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The World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig, Harry Zohn (Introduction)
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Helle
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April 28, 2017
Before I went to Vienna over Easter, I began reading Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday. The book informed my trip and made me imagine the Vienna of 1910 before the world went over the edge, or at least before Europe did. This is very much a European memoir, and to my mind it ought to be required reading for all Europeans, in fact for everyone who considers themselves citizens of the world and who do not define themselves, as Zweig did not, by means of the narrow and excluding confines of nationality alone.
This rather bloodless introduction does not even begin to describe my experience of reading this sweeping, touching memoir of a life lived in what was probably the most tumultuous period in European history. Stefan Zweig has the true soul and sensibility of an artist, and it is with keen observation, nostalgia and regret that he paints, first, the bygone days of one of Europe’s most overlooked culture capitals, Vienna, and, then, how geopolitical excuses and the human quest for power over others marked the end of peace in Europe and the beginning of a new era.
Alongside a very insightful and personal account of the two world wars, their causes and their repercussions, Zweig tells the story of how he became an author: how at school he was part of a group of youngsters who all adored poetry and the arts, how he began writing poetry and was published at a young age and how he humbly decided to dedicate himself to travel and to the translation of other authors’ works of literature in order to add more substance to his own literary endeavours. Zweig would become one of the most read and translated authors of his age, but like much else in the wake of Hitler’s slaughter of Europe, that, too, came to a (temporary) end.
Throughout the book Zweig demonstrates a touching reverence for other masters of literature, e.g. Goethe and Rilke, but also for composers, e.g. Beethoven, and, towards the end, Freud, whom he visited in both Vienna and London and considered a good friend. (I, too, visited Freud’s apartment in Vienna over Easter and saw a portrait of Zweig there in one of the rooms). He took great pleasure in many of the friendships he developed throughout his life with clever, thinking people all across Europe, but in the end he had to flee Austria and his beloved Europe because he was a Jew.
He never discloses the most private aspects of his life, e.g. details surrounding his two marriages, because that is not his errand here. It is a story about Europe and a about a world long gone, as seen through the eyes of one of its biggest fans. At one point he describes himself as a man with ‘a near pathological lack of self-confidence’, which I found both remarkable and likeable in a renowned and gifted writer when only last week I heard a not-so-gifted but young (and thus perhaps forgivable) wanna-be poet admit to being a narcissist, a word that these days gives me the creeps (and I told him as much). I wonder what Stefan Zweig would have made of the world of today.
I not only admired this book but grew increasingly fond of Stefan Zweig as I neared the end, which had me in tears, I must admit. The book goes straight to my ‘favourites’ shelf. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
(This was a timely read for me, as I discovered upon returning from Vienna that a new movie is out about Stefan Zweig called ‘Farewell to Europe’. A tragic aside: Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide only days after the manuscript for this book was sent to his publishers).
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Flo
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July 4, 2019
...after all, shadows themselves are born of light.
...toda sombra es, al fin y al cabo, hija de la luz.
There are people who breathe nostalgia every day. They enjoy it, they suffer it. They stare at some object and thousands of memories come to mind. People, friends, lovers, happiness, regrets. They are usually looking back wishing for the past to become present again. For that little part of the world they knew and that it felt much safer than the one they inhabit today. Nostalgia has a life on its own.
There are many wonderful reviews about this book therefore I have nothing new to say. I will simply share some rambling thoughts.
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) has written a book where the universal sense of loss is omnipresent. What to do when the world you have always known crumbles in front of your eyes because of the atrocious acts of other human beings? I cannot imagine facing such cruelty. And then I can due to the vividness of Zweig's prose. I was the one remembering the past, enraptured by the feeling of a distant sense of safety. A stateless individual on some strange ground, holding a pack of memories that contrasted so harshly with his present. I have read, I have lived through his words and I have learned.
I've read other works by Zweig beforeand his magnificent writing is obviously present in this book which is considered - and rightly so - a real masterpiece. His prose, evocative, sharp and clear as usual, deals with many issues of society at the start of the 20th century; some ordinary, some controversial. It also describes his relationship with other relevant figures of his time. There is plenty of the external world and his perspectives.
Through his words, the author gave form to the world he has seen and lived before. Avoiding a detailed recount of his own life, this book portrays the sense of security of those lost days. He gave his memories enough time to speak for him before he succumbed to a death caused by total despair and sealed by his bare hands. The defeated dream of humanity as a whole. A dream stolen by two wars that surpass every attempt of reasoning.
Reading this book was a strange experience. I've lost a lot while I was reading it and have gained much after finishing it. We are always returning to where we started, aren't we? Always moving from beginning to middle and vice versa. Our seeming incapacity to learn from our mistakes intoxicates our essence. Most of us are left with a bittersweet confidence in human nature. A naive optimism fighting for survival. For I am writing these lines and, in another part of the world, people have fifteen seconds to save their lives from the atrocity of others. Those who can feed or restore our faith in humanity can guarantee anything in a place that will never be safe.
There are those who breathe nostalgia every day and those who don't forget about the air of the present. An existence perpetually longing for what has passed cannot see what is coming.
I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.
July 30, 14/Update July 3, 19
* Also on my blog.
Notes:
-Painting: Stefan Zweig, oil on canvas / via flickr
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Garima
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August 6, 2014
Once more I wandered down to the town to have a last look at peace.
Time is an invincible enigma. Every moment brings something new for us to keep our faith intact while every new day brutally shatters the long held belief about matters dear to one’s life. This paradoxical existence of seemingly benign hands of minutes, seconds and hours have made people witness the extent of human compassion as well as the chasm of inhuman atrocities; and when the smoke from glowing and extinguished embers of past settles down, whatever little remains in the form of nostalgia or hopeless realization emanates nothing but little consolation. In ‘The World of Yesterday’, Stefan Zweig laments about one such time when the world of his dreams transmuted into that of his nightmares and surfaced in front of his eyes like a menacing shadow which left him melancholic at the fateful loss of a paradise.
But we, who once knew a world of individual freedom, know and can give testimony that Europe once, without a care, enjoyed its kaleidoscopic play of color. And we shudder when we think how overcast, overshadowed, enslaved and enchained our world has become because of its suicidal fury.Once upon a time that world was beautiful. Zweig was born and brought up in luxury, both of material and intellectual wealth. Art was a way of life which didn’t limit itself within the realms of mere hobby or passion but was also a source of recreation. Although this culture of Europe had its flaws, it was also a home to a young generation which was restless for exciting discoveries and inevitable changes. If the masters of history were highly revered, the talent of present was duly encouraged too. This was a time of known unknown talents in various fields going by the names of Rilke, Freud, Rodin, Peter Hille, Emile Verhaeren, Richard Strauss, Bertha von Suttner and this was also the century where people like Hitler emerged as a demonic power. Yes, it was an indulging era which gave its citizens a sort of utopian freedom that proved to be a boon and later an irrepressible curse.
If we, driven and hunted in these times which are inimical to every art and every collection, were put to it to learn a new art, it would be that of parting from all that once had been our pride and our love.
Zweig has given us a self-effacing and profound account of a period where he was lucky to explore the alleys of great literary avenues and himself became a virtuoso of dazzling words. Though one can gauge the prudence in his writing, his enthusiasm on meeting his heroes, whether personally or through original manuscripts was contagious and one can easily feel his pain when he had to leave those very alleys which were sucked into the unbridgeable gaps created by two world wars. This memoir is an attempt to verbalize the vulnerability of happiness, success and innocence. It’s a portrayal of those people whose understanding of a hollow worldliness came through hardships and betrayal. It’s a story of the unfortunates who renounced their lives not because of death but deathlike experiences in which their each breath became accountable to an unworthy despot. It’s a cautionary case presented by a beloved writer with a hope that his thoughts will reach us in some form when time again strikes doom.
My life was already unconsciously accommodating itself to the temporary rather than to the permanent.
Sometimes heart and home can never be together. Zweig never returned home.
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Elyse Walters
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November 4, 2020
The experience was profoundly affecting.....
I’ll return with some thoughts - will include passages that resonate with me...
But I just finished it...
I’m going to close my eyes ... snuggle longer under these covers.
I’m back....with my review....THIS DEEPLY MOVING NON-FICTION book....which reads like fiction. ( but sadly ...it’s all true)....
As I sit here this morning with anticipation on this pivotal day - Election Day - November 3rd, 2020....with other Americans and friends around the world...
I realize I will forever associate reading “The World of Yesterday”, this historic autography, with significant memorable appreciation.
It was remarkably eerie with the relevances of our current events today.
This is only the second book I’ve read by Stefan Zweig - so far - I’m still hungry to read more of his work. He was a fascinating and brilliant man.
Stefan Zweig, ( 1881-1942), born in Austria, was a famous biographer, novelist, dramatist, and journalist, who spent his formative years living in Old Vienna. He earned a doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Vienna.
He was second born - had an older brother. Their family was wealthy. His father a shrewd businessman.
Zweig followed in his parents footsteps regarding religion: Jewish, but not observant.....yet Zweig was profoundly sensitive to the dire perplexities of the German and Austrian Jews during the rise of Nazism.
In the opening chapters ....it was easy to marvel at the joys of grandeur in Vienna. The years before WWI...were less political, instead, more culturally driven ....with poets, novelists, musicians, sculptors, painters, and mental health professionals, delighting in intellectual conversations about the arts. Sitting in cafes, was relaxing. They read newspapers- played cards, and sat in coffeehouses for hours.
I learned about many people I didn’t know. Famous colorful textured people that Zweig was friends with - and collaborated with some of them. I took time reading about each of the following on google.
Some of these people mentioned in “The World of Yesterday” ....gave me a warm ( almost envious), feelings for the joys of cerebral richness connecting.
Stefan ‘did’ experience rich fulfillment in his life - with many bright minds that were a perfect fit for Zweig’s own brilliant mind.
Some of Zweig’s friends were:
Rainer Maria Rilke, August Rodin, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Herzl, Jean Jaures, Hoffmanstahl, Paul Verlaine, Emile Verhaeren, Rathenau, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Salvador Dali, Joseph Roth, Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac,
Romain Rolland, Friderike von Winternitz,
Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Richard Strauss...
These next three people ....intrigued me...reading more about their lives - thanks to the help on google.
....Hugo von Hofmannsthal: an Australian novelist, poet, dramatist, narrator, essayist.
.... Arthur Rimbaud: French poet, known for his simplistic prose poems and for his stormy relationship with..
....Paul Verlaine: another French poet - who fired two shots at Rimbaud (injuring his wrist), and Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned. Later Verlaine underwent a re-conversion to Roman Catholicism—which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud’s sharp criticism.
SO MUCH DRAMA IN THE LITERATURE WORLD... 🤨✍️...(luxury challenges)....
Life was good ....until it wasn’t
“Making music, dancing, the theater, conversation, proper in urban deportment, seas were cultivated here as particular arts. It was not the military, nor the political, nor the commercial, that was predominate in the life of the individual and the masses”.
Zweig gave readers a direct experience of the contrast between the beautiful years in Vienna...and the devastation years....(especially to the Jewish community with so much anti-Semitism).
Society changed so dramatically and quickly.
It felt similar to what many of us have felt in 2020...with the ways the covid-19 pandemic, and the horrors of present day racism, hit us like a brick wall before most of us saw what was coming.
But....
Stefan Zweig ‘did’ see the heavy impact of the world wars before many did. He saw, and felt life’s deterioration during one of the most progressive periods of European history.
His exceptional- intimate - storytelling gave us comprehensive cognizance into how life was in Europe before WWI, between the wars, and the beginning of WWII.
“Before the war I knew the highest degree and form of individual freedom, and later its lowest level in hundreds of years; I have been celebrated and despised, free and unfree, rich and poor. All the livid
steeds of the Apocalypse have stormed through my life—revolution and famine, and terror, epidemics, and emigration”.
“I have seen the great mass ideologies grow and spread before my eyes—Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all else arch-plague nationalism which has poisoned the flower of European culture”.
“I saw the catastrophe coming, inevitability: on hundreds of mornings during those years, when everybody else reached for the newspapers confidently, I was gripped by an inner fear of the headline: ’Finis Austrice’. Oh, how had I deceived myself when I had pretended to myself that I had long since prided myself loose from her fate! From afar I suffered her long and feverish agony daily, infinitely more than my friends in the country itself, for they deceived themselves with patriotic demonstrations and reassured each other with ‘France and England cannot let us down. And above all, Mussolini Will never stand for it’. They believed in the League of Nations and in the peace treaties as sick people do in neatly labeled medicines. They lived on carefree and happy while I,seeing more plainly, worried my heart out”.
"To give witness to this tense, dramatic life of ours, filled with the unexpected, seems to me a duty; for, I repeat, everyone was a witness of this gigantic transformation, everyone was forced to be a witness".
The history- politics - war - ( pointless war) - anti-Semitism - ( pointless as well), fleeing one country to the next: Austria, Paris, the UK, US, Brazil ( the country that disappointed his expectations and where he and his wife committed suicide)....
is one heck of an unforgettable phenomenal book....
Stefan Zweig’s sentences had a life of their own, at the same time his writing felt so completely natural. There was an ease about his writing
and his words pierced my heart.
His humanity and kind sweet soul was subtly beautiful.
Of course the ending is sad.....
That said... I still want to read more of his work.
I’ll end with this quote I read in the ‘New Republic’:
“The very success with which this book evokes both the beauty of the past and the fatality of its passing is what gives it tragic effectiveness.
It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age, and the author seems, in his own phrase, to be the narrator at an illustrated lecture. The illustrations are provided by time, but his choice is brilliant and the narration is evocative”.
5 stars....
....and wishing everyone a peaceful next few days - while we watch and witness history unfold in front of our eyes.
Prayers for healing of this country.
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Cheryl
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February 7, 2017
"I am now a writer who, as Grillparzer said, 'walks behind his corpse in his own lifetime.'" -Stefan Zweig
After reading Zweig's Journey into the Past and Confusion, I now understand the plight of those characters in his novellas when I read these words in his memoir: "I am always most attracted to the character who is struck down by fate in my novellas…" I've admired Zweig's permeance of the novella art form, and his stories that linger with psychological palpability. He's made me take particular interest in the form, allowing me to fall in love with genre and stylistic profundity. Structurally, I now compare every novella to his.
Each page of this memoir made me more and more appreciative of Zweig's works as I learned how much he adhered to language, to words that were structurally arranged into literary portraits on the page; at times he even abhorred his first poetic pieces because he thought he should have given himself more time to efficiently grasp the terms of literary art. Most importantly, each chapter of his memoir made me appreciate a time and era when books were prominent and intellectual discussion was paramount. As a child, I grew up in my own makeshift literary world and as an adult, I wanted to disappear into the literary Vienna that Zweig describes, once an "international metropolis for two thousand years" that he says was "demoted to the status of a provincial German town."
(A coffeehouse in Vienna).
"Anyone who lived in Vienna absorbed a sense of rhythm as if it were in the air. And just as that musicality expressed itself in writers in the particular attention we paid to writing particularly well-turned prose, in others the sense of delicacy was expressed in social attitudes and daily life."
There are many enlightening moments stemming from his account of numerous artists, like his giving us a peek at James Joyce as a young artist in the middle of his masterpiece, or his allowing me as a reader to feel oneness with the poet Rilke in the way he describes him in his daily element, and even those times when one feels close enough to cherish Zweig's friendship and literary brotherhood with Romain Rolland. Just as Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and Achebe's There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra are autobiographical stamps of time, place and indelible literary periods, so is this compelling historical account by Zweig. It's impossible to read this and not be captivated by the world he describes. In this book, his Vienna lives and allures, despite its enemies intentions.
The Strudlhofstiege, a literary landmark in Vienna
Imagine a person's art taken away from him at the height of his literary career. Imagine a famous author whose debut novels sold twenty thousand copies in only a few days, having to witness his books banned and burned. Imagine what happens when an artist sees his numerous works "consigned to the poison cupboard of public libraries;" imagine what happens when his readers and friends wouldn't dare put his "reprehensible name on an envelope." Zweig worked on this autobiography in 1940; soon after, he committed suicide, fearful of what could happen next, to him, a Jewish writer in Hitler's world.
"Success did not arrive suddenly, storming into my house; it came slowly and discreetly, but it proved a faithful friend, and stayed with me until Hitler drove it away with the lash of his decrees."
As a reader, one must pause and gather perspective before attempting a review of this important nonfictional work. This is not a book you read for enjoyment, but for enlightenment and understanding of the world then, the world now. Stefan Zweig's world may have been yesterday, but it lives on in the words he's left us, in the current events of the world today, and in the literary safeguards he's put into place.
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Gabrielle (Reading Rampage)
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March 16, 2019
I am clearly a bit of a sucker for nostalgia: I am mildly obsessed with vintage-style clothes, mid-century modern kitchen knick-knacks and I am actively looking for an antique typewriter and gramophone to decorate my library. But my nostalgia is purely aesthetic: I know good and well that everyone wearing hats and gloves did not make the world a more wholesome place (just a more elegant one), and that beautiful old cars are an environmental disaster no matter how cool they look. But it is hard to resist the appeal of the illusion that there was a time when things were simple, more civilized and more – for lack of a better word – tasteful. Some might argue that makes me the ideal audience for the Zweig “revival”.
Call me a hipster, but I got interested in Zweig’s work because of the Wes Anderson movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, especially after reading that Anderson created the character of M. Gustave to represent Zweig himself: someone deeply attached to a set of values and code of conduct that might feel old-fashioned, but that certainly represented a more elegant and liberal civilization than the one they were forced to live in. A man with very high standards and a kind heart. I just had to know more about a man like that, especially after reading “Chess” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). This book being a blend of memoirs and recounting of how the Austro-Hungarian empire went from a sophisticated realm with a refined culture to being the Third Reich’s backyard, I knew it would be interesting and also heartbreaking. Having had to flee his homeland, and eventually Europe altogether, I also knew that Zweig would be looking back at his old life with rose-coloured glasses. I can’t say I blame him.
The first thing that struck me as I made my way through this memoir was the absolute beauty of the prose. I know it’s a translation, but wow! This is the kind of book that reads like soft, chewy candy to me: I want it to go on forever and I’m kind of bummed when it’s all gone. Zweig’s love for Vienna shines through the writing vividly. He was brought up in a city and a family that valued culture tremendously, and made intellectualism a holy value, more important than money and politics, and his character is very much a reflection of the time and place of his birth and early life. It made me wish I had lived there and then, in that incredible place where people sought enlightenment in books and art.
Zweig was a realist, who saw the quirks and contradictions of human behavior with a compassionate eye, and until the Great War, was more often amused at people’s less admirable sides that appalled or weary of them. The way he talks about Vienna, Berlin and Paris, and the advent of a more modern way of living and a greater equality between sexes and classes, has the exuberant enthusiasm of someone who witnesses spring for the first time. Everything was fresh and bright in his eyes, and his love for the time and places is infectious. He was also fiercely admiring of the artists, writers and actors he met and befriended: it could sound like shameless name-dropping to talk about one’s friendships with Rilke, Freud and other turn-of-the-century luminaries, but Zweig is too earnest in his admiration of the great minds he frequented to ever sound like he’s bragging to have known them: he just wants everyone to love them as much as he did.
When he switches gears and turns his narrative to the Great War, and the way it broke Europe’s (and his generation’s) innocence, I suddenly had a pit in my stomach. Lines such as “Our common idealism, the optimism that had come from progress, meant that we failed to see and speak out strongly enough against our common danger” felt too close to home for me, too close to the way I have felt at the back of my head for the past couple of years.
I was brought close to tears more than once by the way he describes the devastation war left in its wake through Austria, when he mentions the letter someone secretly slipped in his pocket when he visited post-Revolutionary Russia – to tell him not to believe everything he heard – and of course, when he suddenly finds himself forced to leave his beloved country behind when Hitler’s regime makes being a Jewish writer in Austria extremely dangerous.
It’s hard to read a book like that, a book that paints such a vivid picture of all the good and beautiful things that greed, intolerance, hate, and ignorance can ruin, especially when all we seem to hear about on the news is the resurgence of greed, intolerance, hatred and ignorance. It’s frightening to think of the historical parallels, to imagine what could happen (again!) if things go south… As much as I loved this book, I would lie if I said it didn’t also break my heart. I feel like I found a long-lost friend in Zweig, and then all I could do was listen to him tell me about all the things he lost. He deeply believed in what one could call the brotherhood of people, and that arbitrary divisions would cause nothing but pain on either side: seeing his ideals blown apart was too much for him.
