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Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday

 

Released in 1942, Stefan Zweig's The World Yesterday is an enlightening book about the past in Europe that tells us a lot about today. A must read. Chris Aderne's review gives us some good insight:

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.

A Sense of Rebellion

 

A highly recommended podcast of a think tank that existed in the 1060's and 70's and the characters that populated it. A must hear.

The Snake Story

 

One of the things you can do to understand how moronic Donald Trump is and how deluded his followers are is to read the transcripts (everything below is from a recent Trump Rant) from his stream of consciousness rants-here is this week's story from Las Vegas. I actually interpret this as Trump being the snake, and he tells this story to his cult:

 

On her way to work, one morning down the path along the lake, a tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake.

His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew.

“Poor thing,” she cried. “I’ll take you in and I’ll take care of you.”

“Take me in, oh, tender woman. Take me in, for heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh, tender woman,” cried the vicious snake.

She wrapped him up all cozy in a comforter of silk and laid him by her fireside with some honey and some milk.

She hugged and kissed him brightly. The work that night had gone. She found the pretty snake she had taken in had been revived.

“Take me in, oh, tender woman. Take me in, for heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh, tender woman,” cried that vicious snake.

She clutched him to her bosom. “You’re so beautiful,” she sighed.

“But if I hadn’t taken you in by now, you truly would have died.” She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed and held him tight.

But instead of saying, “Thank you, ma’am,” the snake gave her a vicious bite.

“Take me in oh, tender woman. Take me in, for heaven’s sake. Take me in, oh, tender woman,” sighed the vicious snake.

“I saved you,” cried the woman, “And you’ve bitten me. But why? You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.”

“Shut up, silly woman,” sighed the reptile with a grin.

“You know damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”

And that’s the end of the story.

And I had to do that sucker by memory because there’s no light up here. As much light, I’m dark. It’s like dark. I had two problems. It’s dark and the print on that thing is so light you couldn’t read it. So I did the best I could, but not bad, right? I couldn’t see. Michael, I couldn’t see a fricking word. I said, “I have an idea. Let’s do this snake.” And then I take it out. I say, “Oh, my God. That’s a very light print. Oh, my God. There’s no light.” Between the light and the print. I’m saying, “What the hell am I doing this for?” But it wasn’t bad. And you get the point. When I’m a president and when I become your president, when we all — we’re going to all work together. We’re going to make it happen. We will get the illegal alien, murderers, rapists, and child predators the hell out of our country, and we will not ever, ever, ever let them back in. So Nevada, get out and vote. We win this state. We’re going to win the whole thing. We win this, we’re going to win the whole thing.

The Anarchist Position

From a new biography by robert Barsky of Noam Chomsky and his admiration for Orwell's Homage to Catalonia:

When Chomsky was in his teens he read Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” “which,” he told me in 1995, “struck me as amusing but pretty obvious”; but in his later teens he read “Homage to Catalonia” “and thought it outstanding (though he overdid the POUM role I felt, not surprisingly given where he was); it confirmed beliefs I already had about the Spanish Civil War.” “Homage to Catalonia,” Orwell’s description of the Spanish conflict, which he wrote after completing a stint as an active member of the POUM militia, is still a book to which people (including Chomsky) who are interested in successful socialist or anarchist movements refer, because it gives an accurate and moving description of a working libertarian society. The “beliefs” that it “confirmed” for the teenaged Chomsky were related to his growing conviction that libertarian societies could function and meet the needs of the individual and the collective.

There were three left-wing groups active on the scene in Barcelona during the 1930s: the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or POUM; the socialist PSUC (Partido Socialista Unificado de Catalunya), which was dominated by Stalinists; and the anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores-Federacion Anarquista Iberica), which honored Rudolf Rocker as “their teacher” on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Orwell joined the POUM militia at the end of 1936 as a means of entering Spain to write newspaper articles. His description, in “Homage to Catalonia,” of the POUM line sets up an oversimplified but provocative relationship between bourgeois democracy, fascism, and capitalism:

Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control. If you set up any less goal than this, you will either hand the victory to Franco, or, at best, let in Fascism by the back door. The war and the revolution are inseparable.

Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II. This concept is a difficult one to grasp for those of us who have been programmed, in large measure by the mainstream press, to think that battles must involve two opposing forces — one good and one evil. World War II is often portrayed this way: the Allied side is taken to represent freedom and democracy, while fascism and Nazism are considered synonymous with totalitarian oppression. Chomsky knew early on that there were other ways to conceive of contemporary political structures. He tended to lean towards the left-libertarian interpretation of events, and concluded that neither side deserved the support of those interested in a “good society.” How “good” is the society that drops atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, or reduces German towns to rubble? Isn’t there an alternative?

This subject is still hotly debated, even among members of the libertarian left. Norman Epstein, who has been active in leftist movements for many years and who is otherwise generally sympathetic to Chomsky’s position, here dissents by taking exception to Orwell’s paraphrasing of the POUM line. He emphasizes that “fascism is not simply another name for capitalism. It is a form, and a particularly brutal one, which capitalism takes under certain historical circumstances (including today in many third world countries under the sponsorship of U.S. capital) which is different from bourgeois democracy. Someone like Chomsky is allowed to function under bourgeois democracy but not under fascism.” But we must recognize the similarities between a fascist agenda and that of the so-called democratic West if we are to understand where Chomsky is coming from in his political works, and to do so we have to engage with the anarchist position that he had begun to develop in his youth.

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Daido Moriyama Speaks

The Pencil Method

From The NYRB, J.M. Coetzee writes in 2000 regarding Robert Walser:

In 1913 Walser left Berlin and returned to Switzerland “a ridiculed and unsuccessful author” (his own self-disparaging words). He took a room in a temperance hotel in the industrial town of Biel, near his sister, and for the next seven years earned a precarious living contributing feuilletons—literary sketches—to newspapers. For the rest he went on long country hikes and served out his obligations in the National Guard. In the collections of his poetry and short prose that continued to appear, he turned more and more to the Swiss social and natural landscape. He wrote two more novels. The manuscript of the first, Theodor, was lost by his publishers; the second, Tobold, was destroyed by Walser himself.

After the World War, the taste among the public for the kind of writing Walser had relied on for an income, writing easily dismissed as whimsical and belletristic, began to wane. He had lost touch with currents in wider German society; as for Switzerland, the reading public there was too small to support a corps of writers. Though he prided himself on his frugality, he had to close down what he called his “little prose-piece workshop.” He began to feel more and more oppressed by the censorious gaze of his neighbors, by the demand for respectability. He moved to Bern, to a position in the national archives, but within months had been dismissed for insubordination. He moved from lodgings to lodgings, drank heavily. He suffered from insomnia, heard imaginary voices, had nightmares and anxiety attacks. He attempted suicide, failing because, as he disarmingly admitted, “I couldn’t even make a proper noose.”

It was clear that he could no longer live alone. His family was, in the terminology of the times, tainted: his mother had been a chronic depressive; one brother had committed suicide; another had died in a mental hospital. It was suggested that his sister should take him in, but she was unwilling. So he allowed himself to be committed to the sanatorium in Waldau. “Markedly depressed and severely inhibited,” ran the initial medical report. “Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life.”

In later evaluations Walser’s doctors would disagree about what, if anything, was wrong with him, and would even urge him to try living outside again. However, the bedrock of institutional routine would appear to have become indispensable to him, and he chose to stay. In 1933 his family had him transferred to the asylum in Herisau, where he was entitled to welfare support. There he occupied his time with chores like gluing paper bags and sorting beans. He remained in full possession of his faculties; he continued to read newspapers and popular magazines; but, after 1932, he did not write. “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad,” he told a visitor. Besides, he said, the time for litterateurs was over. (Recently one of the Herisau staff claimed to have seen Walser at work writing. Even if this is true, no trace of such post-1932 writing has survived.)

