrian side of this little border town, its placards and signs still clearly legible with the naked eye, men were being taken out of every little house and hovel, put on trains and sent to the Ukraine and Albania to murder and be murdered; here, five minutes away, men of the same age could sit at ease with their wives outside their ivy-clad doors, smoking their pipes.
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