As I have learned watching “Mad Men” obsessively, the word nostalgia means “the pain from an old wound”. Never has this definition felt more appropriate than reading “The World of Yesterday”. A beautiful, bittersweet and still very relevant book.
--
I was talking with a colleague last week who told me Zweig is his favorite writer: I am often tempted to judge people by the books they read (and the music they listen to, because I’m basically a “High Fidelity” character), and based on that, I think well of this guy: if your favorite writer is a humanist who believed in the importance of art and peace, you can’t be a bad person in my eyes.
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Ted
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December 20, 2017
This is a poignant portrait of a "world of yesterday", specifically the world of turn-of-the century Vienna, and of European culture prior to the First World War. Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881, and was thus a young man during the decade preceding the War. His family was well off, and he was brought up surrounded by culture of every kind. He is now a writer mostly forgotten [correction - becoming famous again on Goodreads, at least among my friends], but one who was judged in the 1920s and 1930s to be one of the most famous writers in the world. He was well acquainted with, and close friends of, many of the eminent writers and artists of Europe.
Zweig's writing is superb, and his reminiscences are profound, and profoundly moving. For example, on pages 139-146 of the edition pictured here Zweig writes movingly of his friendship with the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in Paris. And in the penultimate chapter, "Incipit Hitler", his description of Hitler's rise conveys in thirty pages more insight and illumination than I have seen in major histories of the time.
This was the last of many books that Zweig wrote, being published shortly before he and his second wife committed suicide in Brazil in 1942. It is ostensibly his autobiography, but it is really more the story of an age than the story of a man. Zweig originally intended to call the book Three Lives, referring to the three time periods that had comprised his life: the Vienna that he grew up and matured in; the Great War, and the inter-war period, during which he dealt with the loss of the dreams of human progress that he had had as a young man before the War; and finally the advent of Hitler and the outbreak of the second World War.
Zweig says of the European mood in the early years of the century " ... I pity those that were not young during those last years of confidence in Europe ... each one of us derived strength from the common upswing of the time and increased his individual confidence out of the collective confidence ... whoever experienced that epoch ... knows that all since has been retrogression and gloom." That was written of course near the end of his life. Nevertheless, the inter war period was when Zweig's career bloomed. Those such as Zweig who had survived the war (and those too young to have found it an annihilator of dreams) found that European art and culture in the 1920s, having lost the pre-war air of optimistic progress, was nevertheless vibrant with new, more sobering, ideas.
Zweig always viewed himself, not as an Austrian Jew, but as a European. (The subtitle of the book in the original German was Memoirs of a European.) When the lights began going out all over Europe for a second time in the mid 1930s, Zweig essentially became stateless, moving to England, then to America, and finally to his last destination in South America.
I can't say enough about this book. I first read it decades ago, eventually lost the book, then found a few years ago that it was still (or perhaps once again) in print, and read it a second time. If you have any interest in the history of European culture of a hundred years ago, read it! You won't be sorry, though you might be a bit affected by the sense of profound loss that Zweig himself felt so keenly.
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Ulysse
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May 4, 2023
Zweig’s story as told in these memoirs is so painful, beautiful and tragic I am left speechless. That he and his wife Lotte committed suicide the day after submitting the completed manuscript makes the experience of reading this even more devastating. Writing a review almost feels like a desecration. So I’ll just leave my tears between the pages of this magnificent book and be grateful that it was written--in spite of the deep despair that underlies it, a despair that would eventually end the author’s life.
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Roy Lotz
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July 7, 2017
Memoires often make the best travel books. I began this book in preparation for a short trip to Vienna, and quickly discovered that I had chosen well. Whatever your opinion of Zweig, The World of Yesterday is worth reading simply for the wealth of information it contains. Few history books paint so rich and full a picture of European culture during these transformative years—above all, in Paris, Berlin, and Zweig’s original home of Vienna—from the peaceful span preceding the First World War, to the Indian Summer of the interwar years, to the terrible hardships that led to the second great conflagration.
The last two autobiographies I read were of Benvenuto Cellini (whose beautiful salt-cellar is on display at the Vienna Art History Museum) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, two very different men alike in their narcissism. Whatever faults Zweig may have had, he was not a narcissist. This is the least personal of autobiographies, almost never mentioning Zweig’s so-called “personal life”—his marriages, private disappointments, and intimate friendships. Instead Zweig focuses his gaze outward, at the world around him, the cultural milieu, the slowly shifting tides of history.
By being so self-effacing, Zweig succeeds in producing a surprisingly insightful look at his world. A delicate, sensitive, and intelligent man, Zweig was extremely well-read, and knew virtually everybody—every famous European, at least—and so was in a uniquely advantageous position to write the history of his times. To give you some idea of his social circle, Zweig knew Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí (he even facilitated a meeting between the two when Freud was in London), he met Auguste Rodin, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and was friends with Richard Strauss, Benedetto Croce, Rainer Marie Rilke, Romain Rolland, and Maxim Gorky, just to name the names that come to mind.
Zweig’s history is largely one of tragic loss, as he repeats again and again. He begins his life in an affluent home, the son of a successful industrialist, in a period of calm stability and cultural efflorescence in Europe. He hones his writing skill, quickly gains success, meets several famous contemporaries, travels and sees the world, and then witnesses the body of European civilization tear itself apart for the flimsiest and most fatuous of reasons during the First World War. The war eventually comes to its bloody end, Austria and then Germany suffer terribly, Zweig meanwhile becomes one of the world’s most famous and most translated authors (although the English never liked him), and then Hitler’s rise begins, forcing Zweig to flee. The book ends just as the Second World War is commencing.
Despite the tragedy that Zweig lived through (and committed suicide during), it is impossible for me not to have life-envy. Here was have a man born into wealth, who had the time and resources to dedicate his whole self to his art, who could travel wherever he pleased whenever he pleased, who achieved instantaneous success seemingly without effort, who was able to meet and befriend all of his contemporary heroes, and who was even wealthy enough to collect manuscripts of his deceased idols—in short, it would be hard to imagine circumstances more favorable to the creation of a writer than those Zweig enjoyed. If you had asked me, before reading this book, to give my prescription for creating a first-class writer, I don’t think the result would be far off.
Yet for all his cultural capital, Zweig does not come across as pretentious or pompous. He is timid, uncharismatic, and even mundane. It is easy to imagine bumping into him on the street. (Though, as Hermann Kesten wrote, the Zweig of reality was far more eccentric than than Zweig of this book.) As a writer, he is skilled, consistent, and accessible. In a word, his prose is fluent: easy to read and digest, even in large doses. He is always interesting and never overpowering, like an excellent dinner guest. The one quality he lacks is humor—a serious deficiency, but not a fatal one. Perhaps the best way to describe Zweig is that he is a sophisticated middle-brow author, which might be why the high-brow world has had trouble accepting him; unlike Milton, Zweig intended to soar a middle flight.
It is hard to criticize Zweig—the champion of European solidarity, whose message is especially important now—who asks so little and never imposes his views. But I must say that he had several blindspots.
First, I think that his narrative of events is deeply colored by his affluence. Zweig—a rich, successful, cosmopolitan intellectual—simply cannot imagine why anyone would do something so insane as to start a war. How is he to travel to Paris or to attend the theater festival in Brussels if men are fighting? His explanation of the conflict—which comes down to thoughtless stupidity—is historically unsatisfactory. And even though I, of course, agree with his anti-war ideals, I couldn’t help thinking that his social status prevented him from understanding why less fortunate people might be dissatisfied with his wonderful world.
More generally, I think that Zweig’s life demonstrates why art should not be made into a religion. Zweig did not only love art, he worshipped it. His intense focus on the objects that artistic geniuses have touched—their manuscripts and notebooks and even their furniture—reminded me of the reliquaries of Catholicism. Every time he introduces one of his famous acquaintances, he writes a mini-hagiography, obsequiously describing even his subject’s face, manners, and expressions, as if artistic skill sanctified one’s mortal frame.
I personally found it all very distasteful—how, for example, Zweig fetishized every item that was in Beethoven’s room when he died. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, of course; but it makes it very easy to confuse aesthetic with ethical values. This confusion leads to the kind of political apathy Zweig succumbed to. When the beautiful is all that matters, why worry about tawdry things like social welfare?
Zweig had the attractive, but ultimately vain, notion that he could live aloof from politics. He never mentions anything even remotely political in his fiction; he didn’t even vote. Then he is surprised and dismayed that politics follows him everywhere. Granted, he does have a political stance: he is a pacifist, a humanist, and an internationalist. But this stance is not the product of reasoned consideration; it is the stance that allows him to continue his life as a traveling author unmolested. To steal a phrase from Michael Hoffman’s scorchingly hostile review, he is more a passivist than a pacifist. What Zweig wants from politics, in other words, is what would be necessary for him not to bother with politics.
Now, it is worth asking whether we ought to live in a world where we have no choice but to pay attention to the dreary doings of politicians. Be that as it may, Zweig certainly didn’t have a choice, which led to the irony of this most apolitical of authors structuring his autobiography according to political events.
All these criticisms notwithstanding, I think most people will find here a fundamentally sane, humane, and liberal book. For my part, Zweig supported the right causes, if not always for the right reasons. One thing, however, is left unclear: the relation of this book to Zweig’s suicide. Zweig, along with his wife, ended his own life not long after finishing this book. One might expect this to be his final message to the world; but as the translator notes, it is difficult to read this as a long suicide note. Zweig talks of a future, his future, with more books to write and years to live. The book even ends with a paean to life.
Whatever reason Zweig ended his life, one thing was certain: the Vienna of his youth, the Vienna he so lovingly describes here, is mostly vanished. If I can judge from my short visit, the city is entirely changed: Vienna nowadays is a city of tourism. Instead of the music-loving, critical, and discerning audiences Zweig describes in theaters and concerts, the city is now full of tourists who will pay periwigged salesmen to attend generic Mozart concerts, which run identical programs of greatest-hits that tireless musicians perform nightly. In the streets, English and Chinese are more commonly heard than German. Of course, Vienna is still lovely and full of cultural treasures; but these cultural treasures are of the past now, not the living present.
Did Zweig sense this change coming? Maybe not in so many words, but I think he knew that his world had forever passed into memory. There was no putting Europe back into the same postwar shape after so much destruction and death. That past now exists only in museums, grand old buildings, and books like this.
biography-memoir-travel eurotrip germanophilia
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ميقات الراجحي
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January 1, 2018
هذه المذكرات هي خلاصة تجربة الأديب ستيفان زفايج والذي كان معنيًا بتدوين يومياته - مذكراته وكان يشجع أصدقائه على فعل المثل ليس بغية النشر بقدر الفائدة الشخصية منها عند القراءة أو ليقرأ أبنائهم ماجاء فيها على الأقل؛ إيمانًا منه بأن "كل حياة تتضمن تجارب نفسية واجتماعية جديرة بالتدوين" وعلى المستوى الشخصي أظن أن مذكرات زفايج لم يكن يخطط لنشرها في حياته حتي لو فكر في نشر جزء منها يمثل مرحلته العمرية في أوروبا قبل خروجه للبرازيل وذلك لعزوف الرجل عن الشهرة. علي الأقل لم يكن ينوي طبع هذا المذكرات في حياته لكن أعتقد جهّزها للنشر لمعاهدته لها بالتنقيح في نيويورك خلال إقامته فيها في (1941م).
موجعة هذه المذكرات بها الكثير من الحزن والمرارة والفاجعة على أحادث أليمة مرت بأوروبا في التاريخ الحديث عانى منها ليس فقط ستيفان بل "مصير قلما أثقل جيلًا آخر في سياق التاريخ" وكما يقول "هو قدر جيل كامل". كان غاضبًا، وغضب وتكدرت حالته النفسية بسبب معاصرته لسقوط العالم بسبب الفاشية والنازية خصوصًا وأثر الحرب العالمية الأولى ثم الثانية التي شهد عدة سنوات فشعر بالسلم يغيب أمام ناظريه فأٍدم علي الإنتحار هو وزوجه وحتى كلبه لم ينساه وكل ذلك تعبيرًآ عن رفضًا عن حالة العالم وصراعاته في الحروب.
يتناول ستيفان حياته منذ ما أعتبره العصر الذهبي لحياته هو حيث أعوام التي عاشها قبل إندلاع الحروب خصوصا الحرب العالمية الأولى (1914) ثم سرعان ما يتحدث عن حياته فترة الحرب وكيف حتي أن يهوديته أثرت عليه بسبب موقف النازية من اليهود، وبسبب موقفه هو من النازية التي لم تتركه في شأنه وأتلفت كتبه وكل حياته وبقي خاليًآ من كل شيء إلا ذكرياته التي يسطرها هنا بمرارة. لن تجد في الكتاب الكثير عن أدبه وحياته الأدبية بل جل ماهو موجود عن هذه الفترة الحرجة عن أوروبا. هذه سيرة رجل رغم إمتلاكه للمعرفه ومعرفته بالناس جيدًا هاهو يؤرخ للإنسانية بحزن وكأنه أمام إنسان جديد إنه إنسان الحرب والدم والقتل والتهجير الذي عرفه العالم خلال الحربين العالميتين وإن كان تأريخه لتحولات نهاية القرن التاسع عشر وحديثه عن إرهاصات الحرب العالمية الثانية – لإنتحاره في منتصفها – أعظم ما يضمه الكتاب. كمية الإنسانية التي تفوح من ستيفان مخجلة لأي إنسانية أخرى وإن كان أغضبني إزهاقه لروحه رغم عذره.
من أعظم حزن هذا الرجل فقده لأعز ما يملك بعد كرامته وهو إرثه الفكري ومخطوطاته التاريخية والأدبية بفعل الحرب ولعل هذا مبلغه عظيمه في نفسه.
تعجبني كتابات ستيفان / شتيفان خصوصًآ تشريحه للشخصيات بحيادية منهجية. من الكتب المعرفية الجميلة المسلية ولا تمنحك ثقافة بل عادة ما ترشدك لكتب أخرى لتتوسع في بعض المواضيع المطروحة في الكتاب وربما هذا من حسنات هذا النوع من الكتب المعرفية / السيرة - المذكرات.
قراءات 2013
آداب-سيرة-عام
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Lee Klein
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February 28, 2014
I'd been having trouble settling into a string of novels, too impatient and restless and dissatisifed even with Tolstoy's Resurrection, zoning out, not looking forward to reading at all. Finally I said screw it and grabbed Zweig's memoir. By the time I'd made it through his preface it was like he'd administered a heaping dose of just what I need into my unsettled reading organ. I really did feel immediately healed, wanting nothing other than to settle down with Zweig's flowing sentences, his self-effacing charm, his belief in the primacy of art as protection for humanity. For a memoir covering his days of early education to 1939, a few years before his suicide in Brazil, he so rarely talks about himself or his family -- there's a mention of trying to apply for a license to marry his second wife in England right as England declares war on Germany, but no mention of a first wife. No mention of kids. Hardly a mention of his parents, other than a bit at the beginning and a bit at the end about his mother. This isn't a personal memoir at all, really, but a cultural/artistic one. Zero gossip, even if he namedrops Rilke, Rodin, Gide, Joyce, Freud, Richard Strauss, Romain Rolland (who he considers the best of the best and who now seems wildly underread). Zweig's a little like a Zelig character, except Zweig at the time is as famous as those he's with. The portraits of Rodin (great artists are always the kindest, he says -- he also shows Rodin go into such an OCD trance while working on a sculpture that he forgets young Zweig is even in the room) and the stiff, bitter polylinguist James Joyce during WWI in Zurich as he's working on Ulysses are worth the price of admission. But more so it's the gravitas, the horrorshow, the heft, the drastic real-life poignancy of the loss of old European security. Forever everyone has remarked -- most recently, the poet known by the nickname Biggie -- that things done changed, but the change experienced by Zweig, Vienna, and Europe in general from the 1890s to 1939 is drastic. Zweig's storytelling skills make it all seem like a consistent forward flow into the abyss -- the days of security and complacency and the primacy of art, lit, music, and theater, give way to enthusiasm for the first World War (a completely unnecessary consequence of international saber-rattling/posturing) to post-war horrors, poverty, runaway inflation, to a period of experimentation and youthful reflowering coinciding with a rage for order that leads to protofascist glimmerings, brownshirts, the rise of the secretly well-funded National Socialists, political deceit, and crimes against humanity. The Nazis are the antithesis of Zweig's apolitical pan-European humanism. He's able to write a letter to his number one fan in Italy (Mussolini) to get someone's sentence lightened, but he can't change history once it's goosestepping toward Hades. He retreats, goes into exile, and writes biographies subtly critiquing the contemporary political situation. He works with Strauss who works with the Nazis -- and Hitler himself even lets an opera with a libretto written by the Jew Zweig be performed. (It rarely comes up, but Zweig is a totally assimilated Viennese Jew.) He didn't collaborate with the Nazis so much as try to preserve the primacy of art when faced with deathheads. It's the sort of book that makes you aware of the sweep of history we've lived through -- the comparatively quiet yet totally disruptive technological revolution of the past 17 years or so, the artistic and cultural plate tectonics that slowly but surely rearrange the continents over time. I read this purposefully before reading The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig and I'm glad I did. I look forward to seeing echoes of everything covered in this memoir in his fiction, and I'll also probably get to a biography about him to learn a bit about his personal life. Zweig doesn't have the reputation of Mann and Musil or Proust or those early 20th century uberdogs, and that's most likely because he's a centrist who's so very balanced aesthetically and intellectually. Also, unlike Mann and Musil, his books were suppressed and/or burned and therefore unread in Germany for a while there. His writing and thinking are so accessible and he sold millions of copies as a result but he never dumbs things down. The few pages where he talks about his writing process were illuminating: he apparently wrote 800 pages and whittled them to the 200 necessary pages, always interested in pace, since he identified himself as a restless reader. Anyway, I'll try to fill this out with some quotations and other thoughts later.
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Iain
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January 4, 2024
An account of Europe, especially Austria and France, as it was before and after WWI. Written as a travelogue/autobiography by the Austrian author Stefan Zweig, who writes with passion, longing, and a great deal of love for the Europe he cherished so dearly. He also journeys to America, a country he also admired. With the rise of the Nazi party, Zweig flees to England, then New York, and finally Brazil, where he settles. This book was first published in 1942, before the end of WW2 was in sight. Sadly, Stefan and his wife never saw the publication of the manuscript, as it was published posthumously. I intend to reread this book; it's beautifully written and was a joy to read.
biography lifelong-learning
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Dani (IG: danilector)
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October 6, 2021
Inicio una de las resacas lectoras más complicadas con las que me he encontrado. Stefan Zweig se ha posicionado indudablemente como uno de los mejores escritores de novela corta. Se puede ir a ciegas con cualquiera de sus obras y se descubrirá un relato perfeccionista y estremecedor sobre sus miedos, envueltos en torno a la situación europea durante el siglo XX y protagonizados por personajes tan profundos e imperfectos que parecen reales.
El mundo de ayer se presenta como un relato desgarrador sobre un judío austríaco que tuvo que estar presente en el estallido de las dos guerras mundiales que sacudieron el continente europeo. Desde su infancia hasta el auge del nazismo, Zweig relata un periodo de unos sesenta años desde un punto de vista predominantemente cultural e intelectual. Así, el lector asiste a los teatros vieneses anteriores a la guerra, se adentra en los hogares de los mayores artistas del periodo y sufre el miedo y el horror ante el hundimiento de las principales potencias europeas.
Cada frase se convierte en prosa poética de la mano de un escritor con un control del lenguaje descomunal. Sus palabras impactan, duelen, remueven y enfurecen. Sólo se puede admirar y disfrutar de los pasajes cargados de historia y amor hacia una sociedad que se iba consumiendo con su propio aliento. La tristeza por la pérdida de oportunidades, por el fanatismo que se iba apoderando de la población y por el odio a determinados grupos está presente y brillantemente plasmado.
