Here is the preface of Zweig's "Yesterday's World", maybe it can help you understand this movie

Jefferey 2022-03-22 09:01:12

I have never regarded myself personally so important that I am obsessed with telling others about my life and history. It's just because before I summoned up the courage to start writing this book with me as the protagonist or, to be exact, I was the center of the book, there have been so many things that have far exceeded the events and disasters experienced by the previous generation. And test. The reason why I let myself stand in the front is just as an narrator of a slide show; it is the era that provides the pictures, and I am nothing more than explaining these pictures, so what I am telling is not my experience at all, but the whole of us at the time. The experience of a generation In past history, almost no generation has had such ill-fated fate as ours. Every one of us, even the very young and the most insignificant, has been stirred in the depths of his soul by the almost endless volcanic shock of our European land; and I know that in these thousands Among the tens of thousands, no one has the superior conditions like me: I, as an Austrian, Jew, writer, humanitarian, and pacifist, happened to stand in the place where the earthquake was most severe. That violent earthquake destroyed my home and life three times, and disconnected me from any connection with the past. The dramatic and fierce turmoil threw me into a void, throwing me into "I don't know where to run". I am already familiar with it. The situation. However, I have no complaints about these, because it is precisely those who are displaced will get a new sense of freedom, and only those who no longer maintain any contact with everything do not have any scruples. Therefore, I hope I can at least meet the first conditions that any work that truly reflects the times must have: fairness and freedom from prejudice. Because I am free from all roots, even from the land that nourishes these roots, people like me are rare in any era. I was born in a powerful empire, the empire of the Habsburgs, in 1881, but I cannot find it on the map today: it has been erased without leaving a trace. I grew up in Vienna. It is a capital with a history of two thousand years and has experienced many countries. However, before it became a provincial capital of Germany, I had to leave it like a criminal. The literary works I wrote in my mother tongue were burned to ashes there, but it was in that country where millions of readers regarded my books as friends, and I no longer have any belongings; Everything is just as a stranger, or at most as a guest; even if I choose Europe as my hometown in my heart, since it tore itself to pieces for the second time in the war of self-destruction in the same room. , Has disappeared in my heart. Contrary to my own wishes, I became the witness of the most terrible failure of reason and the greatest victory of barbarism in the chronicle of the times; there has never been a generation like ours whose morality will be so high in spiritual civilization. Falling to such a low point I point this out, not out of pride, but shame. The drastic changes that took place in the short span of time from when I started to grow a beard to when the beard began to gray, that is, within half a century, greatly exceeded the time of the usual ten generations. And everyone among us feels that there are too many changes between today and yesterday, between my support and the continual decline, so that I sometimes feel as if I have been in my life. The life I spend is not just one kind, but several completely different kinds, because I often encounter this kind of situation. When I accidentally mention "my life", I can't help but ask Myself: "Which kind of life is mine?" Is it the life before the First World War, the life before the Second World War, or the life today. Similarly, I am noticing it from time to time. When I say "my I don’t immediately know which home I’m referring to before, the home in Bart, the home in Salzburg, the home of my parents in Vienna, or when I say “at our home”. When I was there, I had to remind myself in panic: For the people in my hometown, I am no longer one of them, just like I am not a British or American, I and there no longer exist. Organic connection, and here, I have never fully become one of them. The world where I grew up and the world today, as well as the world in between, appear to be more and more different in my mind, becoming a completely different world. Whenever I talk to my young friends about something before the First World War, I find from their sudden questions how many things are still self-evident reality to me, but to them It has become history or incredible. But an instinct hidden in my heart makes me feel that their questioning is reasonable, because all the bridges between our today and our yesterday and the day before yesterday have been torn down. Even I myself have to be amazed today that we have compressed such a large and complex content into the short time of the life of a generation, especially when I believe that life is a kind of damage and extremely embarrassing. This is especially true when comparing his life with the way of life of my ancestors. My