Literature, history and biography in one package. Gripping from the first paragraph to the end the last. Never have I felt more vividly nor understood more clearly the catastrophe that was the First World War, not just for the world it destroyed but for the evils it enabled, evils that live with us sti…
Literature, history and biography in one package. Gripping from the first paragraph to the end the last. Never have I felt more vividly nor understood more clearly the catastrophe that was the First World War, not just for the world it destroyed but for the evils it enabled, evils that live with us still.
Zweig was a close friend of Theodor Herzl, visited the Panama Canal as it was being built, had stay over at his house James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Richard Strauss, Bartok, Toscanini and a dozen other cultural figures whose names I do not recognize.
A pacifist intellectual of first rank who discovered in middle age that Hitler classified him as an Austrian Jew and, thus, that he must lose almost everything. Shortly after submitting the manuscript, just as the tide was about to turn, in February 1942 Zweig and his wife committed suicide.
One paragraph as a sample among hundreds of similar power:
"
Two charming girls, black-eyed and slim, well educated and well mannered, discreet and elegant, were on the same vessel. I noticed on the very first day that they kept at a distance, or were kept at a distance by some invisible barrier. They did not appear at the dances, they did not enter a general conversation, but sat apart reading English or French books. It was only on the second or third day that I became aware that it was not they who avoided the society of the English, but the others who drew back from these half-castes, although these two attractive girls were the daughters of a Parsi merchant and a Frenchwoman. For two or three years, in a boarding school in Lausanne and in a finishing school in England, there had been no discrimination, but on the ship going to India a cool, invisible but none the less horrid social exile had set in. This was my first sight of the pest of the racial purity mania which has become more dangerous for our world of today than the actual plague had been centuries ago.
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig
Literature, history and biography in one package. Gripping from the first paragraph to the end the last. Never have I felt more vividly nor understood more clearly the catastrophe that was the First World War, not just for the world it destroyed but for the evils it enabled, evils that live with us still.
Zweig was a close friend of Theodor Herzl, visited the Panama Canal as it was being built, had stay over at his house James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Richard Strauss, Bartok, Toscanini and a dozen other cultural figures whose names I do not recognize.
A pacifist intellectual of first rank who discovered in middle age that Hitler classified him as an Austrian Jew and, thus, that he must lose almost everything. Shortly after submitting the manuscript, just as the tide was about to turn, in February 1942 Zweig and his wife committed suicide.
One paragraph as a sample among hundreds of similar power:
"
Two charming girls, black-eyed and slim, well educated and well mannered, discreet and elegant, were on the same vessel. I noticed on the very first day that they kept at a distance, or were kept at a distance by some invisible barrier. They did not appear at the dances, they did not enter a general conversation, but sat apart reading English or French books. It was only on the second or third day that I became aware that it was not they who avoided the society of the English, but the others who drew back from these half-castes, although these two attractive girls were the daughters of a Parsi merchant and a Frenchwoman. For two or three years, in a boarding school in Lausanne and in a finishing school in England, there had been no discrimination, but on the ship going to India a cool, invisible but none the less horrid social exile had set in. This was my first sight of the pest of the racial purity mania which has become more dangerous for our world of today than the actual plague had been centuries ago.
"