¿Entonces, qué ha fallado? El principal problema es que no encuentro a Zweig. Se pierde en relatos y su figura desaparece. Se convierte en un testigo alejado de las atrocidades que ocurrían a su alrededor, optando en ocasiones por una visión excesivamente inocente de la situación. El mundo de ayer no es una autobiografía, incluso sorprenden los comentarios tan abruptos y fugaces sobre su vida privada. Y todo esto es completamente lícito. Aun así, la narración se vuelve engañosa, ligeramente maquillada entre luces cegadoras de arte y cultura.
Zweig narra hechos históricos desde una posición socialmente privilegiada. En ocasiones, su particular visión parece encajar como si fuesen las piezas de un rompecabezas, pero omite eventos que no se amoldarían con tanta perfección, y convertirían su relato en hechos con una complejidad que no interesaba al escritor. También me sorprende como parece justificar su obnubilación ante el desastre que se avecinaba y, sin embargo, reprochaba la misma despreocupación cuando era el resto de la sociedad la que estaba cegada.
El libro está plagado de grandes autores y artistas del siglo XX, la mayoría de los cuales siguen siendo referentes en la actualidad. Auguste Rodin, Romain Rolland, H.G. Wells, Thomas Mann o James Joyce son sólo algunos ejemplos de todas las personalidades que ocuparon un hueco en su último testimonio. Sin embargo, en su mundo parece no haber espacio para la mujer. No cree conveniente ninguna mención de las aportaciones culturales e intelectuales que tuvieron muchas mujeres durante el siglo XX, pese a la guerra y pese a su mayor dificultad por destacar.
Por todo esto, me quedo con la sensación de no haber podido comprender a Stefan Zweig, de haberme perdido en su relato. Probablemente la ampliación de su obra con la reciente publicación de sus diarios ofrezca cierta luz a unos recuerdos que se me quedan incompletos. Aun así, conservo en la memoria la lección de escritura que ofrece en cada una de sus obras y la advertencia que Zweig querría transmitir a las generaciones futuras: ninguna sociedad está libre de la sombra que tiene que llevar a su espalda, pero sin embargo será responsable de la sombra que proyecte hacia adelante.
1900s
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Marc
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September 5, 2024
Oh, Zweig offers such a marvelous, seductive portrait of the period 1890-1914 that you cannot but enjoy it thoroughly. The whole 'fine fleur' of European culture passes by, through the eyes of a celebrated Austrian-Jewish writer, and he does that in an impressive way. It makes you eager to step into a time machine and jump back to Paris, London, Berlin and Vienna and take part in this intensive cosmopolitan culture from before the First World War.
But, unfortunately, a small warning is in place here: Zweig clearly presents a "constructed" image of this age. He wrote this in the darkest period of his life, just before his suicide (on the run for the Nazis). And so he offers a real romantization of the periode before the First World War, a sketch that is way too idyllic, drenched in melancholy, and only focused on the very tiny, cultural elite. He kept the gruesome life of peasants, laborers, servants and the intense nationalistic, racist and militaristic fever (in which also intellectuals participated) almost completely out of the picture.
Clearly Zweig uses this idyllic portrait to contrast it to the chaos and barbarity he experienced after the Great War. So, don't be misled: history never is black and white. Nevertheless, I must agree, this is a very compelling read!
austria german-literature world-war-1
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Maziyar Yf
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May 3, 2021
دنیای دیروز نوشته اشتفان تسوایگ ، نویسنده و روزنامه نگار اتریشی ، خاطرات اوست اززندگی در وین ، پایتخت امپراطوری اتریش – مجارستان و سپس اتریش و در آخر اروپا قبل از جنگ جهانی اول ، در خلال جنگ ، پس از جنگ و ویرانی ، اروپا بین دو جنگ تا ظهور هیتلر و سپس اروپا در آستانه جنگ ..
تسوایگ با کلامی آمیخته با حسرت و افسوس از وین می گوید ، او که زاده وین است همواره با عشق به شهر خود می نگرد ، او عاشق سبک زندگی ایست که به تدریج در وین شکل گرفته ، تئاتر ، موسیقی ، فرهنگ کافه نشینی . ظهور طبقه متوسط و تلاش حاکمیت برای بهبود اوضاع کارگران و دادن آزادی های بیشتر به اتریشی ها و از جمله اشتفان تسوایگ حس امنیت داده است .
تصویری که تسوایگ از وین به عنوان بزرگترین شهر آلمانی زبان آن دوران ارائه داده واقعا رشک برانگیز است . رقابتی که میان وین قدیمی و با اصالت و برلین تازه به دوران رسیده شکل گرفته ، نویسنده به آلمانی ها طعنه می زند ، او آنها را قومی می خواند که همه چیز را برای خود می خواهند ، فلسفه ای که کاملا با دیدگاه تساهل اتریش در تضاد است .
تسوایگ که خود نویسنده ، روزنامه نگار ، آهنگساز ،نمایشنامه نویسی مشهور است از دیدارهای خود از شهرهای مختلف اروپا و با مشاهیر معروف آن گفته ، از دیدار با رومن رولان و روژه مارتن دوگار در پاریس تا دیدار با ماکسیم گورگی در ناپل ایتالیا ،
برنارد شاو و جیمز جویس در لندن .
با پیش رفتن اروپا به سمت جنگ اول ، تلاشهای تسوایگ و سایر صلح خواهان اروپا شدت می گیرد ، اما آنان سرانجام شکست می خورند ، جنگ از اتریش ، کشور اشتفان تسوایگ شروع می شود ، نویسنده با تلخی به ویرانی کشور خود و اروپا می نگرد .
پایان یافتن جنگ اول فرصتی ایست برای اروپا تا از خاکستر جنگ بر خیزد ، از امپراطوری اتریش تنها کشور کوچک اتریش باقی مانده و آن هم به مانند بیشتر شهرهای اروپا در زیر بار جنگ خُرد شده ، اما با وجود مشکلات فراوان و سقوط شدید کرون واحد پول اتریش ، آنها و اروپاییان شهرها و کشورهای خود را از نو ودوباره می سازند ، زندگی بار دیگر به اتریش و اروپا بازگشته است .
تسوایگ مانند یک سفیر صلح عمل می کند ، او برای خود رسالت فرهنگی در نظر گرفته ، او به ایتالیا که با اتریش دشمن قدیمی بوده ، می رود ،از او شهر به شهر مانند یک قهرمان استقبال می شود . در نگاه تسوایگ دیگر جنگی نخواهد بود و صلح بر اروپ�� پایدار خواهد بود .
اما آرزوهای تسوایگ و سایر صلح طلبان اروپا به زودی نقش بر آب می شود ، نازی ها در آلمان قدرت می گیرند و سپس در میان سکوت دموکراسی های غربی ، اتریش را تسخیر می کنند و قوانین ضد یهود خود را به اجرا می گذارند ،علاوه بر این که کتابهای تسوایک از کتاب فروشی ها جمع شده و به آتش کشیده می شوند ، او حتی دیگر حق نشستن بر صندلی ، رفتن به پارک و استفاده از سیستم حمل و نقل شهری را هم ندارد . تسوایگ طاقت ندارد ، به لندن رفته و تا سال 1940 درآنجا می ماند ، او در حالی که دیگر از صلح در اروپا ناامید شده به برزیل می رود .
طبع و ذات لطیف تسوایگ تحمل فجایعی که در اروپا می گذرد را ندارد ، اوحتی آن قدر زنده نمی ماند که شاهد اردوگاه های مرگ و کوره های آن و نسل کشی یهودیان باشد . در سال 42 او با طیب خاطر و در کمال صحت عقل پس از سپاسگذاری از برزیل و مهمان نوازی مردم آن و با آرزوی صبحی زیبا پس از شبی طولانی دست از زندگی شسته و به همراه همسرش خودکشی می کنند .
در پایان میراث تسوایگ و آنچه از او باقی مانده (از جمله کتاب هایش ) سخت شگفت انگیز است . او صلح طلبی بوده که همواره صلح را فریاد زده و با خشونت جنگیده و نبودن را به زیستن در سایه شوم استبداد و خودکامگی ترجیح داده است .
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Perry
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October 29, 2021
Such Abounding Beauty; Such Utter Sadness and Despair Thereafter
The World of Yesterday is the inimitably enriching and enthralling literary memoir of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer who was one of the world's most popular in the 1930s until forced by Nazi pressure to flee continental Europe in 1934 and emigrate to England, the U. S., and ultimately Brazil.
Zweig's gorgeous descriptions and memories sweep one into the Hapsburg empire of the early 20th Century. He vividly captures the time's aesthetics, sophisticated culture, art and beauty of Vienna, like a dreamscape in homage to his homeland.
It was disorienting to drop into a palpable simulation of the fear and disbelief Zweig felt as a world-famous author who is forced to abandon his home and his homeland and run for his life. Because he was born Jewish.
Highly recommended.
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piperitapitta
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January 6, 2018
Uno, Zweig, centomila!
Io sono stordita da questa lettura.
Leggo le parole di Zweig e ho voglia di leggere Henry James.
Continuo a leggere Zweig e ho voglia di leggere Schnitzler.
Leggo Zweig e ritrovo Maugham.
Che meraviglia, Vienna, Berlino, Parigi e ancora Hertzl, Rilke, Valéry, Rodin!
Un meraviglioso tuffo nella storia della letteratura di inizio secolo, nella storia dell'arte, nella storia e nella distruzione dell'umanità attraverso le due guerre mondiali; il sogno di un'Europa unita, il ricordo di un mondo in cui per passare i confini e viaggiare da un continente all'altro non servivano documenti e passaporti ma bastava semplicemente avere un biglietto, imbarcarsi e partire; la speranza di un mondo in cui tutti gli intellettuali - e quanti ne ha conosciuti Zweig, vengono i brividi solo a pensarci! - potessero dimenticarsi di quale nazionalità fossero per opporsi alla guerra.
Purtroppo così non è stato e se nelle pagine di Zweig prevalgono lo sgomento e l'incredulità, se la fine dell'impero asburgico l'aveva segnato ma non demolito, se l'avvento di Hitler l'aveva ferito ma non spezzato, nella breve prefazione da lui scritta si percepisce tutto il dramma di un uomo diventato non più apolide, come forse aveva sempre desiderato essere, ma senza patria nel senso più ampio del termine e senza terra, di un uomo arrivato allo stremo delle forze interiori e ad un passo dalla resa.
Bellissimo, intenso e colmo di dolore.
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Ángela Arcade
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March 15, 2025
Libro imprescindible para amantes del arte, la literatura y la historia, para comprender nuestra actualidad (y quizá nuestro futuro) a través de una de las voces más insignes de su época y de la nuestra.
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فهد الفهد
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September 26, 2018
عالم الأمس
لو كان هناك قانون يجرم الذين يعيشون حياة مليئة من الأدباء والسياسيين، الاقتصاديين والعلماء، الباحثين وغيرهم، ثم لا يكتبون عن هذه الحياة، لا يحولون تجاربهم إلى كلمات، لو كان هذا القانون موجودا ً لربما كان أكثر المدانين من العرب.
فالعرب ولا فخر مقلون في كتابة السيرة الذاتية، بعكس الغربيين والذين تجد لمشاهيرهم سير متعددة، بل لديهم كتاب سير متخصصين.
وهذا ما كانه (ستيفان زفايج) في جزء من أعماله، كاتب سير، كتب عن بلزاك، ديكنز، دستويفسكي، نيتشه، ستاندال، تولستوي، وها هو في هذا الكتاب الأخير، الذي فرغ منه والعالم يقتل بعضه بعضا ً – 1942 م -، وهو بعيد على الجانب الآخر من الأرض – البرازيل -، ها هو يتوقف عن الكتابة عن الآخرين ليكتب عن نفسه.
تعرفت على زفايج مبكرا ً، قرأت روايته الجميلة (حذار من الشفقة) ذات صيف بعيد، بترجمة حلمي مراد، وضمن سلسلة كتابي، ذات الأغلفة الجميلة، واللوحات الداخلية، والحجم الصغير الذي يجعلها أكثر من ملائمة لممارسة القراءة، بعيدا ً عن العيون الفضولية، التي كانت تزعج المراهق الذي كنته.
لازلت أذكر الرواية جيدا ً، رغم كل تلك السنوات، وهذا لا يحدث مع الكثير من الكتب، ولكن يبدو أن بعضها ذات كلابات تجعلها تعلق في الذاكرة، وتكون عصية على النسيان.
ولكن هذه المعرفة المبكرة بزفايج لم تعن شيئا ً، لم أوفق للحصول على كتب أخرى له، أي فرصة كانت في تلك الأيام للحصول على كتاب جيد !!! أو معرفة هل ترجم لهذا الكاتب كتب أخرى أم لا؟ كان الحصول على الكتب يعتمد في جله على الحظ، لا على الاختيار والانتقاء، فلذا لم تتطور هذه المعرفة كثيرا ً، وانقطعت حتى حصلت في هذه السنة على كتابين لزفايج، الأول هو كتابه التاريخي (ساعات القدر في تاريخ البشرية) – ترجمة محمد جديد، ونشر دار المدى - ، والثاني هو مذكرات زفايج هذه والتي عنونها بكل حسرة (عالم الأمس).
لن نفهم هذه الحسرة، حتى نقرأ الكتاب كاملا ً، ولكننا سنلمسها من الصفحة الأولى، عندما يبدأ ستيفان مذكراته بهذه السطور "وأنا أحاول أن أجد صيغة بسيطة للفترة التي نشأت فيها قبل الحرب العالمية الأولى، آمل أن تكون تسميتي لها (عصر الأمن الذهبي) وافية بالغرض"، هذا الأمن الذي يكتب عنه ويصفه زفايج بحرارة وبكلمات تنفذ إلى القلب، لم تبدده الحرب فقط، الحرب كانت البداية التي حولت عصر العقل الذي ظن الأوروبيون أنهم وصلوا إليه، إلى عصر اللا عقل واللا معنى، عصر الوحشية، ولأن زفايج كان نمساويا ً، يعيش في ظل الإمبراطورية النمساوية المترهلة، والتي انهارت بعد الحرب العالمية الأولى، ولأنه أيضا ً كان يهوديا ً ملاحقا ً من قبل النازيين قبل وأثناء الحرب العالمية الثانية، فلذا فقد كل شيء، الأمن الذهبي الذي نشأ في ظله، الوطن، مقتنياته الثمينة من المخطوطات التي جمعها على مدى عمره، صداقاته، هويته، وقام النازيون بحرق كتبه علنا ً، وكان هذا الكتاب آخر ما كتب، قبل أن ينتحر في البرازيل، وقد فقد إيمانه بهذا العالم البشع.
كان انتحار زفايج، ورسالته الأخيرة مفاجئ لي، لأني قرأت الكتاب كله وأنا لا أعلم بمصير الرجل، حتى وصلت إلى الصفحة الأخيرة حيث تعقيب الناشر والذي يوضح فيه نهاية زفايج.
هذه الصدمة جعلتني ألاحظ أن زفايج لم يكتب في هذا الكتاب عن نفسه حقا ً، أي أن زفايج الكاتب والأديب لم يكن موجودا ً في هذا الكتاب، من كان موجودا ً زفايج الإنسان، زفايج الذي عصفت به السياسة، والحروب، والكراهية، بحيث كتب عندما أراد أن يتحدث عن نفسه، عن السياسة، عن جهوده في الحرب العالمية الأولى ومراسلاته ومقالاته في نبذ الحرب، والأمل بعودة السلام بين الأوروبيين، لم يتحدث زفايج في هذا الكتاب عن الكتب، لم يتحدث عن أعماله كثيرا ً، لم يكن الكاتب فيه من يتحدث إلينا، بل كان الرجل، المفكر، والإنسان المطحون.
عالم الأمس
ستيفان زفايج
ترجمة: عارف حديفة
الناشر: دار المدى
الطبعة الأولى 2007 م
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Lyubov
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September 16, 2019
Абсолютно прекрасна книга. Изящество и ерудиция от най-висока класа.
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Piyangie
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July 14, 2025
This memoir of Stefan Zweig is one man's yearning for a lost yesterday. Zweig lived through two world wars and witnessed how the society gradually declined in its humane qualities, how a man's tyranny destroyed the unity of Europe, and how racial hatred was slowly sown until one race was mercilessly persecuted. All this pained his sensitive and artistic mind to the point of despondency.
Stefan Zweig was a widely read and loved author in Europe, He was a literary giant when Hitler came to power. Yet, being a Jew, he was viewed through the glasses of racial hatred. All his achievements, accomplishments, intellect, and vast contribution to German literature were overlooked because of his race. He left his home in Salzburg and his beloved Austria and lived in exile. His work was banned from German soil and his books were burned. His works existed only in translation, being banned from publication in the German language in which they were written.
It was hard for a sensitive man like him to see such atrocities done to his lifelong work. He felt it to be an insult to the whole body of European literature. He, who hoped for an intellectual unification had to witness one man building a wall of division. That wasn't all. Zweig was horrified by the fall of humanity and the humiliation to which his race was unfairly subjected. His shock and grief were too great to be alleviated by any hope of ever experiencing peace and tranquility. In slow degree,s Zweig plunged into despair, and we know all too well the tragic consequences of his hopelessness.
The World of Yesterday however, is more than a personal account. It is also an unbiased record of lost time. The memoir covers a period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from post-World War I to World War II. Zweig brings us a peaceful, tranquil, intellectually rich, and humane Europe where people respect each other despite their differences in race and faith. It's an interesting narrative of a bygone era in European society, art, theatre, and literature. We meet many famous poets, writers, painters, sculptors, theatre actors, and directors. Through his recital, he creates a fascinating world, informing the reader of a history different from ours.
Zweig compared his past and present, reflecting on the conduct of European society. Despite his pain at witnessing the gradual debasing of humanity and ethics, Zweig gave due credit to the technical and innovative progress the world was making towards the betterment of human lives. Interestingly, for a man who shunned any sort of violence, Zweig drew comparisons between the two world wars and stated that in the First World War, "peoples, emperors, kings, who had matured in the traditions of humanity still cherished a subconscious shame about the war" and "the world conscience was still a courted power; the artistically productive, the moral elements of a nation, still represented a force in the war which was respected for its influence". By contrast, the Second World War used "inhuman terror".
Zweig's lifelong mission was to advocate for the "intellectually unified Europe". His work, especially in the capacity of a translator, was a representation of his devotion to this ideology. But his efforts were dashed by one man's tyranny. Zweig knew that the unity of Europe was broken through Hitler's autocracy and that even if the war ended with defeat to Hitler, there was no future hope for an "intellectually united Europe". This utter hopelessness was the turning point of his decision to end his life. There was no more left for him to do in this life.
The World of Yesterday is a beautifully written account of a lost world. Although mingled with an undercurrent of pain and despair, the memoir doesn't fail to enchant the reader with a forgotten yesterday. Many have interpreted this work as one long suicidal note. But I'd like to view this heartfelt narrative as a living experience of one sensitive and intellectual man who was unfortunate to witness two world wars. Even in his despair, he kept a positive attitude. "Only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived."
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
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Murtaza
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May 8, 2020
Stefan Zweig lived through the death of a world that he loved. Born and raised during the cultural apex of Vienna, he became a famous writer and advocate of European unity who made the acquaintance of some of the most brilliant poets and thinkers of his time. His memoir is both a time capsule of a Europe that was destroyed during the World Wars and a meditation of the impact of mass politics on an individual life. From living in a world where he believed, like many of us today, that "nothing bad could ever happen," he was forced to watch the violent degeneration of his country and continent, before he himself was driven into exile from his home. He committed suicide along with his wife in 1942.
Its hard to convey what a powerful and moving book this is. I've been looking for a book like it for a long time. Zweig lived through so many different changes in one lifetime: moral, technological and political, and his insights into what life was like growing up in late-19th century Vienna almost sound like they come from another planet. What is more incredible is that he anticipated readers would feel this way even in 1941, when the book was written. The pace of change that has existed in the world since the dawn of modernity has been such that its hard to get a handle on reality. Its a disconcerting feeling that is not at all like the stable way that our ancestors lived. Things move so fast that the beginning of one life and its end appear wholly unlike each other. One can only wonder whether we will experience political change to the same monumental degrees that Zweig did.
This is definitely a book I will return to again and again. In many ways, its a very simple one. Just a memoir of a life in the past century. But the evocative prose and beautiful depictions of the world that he lived in make it really special, as does its bracketing within tragedy. The pain of loss is so much greater because you see how much Zweig loved his life and the old European civilization he contributed to. The writing itself is some of the best I've ever come across. I would recommend this book in any context, but its even more relevant during the present political moment. Zweig did not just write for vanity; his memoir was a warning about what can happen to even the most secure and stable society. I think he'd be gratified to know it had some utility for people 70 years after it was published.
