The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig Page A

private lives in a more individual and personal way. We were able to live in a more cosmopolitan manner; the whole world was open to us. We could travel anywhere we liked without passes and permits; no one interrogated us about our beliefs, our origins, our race or religion. We certainly did—I do not deny it—have immeasurably more individual freedom, and we did not just welcome that, we made use of it. But as Friedrich Hebbel once nicely put it, “Sometimes we have no wine, sometimes we have no goblet.” Both are seldom granted to one and the same generation; if morality allows a man freedom, the state tries to remould him. If the state allows him freedom, morality will try to impose itself. We knew more of the world then, and knew it better, but the young today live their own youthful years more fully and are more aware of what they experience. Today, when I see young people coming out of their schools and colleges with heads held high, with bright, cheerful faces, when I see boys and girls together in free and easy companionship, competing with each other in studies, sport and games without false shame or bashfulness, racing over the snow on skis, rivalling each other in the swimming pool with the freedom known in the ancient world, driving over the countryside together in motor cars, engaging in all aspects of a healthy, untroubled life like brothers and sisters, without any internal or external pressure on them, I always feel as if not forty but a thousand years lay between them and those of us who had to look for any experience of giving and taking love in a hole-and-corner way in the shadows. I see genuinely happy expressions on their faces. What a great revolution in moralityhas taken place to the benefit of the young; how much freedom in life and love they have regained, and how much better they thrive both physically and mentally on this healthy new freedom! Women look more beautiful to me now that they are at liberty to display their figures; their gait is more upright, their eyes brighter, their conversation less stilted. What a different kind of confidence this new youth has acquired! They are not called upon by anyone else to account for what they do or do not do—they answer only to themselves and their own sense of responsibility, which has wrested control over them from mothers and fathers and aunts and teachers, and long ago threw off the inhibition, intimidation and tension that weighed down on their own development. They no longer know the devious secrecy we had to resort to to get the forbidden pleasures that they now correctly feel are their right. They happily enjoy their youth with the verve, freshness, lightness of heart and freedom from anxiety proper to their age. But the best of that happiness, it seems to me, is that they do not have to lie to others, while they can be honest with themselves and their natural feelings and desires. It is possible that the carefree way in which young people go through life today means they lack something of our own veneration for intellectual subjects when we were young. It may be that through the easy give and take that is accepted now, they lose an aspect of love that seemed to us particularly valuable and intriguing, they lose a certain reticence caused by shame and timidity, and certain especially tender moments. Perhaps they do not even have any idea how the awe of what is banned and forbidden mysteriously enhances one’s enjoyment of it. But all this seems to me a minor drawback by comparison with the saving grace—the fact that young people today are free from fear and oppression, and enjoy in full what was forbidden us at their age, a sense of frank self-confidence.
NOTES
    1 What is natural is vile.
    2 La Dame aux camélias, novel by Alexandre Dumas fils , on which Verdi’s famous opera La Traviata is based.
    3 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, 1832-1910, Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903.
    4 Strich— line or break. To be auf