Finally finished
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, a book on my reading list for a few years now.
As a prolific novelist, playwright, biographer, publisher of historical texts, and a world traveler hailing from Vienna’s turn-of-the-century scene of intellectuals and artists, Zweig’s literary talent coalesces into his memoir,
The World of Yesterday, reflecting on his years living through Europe’s two World War periods, both coinciding with his most active years as an author widely read across Europe.
Though inescapably anchored in history, Zweig is careful to say that this is not a strictly historical recounting of either war, but rather his standby recollections of how both wars played out and impacted the lives of so many. With more time gone by to assess WWI, Zweig writes with clearer understanding and objectivity to its surprising outbreak, its sights –
“…in Austria there were notices up in every station announcing general mobilization,” and its aftermath. When returning to Austria after its defeat alongside Germany, Zweig writes alarmingly of his native nation falling into shambles:
“No new buildings had been erected in Austria for four years, many houses were in a dilapidated state, and now suddenly countless demobilized soldiers and prisoners of war were streaming back and had nowhere to go…” Austria’s currency had collapsed, causing an economic depression, and food shortages abounded.
Still, through the interwar years, Zweig continues writing, killing time in sidewalk cafes, and continuing friendships with an impressive roll call of artists and intellectuals across the continent. There’s a lot of namedropping in,
The World of Yesterday, but it’s perfectly warranted given his hosting of and/or correspondences with numerous figures – among the more well known: Thomas Mann, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Maxim Gorky, and Sigmund Freud. He travels as well, dedicating months in London, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, all while tracking signs of WWII’s dictatorships gradually taking hold. It is in Russia while visiting Leo Tolstoy’s burial mound that he realizes that as a foreigner the Russian state keeps him under surveillance and subject to constant propaganda.
As Stefan Zweig’s memoir nears the frightening onset of WWII, there’s an immediacy to his reflections, especially in recounting the events in Germany – reflections too recent for him to grasp (with our modern hindsight) the vast destructiveness of WWII across Europe. Himself a Jewish artist whose works and plays are suddenly banned across Germany, it’s tough to read how Zweig is only beginning to comprehend just how fateful the 1930s will become for so many fellow Jews outcast and eventually lost to the Nazi state.