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Hanneke
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June 20, 2019
I finished the autobiography of Stefan Zweig with a very heavy heart. How clearly he describes the returning mechanism of looking away nationwide and ignoring the signs that devastation is just around the corner. His personal account saddened me more than I can convey.
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Anne
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December 4, 2020
This review is somewhat and disjointed and incomplete. In the course of writing this review i read an article about Zweig which called into question how Zweig portrays himself in this memoir. This article is rather damning of Zweig. Among other things, the article accuses Zweig of being a master at manipulating his public image and gives many examples of this, countering much that is in his memoir. He is accused of lying by Hannah Arendt, no less. I became distracted by this article and left my review as it stood in order to do further research which led me to the opinion that the one negative article among many other positive articles should all just stand as they are, as opinions or biases which can no longer be confirmed because all the relevant people are dead. In the same vein, this memoir can stand as it is, as a beautiful memoir documenting a life and a culture between pre-WW1 to pre-WW2. If this memoir is biased it is no different from any other memoir since memoirs, by their nature, are biased. In general, people do not always see themselves as others see them.
This is a beautifully written, poignant and informative memoir. Though it is lengthy it does not ramble. The writing is not as tight as his novellas, but I was interested in everything Zweig had to say.
This memoir, sadly, is still relevant today. Roger Cohen quotes from it in the op ed piece published in the New York Times today. Interesting article. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/op....
This is an excellent document about Vienna pre and post WW1. Zweig brought Vienna alive for me, both the social norms and how they changed over time as well as the artistic and intellectual life of the city which he loved. I was very moved by and interested in all that I read.
Zweig's writes at length about the very strict school system in Vienna which was both infantilizing and rigid. He quotes Freud who also grew up in the same system:
"The main purpose of school was to hold us back...to fit us into the established mode. "It may be no coincidence that the inferiority complexes were revealed by men who'd been through the old Austrian schools themselves," e.g. Freud, et al..."
In Zweig's words, "It was always impressed on a boy that he didn't know anything yet, didn't understand anything and if he asked a question he was told he was too young..... Just listen.... don't ask questions" .
They took their eagerness to learn and their curiosity about art and culture to the Viennese coffee houses where they could read all the German newspapers and get and share all information on what was going on in the arts. They'd sit for hours discussing together, in constant competition about information about music, the arts, anything.... They read as many books as they could and shared these books.
After finishing school, Zweig lived in Paris. Zweig waxes poetic about how free and wonderful life was in Paris compared to Vienna. He writes of the community of artists in Paris to which he belonged. They lived simply, near poverty level, but subsidized by the government with small jobs, devoted to their art. Zweig tells anecdotes about all of the artists he met, like Rilke. He wrote a beautiful portrait of a very sensitive Rilke, his nature, his habits, and the way he dressed and lived.
He also told a lovely vignette about visiting Rodin and watching him paint. Apparently Rodin painted with such complete concentration he forgot Zweig was there.
Zweig seemed to have knack for making friends and became friends with all of the major artists and intellectuals of his time.
After meeting so many great artists it took Zweig 30 years to write his first novel. He wrote plays and essays instead. He was completely enamored and, I think, intimated by great artists and their process. He became a great collector of items that belonged to artists and showed the artistic process. He loved to find or be given first drafts of novels, for instance, with the writer's notes in the margins.
Zweig wrote that he was doubtful of his own literary works. He identified with the "losers" in his works, not the heroes; those who are "struck down by fate." In the biographies he identifies with those who are morally right but not successful.
Zweig writes poignantly about WW1 and it's devastation and deprivations and then the 10 years following during which a better and freer life came to Austria.
By 50, Zweig had become a renowned playwright and his first novel was published. Hitler and his blackshirts are in the picture now. Zweig lives a stones throw from Berchtesgaden and had been going there almost every day enjoying it's beauty and enjoying his life and the new Austria which had been slowly rebuilt after WWI.
Zweig writes about his lack of confidence, which is why it took him 30 years to write his one novel. He writes that he was always surprised when a play of his was accepted. He traveled throughout his own country but also to Italy, France, and America and elsewhere to see his plays performed. He made friends with artists and writers wherever he traveled.
Zweig sees WWII coming while many of his friends believed he was too sensitive and anxious. Zweig writes:
"Many people, especially intellectuals, didn't take Hitler seriously because Germany had never had an uneducated man in high office."
Zweig tells an anecdote about working as Strauss's librettist. Strauss, a favorite of Hitler, claimed to be apolitical but Zweig claims that Strauss was trying to safeguard his work. Also, his son's wife was Jewish so he wanted to remain popular with Hitler. The Nazis had a big dilemma about whether to allow Stauss' new opera to go on, given that Zweig, his librettist, was a Jew. Zweig wrote that enjoyed their dilemma. Hitler decided to allow the production to go forward, but it was canceled after the 2nd performance because Hitler learned that Strauss had Zweig start working on a libretto for his next opera."
As the situation in Austria deteriorated Zweig's non-Jewish friends didn't want to be seen in public with him anymore; Zweig would notice them avoiding him if they saw him on the street.
After the police raided his house looking for guns, he writes that he then understood that his personal liberty was at risk. He began packing that same night, went to London and gave up his Austrian residence. He rented a small flat in London and stayed for 6 years, between 1934-1940.
He writes, "I was in a strange place again. Everything I had done and been had drifted away. I faced another beginning."
But he also had some good times in London. He tells an anecdote about lunching with George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells. "They were sparring verbally.. 2 of the finest minds in England ... a dazzling display of dialogue.... I'd seen nothing better in a play before or since."
In 1940 he left London, continuing his life of exile. "However far I went from Europe it's fate came with me". Wherever he traveled, the US, Brazil, or back to Austria he couldn't escape the news. "Every morning, I was afraid of picking up a newspaper and seeing a headline announcing the fall of Austria." " Reading about negotiations over Austria between Hitler and Britain made his hands shake."
He went back to Vienna for a quick visit to see his mother and old friends. His friends still were not worried about war. "For the first time I was distressed by the eternally light-hearted attitude of old Vienna which I always used to love so much .... I will dream of it all my life." He walked around Vienna and looked at every one of the familiar streets, parks and gardens, "every old nook and cranny where I had been born with a desperate silent farewell. in my mind...I embraced my mother with the same secret knowledge that it was for the last time." As the train passed the border out of Austria I didn't look. ... I knew, like Lot... all behind me was dust and ashes, the past transformed into a pillar of bitter salt."
Later, he suffered hearing about the suffering of those he loved after Austria was annexed by Germany. He was relieved to hear of his mother's death, age 84, that she would not suffer under the Nazis."
Zweig lost his passport while traveling. . To travel he spent hours filling out forms, waiting to speak to officials, being searched at crossing points. He felt it was demeaning. He spent more time reading regulations than books. "Nothing was our right but a favor granted by authorities."
With emigration he felt less confident. "I don't feel like I belong entirely to myself anymore. My natural identity is destroyed."
This is an interesting statement coming from Zweig. He was not alone in this feeling. In Los Angeles there were dozens of famous artists of all living in exile from Germany and elsewhere. Many were very successful and seemingly led fulfilling lives, but underneath that success were dark feelings about Los Angeles and about living in exile. In a New Yorker article, The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile, dated March 2, 2020, the author writes, "even the most resourceful of the émigrés faced psychological turmoil. Whatever their opinion of L.A., they could not escape the universal condition of the refugee, in which images of the lost homeland intrude on any attempt to begin anew. They felt an excruciating dissonance between their idyllic circumstances and the horrors that were unfolding in Europe. Furthermore, they saw the all too familiar forces of intolerance and indifference lurking beneath America’s shining façades. To revisit exile literature against the trajectory of early-twentieth-century politics makes one wonder: What would it be like to flee one’s native country in terror or disgust, and start over in an unknown land?"
The list of German emigres is impressive: Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Salka Viertel , Alfred Doblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Vicki Baum, Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler, lived with her third husband, the best-selling Austrian writer Franz Werfel, Bruno Walter. Elisabeth Hauptmann, the co-author of “The Threepenny Opera,” Peter Lorre, e philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. These writers lived very close to each other and were "at the core of a European émigré community that also included the film directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler; the theatre directors Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner; the actors Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr; the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra; and the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
So what made Zweig different from all of these artists, some of whom he could claim as friends?
I'm not sure that I can answer that question but I do know Zweig struggled with depression throughout his life. His first wife reported that he asked her to suicide with him while they were married. This depression could have tipped the scales for him, and perhaps, being depressed while in exile, not making the best decisions for himself. For one thing, he never tried living in Los Angeles where he would have had friends. He thought that the mountains of Brazil would be the place most similar to Vienna. This I do not understand, though I have never been to Brazil. So he lived an isolated life in the mountains for a few months before killing himself.
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Margarita Garova
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March 9, 2022
Тъй като “Светът от вчера” е дългото сбогуване на Стефан Цвайг със света, който познава и обича, съзнателно отлагах прочита на последната книга от най-любимия ми писател. Много рядко се случва, когато в книгите доловиш гласа не само на автора, а на човека и личността и тази личност напълно се припокрива с твоите представи за човешки идеал – с хуманизма, демократизма, космполитизма и толерантността си, и най-вече – липсата на какъвто и да е провинциален или националистически възглед за света. Да обичаш родината си и да й отдаваш дължимото, като в същото време не само не отричаш правото на другите народи да имат своето място под слънцето, но даже и открито (но не сляпо) да им се възхищаваш, да взимаш най-доброто от света, от постиженията на всяка страна – това го умеят широко скроените, висококултурните, скромни и извисени души като Цвайг.
Бързам, преди да изпадна в сантиментална патетика (винаги има риск от такава, стане ли дума за любимите ни неща), да откроя достойнствата на тази книга, особено от съвременна гледна точка. Запознатите с историята няма да открият нищо ново от фактологична страна – безметежните, макар и задушаващи в (не)добронамерения си консерватизъм, времена отпреди Голямата война, шокът и ентусиазмът от тътена на оръдията през август 1914 г., поствоенната спекула и галопиращата инфлация, експресионистичния вик, оттекнал в изкуствата на междувоенните години и краят на една епоха – септември 1939 г. Зад този официалния наратив са драмите, възторзите, ужасът и опасенията на поколението, родено в края на 19 век – поколението на автора – на два пъти пожертвано - по фронтовете, на опашките за изходна виза или в концлагерите.
Най-формиращите, мрачни и вълнуващи години за европейската идентичност. История, в която последната плавна смяна на поколенията се е състояла преди 1914 г., която нагледно показва как духовният регрес връща часовника хронологично и дори моралната съпротива срещу историческите превратности не спасява от най-дълбокото отчаяние, че за теб няма вече място в такъв свят.
Стига да прочетем “Светът от вчера” и ще си дадем сметка колко силна е била идеята за обединена Европа в европейските интелектуални кръгове и как тази идея е била усърдно промотирана от над-национални мислители като Цвайг като единствената възможна алтернатива на войната, омразата и разделението и то десетилетия, преди бащите-основатели на днешния Европейски съюз да я превърнат в дело – документално и практически.
Нелеп логически и умствен анахронизъм е да искаш да върнеш “Светът от вчера”, но точно този свят, за който пише Цвайг, времето, когато самият той е бил щастливо пишещ, свободно пътуващ и плодотворно общуващ със съмишленици от цял свят – трябва да е светът от днес, светът от винаги.
“онагледявайки вкуса на времето, модата на едно столетие неволно разкрива и неговия морал”.
“Нищо, което някога е направено всеотдайно, не е отишло напразно.”
“...в живота по правило най-красноречиви са дребните на вид лични преживявания”.
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Emilio Gonzalez
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April 2, 2021
Un excelente libro en el que Stefan Zweig refiere los vientos de cambio que fueron sacudiendo a Europa desde fines del siglo XIX hasta la Segunda Guerra Mundial
Aunque el libro seria algo así como las memorias del autor, el verdadero protagonista aquí es Europa, porque Zweig va desmenuzando con una mirada muy aguda los hechos que marcaron al continente desde los últimos años del siglo XIX hasta los primeros de la Segunda guerra Mundial, pasando por las costumbres sociales y el esplendor artístico de fines del siglo XIX, las tensiones políticas que llevaron a la Primera Guerra Mundial y las posturas de distintas personalidades a favor y en contra de esa guerra tremendamente cruel, la posguerra y la devastadora inflación que generó pobreza y hambruna en Austria y Alemania, para terminar contando como un cronista de lujo como se fue viviendo el ascenso del nacionalsocialismo en Alemania y la cronología de los hechos que desencadenaron en la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Acompañando la crónica de lo político y social de esa arrolladora primer mitad del siglo XX en Europa, comparte también, aunque sin entrar en demasiados detalles, algunos hechos de su vida privada, muchos de los cuales tienen relación con su vida artística y cultural que incluye anécdotas sobre la amistad y relación que Zweig tuvo con personalidades únicas como Freud, Dalí, Rilke, Strauss, Yeats, Rodin, Joyce, Pirandello y tantos otros.
Stefan Zweig nació en 1881 en Viena y se quitó la vida junto a su esposa en Brasil en 1942, escapando del nazismo.
Me parece un libro súper recomendable desde lo artístico e histórico con la calidad y sencillez a la que Zweig nos tiene acostumbrados en sus novelas y biografías; realmente no tiene desperdicio.
Un dato a tener en cuenta es que esta edición está plagada de errores tipográficos, que aunque no alteran la lectura pueden llegar a ser bastante molestos.
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Warwick
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October 12, 2023
If this book feels less like an autobiography and more like a memoir, that’s perhaps because it feels less like a narrative of Zweig’s life and more like a portrait of a specific, unified time and place, now vanished. Never mind that the place covered numerous European countries and the time numerous years: all of it comes together in Zweig’s memory as representing some coherent, humanistic whole – one which the world must now do without.
Zweig was lucky enough to be born into Vienna’s golden age, and unlucky enough to see it destroyed. In the European culture he grew up in and did so much to foster, every citizen ‘also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world’, moving across borders and between languages with joyous curiosity. The drawback was that an end to such freedom became unimaginable.
It is difficult to rid yourself, in only a few weeks, of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place.
The enduring image from this book is of Zweig sitting out on his terrace in Salzburg, and looking out at the slopes of Hitler’s retreat in Berchtesgaden over the border, little knowing that the man on the other side of the valley would one day destroy everything he loved. And this was not just because Zweig was a Jew (‘a category,’ as Clive James put it with typical economy, ‘in which he was reluctant to believe until he found out the hard way that Hitler did’), but because his writing embodied exactly the kind of wide-ranging, international solidarity that the Nazis so loathed.
The lesson that past progress is no guarantee against future barbarism is one that must be continually relearned. Even people my age, on a much lesser scale, found that growing up in the progressive 90s often left them hopelessly ill equipped to deal with the idiocies of Brexit and Trump. For Zweig’s generation, the build-up had been unimaginably more glorious, and the drop would be unimaginably more awful.
Our common idealism, the optimism that had come from progress, meant that we failed to see and speak out strongly enough against our common danger.
Occasionally, this brings flashes of cynicism – ‘only delusion, not knowledge, brings happiness,’ he says at one point – but for the most part Zweig remains, sometimes despite his better instincts, committed to the idea that Europe shares a common humanistic heritage. This was the impulse behind his long series of literary and political biographies; and even towards the end here he talks of future hopes and dreams with apparent belief that they might be realised.
Which, of course, they wouldn’t be. The coda that hangs over this book is Zweig’s suicide, carried out by barbiturates the day after he sent the manuscript of it to his publisher. You wouldn’t predict it from the text, which is far from bleak – it is, if anything, a celebration – but perhaps it’s a twisted reflection of Zweig’s humility. Throughout his memoir, he downplays his own contributions in order to bring attention to those other writers, artists and musicians that he thought had been overlooked, and in the end he sees a way to remove himself from the narrative entirely. It’s up to everyone else now – but at least we have something he didn’t have, which is the works of Stefan Zweig.
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Milly Cohen
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September 19, 2017
Este libro es como de lo mejor que me ha pasado en la vida.
No sé qué más decir.
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Maryana
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June 23, 2023
Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.
Stefan Zweig believed in a world beyond borders, but he became defined by them. Knowing the author's fate and the depressing reality of those times (oh and present times), this memoir is heartbreaking, yet full of human decency and, dare I say, hope.
∞/5
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Maciek
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February 19, 2016
We failed to see the writing on the wall in letters of fire. Like King Belshazzar before us, we dined on the delicious dishes of the arts and never looked apprehensively ahead.
At one point during the first half of the 20th century, two Austrians would take residence in the high and remote corners of the Alps, almost exactly opposite one another. Both were at one time living in the Austrian capital of Vienna, though their experiences have been remarkably different - one wanted to be an artist, but failed; the other wanted to be an artist, and succeeded. Despite that difference, both of them would venture out to Vienna and become remarkably famous. One of them would lead a movement which would change the world; the other would be applauded and loved for his work across the continents, but later forced into self-exile and banned in his native country. To our detriment, we live in a world shaped by the actions and ideas of the first Austrian, while the other has been quietly pushed away into obscurity and largely forgotten.
The world of today continues to exist in the shadow of Adolf Hitler, and all that he came to embody: political fanaticism, blind nationalism and equally blind faith in personal superiority shared by everyone. Although he was one of the most famous writers of the world during his lifetime, Stefan Zweig is little known today . His many romantic stories, novellas and plays have been gathering dust in libraries and disappeared from the world of international publishing; only recently there's been a small resurgence in his work, thanks largely for it being newly translated into English.
The World of Yesterday is Zweig's last book, in which he describes the world he had to leave with great love and affection, but also great sadness resulting from certainty that he was seeing its last days. This is not a proper autobiography, since Zweig keeps many details from his personal life away from the reader; it is a combination of a memoir with a travelogue, in which he reminisces about the many places he visited and lived in, and the people he met and was friends with.
Vienna, the traditional capital of the Habsburg monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian empire, was one of the most multicultural and populous cities in Europe. A major cultural hub on the continent, the city was home to Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud among many others; one could hardly find a more cosmopolitan metropolis in the entire world. Vienna personifies the great divide between Stefan Zweig and Adolf Hitler. Zweig embraced the cosmopolitan city and its culture: he felt at home in its many cafes and artistic venues, embracing the atmosphere of intellectual tolerance, which attracted the most diverse people. A pacifist and firm believer in European unity, freedom of movement and friendship between nations, Zweig considered himself and his fellow Viennese real, supranational citizens of the world.
Young Hitler left Linz for Vienna to enroll in the Academy of Fine Arts, where he wanted to learn to paint. Twice rejected, he quickly spent his inheritance and lived in a series of shelters and men's homes, sometimes sleeping rough and having to beg for money. Hitler did not admire the city like Zweig did, considering it to be one of the most backward cities in Europe, where" dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply". As he painted postcards of Vienna for pennies to get by, Hitler came to know the face of the city which the bourgeoisie Zweig never could - that of abject and miserable poverty. Hitler later wrote that he associated Vienna only with hardship and misery; it was during this period that he adopted ruthless social darwinism, which would remain the main worldview to the end of his life. Contrary to apolitical Zweig, Hitler developed an intense interest in politics - reading any newspaper or book that he could get his hands on, and engaging in debates with anyone willing to listen to him. Like many Viennese at the time, Hitler also attended debates held by the Austrian parliament, but found them to be a multilingual chaos, a lamentable comedy, a farce. It is also at this time when he began to pick up the odious antisemitism which was common among Viennese pan-Germans, loating the diversity of the city so adored by Zweig; Hitler wrote that it was in Vienna where he discovered "the two menaces" - Marxism and Jewry, and where he ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and became an anti-semite.