father, my grandfather, what have they seen? Each of them spent their lives in a revolutionary way, From beginning to end, there is a kind of life, there is no flat sky, no decline, no turbulence, no danger, a life with only small anxiety and unnoticeable gradual change, a life with the same rhythm. Life, easy and peaceful, is the wave of time that takes them from the cradle to the grave. They lived on the same land from birth to death, in the same city, and almost always in the same house. As for what happened in the outside world, it just stayed in the newspaper and never came to their door. In the days they lived, there probably had been wars somewhere, but judging by today's scale, it was only a small battle, and it took place on a remote border. People could not hear the rumble of cannons. After another half a year, it disappeared, was forgotten by people, and became a withered page of history. The old-fashioned life started again. But the life of our generation, everything will not be repeated, the past life will not leave any traces, and will never come back. Our generation has tasted to the utmost everything that past history has been divided into a country and a century in a controlled manner. In the past, at best, this generation experienced revolution, the next generation encountered riots, the third generation encountered war, the fourth generation tasted hunger, and the fifth generation suffered the collapse of the national economy. Besides, there are always some Fortunate countries, fortunate generations, have not encountered anything at all. And our 60-year-old generation today and a generation slightly older than us, have never seen anything, have suffered nothing, have not experienced all the disasters that can be imagined, we are all from beginning to end. I've tasted it one by one and haven't tasted it. I am the same generation of the two biggest wars of mankind, and even experienced it on different fronts each time. The First World War is on the side of Germany, and the Second War is on the side. On the anti-German side. I had enjoyed the fullest personal freedom before the war, but after the war I tasted the greatest unfreedom in hundreds of years. I have been praised and rejected for no reason. I have been free and I have not been free. I have been rich and poor. The few pale horses in John's Revelation have all broken into my life, that is, revolution and famine, currency devaluation and reign of terror, epidemic disease and political exile. I have personally witnessed the emergence and spread of various mass thoughts: Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, and Bolshevism in Russia. In particular, the incurable plague poisoned the nationalism of the flower of our European culture. As a result, I am bound to become a defenseless and powerless witness, Witnessing mankind’s unimaginable retreat into the barbarism that people thought had long been forgotten, this is a kind of anti-human barbarism with its own programmatic and conscious sentiment, so that we have seen it again after several centuries. The undeclared war saw concentration camps, tortures, looting and bombing of undefended cities. All of these bestial acts have never been seen before by fifty generations of us, and I hope our descendants will never tolerate it again. However, in contradiction to this, I am in this world which makes us morally symbolize plague, war, famine, and death. In the same era that has been retired for nearly a thousand years, I have also seen the same human beings have made great progress due to their unexpected achievements in technology and intelligence, and have surpassed the achievements of the past few million years. Let’s take a look: if you conquer space with airplanes, words on the ground can spread all over the world in the same second, thus overcoming the world’s spatial distance; atomic fission defeated the most sinister latent disease, these things that were impossible yesterday. Now it repeats itself almost every day. In short, before us, human beings as a whole have neither shown the demonic and hideous features we have seen, nor have they achieved the kind of performance that seems to be created by the gods. I seem to feel that it is an obligation to bear witness to the kind of intense and dramatic life we ​​have experienced, because everyone is a witness to those great changes and is a compelling witness. Repeat it again. For our generation, there is no escape, and it is impossible to stay outside like our ancestors; because of the new mechanism of simultaneity, we are always closely related to the times. If the bomb destroys houses in Shanghai, we will know it in our own rooms in Europe before the injured are carried out of their houses. What happened on the other side of the ocean a thousand nautical miles away will soon be printed as a picture and displayed in front of us, as if in person. In the face of such constant communication and intervention, there is no safe place to evade. There is no land where you can escape; there is no peace that you can buy with money. The hand of fate will grab us anytime, anywhere, and drag us into its insatiable teasing. Besides, a person must always obey the requirements of the country, allow himself to be the victim