The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography by Stefan Zweig Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography
Book Review: A Serious Look at the Past
Summary: 5 Stars
Stefan Zweig's life coincided with earth shaking events that shaped the present day. This is not just an autobiography - it is a piercing and masterful examination and analysis of these events by someone who was at the epicentre and whose own life was shaken to the core. Thus the insights it provides can also help us shape the futureBook Review: A deeply touching book about the fragility of civilisation and progress
Summary: 5 Stars
This is not a history book or a classic autobiography, but a reading of the author's time, as seen through his personal experiences with his own writing and with European intellectuals. Zweig captures with much nuance the end of a certain kind of European civilisation after World War I erupts, and how it impacted disastrously on society, individuals, and the post-war intellectual climate. Writing the book during the height of Nazi power, the author's words are an appeal to humanity, civility and decency at one of the lowest points in European history. At the end of the book, one cannot but feel that a delicate soul like Zweig's could not be able to resist the brutality of the times. It comes as no surprise to read that a year after finishing the book, he committed suicide. An intelligent, touching book, which excels at giving a sense of what it felt to live in the first decades of the 20th century as a writer and intellectual. It will also be a fascinating book for anyone familiar with Zweig's literary output.Book Review: A real experience
Summary: 5 Stars
From its introduction: "So choose and speak for me,ye memories, and at least give some reflection of my life before it sinks into the dark!" to its final despairing end, this book is a tour de force. It was first published in 1943, and since Zweig and his second wife committed suicide on Feb. 23, 1942, I presume it was the last thing he wrote that was published. It is of interest that his first wife in 1946 published a book about her first ex-husband (entitled "Stefan Zweig"). The World of Yesterday says nothing about his marriages, but his wife's book succinctly describes how she learned of her husband's affair: "Hastening back to the hotel, I entered my husband's study from the bedroom. Unfortunately it was an inopportune moment."Book Review: A sensitive and intelligent view of 20th century Europe
Summary: 4 Stars
This book puts you behind the observant eyes and inside the thoughtful mind of a man who lived very much in the world -- the world being that of Europe in the first half of the 20th century.. An Austrian Jew born in late 19-century Vienna, Stefan Zweig came of age in a city that was the capital of a centuries-old empire and one of the cultural centers of Europe. He died by his own hand 61 years later in exile from a Europe in the grip of Hitler's savagery. Through his astute and urbane eyes we see the optimism of pre-World War I Europe, the division of Europe into two hostile sides during World War I, the collapse of the German and Austrian economies between the wars, and the rise of Hitler. Zweig was a pacifist. During World War I, he and his friends (most notably the French author Romain Rolland) met in neutral Swtizerland to publish a dissident journal which they hoped would transcend the government propaganda that labeled nationals of the opposing countries as "the enemy." Nonetheless, he recognized that the rise of the Nazis was something very different and had to be opposed.
Zweig was a well-known and popular author before the Nazis banned his writings. His many books and plays were translated into 30 languages. Sadly he is almost unknown today. This book is a wonderful introduction to a man who must have adorned any group fortunate enough to have him as a participant.
Book Review: A window into a fascinating period of European culture
Summary: 5 Stars
Stefan Zweig was a quintessential man of letters whose work and sensibility come to life in this memoir. He was a key participant in European literary culture during the early part of the century, and was a contemporary and colleague of many great writers and thinkers. The book portrays the type of privileged life into which he was born, and poignantly documents the degeneration of his beloved Europe into a state of barbarity.This book is fascinating as much for what it includes--descriptions of his work, his associations, the events that shaped the time--as for what it does not--any mention of his personal relationships with his wives or with those outside his cultural life. One learns about the man mostly indirectly; this is not a confessional memoir as much as a document of a brilliant man's literary values and intellectual life, and how they were shattered by the destruction of war.