Whereas Hitler sought the establishment of people's community, which would unify all ethnic Germans through National Socialism and ultimately create a racially uniform German Reich, Zweig remained a transnational humanist and a believer in the transcendental power of culture. The World of Yesterday is full of Zweig's excitement at the sheer amount of artistry and creativity present on the continent before the outbreak of the war. Zweig writes with genuine feeling not only about Vienna, but also about Paris, a city which he genuinely loved and despaired when it fell to the Nazis; he also travels to the young Soviet Russia, and to his credit remains skeptical about this great social and political experiment - unlike many other intellectual and writers. He rubs elbows with Theodor Herzl - the founder of modern Zionism, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, meets James Joyce, attends a poetry reading by W. B. Yeats, witnesses a debate between H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw, and even claims that Benito Mussolini has personally intervened and pardoned a prisoner after his request. In a cruel twist of historical irony, the moment where European culture is at its highest is also the one where the political situation on the continent is most unstable; Zweig's devotion to European unity, free movement and open exchange of culture and ideas is constantly contrasted by the looming specters of war - first the Great War, and later World War 2, which would drive him out of the continent altogether.
Zweig observes the hyperinflation and the rise of nationalistic radicalism, which first removed his native Austria from the map and then reduced the rest of the continent to a burning mass of rubble and death. The later sections of the memoir are the most poignant; Zweig, a real citizen of the world if there ever was one, sees increasingly growing ethnic tensions and political hatred, and is rendered stateless and without a home, forced always to be at the hospitality of others. The man who saw no sense in borders between nations and advocated for international fraternity and friendship was forced to fill mountains of paperwork as he moved between countries, having to apply for endless visas and being treated as an enemy alien; in a deeply poignant moment he mourns the shattering of the prewar dream of a truly free and borderless world, and the human dignity and creativity lost in the spirit-crushing border procedures.
Zweig eventually arrived in Brazil, a country which he picked because he saw it as a place still undiscovered, with its immense natural beauty allowing for a possibility of development of an entirely new, untainted civilization. But the shadow of war and destruction of Europe has followed him there,and refused to let go. Tormented by the loss of his country and the world he believed in, Zweig posted the manuscripts of The World of Yesterday and his last novella, Chess Story to his publisher in New York on February 22, 1942, and committed suicide together with his wife, Lotte, on February 23th. They were found dead in their bed,together, in a final embrace. Three years later, in the last remarkable similarity which their lives would share, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun would also commit suicide. This would put not only an end to the war in Europe but also a final end to Zweig's World of Yesterday, which would never again exist and where his golden age of security would never resurface, and be instead replaced by the bitter experience and barbed wire of the Cold War, international terrorism instead of international fraternity, with the new looming threat of the nuclear bomb.
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The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European Kindle Edition
by Stefan Zweig (Author), Anthea Bell (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (728)
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Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday, (Die Welt von Gestern) is a unique love letter to the lost world of pre-war Europe The famous autobiography is published by Pushkin Press, with a cover designed by David Pearson and Clare Skeats. Translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell.
Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of pre-war Europe its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall. Through the story of his life, and his relationships with the leading literary figures of the day, Zweig s passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction.
This new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell captures the spirit of Zweig's writing in arguably his most important work, completed shortly before his death in a suicide pact with his wife in 1942.
The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed.'- David Hare
'This absolutely extraordinary book is more than just an autobiography. (...) This is a book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942. That should cover a fair number of you.'- Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, is published by Pushkin Press.
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear.
In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide.
Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
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Never until our time has mankind as a whole acted so diabolically, or made such almost divine progress.
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It is generally assumed that getting rich is a Jew’s true and typical aim in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting rich, to a Jew, is only an interim stage, a means to his real end, by no means his aim in itself. The true desire of a Jew, his inbuilt ideal, is to rise to a higher social plane by becoming an intellectual.
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The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed -- David Hare This absolutely extraordinary book is more than just an autobiography. (...) This is a book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942. That should cover a fair number of you -- Nicholas Lezard His memoir, The World of Yesterday, is one of his best works, a marvellous recapturing of a Europe that Hitler and his thugs destroyed. Zweig seems to have known everyone, and writes about the great figures of his day with insight, sympathy and, most unusually for a writer, modesty -- John Banville One of the canonical European testaments... [Zweig's] life and work tell of the perilous flimsiness of our world of security-a message that many insistently deny, but somehow need to hear -- John Gray New Statesman Unnervingly topical The Week
About the Author
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to london, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.
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From Australia
Maria Vaid
5.0 out of 5 stars High recommend read
Reviewed in Australia on 5 February 2025
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Fantastic and very moving account of a critical time and place in history. Makes me fear that this time isn’t different and that history unfortunately does in fact repeat….
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Ardy
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best Biographies I have Read
Reviewed in Australia on 13 March 2015
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I loved every page of this book and wanted it to go on beyond the start of the second world war. He writes very well and it moves with a speed and comprehension that defies the topics and areas the book covers. Great historical document without some of the drum banging that goes on about Jews being displaced, in this instance the shock of his quiet approach leaves you wondering what he had seen that was too mundane to mention.
Anther aspect to this book is the deep friendships he had prior to Hitler and how few he had after. It felt as if this aspect was the hardest for him to accept, the loss of everything else seemed minor compared to his love of friendship. Of course he talks mainly about the loss of culture and freedom that the 1st world war ushered in and the rise of the nazi party on the back of that, threatening to totally destroy the European concept of Art and Culture.
Amazing that a writer of his ability should be almost forgotten. Reminds me of Knut Hamsun who was forgotten for being on Hitler's side as opposed to Stefan Zweig who's books were destroyed by being in Hitler's way.
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Kenneth W. Wilder
5.0 out of 5 stars Survival
Reviewed in Australia on 29 July 2016
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A brilliant account of what it meant to be caught up in the whirlpool of suffering and insecurity as
result of the turmoil created by Nazi Germany.
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Frank B.
2.0 out of 5 stars Not my ‘cup of tea’
Reviewed in Australia on 6 December 2023
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Probably reflects more on me than the book. That’s allowed.
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Booklover
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful look at a bygone world
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2013
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I chose this book because I had recently read a short novel by Stefan Zweig (The Post Office Girl) and wanted to know a little more about him and his reactions to the inter-war years. This memoir, written before the end of the second world war, when he was in exile in South America, is a truly remarkable record -- a vivid recreation of the world of Zweig's childhood in the Austro-Hungarian empire, his early development as a writer in pre-world war one Europe, and his later experience of the inter-war years at the beginning of the "modern" world. Zweig's recollections of the many artists and writers he knew intimately are interesting, but his ability to invoke a period (Austria in the immediate post-war years, for example) through the accumulation of vividly remembered details is outstanding. He was clearly a gifted writer, though many of his short stories and novellas are now somewhat dated, and his suicide in 1941 was a tragic end to a life in which so much had been achieved but from which, maybe, much more might have been expected.
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Cornwallis
5.0 out of 5 stars The World of Yesterday
Reviewed in Spain on 4 July 2024
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I am a great fan of Stefan Zweig and consider him one of the finest writers of the last century. This book is the last he wrote before committing suicide with his wife in 1942. It's a very personal story of the world before both World Wars and the astonishing creative and cultural dynamic that existed then. I felt swept up by his stories, imagery, and writing, which described a world so far removed from what we have created now and yet is so near in time. I think it's a book we should all read as it gives so much perspective to the lives we have now.
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Mrs. Suzanne R. O'shea
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Biography
Reviewed in Germany on 22 December 2023
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Often, I find biographies boring. But Stefan Zweig's is both funny and tragic as he charts the loss of his life's former certainties, like his comfortable home and good standard of living, in the political upheavals for Austria and Germany following WWI which caused so much deprivation.
It has parallels for us today, as we see the rise of far right populist movements totally lacking in compassion. We stand on the edge of the abyss. Let's not make the same mistake as our grandparents and great grandparents.
War destroys and scars all. There are no winners.
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Kareena Arthy
5.0 out of 5 stars A Voice From a Vanished World
Reviewed in the United States on 16 April 2024
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There's a lot to like about Zweig's "The World of Yesterday". It a beautifully written memoir, almost entirely in chronological order, of his life before, during, and after the Nazi expansion across Europe. He paints a vivid picture of a European/internationalist intellectual and cultural life, living his life (and earning his living) with his mind and his writing ability (translations, articles, novels and letters).
His descriptions of his contemporaries are vivid, and they are not confined to just the well known figures he met. More than once he describes people that were well known in his past but, even by the time he wrote this book during WW2, had already been largely forgotten. His descriptions of them seem fair and honest, if occasionally unkind, though my trust in his ability to judge character was slightly undermined near the end of the book when he gave repeated fawning assessments of Freud and his legacy, also revealing a pretty limited understanding of how science works. But this is a minor niggle in an otherwise sensitive book full of unique insights about humanity, hate, war, journalism, and modern communications - many of which remain relevant today.
The book is also unusual in that it is written from the middle of the Second World War, and self consciously acknowledges the limitations of his perspective on the conflict for this reason.
The book is, however, almost completely devoid of descriptions of Zweig's private life. What little there is could probably fit on a single page. So if you're looking for any direct insight into the reasons behind his and his wife's double suicide not long after the book's completion, you'll be disappointed. The book doesn't read like an extended suicide note at all (he and his wife did actually leave a suicide note), in fact the ending of the book is cautiously optimistic. But as the introduction points out, the book does describe Zweig's beloved world of culture, art, intellect and internationalism as a world that was vanishing in front of his eyes, so perhaps the seeds of his eventual decision is in there.
Definitely worth a read, and the audio book at kindle is also excellent.
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ఏమి?
5.0 out of 5 stars A swansong of chillingly epic proportions
Reviewed in India on 18 February 2017
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This book is a moving testament to the lost world of deceny, tolerance, artistic and cultural progress, and most importantly of all - humanity. This book makes you feel what Anthony Trollope or whoever once said, that books are usually about everyday things, because no matter what it is, when it happens to you, you feel as if it is happening for the first time in the universe.
This book has that kind of an effect on you. You know the event that transpirte. We all do. They are well documented historical events. You know the outcomes. We all do. We read about them extensively and everywhere. But what Zweig does is to take history down to a single indiviual. Through his eyes you experience history happening to you.
The descriptions of prewar cities, of friendships formed, of lives torn apart from a first person perspective is a stunningly moving, visceral experience. Zweig is matter of fact, yet eloquent. Gentle, but pulls no punches.
This book is an eloquent suicide note of a love lost. Love of freedom, love of life, and love of freespeech. This is history pared down to a single Individual. An individual who is not afraid to lay bare his soul knowing full well, that he would not exist to face what repercussions may come. With that knowledge of being above repurcussions comes a freedom and a brutal honesty that can be both chilling, and revelatory.
A must read for anyone interested in the human condition. And even more of a must read for all those who want to travel back in time (1881 - 1942) to a more glorious past.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Memoir and History
Reviewed in Japan on 28 November 2020
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Stefan Zweig, 1881~1942, Austrian, famous writer, relates a personal history--pre-WWI; between WWI and WWII; coming of Hitler; outbreak of WWII. Zweig knew numerous famous people and he gives a first-hand account of those relationships. At the same time, he draws a broad historical picture of European life during distinct eras that Zweig lived through. Excellent book!
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Amare Tegbaru
5.0 out of 5 stars A story of an uncompromising humanist
Reviewed in Sweden on 28 June 2025
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to stand firm as a humanist if that costs even taking one's life, though tragic.
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佐藤國雄
5.0 out of 5 stars 最高の自叙伝
Reviewed in Japan on 2 December 2015
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ヨーロッパの最高の知性が私的な側面を押さえながら、世界第一次大戦前後から第二次大戦にいたる社会状況を実に深く活写している。
ヒットラーの進出と大衆の支持のなかで、価値あるヨーロッパが崩壊していくのを悲しみと、ある種の諦念をもって画がいている。もちろんエリート臭が
ないわけではないが、それにもかかわらず、彼の他の作品を読みたくなる。
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viswamurthy
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for everyone
Reviewed in India on 24 May 2020
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I am no one to review about Stefan Zweig .....indeed a pleasure to read about his life....
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Francis Phillips
5.0 out of 5 stars Life in pre-WW1 Vienna among the cultured middle classes
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 February 2021
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This was the last book Stefan Zweig published before his suicide in Brazil in 1943. It is a superb evocation of the life of a cultured and secular Jewish youth in Vienna, before the Great War brought this privileged life to an end. He includes a description of his life in the 1920s, his writing projects and his fame - which seemed to come easily to this gifted man. The mystery (to me) is why he killed himself in a joint pact with his (much younger) lover when in exile in Petropolis, Brazil: he had escaped the Holocaust, had plenty of money, a respected reputation; thus he would have found a comfortable niche after WW2. Possibly he could not bear to witness the modern changes to Vienna, or the death of the culture he had known. None of this is evident in this book although its final sentence does give intimations of the horrifying future for European Jews under Hitler: Zweig's home in Salzburg, a former hunting lodge in the hills above the city, had a commanding view of the surrounding mountains, including Hitler's eyrie, the 'Eagle's Nest', in nearby Bavaria. Possibly the pride of a successful man, who did not want to be dogged by his Jewish ancestry, would not allow him to continue living under the shadow of the War? He had grown up in a Vienna at the height of its civilization, documented in these pages, a world that could not be bettered; the world of yesterday rather than the future, which Zweig refused to contemplate.
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Kindle-klant
5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful!
Reviewed in Germany on 12 April 2023
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Zweig gives a unique and very personal account of this dynamic, rich and tragic period of human history. Truly recommended!
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars THE Memoir of the early 20th century
Reviewed in the United States on 14 October 2022
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Zweig is a master. This is a must read for anyone interested in what the world was like pre-World War 1 thru World War 2. Zweig writes from a place of deep love for humanity, even as the world is falling apart all around him. Do yourself a favor and read this book - you won't regret it.
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farimanokami
5.0 out of 5 stars 素晴らしいの一語に尽きる
Reviewed in Japan on 10 February 2016
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第一級の文化人による、古き良き時代の自伝的回顧録では済まない、現代人必読の文明批判の書。いがみ合いやテロの横行する今日の世界への、昨日の世界からの人間味ある温かい警鐘に、我々アジアの人間は真摯に耳を傾けるべきである。
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CBS
4.0 out of 5 stars A Life Turned Upside Down
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 September 2024
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The World of Yesterday (TWoY) is a pacifist, European, anti-nationalist memoir of life of the Austrian (i.e. a subject of Dual Monarchy Austria-Hungary) writer Stefan Zweig, born into the ‘belle époque’ period preceding the First World War. TWoY comes across as a somewhat bewildered and bemused account by Zweig on how it came to be that his life was three times turned upside down -- when his forebears had had an untroubled orderly bourgeois existence.
TwoY is a good book, well written, with prose mostly economical and to the point. However, at 462 pages, I still found it something of an effort to finish. Zweig is very self-consciously an “artist”. He seems to know and personally be in contact with almost all the literary and artistic figures of Europe at that time. Whether or not they want to know and be in touch with him is less clear. For me, the history that Zweig presents is very good, but there’s rather too much tedious ‘arty’ stuff and name-dropping of the world’s famous and not-so-famous. Zweig seems eager to please and gain the approval of his artistic contemporaries; hence the somewhat excessive encomiums to people such as Richard Strauss, Rudolf Steiner, Theodor Herzl, Charles van der Stappen, Emile Verhaeren and others.
In summary, TWoY is well written, good history, but somewhat self-conscious and self-involved.
The book starts with a depiction of what Zweig calls “The World of Security”, a memorable portrait of the stable world of the Austrian Monarchy. From p23 of the paperback:
“Everyone knew how much he owned and what his income was, what was allowed and what was not. Everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight. If you had wealth, you could work out precisely how much interest it would earn you every year, while civil servants and officers were reliably able to consult the calendar and see the year when they would be promoted and the year when they would retire.”
And, from p47: “…in that stable bourgeois world with its countless little safeguards nothing sudden ever happened… In the serene epoch of their Austria, there was no upheaval in the state, no abrupt destruction of their values.”
According to Zweig, the arts were everything in Vienna. In the later years of the 19th century; there was something of a run of non-artistic Emperors. The Jewish intelligentsia (of which Zweig was one), now settled in the city for 200 years, benignly stepped into the gap, becoming the main supporters, benefactors and patrons of the arts in Austria. Zweig was himself from an early age of a literary bent. He never seems to have actually *done* anything except poetry and books. He had no interest in sport, socialising unless with literati, or vocational pursuits; he certainly appears never to have held down a ‘real’ job. Literary art was for him the be-all and end-all. He says the same was true of all his youthful contemporaries, but I find this a bit hard to believe and somewhat tedious.
We see Zweig’s formative years, the rigid and repressive Austrian school system, his awakening to relationships and sex. In summary, for the upper class, sexual activity was suppressed, especially for girls; for the lower classes, matters were more free and easy. In the repressive, dishonest, atmosphere, according to Zweig, prostitution and venereal diseases were rampant. These were the norms in 1900; at the time of writing (1940) societal norms had become comparatively honest, transparent -- simply better. I was left wondering whether or not the change in fact so total.
We see Zweig’s early adulthood and his first publications. He is, at the young age of 19, spectacularly validated by the “feuilleton” (art section) of the Neue Freie Presse, the Vienna newspaper of record, and its editor Theodor Herzl. Thus begins Zweig’s mixing with the literati of Vienna and Berlin and the expansion of his ideas and ambitions. We see Zweig’s sojourns in Berlin and Paris, India and the USA; his experimentation with theatre, and the first hints of political change.
War is unnecessary and barely foreseen, but distant rumblings in Europe increasingly worry Zweig. He finds that writers have little political influence, that there is no objective reason for war but that nationalist ill-feeling across the continents is increasing.
Chapter 9: “The First Hours of the 1914 War” is Zweig’s memorable evocation of Europe in the balmy summer of 1914, with war creeping up; the sudden collapse of confidence that all will be well; the assumption of all sides that their rulers are in the right; general euphoria at the departure of the armies to war; and a reflection on the comparative sober realism of 1939. There are extremes of hate and national fanaticism early in the war (see, for example, the “Hymn of Hate against England” by Ernst Lissauer). It is a time of triumph of overheated nationalist emotion on the part of all classes including artists, writers, doctors and professionals. Hatred for the enemy, especially “England”, is trumpeted by very many in Austria and Germany, most prominently intellectuals who should have known better.
Zweig spends the years of the First World War trying to team up with writers of all belligerent nationalities to oppose the war. But he’s in a small minority, his efforts are ineffective and he allows them to peter out. He avoids military service on grounds of medical unfitness, spending a lot of time in the comparative comfort and plenty of neutral Switzerland. The reader gets a sense, not so much of any nobility on Zweig’s part as of a tendency to wring his hands ineffectually in the face of trouble or violence, to hide, to run away.
In 1918, the war ends, with high hopes (in Zweig at least) for justice, fraternity and a united Europe. But his post-armistice return from Switzerland to Austria is to an impoverished, freezing, starving country beset by hyperinflation. With money worthless and the war over, art and living, for Zweig, assume new importance. But, post-war, everything is extreme, experimental and provisional; everything traditional and venerable is discredited along with the previous ruling generation.
The period 1924-33, up to Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, is Zweig’s most successful period. He questions why his books are so popular in so many countries, concluding that it’s their brevity and economy of style in comparison to ‘traditional’ literature. Here, Zweig singles out (pp343-4) The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (my review is on Amazon) for unfavourable contrast with his own work. I agree with Zweig on this point at least.
On page 345, we see Zweig’s single reference in the whole of TWoY to “my wife”. He married in 1920 but keeps all reference to his spouse out of this personal account of his life. Strange.
From Chapter 15, we see the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. As ever, Zweig once again runs away from trouble. With Austria in ferment after the Nazi takeover in Germany, he goes to London for the first time in 30 years. He ingratiates himself with Richard Strauss, even though Strauss is in collusion with the Nazi authorities in Germany. Zweig never himself puts his head above the parapet facing the Nazis (admittedly a stance that does need courage). He says the violent suppression of the Social Democrats of February 1934 in Vienna (“the revolution”) happened without his knowing it, even though he was in the city at the same time. For me, he protests his innocence too loudly; it’s hard not to conclude that Zweig is something of a pleasure-loving coward.
Zweig flees to England for the years 1934-40. He keeps his head down there too: criticism of Hitler “might be taken as personal prejudice”. He becomes something of a recluse in Britain, then runs further from the unpleasantness by going off to both North and South America, preferring the South – he eventually settles in Brazil, committing suicide there in 1942 along with his second wife. He divorced the first in 1938, but we don’t see any of that in TWoY.
