The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig (PDF)

Description

This Plunkett Lake Press eBook is produced by arrangement with Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.The World of Yesterday, mailed to his publisher a few days before Stefan Zweig took his life in 1942, has become a classic of the memoir genre. Originally titled “Three Lives,” the memoir describes Vienna of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, the world between the two world wars and the Hitler years.Translated from the German by Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger; with an introduction by Harry Zohn, 34 illustrations, a chronology of Stefan Zweig’s life and a new bibliography, by Randolph Klawiter, of works by and about Stefan Zweig in English.“The best single memoir of Old Vienna by any of the city’s native artists.” — Clive James“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.” — The Guardian“It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age.” — The New Republic

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Zweig was one of the most popular writers in the world in the 20’s and 30’s (in multiple languages). After reading this work, I can understand why. I just wish I had found him in my youth!“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, inflation and terror, epidemics and emigration.’’What does Zweig see as the worst poison?“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 that arch-plague nationalism which has poisoned the flower of our European culture.’’This polemic against ‘that arch-plague nationalism’ runs throughout. He spends time and effort presenting the overwhelming impact of this new ‘arch-plague’.“To give witness of 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.’’Zweig pleads with the reader to accept his ‘witness’ of the ‘gigantic transformation’. What was the change?“In its liberal idealism, the nineteenth century was honestly convinced that it was on the straight and unfailing path toward being the best of all worlds. Earlier eras, with their wars, famines, and revolts, were deprecated as times when mankind was still immature and unenlightened. But now it was merely a matter of decades until the last vestige of evil and violence would finally be conquered, and this faith in an uninterrupted and irresistible “progress” truly had the force of a religion for that generation.’’‘Faith in irresistible progress’ was a religion!“One began to believe more in this “progress” than in the Bible, and its gospel appeared ultimate because of the daily new wonders of science and technology. In fact, at the end of this peaceful century, a general advance became more marked, more rapid, more varied. At night the dim street lights of former times were replaced by electric lights, the shops spread their tempting glow from the main streets out to the city limits. Thanks to the telephone one could talk at a distance from person to person. People moved about in horseless carriages with a new rapidity.’’This new faith produced daily miracles! Who wouldn’t believe this more than the Bible? But . . . What happened?“A certain shadow has never quite disappeared from Europe’s once so bright horizon. Bitterness and distrust of nation for nation and people for people remained like an insidious poison in its maimed body.’’“In spite of the social and technical progress of this quarter of a century between world war and world war, there is not a single nation in our small world of the West that has not lost immeasurably much of its joie de vivre and its carefree existence. It would take days to describe how confiding, how childishly joyous the Italian people once were, even in the depth of poverty, how they laughed and sang in their trattorie, how wittily they derided the bad government and now they march sullenly with their chins thrust forward and wrath in their hearts. Can one still imagine an Austria so lax and loose in its joviality, so piously confiding in its Imperial master and in the God who made life so comfortable for them?’’“The Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, not one of them can remember how much freedom and joy the soulless, voracious bogy of the “State” has sucked from the very marrow of their soul. All peoples feel only that a strange shadow hangs broad and heavy over their lives. 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.’’Wow! No wonder Zweig is abandoned, in this world that lives and dies for (worships) nationalism!I ~ The World of SecurityII ~ School in the Last CenturyIII ~ Eros MatutinusIV ~ Universitas VitaeV ~ Paris, the City of Eternal YouthVI ~ Bypaths on the Way to MyselfVII ~ Beyond EuropeVIII ~ Light and Shadow over EuropeIX ~ The First Hours of the War of 1914X ~ The Struggle for Intellectual BrotherhoodXI ~ In the Heart of EuropeXII ~ Homecoming to AustriaXIII ~ Into the World AgainXIV ~ SunsetXV ~ Incipit HitlerXVI ~ The Agony of PeaceReturning to Austria after the war . . .“Children as young as eleven or twelve went off in organized Wandervögel troops which were well instructed in matters of sex, and traveled about the country as far as Italy and the North Sea. Following the Russian pattern “pupils’ councils” were set up in the schools and these supervised the teachers and upset the curriculum, for it was the intention as well as their will to study only what pleased them.’’‘Supervised the teachers’!“They revolted against every legitimated form for the mere pleasure of revolting, even against the order of nature, against the eternal polarity of the sexes. The girls adopted “boyish bobs” so that they were indistinguishable from boys; the young men for their part shaved in an effort to seem girlish; homosexuality and lesbianism became the fashion, not from an inner instinct but by way of protest against the traditional and normal expressions of love.’’“The general impulse to radical and revolutionary excess manifested itself in art, too, of course. The new painting declared all that Rembrandt, Holbein, and Velasquez had created as finished and done for, and set off on the most fantastic cubistic and surrealistic experiments. The comprehensible element in everything was proscribed, melody in music, resemblance in portraits, intelligibility in language.’’In the 20’s? Here we are hundred years later and now it describes whole world, not just Austria!Zweig writes in the manner of the nineteenth century German academic. Dense, detailed, filled with metaphors and literary allusions. Not philosophically obscure, nevertheless requires serious concentration and thought. On the other hand, reader can unearth treasures that shallow digging would miss.Compelling!(See also: “1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder’’ by Arthur Herman. New book that complements Zweig’s insights.)

