“Society is always most cruel to those who betray its secrets, where its dishonesty commits a crime against nature.” — Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
I think of this sentence so often. It’s one of those rare sentences that actually help the chaotic world make sense, bringing the root of the issue into sharp relief. Oh, look, there goes society again, being most cruel to those who betray its secrets.
“Secrets” meaning the truth beneath the official lie, the fictions parroted by a society about itself: Here is who we are, here are our ideals and values. Meanwhile: look for whom said society has picked out for its cruelty. In this passage in his extraordinary memoir, published just a month before Zweig and his wife – on the run from Nazi persecution – took their own lives, Zweig was talking about the persecution of sex workers (whose numbers were legion) in 19th-century Vienna. Prostitution was tolerated but prostitutes were given no protections. If they complained to police about mistreatment, they were arrested. Many were held prisoner by their madams, whom they owed money to perpetually. They had no recourse. The society at that time denied that sexuality even existed before marriage. It was stiflingly prudish, and Zweig devotes an entire chapter to it. There was also, of course, the double standard. It was understood that men would probably experiment before marriage, but it was unthinkable of a woman. (Freud, operating at the same time in Vienna as Zweig, exploded THAT fiction). And so, if society’s lie about sexuality was true, then why did disease-ridden desperate women paw at men in the streets? Sex workers were everywhere. If society’s lie about sexuality was true, then why did one in ten men contract syphilis? Sex workers were punished for betraying society’s secrets.
Zweig – a Jewish citizen of Austria in the 1930s – would eventually know this truth first hand, for an entirely different reason.