Zweig returns to Austria from Britain in November 1937 to see his country one last time before the inevitable subjugation. Austria is at ease, with its head in the sand. Zweig claims he sees the future where others don’t or don’t want to. The 1938 fall of Austria to the Nazis and the thousand forms of nasty brutality that follow hit Zweig hard – even though he gets out in time. He loses his Austrian passport and gets a stateless-person one in Britain.
Zweig concludes with a sad comparison of the world before 1914, when there were no passports or travel red tape, with now (1940), when all free movement and civil rights are lost because of xenophobia and distrust. In his impassioned expression of the plight of European Jews, we need to remember that Zweig, writing in 1940-42, cannot know about the impending Holocaust.
Zweig’s memoir ends with declaration of war by Britain in September 1939, and a glimmer of hope. But that’s not enough to prevent Zweig running once again, this time to Brazil.
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Mark Vickerman
4.0 out of 5 stars An elegiac portrait of a time long gone when Europe ...
Reviewed in the United States on 4 December 2014
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An elegiac portrait of a time long gone when Europe was a country without borders for intellectuals and elites
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David M. Bennett
5.0 out of 5 stars A Sad Jewel
Reviewed in the United States on 2 August 2013
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This beautifully written book, is, one feels, slowly burnished by its author. It describes a rich life, with many highs and ends with the low felt by Zweig as a refugee at the outset of another world war occurring in his life, a tragedy he had lived through once before. I have never previously owned a book in which I have marked so many passages for their insight, wanting never to lose them and to be able to share them. I was sad to find that I had come to its end, a sadness sharpened by the knowledge that not long after Zweig delivered the manuscript to its publisher, Zweig and his wife jointly suicided. What a tragic loss. It underlines the waste of war and racial hatred.
David Bennett
Melbourne
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Dan
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 July 2025
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Excellent autobiographical info on one of the great 20th Century authors.
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MLS
5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable and shocking historical testimonyReviewed in Germany on 21 June 2021
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A vivid and heartfelt depiction of the European collective moods and beliefs that led to WWI & WWII; a scary realization of the difficulties (impossibility?) to understand one’s own time and the tragedy that this realization entails; a defense of universality and of the perils and evils of chimeric Nationalisms.
An indispensable book.
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Nick Barniville
5.0 out of 5 stars This should be mandatory for all EuropeansReviewed in Germany on 24 December 2019
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A brilliant personal journey through the late 19th and early 20th century, terse prose laden with emotion. With the rise of ignorant nationalism, it would do no harm for this book to feature on all school curricula before it all happens again.
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G. Gensbygel
5.0 out of 5 stars A must for our time - history DOES repeat itselfReviewed in the United States on 22 September 2012
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A sad, exhilarating, fascinating and meaningful book. Not an "autobiography" but the reflections of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century on the decline of civilization. A dire warning to our time, when materialism, greed and hunger for power at all costs are driving us towards the extinction of the human race. Pity about the translation, though: there are several dreadfully wrong translated words and phrases (i.e: "genial" in German does NOT mean "genial" in English, but "of genius"). Printing errors as well spoil the pleasure.
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laurencebbrown
5.0 out of 5 stars A superb work by a great writer!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 July 2024
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It's a very fine edition of a beautiful and distinguished work of literature. I cannot wait to read it.
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Suzanne M. Wheat
5.0 out of 5 stars This is one of the best books I have ever readReviewed in the United States on 15 May 2016
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This is one of the best books I have ever read. Beautiful writing and a compelling story of Zweig's life in his beloved Vienna during the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s and '40s. Today he is still one of Europe's most celebrated authors. Friends have borrowed it and report that they can't put it down.
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Renske ten Veen
5.0 out of 5 stars Good readReviewed in Germany on 19 February 2018
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One beautiful piece of literature. Captures the life of a person in the Habsburg Empire well. Zweig shares his thoughts and makes comparisons about life before and after certain events. Swiftly written. Well translated.
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A. Pini
5.0 out of 5 stars I've read it for the second time. It is ...Reviewed in the United States on 15 September 2014
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I've read it for the second time. It is as up-to-date as ever. Argentina, Venezuela to say nothing of Ukrainia, Irak, Iran, Syria and so on. This materpiece of contemporary literatura is a desperate call to attention, against underestimation of political abuses.
Angel D. Pini
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Eugene Onegin
4.0 out of 5 stars When Respect for Art is Lost...Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 March 2012
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Stefan Zweig was one of the most respected and widely read authors in continental Europe in the first third of the twentieth century and at the very heart of its literary and cultural life. Therefore, he was in a very good position to write a memoir of the intellectual history of the time and that is what he offers here. This is NOT an autobiography in the normally understood sense of the term rather an exceptionally fine portrait of the turbulent age in which Zweig was living and working. As Zweig takes you through his education and development into a writer of note a fundamental theme emerges: his passionate belief in a united Europe and the core values that he argues all Europeans share-a commitment to the rule of law, a desire for peace and toleration add above all, a belief in the central role to culture in the promotion of a civilized common life. Zweig finds these shared values in the age before 1914 despite the many failings of the period (which Zweig is keen to acknowledge)and then witnesses their brutal destruction first in the imperial egotism of the First World War and then even more horrendously in the perverted racial supremacy of National Socialism. In the course of his account, the author offers us revealing portraits of the complacency of people in both 1914 and the 1930's when the idea that nations would go to war seemed absurd and against all notions of European progress. However, this book is no dry history enlivened as it is by fascinating vignettes of the great cultural figures of the time most of whom Zweig knew. You can look forward to hearing of Zweig meeting James Joyce, writing a libretto for Richard Strauss or visiting the dying Sigmund Freud. There is also much on the growth of a budding writer and how education and friendship shapes the creative process. Having been forced into exile and disowned by his beloved Austria, Zweig committed suicide with his wife in 1942 in despair as Hitler rampaged through Europe destroying all of the values that he had so long espoused. As a Jew he had lost more than most even though the full horrors of the Final Solution had yet to be perpetrated though his message about the threats of nationalism and greed to civilization remain universal and real. Great credit is due to Anthea Bell for a wonderfully sympathetic translation. Recommended especially to those with an interest in European literature and history, but also to all who like humane and intelligent writing.
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sashatagger
3.0 out of 5 stars he could have easily removed at least two thirds of this one without ...Reviewed in the United States on 3 December 2014
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Very interesting from historical point of view, but too verbose. And he praises himself of going over and over his manuscripts to remove anything not essential. Well, he could have easily removed at least two thirds of this one without tanking out anything of interest.
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Esat Mazreku
5.0 out of 5 stars The best!
Reviewed in Germany on 3 March 2021
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The best account of Europe’s history in pre’WW.
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donadeseu
5.0 out of 5 stars a witness account on a turn in history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 December 2014
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Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was in a privileged position to witness the dramatic changes that agitated Europe at the start of the twentieth century to change it forever. Born in the “Golden Age of Security” of the Vienna under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century, within a bourgeois Jewish household, in the middle of a society with a high regard for culture, and the theatre in particular, Zweig developed a dislike for authority from his time as a student in the strict Austrian schools. But in Zweig’s milieu, a number of Viennese Jews had started to make significant changes in music (Mahler, Schönberg), in literature (Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler), in psychology (Freud)… with a vocation to refine Austrian identity by giving it a European expression.
A paragraph in the early part of the book condensates how these innovations in art were only the forerunners of general change: “The truly great experience of our youthful years was the realisation that something new in art was on the way — something more impassioned, difficult and alluring than the art that had satisfied our parents and the world around us. But fascinated as we were by this one aspect of life, we did not notice that these aesthetic changes were only the forerunners of the much more far-reaching changes that were to shake and finally destroy the world of our fathers, the world of security.”
A keen traveller around Europe from a young age, Zweig enjoyed the advantage of witnessing the developments that led Europe onto its first world war, and then the second, from the perspectives of different nations and also through the eyes of some of the actors who had a part to play in the entire drama. Zweig seemed able to somehow miraculously position himself in the right places at the right time to witness history making itself, and through his eyes we become witnesses on the ground too. And in the end disturbing questions are suggested that invite the reader to continue investigating the period with a keener eye for analysis.
This book is, moreover, not just a historical account, but a lesson on spiritual survival among the general moral decay that gave rise to fascism and nazism. This is one of the books everyone should read in their lifetimes, to be better informed and to become better people.
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Tyke
3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointment
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2012
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First of all,this book is not a conventional autobiography. It covers hardly any biographical detail of Zweig's family or upbringing. His first wife appears about half way in. She is not even named.The only clue to her existence is that the "I" of the narrative unobtrusively becomes "we", with no further explanation. (I assume it refers to his wife..it could be his pet dog for all explanation there is.) It is none the worse for that lack of detail and I am not sure if Zweig himself would have called the book an autobiography.
The only personal aspect of Zweig that is revealed in the book is his intellectual and artisitic development and the impact on this and his extensive array of friends of the demise of the Austian Empire and the rise of Nazism. Both of these historical themes are well covered in Zweig's (and presumably translator Anthea Bell's) smooth and effortless prose. Despite Zweig's smugness and pomposity, there are moments of true sadness when he describes the impact of exile and statelesness.
I came to this book after reading a good bit of Zweig's contemporary, Joseph Roth, and a couple of Zweig's own shorter books. I had saved it, knowing it to be a long read and to give it proper attention, so it was with some anticipation that I started the book.I was aware of Michael Hofmann's (Roth's translator) savage review of the book and I could not reconcile this view of Zweig with my enjoyment of the two books I'd already read.
I have to say, I now undertand some of that criticism. The tone is smug and occasionally pompous, even laughable. Zweig fawns at the feet of intellectual giants such as Freud, Rodin and numerous other lesser lights like some intellectual "groupie". All are lauded at length like Gods! Zweig's greatest sense of injustice is reserved for the destruction through dirty politics and lunatic ideology of the privelidged intellectual and artisitic elite of which he himself was so proudly a member. How could they trample over it with their jackboots? These intellectuals and artists were not even political but creatives, Zweig seems to suggest, a superbreed apart. It's all a bit naive. For which Stefan Zweig paid the price with his suicide, jointly with his second wife, shortly after completion of "The World of Yesterday" as his genuinely beloved European culture was being obliterated.
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Thomas Goggin
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 June 2018
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I found this autobiography to be fascinating as it takes one on an exciting, sometimes troubling, journey from the culturally dynamic, but politically sleepy Vienna of the early 20th century through WWI and then describes the social, political and cultural life in Austria up to the year of the Nazi take-over -1938. The writer then describes his flight from Austria to France, then England, and his arrival in Brazil at the end of that decade. Since I read this book I discovered another book by the same writer - called simply Brazil - in which he takes one through the ups-and-downs of the economic, social and political life of Brazil since Portuguese explorers first sailed into Guanabara Bay in 1502, and also thoroughly enjoyed it.
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Renée-Jeanne
5.0 out of 5 stars A worthwhile autobiography, well written.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 November 2019
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Brilliant autobiography of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish author, who met some of the most influential bright minds of his time, such as Freud and Einstein. Sadly he became a refugee in 1937, having understood the changes brought about by the National Socialists in Germany. He sought refuge with his family in Britain, but when war was declared in 1939, he was no longer welcome and had to move again, this time taking refuge in Brazil. He writes well of how it feels to lose your identity and having to justify who you are where ever you go. It is a beautiful and moving book. Highly recommended.
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A. B. G. Camps
4.0 out of 5 stars Zweig biography
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 January 2014
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Brilliantly written biography of Stefan Zweig who lived from the late 19th til the 1940's.Born into a well to do jewish Viennese family Zweig had a great formal education and loved to read and write from an early age.He went on to write poetry at an early age and befriended many of the poets of that era.The onset of the first world war and the subsequent rise of fascism meant that life in Austri and Germany for Jews became intolerable. Zweig moved on to London and eventually Brasil.The book describes his life as a writer and his many arty friends. Very informative read about life in Europe at that time.
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Asio flammeus
4.0 out of 5 stars A quality production, but . . .
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 June 2017
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I am fortunate in possessing a first edition, hardcover copy of this book published 1943 by Cassell & Co. The translator's identity is not given but I have to say I find this rendering preferable to Anthea Bell's rendition. The differences are mostly subtle but sometimes quite significant. The original has a facsimile of Zweig's "suicide notice" together with a translation, neither of which are included in this paperback edition.
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joseph graham
4.0 out of 5 stars Viennese culture pre-worldl war two.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 May 2014
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Zweig describes the life and experiences of a clever Jewish boy in the hot-house literary circles of Vienna at the height of Austrian Empire.
He shows how the Jewish community had taken over the role of "patrons of art" from the declining aristocratic court.
The whole account is rose tinted but so well written - and translated- that the reader ends up sharing his anger and despair at the careless waste of wealth and artistic achievement under the onslaught of war.
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michael
5.0 out of 5 stars The best and the worst of the first half of the twentieth century recalled
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 June 2014
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Zweig beautifully writes his memories of growing up in the artistic privileged paradise of Vienna at the turn of the century, and there making his way as a talented writer. His anecdotes of the great and the good he meets in the course of his work and friendship are colourful and touching. But the joyful achievements of a youthful talented and optimistic jew come up against the rise of Hitler who makes his homeland intolerable. He flees, and is driven to ultimate despair by what Nazism has done to his world.
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matthew tindall
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 October 2019
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I purchased this book after finding out that it had influenced the motion picture 'The grand Budapest hotel'. I have been reading novels for around 2 years so it is fair to say that i am not the most advanced reading so i was worried that this may be a hard book to tackle, however that most certainly was not the case; i found the book very enjoyable and informative.
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om other countries
soren soyl
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 June 2023
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A beautiful, beautiful book that inspired me to visit Vienna. The the most beautiful city.
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Bernard
5.0 out of 5 stars A classic in the real sense of the word
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 February 2021
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Humbly: Stefan Zweig is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. This book is a tour de force that should be read by all of us. It has also led me to read his short stories, which are beautifully written marvels of artistic imagination and are as relevant today as when they were written.
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N
5.0 out of 5 stars Magical Book, a wonderful evocation of both the world prior to WW1 and to that ended by the start of WWII.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 December 2021
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A great writer writing both his autobiography and also of the fascinating and horrifying time that saw all the old certainties, and confidence in the evolution of civilisation, of 19th Century Europe destroyed, and replaced by hatreds.
A must read.
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M. M
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth a read: a place no longer inhabited.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 January 2015
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This writer is unknown, almost: refereed to on the TV program last week on VIenna.
Described 1900 Vienna and Austria superbly, you almost want to go there (in 1903). Writing of this kind, that is not monomaniac , is now rare, not aligned with a politic, that Stefan saw invading our very lives to destruction. I find his poetry average, perhaps something is lost in translation.
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mr m j barrett/mrs p j barrett
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, as one might expect; & extraordinarily informative
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2021
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I started reading out of idle curiosity, but have become deeply engrossed in learning about historical events, unknown (to me) until now. Very, very interesting.
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Leah Charpentier
5.0 out of 5 stars A wondeful book, cannot recommend it enough!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 July 2016
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One of my favorite books. It is all about changing times and how a generation can feel disconnected from the times in which it lives. Written about the pre and post world war one Vienna, but lessons are applicable to today's world as well...
Also some wonderful reflections on the essence of artistic creation.
A must read!
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Marianne Faithfull
5.0 out of 5 stars I love it; endlessly fascinating
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 July 2017
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I love it; endlessly fascinating; specially for me, as my Parents were both living & young at that time; & both involved in resistance to the Nazis; & one of the best written books I have ever read,( tho I guess every one knows that!) What a great writer! MF
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GeoffC2
5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 February 2015
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One of many Zweig books now available from Amazon. This book reproduces his views on his world then very well - straightforwardly and clearly. Its limitations are apparent, but the content is evocative and would give much to consider for anyone who lived through the era covered and may well enlighten younger readers.
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chino
5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read. Zweig's account of the period in ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 April 2017
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A fascinating read. Zweig's account of the
period in history he lived in is very illuminating, providing a first hand perspective of what we've learned in history books. Also, his international outlook as a European liberal thinker and how the continent descended into chaos draws parallelisms to modern times.
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Sefton Boyd
5.0 out of 5 stars Read it to understand the world of today
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 October 2015
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An outstanding book. Zweig lived through the break up of the Austro Hungarian empire , it's destruction in the first world war, the invasion by nazi Germany, the rounding up of the Viennese Jews and the gathering apocalypse of the Second World War. His description of the destruction of Europe is chilling and prescient .
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D. Mcmullin
5.0 out of 5 stars An Intellectual Giant.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 March 2013
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Essential reading for anyone interested in the life of Stefan Zweig and the period leading up to the second world war. He even explains how he managed to produce great books by eliminating all superfluous text. Zweig is always interesting and compared to many others he is an intellectual giant.
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Arash29
5.0 out of 5 stars Schonwunderbar!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 June 2015
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Wonderful account of Zweig's life, brings not just Vienna but much of Central Europe of the late 19th/ early 20th century to life, with fascinating vignettes of his encounters with artists and intellectuals of his time, as well as the tragic shadow of what was to come.
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John K. Gray
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for an understanding of the two wars that decimated millions
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 October 2013
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The Genius of writers of such insights and acquaintances as Stefan Zweig are little known today in our world of greed and money. His love and his knowledge of his period is truly exceptional. This is a must read for those fascinated in the pages of history.
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Tom
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 December 2019
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Fabulous descriptions lovely book very sad at times but wonderful descriptions of a life lived in dark times truly amazing
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SW BECKETT-DOYLE
5.0 out of 5 stars A fine humanity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 November 2013
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A journey of a man, aware, sensitive and intelligent, tracing a thread of reason in a time that descended into the rule of thugs. I can imagine tears falling on the page as he describes the world he had lost.
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JFL
3.0 out of 5 stars I loved Zweig's Beware of Pity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 November 2017
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I loved Zweig's Beware of Pity, but this is a bit drawn out. I was expecting more insights into the writers in Paris at the time.
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Loessperson
5.0 out of 5 stars Goodbye Vienna
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 May 2016
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This is a look back to the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire- and they were wonderful days for those who could afford the café society. And then it was gone.. gone
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Dick Hamilton
4.0 out of 5 stars Refreshingly different
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 May 2017
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I haven't read it yet, but it looks refreshing and intriuging
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Jacqueline Heywood
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant book. Highly recommended!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2021
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Excellent book. relevent now!
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The Miller Family
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 March 2018
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Why commit suicide Stefan?
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Cliente de Kindle
5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely worth a read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 November 2014
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Wonderfully written, it's a telling insight into life in Europe before the World Wars. Thanks to this book I have discovered Stefan Zweig and look forward to reading more of his books.
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Warrigal
5.0 out of 5 stars Simply one of the best book I've read in my life
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 June 2016
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Simply one of the best book I've read in my life. It gives fascinating insights on how it was to live in Europe before WW1
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johnnoel.
5.0 out of 5 stars Quality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 September 2015
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This book is and should be an example to all writers in any language. It is technically and informatively as good as it gets.A gem!
John S.
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Karen Sedgwick
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in the United States on 18 September 2013
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I thought this writer was sensitive as well as being an excellent story teller. At first I felt it was a little dated, and then I couldn't put it down
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Luis Goldschmidt
5.0 out of 5 stars Important to be read nowadays! So important for mankind ...
Reviewed in the United States on 6 April 2015
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Important to be read nowadays! So important for mankind to understand how peace and war build and destroy everything. A must read for all European!
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Andrew Stephen Kot
5.0 out of 5 stars could easily be carried into this
Reviewed in the United States on 11 June 2015
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Refreshing read. Many observations about historical events from the first half of XX century, could easily be carried into this ...XXI century. Excellent reading.
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mark simmons
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 August 2017
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Elegiac. And a call to arms against those who wish to take the nationalist pathway.
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pgo
5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 January 2014
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Reading this masterpiece you get a sense of how things were for sensitive intellectuals during the turmoil of the 20th century. Stefan Zweig ranks with Hesse and Mann.
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MR W.
4.0 out of 5 stars good
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 November 2016
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fascinating bio
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From other countries
Gillian Williams
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2015
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fascinating view on Austria before and during WW2
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David Martelo
5.0 out of 5 stars I place this book in my short list of FIVE BEST I have red EVER
Reviewed in the United States on 20 February 2015
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I'm 68. I place this book in my short list of FIVE BEST I have red EVER. Very, very impressed!
