- Person
- Stefan Zweig
- Lived
- 1881–1942
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Austrian
The story
Stefan Zweig began his memoir in 1934, after leaving Austria in anticipation of Nazi persecution, and finished it in exile in Brazil. According to the Austria-Forum biography, he wrote it without the books and notes he had been forced to leave behind, entirely from memory. He wanted to bear witness for the next generation to what his own had lived through. He recalled the Vienna of his youth, the final decades of Austria-Hungary under Franz Joseph and what he called the golden age of security before the First World War.
The book describes Viennese schools, the city's passion for theatre and the arts, and the sexual hypocrisy of the era. It follows Zweig through the First World War, when he resisted the hatred of other nations, the interwar years in Salzburg, the rise of the Nazis and his own exile and loss of citizenship. It paints portraits of figures he knew, among them Theodor Herzl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Romain Rolland, Bertha von Suttner, Walther Rathenau, Sigmund Freud and Richard Strauss.
His wife Lotte typed the manuscript, and Zweig posted it to the publisher the day before the couple took their lives in February 1942. The German original, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers, appeared that year from an anti-Nazi exile publisher in Stockholm, and an English edition followed from Viking Press in April 1943. A new translation by Anthea Bell was published in 2013.
The memoir ends not in bitterness but with a reflection that every shadow is in the end also the child of light, and that only someone who has known both light and darkness, war and peace, has truly lived.
The World of Yesterday has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire, and it has been widely discussed as a record of what it meant to be alive in central Europe between 1881 and 1942. It inspired Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel. It remains a vivid record of a cosmopolitan culture and a warning about the hatred that destroyed it.
Why it matters
Zweig's memoir keeps alive the memory of a vanished European culture and warns readers about the dangers of nationalism and hatred.
About Stefan Zweig
Viennese Jewish novelist and biographer, among the world’s most translated writers of the interwar years, whose exile memoir The World of Yesterday mourns a lost Europe.
More about Stefan Zweig
- Stefan Zweig's Chess Story became his most-read workWritten in exile in 1941, Stefan Zweig's Chess Story (Schachnovelle) became his most successful and most widely read work, inspiring several films.
- Zweig's Decisive Moments in History made the past vividStefan Zweig's Sternstunden der Menschheit (1927), historical miniatures of turning points, appeared in English as The Tide of Fortune (1940) and as Shooting Stars (2013).
- Zweig championed tolerance through Erasmus and CastellioIn exile from the Nazis, Stefan Zweig wrote biographies of Erasmus (1934) and of Sebastian Castellio, A Conscience Against Violence (1936), celebrating tolerance against fanaticism.
- Zweig's manuscript collection is at the British LibraryStefan Zweig assembled a great collection of autograph manuscripts, including Mozart's handwritten catalogue of his works. His heirs donated it to the British Library in 1986.
- Stefan Zweig worked for peace and European understandingAfter the First World War, Stefan Zweig became a pacifist who worked for understanding between European countries and lasting peace, long before European unity had institutions.
- Stefan Zweig wrote the libretto for a Richard Strauss operaStefan Zweig wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss's opera Die schweigsame Frau. At the 1935 Dresden premiere Strauss refused to remove Zweig's name from the programme.
Sources
- The World of Yesterday Wikipedia
- Stefan Zweig Wikipedia
- Zweig, Stefan Austria-Forum
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.