The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European
By Stefan Zweig.
Viking Press, 1943 (English Translation).
Reviewed by John P. Rossi.
On February 23, 1942, while Axis forces were triumphing everywhere—the Japanese overrunning the Philippines, the British withdrawing back to Egypt, and the proceedings of the Wannsee conference being typed up—Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte laid down in bed together, took poison, and committed suicide. The day before, Zweig mailed the manuscript of his memoir, The World of Yesterday, to his publisher.
Today, Stefan Zweig is largely forgotten, although at one time, he was among the most recognized literary figures of the first half of the twentieth century. Novels like A Letter from an Unknown Woman, short stories like “The Chess Game,” and popular biographies of figures as different as Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette were widely read. Marie Antoinette was even made into a gaudy MGM film in 1938. “The Chess Game” appeared in many English literature texts for years (that is where I read it as a sophomore seventy years ago). A recent film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, was partially derived from The World of Yesterday. (I thought, if he were alive, he might want to sue).
Today little of Zweig’s work is available or even read. A case can be made that his final creation, The World of Yesterday, a brilliant portrait of the collapse of the last flowering Central European and Austrian Jewish culture—the world of Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud—deserves an audience. Zweig apparently knew everyone of consequence, and he was in many ways the personification of that culture: he had lunch with Anatole France, who told him risqué anecdotes, gave the major oration at Freud’s funeral, owned Beethoven’s desk, and attended the first performance of Mahler’s 8th symphony. He saw himself as a modern Erasmus, a European, not a member of just one nation.
Zweig was born in 1881 to a wealthy Viennese Jewish family and received a classic Central European education. He attended grammar school and a university, where he earned a Ph.D., but admitted that he learned little. He spent most of his time with literary friends, writing poetry, and discussing philosophy.
He won early success, using the money earned from his writings to travel (one of his loves) throughout Europe, while in the process meeting just about everyone of consequence in the cultural world of pre-World War I Europe: Rilke, Shaw, Anatole France, Theodor Herzl, among others. The book is filled with vignettes of these meetings, skillfully drawn by Zweig’s literary gifts. It captures Rilke’s eccentricity: “his pencils and pens lay perfectly aligned on his desk, new sheets of paper were staked in a rectangular pile, and a Russian icon and a Catholic crucifix which, I think, went with him on all his travels gave a slightly religious touch to the place.” On meeting Rodin, the sculptor showed him a piece he was working on, which Zweig could only say was admirable. Rodin then hesitated. “Ah, except there, by the shoulder…with a master’s touch smoothed the shoulder of the soft feminine skin that breathed as if it were alive.”
World War I ended that golden age for Zweig. It destroyed the Austrian Empire and left his beloved Vienna a backwater city. The war and its vast destruction of human life depressed him. Despite a brief return to prosperity in the 1920s, he grew pessimistic about the future, especially as he saw the slow emergence of a new vicious form of hatred of the Jews, not the anti-Semitism of Vienna’s pre-war mayor, Karl Lueger, the Vienna where Lueger said “I determine who is a Jew” and Jews flourished. Something else was afoot.
Zweig’s belief in the power of culture was tested by the war, and he found himself out of sympathy with much of post-war culture, which turned its back on tradition. He described the new culture as a “mixture of impatience and fanaticism.” He began traveling increasingly as if to escape the Europe he saw in ruins. “The world of my language sank and was lost to me, and my spiritual homeland destroyed itself.” And yet his writings remained popular, even if in translation. Some of his most successful novels appeared after the war, including A Letter from an Unknown Woman and the volumes of his popular Master Builders series, biographies of famous figures from the past. During the interwar years, he was the most translated author in the world.
The rise of Nazism was the beginning of the end for Zweig. He lost his Germanic homelands, first in Hitler’s Germany and then in his beloved Austria after the Nazi occupation in 1938. Zweig recognized that his books could no longer be read in the language he prized so much—they were among those ordered burned by Dr. Goebbels. He wrote that he stood like Grillparzer: “one who walks behind his corpse in his own life.”
Unlike many of his German and Jewish refugees, Zweig did not settle in the United States, where he would have been welcomed like his closest German cultural counterparts, Thomas Mann or Einstein. Instead, his travels in the years before World War II destroyed his faith in the future of European culture and took him to England, where he was welcomed and even granted British citizenship. When World War II broke out, he feared that they would have treated him as an enemy alien, hardly likely given his fame and his anti-Nazi reputation.
Instead of fleeing to the United States, where he would have been assured a welcome, Zweig went first to Argentina and finally to Brazil, a country he described as having “untold space for future development.” But he discovered it was too late to acclimate himself to a new culture, and as an Axis victory seemed likely, he lost hope and ended his life.
The World of Yesterday is a fascinating portrait of the collapse of the glorious cultural world of the first half of the 20th century, one that has much relevance to what is happening to the culture of the West today. A curious aspect of the memoir is Zweig’s reticence about his private life, in particular the lack of detail about his wife who died with him. One can only imagine what modern feminists would make of it. Interestingly, the version I read was beautifully translated by a woman, Anthea Bell. It perfectly captures the easy, fluid style of Zwieg’s prose.
John P. Rossi is Professor Emeritus of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
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