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Lina Zambrano
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book. I've enjoyed every page of Sweig's writing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2014
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Amazing book. I've enjoyed every page of Sweig's writing. Delighted and would recommend this book to anyone interested in pre and post-war Europe.
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Elizabeth Frazer
5.0 out of 5 stars An unusual memoir
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 March 2014
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An unusual memoir by a highly proficient writer. Already knowing the history of the period, and of Zweig's eventual suicide, makes this a poignant read.
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Poul Christensen
5.0 out of 5 stars A truly European life
Reviewed in Germany on 17 September 2014
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Very well written. Starting out with a generation who couldn't imagine war to happen again. And then they had two world wars.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful author!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 February 2017
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Heartbraking! Stefan Zweig 's memoirs of his life are so well written, a wonderful author!
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TL
3.0 out of 5 stars Yesterday indeed
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 June 2014
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Like many no doubt I picked this up on the back of Grand Budapest Hotel. Can't say I got very far with it though.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 September 2019
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Amazing read
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Maria Rosa Madsen
5.0 out of 5 stars The world of yesterday
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 December 2013
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I have read this book many times and I find it interesting and touching. The writing is superb! Good for people visiting Vienna.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 5 April 2017
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A wonderful book
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The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European Kindle Edition
by Stefan Zweig (Author), Anthea Bell (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (728)
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Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday, (Die Welt von Gestern) is a unique love letter to the lost world of pre-war Europe The famous autobiography is published by Pushkin Press, with a cover designed by David Pearson and Clare Skeats. Translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell.
Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of pre-war Europe its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall. Through the story of his life, and his relationships with the leading literary figures of the day, Zweig s passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction.
This new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell captures the spirit of Zweig's writing in arguably his most important work, completed shortly before his death in a suicide pact with his wife in 1942.
The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed.'- David Hare
'This absolutely extraordinary book is more than just an autobiography. (...) This is a book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942. That should cover a fair number of you.'- Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, is published by Pushkin Press.
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear.
In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. With the fall of France in 1940 Zweig left Britain for New York, before settling in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide.
Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
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Review
The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed -- David Hare This absolutely extraordinary book is more than just an autobiography. (...) This is a book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942. That should cover a fair number of you -- Nicholas Lezard His memoir, The World of Yesterday, is one of his best works, a marvellous recapturing of a Europe that Hitler and his thugs destroyed. Zweig seems to have known everyone, and writes about the great figures of his day with insight, sympathy and, most unusually for a writer, modesty -- John Banville One of the canonical European testaments... [Zweig's] life and work tell of the perilous flimsiness of our world of security-a message that many insistently deny, but somehow need to hear -- John Gray New Statesman Unnervingly topical The Week
About the Author
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to london, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.
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From Australia
Maria Vaid
5.0 out of 5 stars High recommend read
Reviewed in Australia on 5 February 2025
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Fantastic and very moving account of a critical time and place in history. Makes me fear that this time isn’t different and that history unfortunately does in fact repeat….
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Ardy
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best Biographies I have Read
Reviewed in Australia on 13 March 2015
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I loved every page of this book and wanted it to go on beyond the start of the second world war. He writes very well and it moves with a speed and comprehension that defies the topics and areas the book covers. Great historical document without some of the drum banging that goes on about Jews being displaced, in this instance the shock of his quiet approach leaves you wondering what he had seen that was too mundane to mention.
Anther aspect to this book is the deep friendships he had prior to Hitler and how few he had after. It felt as if this aspect was the hardest for him to accept, the loss of everything else seemed minor compared to his love of friendship. Of course he talks mainly about the loss of culture and freedom that the 1st world war ushered in and the rise of the nazi party on the back of that, threatening to totally destroy the European concept of Art and Culture.
Amazing that a writer of his ability should be almost forgotten. Reminds me of Knut Hamsun who was forgotten for being on Hitler's side as opposed to Stefan Zweig who's books were destroyed by being in Hitler's way.
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Kenneth W. Wilder
5.0 out of 5 stars Survival
Reviewed in Australia on 29 July 2016
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A brilliant account of what it meant to be caught up in the whirlpool of suffering and insecurity as
result of the turmoil created by Nazi Germany.
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Frank B.
2.0 out of 5 stars Not my ‘cup of tea’
Reviewed in Australia on 6 December 2023
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Probably reflects more on me than the book. That’s allowed.
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Booklover
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful look at a bygone world
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2013
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I chose this book because I had recently read a short novel by Stefan Zweig (The Post Office Girl) and wanted to know a little more about him and his reactions to the inter-war years. This memoir, written before the end of the second world war, when he was in exile in South America, is a truly remarkable record -- a vivid recreation of the world of Zweig's childhood in the Austro-Hungarian empire, his early development as a writer in pre-world war one Europe, and his later experience of the inter-war years at the beginning of the "modern" world. Zweig's recollections of the many artists and writers he knew intimately are interesting, but his ability to invoke a period (Austria in the immediate post-war years, for example) through the accumulation of vividly remembered details is outstanding. He was clearly a gifted writer, though many of his short stories and novellas are now somewhat dated, and his suicide in 1941 was a tragic end to a life in which so much had been achieved but from which, maybe, much more might have been expected.
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Cornwallis
5.0 out of 5 stars The World of Yesterday
Reviewed in Spain on 4 July 2024
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I am a great fan of Stefan Zweig and consider him one of the finest writers of the last century. This book is the last he wrote before committing suicide with his wife in 1942. It's a very personal story of the world before both World Wars and the astonishing creative and cultural dynamic that existed then. I felt swept up by his stories, imagery, and writing, which described a world so far removed from what we have created now and yet is so near in time. I think it's a book we should all read as it gives so much perspective to the lives we have now.
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Mrs. Suzanne R. O'shea
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Biography
Reviewed in Germany on 22 December 2023
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Often, I find biographies boring. But Stefan Zweig's is both funny and tragic as he charts the loss of his life's former certainties, like his comfortable home and good standard of living, in the political upheavals for Austria and Germany following WWI which caused so much deprivation.
It has parallels for us today, as we see the rise of far right populist movements totally lacking in compassion. We stand on the edge of the abyss. Let's not make the same mistake as our grandparents and great grandparents.
War destroys and scars all. There are no winners.
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Kareena Arthy
5.0 out of 5 stars A Voice From a Vanished World
Reviewed in the United States on 16 April 2024
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There's a lot to like about Zweig's "The World of Yesterday". It a beautifully written memoir, almost entirely in chronological order, of his life before, during, and after the Nazi expansion across Europe. He paints a vivid picture of a European/internationalist intellectual and cultural life, living his life (and earning his living) with his mind and his writing ability (translations, articles, novels and letters).
His descriptions of his contemporaries are vivid, and they are not confined to just the well known figures he met. More than once he describes people that were well known in his past but, even by the time he wrote this book during WW2, had already been largely forgotten. His descriptions of them seem fair and honest, if occasionally unkind, though my trust in his ability to judge character was slightly undermined near the end of the book when he gave repeated fawning assessments of Freud and his legacy, also revealing a pretty limited understanding of how science works. But this is a minor niggle in an otherwise sensitive book full of unique insights about humanity, hate, war, journalism, and modern communications - many of which remain relevant today.
The book is also unusual in that it is written from the middle of the Second World War, and self consciously acknowledges the limitations of his perspective on the conflict for this reason.
The book is, however, almost completely devoid of descriptions of Zweig's private life. What little there is could probably fit on a single page. So if you're looking for any direct insight into the reasons behind his and his wife's double suicide not long after the book's completion, you'll be disappointed. The book doesn't read like an extended suicide note at all (he and his wife did actually leave a suicide note), in fact the ending of the book is cautiously optimistic. But as the introduction points out, the book does describe Zweig's beloved world of culture, art, intellect and internationalism as a world that was vanishing in front of his eyes, so perhaps the seeds of his eventual decision is in there.
Definitely worth a read, and the audio book at kindle is also excellent.
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ఏమి?
5.0 out of 5 stars A swansong of chillingly epic proportions
Reviewed in India on 18 February 2017
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This book is a moving testament to the lost world of deceny, tolerance, artistic and cultural progress, and most importantly of all - humanity. This book makes you feel what Anthony Trollope or whoever once said, that books are usually about everyday things, because no matter what it is, when it happens to you, you feel as if it is happening for the first time in the universe.
This book has that kind of an effect on you. You know the event that transpirte. We all do. They are well documented historical events. You know the outcomes. We all do. We read about them extensively and everywhere. But what Zweig does is to take history down to a single indiviual. Through his eyes you experience history happening to you.
The descriptions of prewar cities, of friendships formed, of lives torn apart from a first person perspective is a stunningly moving, visceral experience. Zweig is matter of fact, yet eloquent. Gentle, but pulls no punches.
This book is an eloquent suicide note of a love lost. Love of freedom, love of life, and love of freespeech. This is history pared down to a single Individual. An individual who is not afraid to lay bare his soul knowing full well, that he would not exist to face what repercussions may come. With that knowledge of being above repurcussions comes a freedom and a brutal honesty that can be both chilling, and revelatory.
A must read for anyone interested in the human condition. And even more of a must read for all those who want to travel back in time (1881 - 1942) to a more glorious past.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Memoir and History
Reviewed in Japan on 28 November 2020
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Stefan Zweig, 1881~1942, Austrian, famous writer, relates a personal history--pre-WWI; between WWI and WWII; coming of Hitler; outbreak of WWII. Zweig knew numerous famous people and he gives a first-hand account of those relationships. At the same time, he draws a broad historical picture of European life during distinct eras that Zweig lived through. Excellent book!
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From other countries
Amare Tegbaru
5.0 out of 5 stars A story of an uncompromising humanist
Reviewed in Sweden on 28 June 2025
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to stand firm as a humanist if that costs even taking one's life, though tragic.
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佐藤國雄
5.0 out of 5 stars 最高の自叙伝
Reviewed in Japan on 2 December 2015
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ヨーロッパの最高の知性が私的な側面を押さえながら、世界第一次大戦前後から第二次大戦にいたる社会状況を実に深く活写している。
ヒットラーの進出と大衆の支持のなかで、価値あるヨーロッパが崩壊していくのを悲しみと、ある種の諦念をもって画がいている。もちろんエリート臭が
ないわけではないが、それにもかかわらず、彼の他の作品を読みたくなる。
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viswamurthy
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for everyone
Reviewed in India on 24 May 2020
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I am no one to review about Stefan Zweig .....indeed a pleasure to read about his life....
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Francis Phillips
5.0 out of 5 stars Life in pre-WW1 Vienna among the cultured middle classes
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 February 2021
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This was the last book Stefan Zweig published before his suicide in Brazil in 1943. It is a superb evocation of the life of a cultured and secular Jewish youth in Vienna, before the Great War brought this privileged life to an end. He includes a description of his life in the 1920s, his writing projects and his fame - which seemed to come easily to this gifted man. The mystery (to me) is why he killed himself in a joint pact with his (much younger) lover when in exile in Petropolis, Brazil: he had escaped the Holocaust, had plenty of money, a respected reputation; thus he would have found a comfortable niche after WW2. Possibly he could not bear to witness the modern changes to Vienna, or the death of the culture he had known. None of this is evident in this book although its final sentence does give intimations of the horrifying future for European Jews under Hitler: Zweig's home in Salzburg, a former hunting lodge in the hills above the city, had a commanding view of the surrounding mountains, including Hitler's eyrie, the 'Eagle's Nest', in nearby Bavaria. Possibly the pride of a successful man, who did not want to be dogged by his Jewish ancestry, would not allow him to continue living under the shadow of the War? He had grown up in a Vienna at the height of its civilization, documented in these pages, a world that could not be bettered; the world of yesterday rather than the future, which Zweig refused to contemplate.
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Kindle-klant
5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful!
Reviewed in Germany on 12 April 2023
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Zweig gives a unique and very personal account of this dynamic, rich and tragic period of human history. Truly recommended!
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars THE Memoir of the early 20th century
Reviewed in the United States on 14 October 2022
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Zweig is a master. This is a must read for anyone interested in what the world was like pre-World War 1 thru World War 2. Zweig writes from a place of deep love for humanity, even as the world is falling apart all around him. Do yourself a favor and read this book - you won't regret it.
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farimanokami
5.0 out of 5 stars 素晴らしいの一語に尽きる
Reviewed in Japan on 10 February 2016
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第一級の文化人による、古き良き時代の自伝的回顧録では済まない、現代人必読の文明批判の書。いがみ合いやテロの横行する今日の世界への、昨日の世界からの人間味ある温かい警鐘に、我々アジアの人間は真摯に耳を傾けるべきである。
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CBS
4.0 out of 5 stars A Life Turned Upside Down
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 September 2024
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The World of Yesterday (TWoY) is a pacifist, European, anti-nationalist memoir of life of the Austrian (i.e. a subject of Dual Monarchy Austria-Hungary) writer Stefan Zweig, born into the ‘belle époque’ period preceding the First World War. TWoY comes across as a somewhat bewildered and bemused account by Zweig on how it came to be that his life was three times turned upside down -- when his forebears had had an untroubled orderly bourgeois existence.
TwoY is a good book, well written, with prose mostly economical and to the point. However, at 462 pages, I still found it something of an effort to finish. Zweig is very self-consciously an “artist”. He seems to know and personally be in contact with almost all the literary and artistic figures of Europe at that time. Whether or not they want to know and be in touch with him is less clear. For me, the history that Zweig presents is very good, but there’s rather too much tedious ‘arty’ stuff and name-dropping of the world’s famous and not-so-famous. Zweig seems eager to please and gain the approval of his artistic contemporaries; hence the somewhat excessive encomiums to people such as Richard Strauss, Rudolf Steiner, Theodor Herzl, Charles van der Stappen, Emile Verhaeren and others.
In summary, TWoY is well written, good history, but somewhat self-conscious and self-involved.
The book starts with a depiction of what Zweig calls “The World of Security”, a memorable portrait of the stable world of the Austrian Monarchy. From p23 of the paperback:
“Everyone knew how much he owned and what his income was, what was allowed and what was not. Everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight. If you had wealth, you could work out precisely how much interest it would earn you every year, while civil servants and officers were reliably able to consult the calendar and see the year when they would be promoted and the year when they would retire.”
And, from p47: “…in that stable bourgeois world with its countless little safeguards nothing sudden ever happened… In the serene epoch of their Austria, there was no upheaval in the state, no abrupt destruction of their values.”
According to Zweig, the arts were everything in Vienna. In the later years of the 19th century; there was something of a run of non-artistic Emperors. The Jewish intelligentsia (of which Zweig was one), now settled in the city for 200 years, benignly stepped into the gap, becoming the main supporters, benefactors and patrons of the arts in Austria. Zweig was himself from an early age of a literary bent. He never seems to have actually *done* anything except poetry and books. He had no interest in sport, socialising unless with literati, or vocational pursuits; he certainly appears never to have held down a ‘real’ job. Literary art was for him the be-all and end-all. He says the same was true of all his youthful contemporaries, but I find this a bit hard to believe and somewhat tedious.
We see Zweig’s formative years, the rigid and repressive Austrian school system, his awakening to relationships and sex. In summary, for the upper class, sexual activity was suppressed, especially for girls; for the lower classes, matters were more free and easy. In the repressive, dishonest, atmosphere, according to Zweig, prostitution and venereal diseases were rampant. These were the norms in 1900; at the time of writing (1940) societal norms had become comparatively honest, transparent -- simply better. I was left wondering whether or not the change in fact so total.
We see Zweig’s early adulthood and his first publications. He is, at the young age of 19, spectacularly validated by the “feuilleton” (art section) of the Neue Freie Presse, the Vienna newspaper of record, and its editor Theodor Herzl. Thus begins Zweig’s mixing with the literati of Vienna and Berlin and the expansion of his ideas and ambitions. We see Zweig’s sojourns in Berlin and Paris, India and the USA; his experimentation with theatre, and the first hints of political change.
War is unnecessary and barely foreseen, but distant rumblings in Europe increasingly worry Zweig. He finds that writers have little political influence, that there is no objective reason for war but that nationalist ill-feeling across the continents is increasing.
Chapter 9: “The First Hours of the 1914 War” is Zweig’s memorable evocation of Europe in the balmy summer of 1914, with war creeping up; the sudden collapse of confidence that all will be well; the assumption of all sides that their rulers are in the right; general euphoria at the departure of the armies to war; and a reflection on the comparative sober realism of 1939. There are extremes of hate and national fanaticism early in the war (see, for example, the “Hymn of Hate against England” by Ernst Lissauer). It is a time of triumph of overheated nationalist emotion on the part of all classes including artists, writers, doctors and professionals. Hatred for the enemy, especially “England”, is trumpeted by very many in Austria and Germany, most prominently intellectuals who should have known better.
Zweig spends the years of the First World War trying to team up with writers of all belligerent nationalities to oppose the war. But he’s in a small minority, his efforts are ineffective and he allows them to peter out. He avoids military service on grounds of medical unfitness, spending a lot of time in the comparative comfort and plenty of neutral Switzerland. The reader gets a sense, not so much of any nobility on Zweig’s part as of a tendency to wring his hands ineffectually in the face of trouble or violence, to hide, to run away.
In 1918, the war ends, with high hopes (in Zweig at least) for justice, fraternity and a united Europe. But his post-armistice return from Switzerland to Austria is to an impoverished, freezing, starving country beset by hyperinflation. With money worthless and the war over, art and living, for Zweig, assume new importance. But, post-war, everything is extreme, experimental and provisional; everything traditional and venerable is discredited along with the previous ruling generation.
The period 1924-33, up to Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, is Zweig’s most successful period. He questions why his books are so popular in so many countries, concluding that it’s their brevity and economy of style in comparison to ‘traditional’ literature. Here, Zweig singles out (pp343-4) The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (my review is on Amazon) for unfavourable contrast with his own work. I agree with Zweig on this point at least.
On page 345, we see Zweig’s single reference in the whole of TWoY to “my wife”. He married in 1920 but keeps all reference to his spouse out of this personal account of his life. Strange.
From Chapter 15, we see the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. As ever, Zweig once again runs away from trouble. With Austria in ferment after the Nazi takeover in Germany, he goes to London for the first time in 30 years. He ingratiates himself with Richard Strauss, even though Strauss is in collusion with the Nazi authorities in Germany. Zweig never himself puts his head above the parapet facing the Nazis (admittedly a stance that does need courage). He says the violent suppression of the Social Democrats of February 1934 in Vienna (“the revolution”) happened without his knowing it, even though he was in the city at the same time. For me, he protests his innocence too loudly; it’s hard not to conclude that Zweig is something of a pleasure-loving coward.
Zweig flees to England for the years 1934-40. He keeps his head down there too: criticism of Hitler “might be taken as personal prejudice”. He becomes something of a recluse in Britain, then runs further from the unpleasantness by going off to both North and South America, preferring the South – he eventually settles in Brazil, committing suicide there in 1942 along with his second wife. He divorced the first in 1938, but we don’t see any of that in TWoY.
Zweig returns to Austria from Britain in November 1937 to see his country one last time before the inevitable subjugation. Austria is at ease, with its head in the sand. Zweig claims he sees the future where others don’t or don’t want to. The 1938 fall of Austria to the Nazis and the thousand forms of nasty brutality that follow hit Zweig hard – even though he gets out in time. He loses his Austrian passport and gets a stateless-person one in Britain.
Zweig concludes with a sad comparison of the world before 1914, when there were no passports or travel red tape, with now (1940), when all free movement and civil rights are lost because of xenophobia and distrust. In his impassioned expression of the plight of European Jews, we need to remember that Zweig, writing in 1940-42, cannot know about the impending Holocaust.
Zweig’s memoir ends with declaration of war by Britain in September 1939, and a glimmer of hope. But that’s not enough to prevent Zweig running once again, this time to Brazil.
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Mark Vickerman
4.0 out of 5 stars An elegiac portrait of a time long gone when Europe ...
