Crushing the spirit

The fall of Austria [1938] brought with it a change in my personal life which at first I believed to be a quite unimportant formality: my Austrian passport became void and I had to request an emergency white paper from the English authorities, a passport for the stateless. Often in my cosmopolitan reveries I had imagined how beautiful it would be, how truly in accord with my inmost thoughts, to be stateless, obligated to no one country .... I only understood what this exchange of my passport for an alien's certificate meant in the moment when I was admitted to the English officials after a long wait on the petitioners' bench in an anteroom. An Austrian passport was a symbol of my rights. Every Austrian consul or officer or police officer was in duty bound to issue one to me on demand as a citizen in good standing. But I had to solicit an English certificate. It was a favor I had to ask for, and what is more, a favor that could be withdrawn at any moment. Only yesterday still a visitor from abroad, ... now I had become an immigrant, a 'refugee.' ... [E]very foreign visa on this travel paper had thenceforth to be specially pleaded for, because all countries were suspicious of the 'sort' of people of which I had suddenly become one, of the outlaws, of the men without a country, whom one could not at a pinch pack off and deport to their own State as they could others if they became undesirable or stayed too long. Always I had to think of what an exiled Russian had said to me years ago: 'Formerly man had only a body and soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated as a human being.'

Indeed, nothing makes us more sensible of the immense relapse into which the world fell after the First World War than the restrictions on man's freedom of movement and the diminution of his civil rights. Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they wished. There were no permits, no visas and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I had traveled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. ... The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveler, before and during the journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and full face, one's hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible; fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers; furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of good standing, had to be shown; letters of recommendation were required, invitations to visit a country had to be procured; they asked for the addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires, and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out, and if only one of this sheaf of papers was missing one was lost.

Petty details, one thinks. And at the first glance it may seem petty in me even to mention them. But our generation has foolishly wasted irretrievable, valuable time on those senseless pettinesses. If I reckon up the many forms I have filled out during these years, declarations on every trip, tax declarations, foreign exchange certificates, border passes, entrance permits, departure permits, registra-tions of coming and on going; the many hours I have spent in ante-rooms of consulates and officials, the many inspectors, friendly and unfriendly, bored and overworked, before whom I have sat, the many examinations and interrogations at frontiers I have been through, then I feel keenly how much human dignity has been lost in this century which, in our youth, we had credulously dreamed of as one of freedom, as of the federation of the world. The loss in creative work, in thought, as a result of these spirit-crushing procedures is incalculable. Have not many of us spent more time studying official rules and regulations than works of the intellect! The first excursion in a foreign country was no longer to a museum or to a world renowned view, but to a consulate, to a police office, to get a 'permit.' When those of us who had once ... spiritedly discussed intellectual problems met together, we would catch ourselves talking about affidavits and permits and whether one should apply for an immigration visa or a tourist visa, ... . Human beings were made to feel that they were objects and not subjects, that nothing was their right but everything merely a favor by official grace. They were codified, registered, numbered, stamped and even today I, as a case-hardened creature of an age of freedom and a citizen of the world-republic of my dreams, count every impression of a rubber-stamp in my passport a stigma, every one of those hearings and searches a humiliation. They are petty trifles, always merely trifles, I am well aware, trifles in a day when human values sink more rapidly than those of currencies.... It may be that I had been too greatly pampered. ... I have no compunction about admitting that since the day when I had to depend upon identity papers or passports that were indeed alien, I ceased to feel as if I quite belonged to myself. A part of the natural identity with my original and essential ego was destroyed forever. [Editor's Note: "Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881 of a wealthy and cosmopolitan Jewish family.... During the years before the First World War Zweig travelled in Europe, America, India, and Africa, writing, collecting, and meeting with most of the eminent figures in the arts. ... In 1934, as the Nazis' power grew in Germany, Zweig left Austria for England, where he became a British citizen in 1940. He took his own life in Petropolis, Brazil in 1942."This excerpt can be found in Zweig's THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY (first published 1943), Chapter XVI ("The Agony of Peace"), Section 7 (pp. 408-412 of the University of Nebraska Press Bison Book edition of 1964; and pp. 307-310 of the Atrium Press Limited, Cassell Publishers edition of 1987). [v]

Copyright Voluntaryists Third Quarter 2003
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