Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna - its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall.
Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture. His passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the edge of extinction.
And what Stefan Zweig identified as the worst poison could not be accurate today: “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.’’
The lesson Zweig teaches you is as beautiful as it is painful. „My today is so much different than all my yesterdays; I have risen and fallen so often, that sometimes I feel as if I have lived not just one but several lives. When I say, without thinking, ‘my life’, I often find myself instinctively wondering which life.” And: „But if we can salvage only a splinter of truth from the structure of its ruin, and pass it on to the next generation by bearing witness to it, we will not have lived entirely in vain.” Read it, and live as if yesterday and today were the only things you could really own.
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