Customer Reviews

The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

By far the most poignant book I have ever read (and I read a lot.) Every impression and observation has a heightened importance when you know the author and his wife both killed themselves not long after the book was published during the worst years of WWII. Brilliantly recreates the pre-WWI Europe that disappeared after 1914 and is only now maybe being recreated in an updated style. Wonderfully describes the tumultuous years between the wars and demonstrates the despair of the worst years of WWII. Also where else can you read good things about the AustroHungarian Empire these days? Would highly recommend this book for anyone between the ages of 10 and 100. Why don't they use books like this in high school and college history classes to make the past come alive? Also enjoyable because it tells things like they were at the time before 50 years of revisionist and deconstructed history have twisted everything around. The real tragedy of this story is that Mr. Zweig and his wife did not wait another 18 months before killing themselves. They may not have found it necessary once the Allies started defeating the Axis powers in Europe and the Pacific. Still Mr. Zweig's World of Yesterday was irreparably destroyed and would never return.

This is a wonderful book. Poor Zweig. He was born in 1881, and by 1914 he had become one of Vienna's leading journalists. Liberal, and a lover of culture, he knew everybody who mattered in literature, the arts and the sciences at a time when Vienna was the most civilised city in the world.

The universal joy in 1914 at the outbreak of war appalled him, and he became so unpopular for decrying it that eventually he emigrated to Switzerland, to work for the Red Cross.

He returned to Vienna in 1919, and was eventually 'forgiven' by his now-contrite friends. But when during the '20s he was invited to the UUSR, and he returned saying it was hell, his avantguard friends rejected him again.

He retired to Salzburg. In 1933, on Hitler's accession to power, he warned that Hitler would invade Austria and kill all the Jews. He was disbelieved. He emigrated to Britain, where he was appalled by the complacency of the government. Finally, via New York (where he wrote this book) he emigrated to Rio in Brazil (he doesn't spell it out, but he did this presumably because he thought the UK would fall to the Germans, and he feared being detained in the US as an enemy alien). It was in Rio in 1942, at the height of German power, that he killed himself in despair.

In this beautiful book, Zweig creates a fin de siecle elegy for his youth, but unlike the previous reviewer I do not think he is nostalgic. His regret is for his illusions that art was synonymous with moral goodness, and his despair over the folly of his fellow men. It was not so much the evil of a few that upset him but the lack of wisdom of the many.

I believe that Zweig was the clearest thinker of the 20th Century, the worst century since the 14th, and I believe his book should be required reading for all. He was the Erasmus of our age, so it is no surprise he wrote a biography of Erasmus. The book is written beautifully.

On a small personal note, I have often wondered whether his terminal despair was not aggravated by his divorce and second marriage. Those were unusual events in those days, and he may have felt bereft.

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.

In the 1920s and 1930s Stefan Zweig was one of the most popular wirters of the world, best known for his biographies. After the Nazis had driven him from his native Austria because he happened to be Jewish, he tried to remember his own life. As he stresses in a preface, he does this not because he thinks that his own life is important, but to give as a view of the exciting times he experienced.

Zweig was born in 1881, so the times he describes are not more than 100 years away from ours - and yet it is all incredibly far away, even to a European like myself. Zweig describes pre-war Austria-Hungary as a "world of security" where nothing ever changed. The Jewish Bourgeoisie to which he belonged were obsessed with culture; even as adolescents, Zweig and his friends tried to get hold of the latest in German and French poetry. And to understand what you have heard about Freud, just read the chapter about the sexual hypocrisy among Vienna's upper class around 1900!

