"The world of yesterday"

"We enjoyed far more public freedom than the present generation" (that of the post-First World War), "which is subject to military service, labor service, mass ideology in many countries, and everywhere in reality defenselessly delivered to the arbitrariness of a stupid world policy. We could devote ourselves to our art, to our spiritual inclinations, to perfecting our inner life in a more personal and individual way, with less disturbance.

Stefan Zweig

A cosmopolitan existence was possible for us, the whole world was open to us. We could travel anywhere we pleased without passports or visas; no one examined our opinions, our origins, our race, or our religion. And in fact, nothing makes the enormous regression into which humanity has fallen since the First World War more palpable than the restrictions on the freedom of movement of men and their freedoms. Before 1914 the earth belonged to all its inhabitants. Anyone went wherever he wanted and stayed as long as he wanted. There were no permissions, no authorizations, and it always amuses me to see the astonishment of young people when I tell them that before 1914 I traveled to India and America without a passport and never even saw one. You got on the train and got off without being asked anything, without filling out a single one of the hundreds of papers demanded today. There were no permits, no visas, no formalities; those same borders which today, with their customs officers, police, and gendarme posts, have been transformed into barbed-wire networks due to pathological mistrust of everyone against everyone, were nothing but symbolic lines that one crossed with the same carefree ease as the Greenwich meridian. Only after the war did the world experience upheaval through National Socialism, and the first phenomenon engendered by this spiritual epidemic of our century was xenophobia: hatred, or at least fear, of the stranger. Everywhere one defended oneself against the foreigner, everywhere one excluded him. All the humiliations that had previously been invented exclusively against criminals were now inflicted on all travelers before and during the journey. One had to be photographed from right and left, in profile and full face, with hair cut short enough to show the ear; one had to give fingerprints, first the thumb alone, then all ten fingers; in addition, one had to present certificates: of health, vaccination, police, good conduct, recommendations; one had to show invitations and addresses of relatives, provide moral and financial guarantees, fill out forms and sign them in three or four copies, and if even one sheet was missing from this pile of paperwork, one was lost.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, Memories of a European, Le Livre de Poche (translated from German by Serge Niémetz).