Being a writer was difficult for Walser at the most elementary of levels. He did not use a typewriter, but wrote a clear, well-formed hand, on which he prided himself. The manuscripts that have survived—fair copies—are models of calligraphy. Handwriting was, however, one of the sites where psychic disturbance first manifested itself. At some time in his thirties (Walser is vague about the date) he began to suffer psychosomatic cramps of the right hand that he attributed to unconscious animosity toward the pen as a tool. He was able to overcome them only by abandoning the pen and switching to a pencil.

Use of a pencil was important enough for Walser to call it his “pencil system” or “pencil method.” What he does not mention is that when he moved to pencil-writing he radically changed his script. At his death he left behind some five hundred sheets of paper covered in a microscopic pencil script so difficult to read that his executor at first took them to be a diary in secret code. In fact Walser had kept no diary. Nor is the script a code: it is simply handwriting with so many idiosyncratic abbreviations that, even for editors familiar with it, unambiguous decipherment is not always possible. It is in these pencil drafts alone that Walser’s numerous late works, including his last novel, The Robber (twenty-four sheets of microscript, 141 pages in print), have come down to us.

More interesting than the script itself is the question of what the “pencil method” made possible to Walser as a writer that the pen could no longer provide (he still used a pen for fair copies, as well as for correspondence). The answer seems to be that, like an artist with a stick of charcoal between his fingers, Walser needed to get a steady, rhythmic hand movement going before he could slip into a frame of mind in which reverie, composition, and the flow of the writing tool became much the same thing. In a piece entitled “Pencil Sketch” dating from 1926-1927, he mentions the “unique bliss” that the pencil method allowed him. “It calms me down and cheers me up,” he said elsewhere. Walser’s texts are driven neither by logic nor by narrative but by moods, fancies, and associations: in temperament he is less a thinker or storyteller than an essayist. The pencil and the self-invented stenographic script allowed the purposeful, uninterrupted, yet dreamy hand movement that had become indispensable to his creative mood.

Robert Walser as a Young Man

Interview with Novelist Isabella Hammad

David Murray Quartet in Hamburg 5.2024

Lili Anolik, biographer of Eve Babitz

Smithsonian Interview with Eve Babitz 2000

Interview with Eve Babitz for the Smithsonian, here is a sample:

MR. KARLSTROM: And you were being-just to put this into a bit of context-you were being interviewed for a video for a documentary over at Castle Green-

MS. BABITZ: Yes.

MR. KARLSTROM: -Green Hotel in Pasadena

MS. BABITZ: About the Duchamp photograph.

MR. KARLSTROM: Mm-hmm. And the-

MS. BABITZ: You know, I'd never thought of myself as a model in that thing, but I guess I was volunteering for that job.

MR. KARLSTROM: Why don't you -

MS. BABITZ: I thought of myself as, I was like an art groupie/art model and I wanted to-I never modeled for anything like that and never again did, and really most artists, you know, when they have models they really are drawing them basically, like in sculptures, not taking photographs, so I don't know who-and it wasn't Duchamp's idea so I figured I was the artist and the model in that one.

MR. KARLSTROM: Well, Julian Wasser was the photographer.

MS. BABITZ: Right.

MR. KARLSTROM: And I gather that this was something, aside from the official events around the-it wasn't at the opening.

MS. BABITZ: No.

MR. KARLSTROM: Some people think it was at the opening.

MS. BABITZ: That's good.

MR. KARLSTROM: And then that's not right. It really was kind of-what should we say-it was kind of a guerilla act it seems to me.

MS. BABITZ: That's right, it's a guerilla act. It happened in the morning, 7:00 in the morning.

MR. KARLSTROM: Why don't you tell me just, you know, what led up to it, how it came about?

MS. BABITZ: Well, Julian came and there was the-they had the big party at the Green Hotel, even though Julian doesn't remember it; he has photographs that he took there at that time. And so I didn't get invited to it because Walter Hopps [curator of Duchamp retrospective at Pasadena Art Museum, 1963] was mad at me.

MR. KARLSTROM: Why was that?

MS. BABITZ: Because his wife was in town, basically.

MR. KARLSTROM: Is that Shirley? [Art historian later married to dealer Irving Blum.]