World War I changes this world of tolerance and security for ever. Zweig's country is broken up into ridiculous fragments, and the German-speaking countries are in a state of unrest which will eventually lead them into the self-destruction of Nazi barbarism. At the same time, the 1920s are a time of unprecedented creativity for German and Austrian writers (Thomas Mann, Musil, Rilke, Kafka etc.). Zweig shows us this wonderful world of letters, not just in his own country and language, but also in France, Italy, England. He meets Joyce, Rilke, G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells and Yeats. Zweig's book shows you the riches European culture had to offer before World War II put an end to it. Zweig himself tried to start a new life in Brazil, but when the Nazis had conquered all of Europe in 1942, Zweig gave up all hope and committed suicide. Zweig's tragic fate mirrors that of Europe in his time. This book should be read by anyone who is interested in European culture in the 20th century.

It is one of the best books I have ever read. Unfortunately, some people trying to get some knowledge about the history of that time, are not satisfied with this book. But, it is NOT A HISTORY BOOK.
Zweig is not trying to give information about those times. His observations are not his object but his tools to illustrate his great humanistic messages; and he does this in a very kind and as simple as powerful language.

World of Yesterday is an unforgettable classic and it should be mandatory reading in high school. In this autobiography, Stefan Zweig not only tells his life story and how he became a successful writer in Vienna, but he also paints the most vivid picture of Europe in the beginning of the century, with heart-breaking detail of the consequences of World War 1 and Hitler's rise to power on his life and the life of all Europeans. What touched me the most is his suggestion of a free-thinking continent with symbolic borders and no passports, and his definition of peace. Reading this book reminded me of the meaninglessness of war. How one's friend and neighbor living across the river can become his "enemy" once war is declared. Its message is still 100% valid today. Just watch the world news...

A lot has been said about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the description of the pre II WW period in Europe and the raising of Nazism being the background of this writer's autobiography. But, although fascinating and complex, Zweig' s explanation of that context offers more than a purely historical analysis.

Through the pages, he increasingly devotes himself to what he believes to be a fight against absurd madness, ignorance and intolerance. In a time when newspapers were still a single fare of information and being published was an act of public (and social) acknowledgement, what counts is to keep sanity and common sense even if society around you seems not to; to build bridges through the correspondence with friends who can't actually be your friends anymore because they have not the right passport.

And while realising that the tone of the book slowly greys as we read, we still have time to admire his soft & sharp perceptions - sometimes naïve, sometimes pessimistic, even ironical, but never cynical - and his deliciously subtle ability to perceive beauty around the most insignificant act to turn it into a highlight moment (don't miss the scene in Rodin's studio).

I once wrote I like Zweig because he writes the way some of us think. Formally speaking, his exquisite ability with language makes words reach the level of the ideas they were born from without failing to communicate in simple terms.

So while totally aware of my passionate defence of this book, I like Zweig's world because his enthusiastic defence of Humanism - never mind citizenships - because his unconditional support to any manifestation of culture and art and specially and mostly because in a moment when no excuses were (and are) needed to create differences in between countries and people he found a way to make me believe.

Another Zweig stunner. I don't think there is a single novel or short story of his that I haven't loved. This book is marginally autobiographical but it is so much more. It is a vivid, moving and nostalgic portrayal of Europe between the wars. It is also a plea for intellectual brotherhood and a condemnation of the nationalistic madness that destroyed Europe twice. Zweig's reflections are so astute and so germane to our own times.

If, like me, you are interested in the European world that was crippled by WWI and then finished by WWII, you will love this book. Zweig was fully aware that the world of his youth was gone forever, and he wanted to describe that world, the good and the bad, for future generations. While it is generally not a good idea to romanticize the past, Zweig's book forces us to recognize that, in many respects, we are less free, less cultured, and less sophisticated than our great-grandparents. I am certain I will read this book again to reminisce about a world I never knew.

I had never heard of Stefan Zweig. This auto-biography/history is very moving, sad and yet joyous. It gives a wonderful insight into the first four decades of the last century. Though written in 1941, Zweig's insights and observations about the brutality and barbarism of the Nazi regime proved to be correct. His description of a lack of homeland and the destruction of his lifework makes his subsequent suicide easier to understand. His name should be more recognizable by English readers. I would love to see his other biographies translated into English.