Reviewed in the United States on 4 December 2014
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An elegiac portrait of a time long gone when Europe was a country without borders for intellectuals and elites
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David M. Bennett
5.0 out of 5 stars A Sad Jewel
Reviewed in the United States on 2 August 2013
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This beautifully written book, is, one feels, slowly burnished by its author. It describes a rich life, with many highs and ends with the low felt by Zweig as a refugee at the outset of another world war occurring in his life, a tragedy he had lived through once before. I have never previously owned a book in which I have marked so many passages for their insight, wanting never to lose them and to be able to share them. I was sad to find that I had come to its end, a sadness sharpened by the knowledge that not long after Zweig delivered the manuscript to its publisher, Zweig and his wife jointly suicided. What a tragic loss. It underlines the waste of war and racial hatred.
David Bennett
Melbourne
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Dan
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 July 2025
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Excellent autobiographical info on one of the great 20th Century authors.
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MLS
5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable and shocking historical testimonyReviewed in Germany on 21 June 2021
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A vivid and heartfelt depiction of the European collective moods and beliefs that led to WWI & WWII; a scary realization of the difficulties (impossibility?) to understand one’s own time and the tragedy that this realization entails; a defense of universality and of the perils and evils of chimeric Nationalisms.
An indispensable book.
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Nick Barniville
5.0 out of 5 stars This should be mandatory for all EuropeansReviewed in Germany on 24 December 2019
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A brilliant personal journey through the late 19th and early 20th century, terse prose laden with emotion. With the rise of ignorant nationalism, it would do no harm for this book to feature on all school curricula before it all happens again.
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G. Gensbygel
5.0 out of 5 stars A must for our time - history DOES repeat itselfReviewed in the United States on 22 September 2012
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A sad, exhilarating, fascinating and meaningful book. Not an "autobiography" but the reflections of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century on the decline of civilization. A dire warning to our time, when materialism, greed and hunger for power at all costs are driving us towards the extinction of the human race. Pity about the translation, though: there are several dreadfully wrong translated words and phrases (i.e: "genial" in German does NOT mean "genial" in English, but "of genius"). Printing errors as well spoil the pleasure.
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laurencebbrown
5.0 out of 5 stars A superb work by a great writer!Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 July 2024
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It's a very fine edition of a beautiful and distinguished work of literature. I cannot wait to read it.
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Suzanne M. Wheat
5.0 out of 5 stars This is one of the best books I have ever readReviewed in the United States on 15 May 2016
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This is one of the best books I have ever read. Beautiful writing and a compelling story of Zweig's life in his beloved Vienna during the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s and '40s. Today he is still one of Europe's most celebrated authors. Friends have borrowed it and report that they can't put it down.
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Renske ten Veen
5.0 out of 5 stars Good readReviewed in Germany on 19 February 2018
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One beautiful piece of literature. Captures the life of a person in the Habsburg Empire well. Zweig shares his thoughts and makes comparisons about life before and after certain events. Swiftly written. Well translated.
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A. Pini
5.0 out of 5 stars I've read it for the second time. It is ...Reviewed in the United States on 15 September 2014
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I've read it for the second time. It is as up-to-date as ever. Argentina, Venezuela to say nothing of Ukrainia, Irak, Iran, Syria and so on. This materpiece of contemporary literatura is a desperate call to attention, against underestimation of political abuses.
Angel D. Pini
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Eugene Onegin
4.0 out of 5 stars When Respect for Art is Lost...Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 March 2012
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Stefan Zweig was one of the most respected and widely read authors in continental Europe in the first third of the twentieth century and at the very heart of its literary and cultural life. Therefore, he was in a very good position to write a memoir of the intellectual history of the time and that is what he offers here. This is NOT an autobiography in the normally understood sense of the term rather an exceptionally fine portrait of the turbulent age in which Zweig was living and working. As Zweig takes you through his education and development into a writer of note a fundamental theme emerges: his passionate belief in a united Europe and the core values that he argues all Europeans share-a commitment to the rule of law, a desire for peace and toleration add above all, a belief in the central role to culture in the promotion of a civilized common life. Zweig finds these shared values in the age before 1914 despite the many failings of the period (which Zweig is keen to acknowledge)and then witnesses their brutal destruction first in the imperial egotism of the First World War and then even more horrendously in the perverted racial supremacy of National Socialism. In the course of his account, the author offers us revealing portraits of the complacency of people in both 1914 and the 1930's when the idea that nations would go to war seemed absurd and against all notions of European progress. However, this book is no dry history enlivened as it is by fascinating vignettes of the great cultural figures of the time most of whom Zweig knew. You can look forward to hearing of Zweig meeting James Joyce, writing a libretto for Richard Strauss or visiting the dying Sigmund Freud. There is also much on the growth of a budding writer and how education and friendship shapes the creative process. Having been forced into exile and disowned by his beloved Austria, Zweig committed suicide with his wife in 1942 in despair as Hitler rampaged through Europe destroying all of the values that he had so long espoused. As a Jew he had lost more than most even though the full horrors of the Final Solution had yet to be perpetrated though his message about the threats of nationalism and greed to civilization remain universal and real. Great credit is due to Anthea Bell for a wonderfully sympathetic translation. Recommended especially to those with an interest in European literature and history, but also to all who like humane and intelligent writing.
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sashatagger
3.0 out of 5 stars he could have easily removed at least two thirds of this one without ...Reviewed in the United States on 3 December 2014
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Very interesting from historical point of view, but too verbose. And he praises himself of going over and over his manuscripts to remove anything not essential. Well, he could have easily removed at least two thirds of this one without tanking out anything of interest.
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Esat Mazreku
5.0 out of 5 stars The best!
Reviewed in Germany on 3 March 2021
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The best account of Europe’s history in pre’WW.
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donadeseu
5.0 out of 5 stars a witness account on a turn in history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 December 2014
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Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was in a privileged position to witness the dramatic changes that agitated Europe at the start of the twentieth century to change it forever. Born in the “Golden Age of Security” of the Vienna under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century, within a bourgeois Jewish household, in the middle of a society with a high regard for culture, and the theatre in particular, Zweig developed a dislike for authority from his time as a student in the strict Austrian schools. But in Zweig’s milieu, a number of Viennese Jews had started to make significant changes in music (Mahler, Schönberg), in literature (Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler), in psychology (Freud)… with a vocation to refine Austrian identity by giving it a European expression.
A paragraph in the early part of the book condensates how these innovations in art were only the forerunners of general change: “The truly great experience of our youthful years was the realisation that something new in art was on the way — something more impassioned, difficult and alluring than the art that had satisfied our parents and the world around us. But fascinated as we were by this one aspect of life, we did not notice that these aesthetic changes were only the forerunners of the much more far-reaching changes that were to shake and finally destroy the world of our fathers, the world of security.”
A keen traveller around Europe from a young age, Zweig enjoyed the advantage of witnessing the developments that led Europe onto its first world war, and then the second, from the perspectives of different nations and also through the eyes of some of the actors who had a part to play in the entire drama. Zweig seemed able to somehow miraculously position himself in the right places at the right time to witness history making itself, and through his eyes we become witnesses on the ground too. And in the end disturbing questions are suggested that invite the reader to continue investigating the period with a keener eye for analysis.
This book is, moreover, not just a historical account, but a lesson on spiritual survival among the general moral decay that gave rise to fascism and nazism. This is one of the books everyone should read in their lifetimes, to be better informed and to become better people.
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Tyke
3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointment
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 January 2012
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First of all,this book is not a conventional autobiography. It covers hardly any biographical detail of Zweig's family or upbringing. His first wife appears about half way in. She is not even named.The only clue to her existence is that the "I" of the narrative unobtrusively becomes "we", with no further explanation. (I assume it refers to his wife..it could be his pet dog for all explanation there is.) It is none the worse for that lack of detail and I am not sure if Zweig himself would have called the book an autobiography.
The only personal aspect of Zweig that is revealed in the book is his intellectual and artisitic development and the impact on this and his extensive array of friends of the demise of the Austian Empire and the rise of Nazism. Both of these historical themes are well covered in Zweig's (and presumably translator Anthea Bell's) smooth and effortless prose. Despite Zweig's smugness and pomposity, there are moments of true sadness when he describes the impact of exile and statelesness.
I came to this book after reading a good bit of Zweig's contemporary, Joseph Roth, and a couple of Zweig's own shorter books. I had saved it, knowing it to be a long read and to give it proper attention, so it was with some anticipation that I started the book.I was aware of Michael Hofmann's (Roth's translator) savage review of the book and I could not reconcile this view of Zweig with my enjoyment of the two books I'd already read.
I have to say, I now undertand some of that criticism. The tone is smug and occasionally pompous, even laughable. Zweig fawns at the feet of intellectual giants such as Freud, Rodin and numerous other lesser lights like some intellectual "groupie". All are lauded at length like Gods! Zweig's greatest sense of injustice is reserved for the destruction through dirty politics and lunatic ideology of the privelidged intellectual and artisitic elite of which he himself was so proudly a member. How could they trample over it with their jackboots? These intellectuals and artists were not even political but creatives, Zweig seems to suggest, a superbreed apart. It's all a bit naive. For which Stefan Zweig paid the price with his suicide, jointly with his second wife, shortly after completion of "The World of Yesterday" as his genuinely beloved European culture was being obliterated.
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Thomas Goggin
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 June 2018
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I found this autobiography to be fascinating as it takes one on an exciting, sometimes troubling, journey from the culturally dynamic, but politically sleepy Vienna of the early 20th century through WWI and then describes the social, political and cultural life in Austria up to the year of the Nazi take-over -1938. The writer then describes his flight from Austria to France, then England, and his arrival in Brazil at the end of that decade. Since I read this book I discovered another book by the same writer - called simply Brazil - in which he takes one through the ups-and-downs of the economic, social and political life of Brazil since Portuguese explorers first sailed into Guanabara Bay in 1502, and also thoroughly enjoyed it.
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Renée-Jeanne
5.0 out of 5 stars A worthwhile autobiography, well written.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 November 2019
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Brilliant autobiography of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish author, who met some of the most influential bright minds of his time, such as Freud and Einstein. Sadly he became a refugee in 1937, having understood the changes brought about by the National Socialists in Germany. He sought refuge with his family in Britain, but when war was declared in 1939, he was no longer welcome and had to move again, this time taking refuge in Brazil. He writes well of how it feels to lose your identity and having to justify who you are where ever you go. It is a beautiful and moving book. Highly recommended.
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A. B. G. Camps
4.0 out of 5 stars Zweig biography
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 January 2014
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Brilliantly written biography of Stefan Zweig who lived from the late 19th til the 1940's.Born into a well to do jewish Viennese family Zweig had a great formal education and loved to read and write from an early age.He went on to write poetry at an early age and befriended many of the poets of that era.The onset of the first world war and the subsequent rise of fascism meant that life in Austri and Germany for Jews became intolerable. Zweig moved on to London and eventually Brasil.The book describes his life as a writer and his many arty friends. Very informative read about life in Europe at that time.
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Asio flammeus
4.0 out of 5 stars A quality production, but . . .
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 June 2017
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I am fortunate in possessing a first edition, hardcover copy of this book published 1943 by Cassell & Co. The translator's identity is not given but I have to say I find this rendering preferable to Anthea Bell's rendition. The differences are mostly subtle but sometimes quite significant. The original has a facsimile of Zweig's "suicide notice" together with a translation, neither of which are included in this paperback edition.
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joseph graham
4.0 out of 5 stars Viennese culture pre-worldl war two.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 May 2014
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Zweig describes the life and experiences of a clever Jewish boy in the hot-house literary circles of Vienna at the height of Austrian Empire.
He shows how the Jewish community had taken over the role of "patrons of art" from the declining aristocratic court.
The whole account is rose tinted but so well written - and translated- that the reader ends up sharing his anger and despair at the careless waste of wealth and artistic achievement under the onslaught of war.
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michael
5.0 out of 5 stars The best and the worst of the first half of the twentieth century recalled
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 June 2014
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Zweig beautifully writes his memories of growing up in the artistic privileged paradise of Vienna at the turn of the century, and there making his way as a talented writer. His anecdotes of the great and the good he meets in the course of his work and friendship are colourful and touching. But the joyful achievements of a youthful talented and optimistic jew come up against the rise of Hitler who makes his homeland intolerable. He flees, and is driven to ultimate despair by what Nazism has done to his world.
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matthew tindall
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 October 2019
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I purchased this book after finding out that it had influenced the motion picture 'The grand Budapest hotel'. I have been reading novels for around 2 years so it is fair to say that i am not the most advanced reading so i was worried that this may be a hard book to tackle, however that most certainly was not the case; i found the book very enjoyable and informative.
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soren soyl
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 June 2023
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A beautiful, beautiful book that inspired me to visit Vienna. The the most beautiful city.
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Bernard
5.0 out of 5 stars A classic in the real sense of the word
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 February 2021
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Humbly: Stefan Zweig is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. This book is a tour de force that should be read by all of us. It has also led me to read his short stories, which are beautifully written marvels of artistic imagination and are as relevant today as when they were written.
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N
5.0 out of 5 stars Magical Book, a wonderful evocation of both the world prior to WW1 and to that ended by the start of WWII.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 December 2021
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A great writer writing both his autobiography and also of the fascinating and horrifying time that saw all the old certainties, and confidence in the evolution of civilisation, of 19th Century Europe destroyed, and replaced by hatreds.
A must read.
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M. M
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth a read: a place no longer inhabited.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 January 2015
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This writer is unknown, almost: refereed to on the TV program last week on VIenna.
Described 1900 Vienna and Austria superbly, you almost want to go there (in 1903). Writing of this kind, that is not monomaniac , is now rare, not aligned with a politic, that Stefan saw invading our very lives to destruction. I find his poetry average, perhaps something is lost in translation.
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mr m j barrett/mrs p j barrett
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, as one might expect; & extraordinarily informative
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2021
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I started reading out of idle curiosity, but have become deeply engrossed in learning about historical events, unknown (to me) until now. Very, very interesting.
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Leah Charpentier
5.0 out of 5 stars A wondeful book, cannot recommend it enough!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 July 2016
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One of my favorite books. It is all about changing times and how a generation can feel disconnected from the times in which it lives. Written about the pre and post world war one Vienna, but lessons are applicable to today's world as well...
Also some wonderful reflections on the essence of artistic creation.
A must read!
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Marianne Faithfull
5.0 out of 5 stars I love it; endlessly fascinating
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 July 2017
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I love it; endlessly fascinating; specially for me, as my Parents were both living & young at that time; & both involved in resistance to the Nazis; & one of the best written books I have ever read,( tho I guess every one knows that!) What a great writer! MF
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GeoffC2
5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 February 2015
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One of many Zweig books now available from Amazon. This book reproduces his views on his world then very well - straightforwardly and clearly. Its limitations are apparent, but the content is evocative and would give much to consider for anyone who lived through the era covered and may well enlighten younger readers.
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chino
5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read. Zweig's account of the period in ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 April 2017
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A fascinating read. Zweig's account of the
period in history he lived in is very illuminating, providing a first hand perspective of what we've learned in history books. Also, his international outlook as a European liberal thinker and how the continent descended into chaos draws parallelisms to modern times.
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Sefton Boyd
5.0 out of 5 stars Read it to understand the world of today
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 October 2015
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An outstanding book. Zweig lived through the break up of the Austro Hungarian empire , it's destruction in the first world war, the invasion by nazi Germany, the rounding up of the Viennese Jews and the gathering apocalypse of the Second World War. His description of the destruction of Europe is chilling and prescient .
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D. Mcmullin
5.0 out of 5 stars An Intellectual Giant.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 March 2013
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Essential reading for anyone interested in the life of Stefan Zweig and the period leading up to the second world war. He even explains how he managed to produce great books by eliminating all superfluous text. Zweig is always interesting and compared to many others he is an intellectual giant.
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Arash29
5.0 out of 5 stars Schonwunderbar!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 June 2015
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Wonderful account of Zweig's life, brings not just Vienna but much of Central Europe of the late 19th/ early 20th century to life, with fascinating vignettes of his encounters with artists and intellectuals of his time, as well as the tragic shadow of what was to come.
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John K. Gray
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for an understanding of the two wars that decimated millions
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 October 2013
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The Genius of writers of such insights and acquaintances as Stefan Zweig are little known today in our world of greed and money. His love and his knowledge of his period is truly exceptional. This is a must read for those fascinated in the pages of history.
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Tom
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 December 2019
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Fabulous descriptions lovely book very sad at times but wonderful descriptions of a life lived in dark times truly amazing
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SW BECKETT-DOYLE
5.0 out of 5 stars A fine humanity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 November 2013
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A journey of a man, aware, sensitive and intelligent, tracing a thread of reason in a time that descended into the rule of thugs. I can imagine tears falling on the page as he describes the world he had lost.
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JFL
3.0 out of 5 stars I loved Zweig's Beware of Pity
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 November 2017
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I loved Zweig's Beware of Pity, but this is a bit drawn out. I was expecting more insights into the writers in Paris at the time.
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Loessperson
5.0 out of 5 stars Goodbye Vienna
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 May 2016
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This is a look back to the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire- and they were wonderful days for those who could afford the café society. And then it was gone.. gone
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Dick Hamilton
4.0 out of 5 stars Refreshingly different
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 May 2017
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I haven't read it yet, but it looks refreshing and intriuging
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Jacqueline Heywood
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant book. Highly recommended!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2021
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Excellent book. relevent now!
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The Miller Family
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 March 2018
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Why commit suicide Stefan?
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Cliente de Kindle
5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely worth a read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 November 2014
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Wonderfully written, it's a telling insight into life in Europe before the World Wars. Thanks to this book I have discovered Stefan Zweig and look forward to reading more of his books.
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Warrigal
5.0 out of 5 stars Simply one of the best book I've read in my life
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 June 2016
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Simply one of the best book I've read in my life. It gives fascinating insights on how it was to live in Europe before WW1
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johnnoel.
5.0 out of 5 stars Quality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 September 2015
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This book is and should be an example to all writers in any language. It is technically and informatively as good as it gets.A gem!
John S.
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Karen Sedgwick
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in the United States on 18 September 2013
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I thought this writer was sensitive as well as being an excellent story teller. At first I felt it was a little dated, and then I couldn't put it down
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Luis Goldschmidt
5.0 out of 5 stars Important to be read nowadays! So important for mankind ...
Reviewed in the United States on 6 April 2015
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Important to be read nowadays! So important for mankind to understand how peace and war build and destroy everything. A must read for all European!
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Andrew Stephen Kot
5.0 out of 5 stars could easily be carried into this
Reviewed in the United States on 11 June 2015
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Refreshing read. Many observations about historical events from the first half of XX century, could easily be carried into this ...XXI century. Excellent reading.
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mark simmons
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 August 2017
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Elegiac. And a call to arms against those who wish to take the nationalist pathway.
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pgo
5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 January 2014
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Reading this masterpiece you get a sense of how things were for sensitive intellectuals during the turmoil of the 20th century. Stefan Zweig ranks with Hesse and Mann.
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MR W.
4.0 out of 5 stars good
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 November 2016
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fascinating bio
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From other countries
Gillian Williams
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 March 2015
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fascinating view on Austria before and during WW2
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David Martelo
5.0 out of 5 stars I place this book in my short list of FIVE BEST I have red EVER
Reviewed in the United States on 20 February 2015
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I'm 68. I place this book in my short list of FIVE BEST I have red EVER. Very, very impressed!
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Lina Zambrano
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book. I've enjoyed every page of Sweig's writing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2014
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Amazing book. I've enjoyed every page of Sweig's writing. Delighted and would recommend this book to anyone interested in pre and post-war Europe.
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Elizabeth Frazer
5.0 out of 5 stars An unusual memoir
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 March 2014
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An unusual memoir by a highly proficient writer. Already knowing the history of the period, and of Zweig's eventual suicide, makes this a poignant read.
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Poul Christensen
5.0 out of 5 stars A truly European life
Reviewed in Germany on 17 September 2014
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Very well written. Starting out with a generation who couldn't imagine war to happen again. And then they had two world wars.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful author!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 February 2017
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Heartbraking! Stefan Zweig 's memoirs of his life are so well written, a wonderful author!
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TL
3.0 out of 5 stars Yesterday indeed
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 June 2014
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Like many no doubt I picked this up on the back of Grand Budapest Hotel. Can't say I got very far with it though.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 September 2019
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Amazing read
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Maria Rosa Madsen
5.0 out of 5 stars The world of yesterday
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 December 2013
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I have read this book many times and I find it interesting and touching. The writing is superb! Good for people visiting Vienna.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on 5 April 2017
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A wonderful book
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