of the most stupid politics, allow himself to adapt to the most bizarre changes, and link himself to a common destiny forever, despite his efforts to resist and work together. His fate still irresistibly involved him. A person who has experienced such an era from beginning to end, or to be precise, A person who has been driven and chased us with little chance to breathe through such an era will have more experience than any of his ancestors. Moreover, even today, we are still in the midst of the transition between the old end and the new beginning. Therefore, it is not entirely without intention that I temporarily end my life memories on a specific date. Because that day in September 1939 marked the complete end of the era of training and educating us 60-year-olds. However, if we can use our own testimony to leave the next generation of the true situation of our era that is disintegrating, even if it is a little bit, it is considered that we have not completely lost our life. I am clearly aware that I am writing these memories in an environment that is not good for me but is very characteristic of our time. That is, I wrote these memories during the war, living in a foreign country and lacking any materials that can help me remember. In my hotel room, there is no book, no record, no letter slips from a friend. I also have nowhere to inquire, because the postal routes between countries all over the world have been interrupted, or in other words, blocked by the inspection system. Each of us lives in isolation, just like when ships, trains, airplanes, and post and telecommunications were not invented hundreds of years ago. Therefore, everything about my own past is only based on the memory in my own mind. As for everything other than memory, it cannot be found right now, or it has been lost. However, our generation has completely learned a magic method: never remember everything that has been lost. Perhaps the lack of documentation and details is precisely the benefit of my book. Because in my opinion, our memory is not a mechanism for remembering one thing purely accidental and forgetting another thing purely accidental. I wrote these memories when I lived in a foreign country and lacked any materials that could help me remember. In my hotel room, there is no book, no record, no letter slips from a friend. I also have nowhere to inquire, because the postal routes between countries all over the world have been interrupted, or in other words, blocked by the inspection system. Each of us lives in isolation, just like when ships, trains, airplanes, and post and telecommunications were not invented hundreds of years ago. Therefore, everything about my own past is only based on the memory in my own mind. As for everything other than memory, it cannot be found right now, or it has been lost. However, our generation has completely learned a magic method: never remember everything that has been lost. Perhaps the lack of documentation and details is precisely the benefit of my book. Because in my opinion, our memory is not a mechanism for remembering one thing purely accidental and forgetting another thing purely accidental. I wrote these memories when I lived in a foreign country and lacked any materials that could help me remember. In my hotel room, there is no book, no record, no letter slips from a friend. I also have nowhere to inquire, because the postal routes between countries all over the world have been interrupted, or in other words, blocked by the inspection system. Each of us lives in isolation, just like when ships, trains, airplanes, and post and telecommunications were not invented hundreds of years ago. Therefore, everything about my own past is only based on the memory in my own mind. As for everything other than memory, it cannot be found right now, or it has been lost. However, our generation has completely learned a magic method: never remember everything that has been lost. Perhaps the lack of documentation and details is precisely the benefit of my book. Because in my opinion, our memory is not a mechanism for remembering one thing purely accidental and forgetting another thing purely accidental.

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Extended Reading

The Grand Budapest Hotel quotes

  • M. Gustave: If this do be the end, "Farewell!" cried the wounded piper-boy...

    [Jopling stomps]

    M. Gustave: ...whilst the muskets cracked, and the yeomen roared "Hurrah", and the ramparts fell...

    [Jopling stomps]

    M. Gustave: "Methinks me breathes me last, me fears!" said he...

    [Zero pushes Jopling from behind; Jopling falls screaming over M. Gustave's head]

    M. Gustave: Holy shit, you got him!

  • M. Gustave: [sees soldiers enter the hotel] The beginning of the end of the end of the beginning has begun. A sad finale played off-key on a broken-down saloon piano in the outskirts of a forgotten ghost town. I'd rather not bear witness to such blasphemy.

    Zero: Me neither.

    M. Gustave: The Grand Budapest has become a troops' barracks. I shall never cross its threshold again in my lifetime.

    Zero: Me neither.

    M. Gustave: Never again shall I...

    [Zero spots Agatha]

    Zero: Actually I think we might be going in there right now after all!