MS. BABITZ: Yes. I mean she came back, she suddenly did come back in a flash the minute that Duchamp thing happened and I was like not allowed in. So, but then I found out Jim Elliott wasn't invited either, so maybe nobody under 20, maybe 21, under 21 you weren't allowed in. So, so, he didn't invite me, so, and he wouldn't call me back, and he wouldn't call my mother back. And so I decided that if I could ever, like, you know, create any vengeance or havoc in his life I would, even though I was pretty powerless because I was only 20 and there was no way I could get to him. But, this Julian came up to me at the opening, the public opening, which I went to with my parents and-

MR. KARLSTROM: That was at the museum?

MS. BABITZ: Yeah. At the Pasadena Art Museum, and he said he had this great idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp and it seem to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I'd ever heard in my life. It was like a great idea. I mean, it was, not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was like a great idea. And even if it didn't get any vengeance, it would still turn out okay with me because, you know, it would be sort of immortalized. I would be this, you know, here's this Nude Descending the Staircase guy and now he's going to be The Nude in the Pasadena Art Museum. But, of course, I said, you know, I didn't think that the Pasadena Art Museum old ladies would go along with this. So-

MR. KARLSTROM: Was that part of what attracted you to the idea?

MS. BABITZ: Yes. Yeah, because it was like the Little Old Ladies from Pasadena, you know that Beach Boys' song.

MR. KARLSTROM: Right.

MS. BABITZ: So, I thought well, you know, this will be, you know, and it is kind of like, you know, it'll just kill them to find out that this happened there. So, but, I thought that he should tell Walter so Walter would know what we were doing, that we were going to do this. Because, it didn't seem like-I mean, it was okay to do it, but they ought to know basically. But, I know that Julian did not tell anybody because he probably forgot it the minute he agreed to do it. But he did call me the next day and say "Now, you're not going to chicken out are you?" Because we were supposed to do this two or three days later when they came back from Las Vegas, maybe the next day. They went to Las Vegas; they came back, Duchamp shows up at like, I don't know, it was a Thursday morning or something. It was like seven o'clock. Julian comes to get me at, like, seven in the morning. We drive out to Pasadena to create this, you know, rape. And Gretchen meets us there. She doesn't know what's going on. No one has told her.

MR. KARLSTROM: This is Gretchen Glicksman?

MS. BABITZ: Right. They just-Julian just, likes to, you know, play it by ear, basically. So, you know.

MR. KARLSTROM: Did he just tell them that he wanted to come in to do some photographs?

MS. BABITZ: Of Duchamp. Yeah.

MR. KARLSTROM: And Duchamp didn't know what he had in mind either?

MS. BABITZ: And he brought, and he said "Put that chess table there". You know, we're going to do the chess table. So, Duchamp, he had no idea. I mean that maybe he would of chosen someone else basically. He'd never met me before.

MR. KARLSTROM: Oh, I don't know, you look pretty good.

MS. BABITZ: He'd never met me before. I'd never met him before.

MR. KARLSTROM: Did you know who he was though?

MS. BABITZ: No, I didn't know who-I mean, I had an idea when I went to the art opening that he was probably great. He was one of those great people like-

MR. KARLSTROM: But you hadn't heard of him before?

MS. BABITZ: No. I mean I'd never heard of anybody except Ed Kienholz. That was as far as my-I knew who Ed Kienholz was and I thought he was great. So, I didn't even know who Joseph Cornell was at that time. So, and I knew that everybody was like in love with him because they had this huge party and they had two ballrooms and two bands. That I didn't get invited to.

MR. KARLSTROM: And that really pissed you off.

MS. BABITZ: Yes. So I knew, I figured I-there's got to be someway to get to this deal, some way to like, you know-

MR. KARLSTROM: To be part of it.

MS. BABITZ: Right, to be part of it. So-and Julian, you know, figured out this idea. So we got there and I ran upstairs to John Altoon's studio. He was teaching art up there. It was an upstairs room. I changed my clothes and put on this like artist smock. You know, one of those blue worker shirts that guys have on and nothing else underneath it. Gretchen was like, she wasn't going to say anything because the whole thing was to be cool then and not ask what anything is going on and it's still that way today.

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