⭐There are two stories near the end of Zweig’s book that stood out in their sadness and frustration. The first involved his attending a debate between George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Zweig, who is not a native English speaker, listens in to these aging intellectuals as they debate something, the theme of which he can’t quite figure out. He knows there is something brewing between those two minds, but he’s a stranger before them. The other story is of his elderly mother and how she was no longer able to rest during her walks on the public benches in Austria because Hitler stripped Jews of this basic right.The story of how Zweig, and all of Europe got to the point where he was no longer part of the conversation and Jews were humiliated is what this book is about. We do not get the why, however.Zweig begins the account of his beloved Austria and Europe as a child living in the strict and ordered German society that only the old were truly allowed to master. Even someone just turned 40 was still considered, in those days, to be too young to be really trusted with important work. A person had to spend their whole life working at a set pace, each year or decade moving up the ladder as if there was a checklist. But society was secure, there was safety, reliability, predictability in everyday life. Even the unpredictable could be managed with insurance and savings.But Zweig had an artist’s mind and an artist’s youthful enthusiasm. He longed to break through those solid walls that had been mortared up generation after stoic generation, he wanted to be free, free to study art and music and think freely. And for much of his life he did. He rubbed shoulders with nearly every influential artist and thinker of his day. The book is an encyclopedia of who’s who.But what we don’t get, and what he never saw, was what was happening off stage. While he was reading poetry, young people in the Balkans were planning the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Everywhere there was injustice and poverty, only a select few, like Zweig, could really enjoy the lifestyle he so loved and longed for. When WW1 breaks out it’s almost a surprise for him and he is nearly ignorant of the suffering world:”Why should we be concerned with these constant skirmishes with Serbia which, as we all knew, arose out of some commercial treaties concerned with the export of Hungarian pigs?”But I’m not going to be too harsh on Zweig because though he was thoughtless, he was naive in a good-natured way. His life was art, and thinking, and all that is good in the world. Were everyone only concerned with poetry and coffee shops how magical would the world be? How free of pain and suffering? Yet the real world does not take artists very seriously. Someone might make a few headlines with a propaganda poem, such as Ernst Lissauer’s “Hymn of Hate”, but then have to flee after the war because nobody wants to associate with and are ashamed of such hateful rhetoric.Maybe this is a reason why he killed himself (his wife too, though she is barely mentioned more than four times in the book so her story is obscure)? Maybe he saw himself like the old woman who once lived above him, a woman who once knew Goethe, but the link between them is ephemeral, dry, and dying. She was an old woman dying in her room and he only saw the link between her and a great artist. What of her? What of her suffering? We learn nothing. So perhaps his blindness to the greater evils of the world was what did him in. Maybe he knew that his silence on politics was a mistake, but he might have also known it wouldn’t have mattered anyway for who could have stopped either war? Who could truly oppose Hitler and those who followed him?And this is why I wanted to read this book now, because of the current political climate here in America, specifically with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Someone like myself who tries to stay away from politics, who sees that man as a buffoon, is reminded how Zweig saw the rise of Fascism. He saw it and was unable to do anything about it until he had to flee his country where he becomes a stranger and outsider everywhere and leaves his elderly mother behind to be humiliated by not even being allowed to sit on a park bench.All of it is absurd, really. From him sitting in Switzerland with food but drink not 5 minutes away from Austria where everyone starves, to the Belgians using dogs to pull guns on little carts, to men drinking all the beer in one country because it was cheaper than in another and they’d become so drunk they had to practically be rolled back across the border, and where in a war economy when cakes of soap are more valuable than real estate.And after the first World War he could see how the world had been fractured, where artists like Dali and Joyce rewrite the way we interpret the world through art, where instead of free passage between nations one needs passports and fingerprints and interrogations just to move across a line on a map.The world went mad, and then went even madder when Hitler began his march. Zweig had become an alien, not just from his country, but from all humanity. He might have as well been from another planet considering how much the world had changed from when he was born. From beautiful, ordered Vienna, to the crazed heat of Brazil as the world tried to blow itself up once more across both oceans.And the worst part is to be helpless. What good can art do against such forces? Where in the world is there a place for music and literature and the visual arts? How many mouths can an oil painting feed? How much clean water is a poem worth? How many books can save an infant from dying of disease?And so now we stand on the other side of this question where engineering and practicality and a total lack of empathy for ‘those people over there’ is considered a virtue. Entertainment is ok, but not art, art is a waste of time. Artists should be put to the factories to make computers and ring cash registers.And I can’t say I disagree with Zweig in not wanting to live in a world where function reigns over art, where a mind must conform to only one way of thinking and that energy is only directly applied to utility.So where do we go from here, those of us who have lived on after Zweig? What is left for us? What good can art do? What use is an artist?I hadn’t intended to grow so pessimistic by the end of my review, but it does parallel Zweig’s feelings on the state of the world. And while I have no intention of doing myself in, I do have a great sadness for his world of yesterday, too.

