Austrian-Jewish and Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig: "Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all," recalled the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday published after he and his wife committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 . "People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and America without a passport and without ever having seen one." In the late 1890s and after, Canadians required a single piece of paper designating them a "British Subject" for international travel. , according to Winnipeg Free Press. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, Zweig, fearing the worst, first moved to England in 1934. His Austrian passport became "void," as he puts it after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. He was forced to ask British authorities for an emergency white paper, "a passport for the stateless." He came to understand what an exiled Russian acquaintance had once told him: "Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being." The First World War had a profound impact on western life, big and small. A century ago, the war triggered a rash of security concerns, which led to the widespread use of passports and entrance visas. The Great War and its aftermath increased what Zweig calls "a morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of the foreigner.... The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals in mind were now imposed upon the traveller, before and during every journey." Thereafter, everyone required official photographs, certificates of health and vaccination, letters of recommendation and invitations, and addresses of relatives and friends for "moral and financial guarantees." (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.