The World of Yesterday

WHEN in 1942 the great Jewish Austrian writer, Stefan Zweig, committed suicide in exile, his world had already perished before him. All that he had valued with simple devotion — his country, his art, his race — had been humiliated and for him belonged to a world of yesterday. Modestly using the facts of his own life as points of departure, Zweig has recreated with tragic overtones the spiritual atmosphere of the eras he knew: cultured Vienna in the nineties, the First World War, the desiccating inflation, the depression, and the Anschluss. Peace-loving and shy, he kept physically aloof from the conflicts and carried on a sort of artistic internationalism with such friends as Rolland, Shaw, Freud, and Gorky. This excellent book is the X-ray picture of an epoch infected with horrible diseases.