⭐This book perfectly encapsulates a time period and really allowed me to enjoy the read and feel lost in this book. It’s been a while since that’s been the case for me

⭐This book has been reviewed positively by much greater minds than mine own and I share the findings and views presented in these earlier reviews. This book which provides a fascinating narrative from the perspectives of the author himself, a well educated Austrian (known for his poetry and fiction), the literary world and from the European level of the period between the latter years of the 19th Century and the mid point of the second world war. It concludes when he feels it necessary to live in Brazil, giving up his Austrian home, due to the violent upheavals in Europe, and having determined on committing suicide.The book offers hugely interesting insights into the causal factors of the First World War (a great folly resulting from the ineptitude of the political leaders in key European states) and the development of fascism within both Austria and Germany. We are also introduced to many of the great literary figures of the age, amongst them was the author himself, and the context provided by the book helps us to understand the drivers for their work.This is a very worthwhile read.

⭐Although I haven’t yet finished this book I shall be sad when I do because it is a wonderful read. The content fascinates me because I am interested in that period, especially the 15 years before WW1, but it is the quality of the writing and the clarity of the pictures drawn which make it exceptional. As a reasonably wealthy and successful man – and also as a Jew – Zweig was very well placed to observe Europe during that period and took full advantage of his ability to travel, observe, and meet the people who shaped contemporary thinking from relative peace and harmony between Austria, Germany, France and Italy through a period disruption and misery in the 1930s and 1940s.

⭐dear sirI was searching the second hand book and i got it in Cassell Biographies. It is very remarkable autobiography and very sad indeed that the author finished his precious life before the Second World War ended. Long before Lord Edward Grey declared at the beginning of Great War ^ The lights of Europe are put out, we shall never see them again in our lifetime.^ He was correct so as Mr Stefan Zweig that culture of the Europe is completely destroyed.He correctly writes ^There was no protection,no security against being constantly made aware of things and being drawn into them. There was no country to which one could flee , no quiet one could purchase; always and everywhere the hand of fate seized us and dragged us back in its insatiable play.^The world is remembering the trauma of great war as Centenary has quietly passed. We hope the civilized people would never allow the vision of nuclear Apocalypse come true to destroy the world again and politics should dominate the literature and other fine arts. It is disheartening that no new edition of this fine book was published recently and people knew little about this book and its author.At last i quote from the book ^Only that which wills to preserve itself has the right to be preserved for others. So choose and speak for me, ye memories, and at least give some reflection of my life before it sinks into the dark!^I very strongly recommend this fine autobiography to be read by every one who is interested in the history, literature and great authors.

⭐Beautifully written chronicle of a society’s slide into war and barbarism. Many heart-rending moments, such as the author’s last visit to Vienna to see his mother – very movingly conveyed. Only thing that grates at times – the reminders of Zweig’s very privileged life and a sense that he laments the loss of that elevated social circle around him more than the masses of the lowly and impoverished, who are also people too. Issues of social class are never far from the central narrative although these are questions with which Zweig never engages, sadly. Still, a very valuable and touching account. Well worth reading.

⭐How to describe this book? It is a personal memoir by a gifted writer who was raised in Vienna before the Great War, then watched his country suffer after defeat, and crumble with the rise of Nazism. To read it is to be inducted into the world of a Viennese writer at a special moment in history, meeting the people he knew (his memories of Rilke make compelling reading).But it is so much more than that.This book is a testament to civilised life that flowered all too briefly in Austria – and by that I do not mean a closed world of privilege, but the broader realm of culture and ideas centred on life in the coffee house (and from where it spread both upwards, and downwards, on the Viennese social ladder).It is, to my mind, one of three indispensable books on Viennese culture from the dawn of the 20th century to the incursions of Nazism: the other two being an autobiography –

⭐Last Waltz in Vienna

⭐; and an intellectual history –

⭐Wittgenstein’s Vienna

⭐. These three works interweave and complement each other, filling in gaps in the others’ accounts and perspectives.Do read them. You will not regret it.

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