Product Description

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19128 in Books
• Published on: 1964-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 461 pages

Review
"The autobiography of the internationally famous biographer and dramatist is a chronicle of three ages: the golden days of Vienna that ended with Word War I; that war and its aftermath; and the Hitler years. The three ages do come to life in Zweig's book." Publishers Weekly "The very success with which this book evokes both the beauty of the past and the fatality of its passing is what gives it tragic effectiveness. It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age, and the author seems, in his own phrase, to be the narrator at an illustrated lecture. The illustrations are provided by time, but his choice is brilliant and the narration is evocative." The New Republic

Customer Reviews

A remarkable autobiography
Zweig's aim was to compose an eyewitness report on the first part of the twentieth century in order to save the horrendous truth for the next generations.
It is a shocking report about what he calls the 'Apocalypse': terror, war, revolutions, inflation, famine, epidemics, emigration, the rise of bolshevism, fascism and the most horrific plague of all: nationalism.
He gives us a compelling story of contrasts: the soldiers in the trenches and the arms merchants with their luxury life; English unemployed in five star hotels in Salzburg because they could afford a luxury life on the continent with their unemployment benefits; the brothels and the suicides because of syphilis (Eros Matutina); and the desertion of the Kaiser as a thief in the night at the end of the war, after driving millions of his compatriots into a certain death.
He also relates his encounters with fellow writers like Gide, Rolland, Rilke or Verhaeren.
A moving, outspoken, penetrating and emotional report.
A masterpiece.

BEST OF ALL TIMES
For me the best book of all times. Zweig "World of Yesterday" is an unforgettable classic, witch should be mandatory in any high school. The best-selling writer in "yesterday world", world of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mann and any other great writers, he could be happy that his work is not granted in "today world", world of Harry Potter, and similar books.
This book is much more then autobiography, it's a story of one time, it's a vivid, moving and nostalgic portrayal of Europe before wars, it's a story about intellectual brotherhood witch tried to prevent nationalistic madness that destroyed the Europe and the World, twice.
It is a story about what Zweig calls the "Apocalypse": war, revolutions, inflation, famine, epidemics, emigration, the rise of bolshevism, fascism and the most horrific of all: nationalism.
Zweig commits a suicide after he finished this work (1942), he stay in "World of Yesterday".

Old Europe
This is a lovely book. Stefan Zweig included the words `An Autobiography...' in its sub-title. True, but the subject of this autobiography is not he but Europe. He deliberately gave none but the barest personal account of himself or any of his friends.
Half the book is concerned with the Europe from 1895 to 1914. The son of a prosperous Jewish family, Zweig grew up in the Vienna of God and the Emperor Franz Josef. Being Jewish then was incidental to being Viennese. It was a city where opera, theatre and music were the basis of everyday life; news of catastrophes elsewhere did not penetrate the Viennese well-padded existence. The Austro-Hungarian empire's lingual and national differences were harmonised by the common love of music.
On leaving school, Zweig determined on a literary career and, while he travelled around Europe, rejoiced in the differences between countries. The Viennese landlady would always be helpful but not obsessed with tidiness, whereas in Berlin his apartment was spotlessly maintained by the Prussian landlady, who never forgot to add two pfennigs to his bill if she sewed a button on his trousers. Paris during the Belle Époque was a city for the young. There, they breathed the very atmosphere of youth. Like every young man who spent a year there, Zweig carried away an incomparably happy memory that lasted for all his time. London by contrast was polite and, if the truth were known, a bit stuffy.
Europe before the War may have been golden, but it was not Eden. European nations had become increasingly prosperous over the previous forty years. However the position of women had scarcely advanced. Even wealthy women were constrained by the dictate of fashion's handicapping their physical mobility. Middle class women were stultified by lack of sexual education when young and the belief in the custom that sexual enjoyment by them was unseemly. Amongst women it was probably only peasant women who enjoyed sex. Men visited prostitutes for sexual gratification and not infrequently came away with syphilis.
Unanticipated, the Great War that was to destroy Europe suddenly came about in the summer of 1914. Its horrors should have been foreseen by European governments, who had the example of the American Civil War some fifty years before. Zweig, temperamentally and physically unfit for military service was employed as an archivist by the Imperial government. His duties sometimes took him to the Front and his return, transport by hospital train, exposed him to the horrific sufferings that the wounded endured. He was struck by the contrast between the state of the hospital trains and the almost pre-war appearance of normality in Vienna and Budapest. He was allowed to visit neutral Switzerland to stage his pacifist play, Jeremiah. Possibly the granting of this permission was aided by Emperor's secret peace moves in 1917.
After the war he returned to a devastated Austria. After rebuilding his life over the following five years he progressively worried about the rise of Hitler and the way his actions in Germany desecrated the corpse of the old Europe. Eventually, he escaped to England and thence South America. Hitler's malignity progressively depressed him until Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942. Had he lived he might have seen the corpse of Europe decently reburied after 1945. He would not have survived to see today's EEC functionaries and their apologists dance on old Europe's grave.
By chance, Zweig was a witness to the precise moment of Europe's death. Early in 1919 he was standing on the platform of Feldkirch station just over the Austrian border with Switzerland. Whilst waiting for the scarcely operational train with its malnourished crew, which would take him home he noticed another train approach from the Austrian direction. It was truly a train de luxe with spacious black polished cars. It came to a halt at the opposite platform and Sweig then saw standing behind the plate glass window in the car corridor was the person of Emperor, Karl I, looking back for a last time at the hills and homes of his people as he went into exile. Then, the locomotive started with a violent jerk - Europe's last twitch of life - as it started off into Switzerland and his exile carrying Europe's corpse while its soul departed into eternity. Sweig's dead Europe it was, but it was also the Europe of Constantine, of Charlemagne, of St Benedict, of Beethoven and Mozart, of Shakespeare and Dante. Yes, and our Europe too, for that Europe gave us our faith and our laws.