In an unintended coincidence, the last book I read in 2023 was also a Stefan Zweig book. Maybe I have the beginnings of a new tradition.
As I wrote after reading Zweig'g Chess Story, I only became aware of Zweig in 2013. I remarked then about my surprise that I hadn't heard of him before, and after reading The World of Yesterday I only feel more surprised. If anything, Zweig is modest in his memoir but one does get a sense of his wide fame when reading it. I half joked to friends that I was reading a celebrity memoir, because the book is full of anecdotes about his meetings and friendships with other celebrities of the time, from Freud to Richard Strauss to Dalí to Gide to Rodin and so many others. Zweig traveled the world, both before World War I and between the wars, visiting the United States, Central and South America, and India, as well as the expected places in Europe. He led a remarkable life, which his memoir – even with his personal perspective – describes within the context of the history and events as they were happening around him. There is an almost incredible clarity to this book that is hard to imagine achieving without some distance. (I think he must have written it after leaving Europe for Brazil, though his life in Brazil is never mentioned, so perhaps that was the distance.)
I expected to learn more about his personal life, but while his friendships with celebrated authors, artists, and musicians are covered, his intimate relationships are almost completely left out. We learn only a little about his immediate family at the beginning and then hear briefly about the fate of his mother toward the end. We learn virtually nothing at all of his spouses and home life. Even more surprising, the book is very limited in its discussion of his work. While a few particular works are discussed in some detail, most that come up are mentioned only in passing, and many don't come up at all. At one point he alludes to his plans to write a novel – which I think must have been Beware of Pity – which got sidetracked when he developed an interest in Mary Stuart. And he references his biography of Marie Antoinette only briefly in the context of Mary Stuart. He mentions Burning Secret only in the context of the film adaptation of it being banned in Germany. Most of his other novels are not mentioned at all. One knows when reading the book that he is a prolific writer across many different forms, but the creation of those works play a small part in the memoir.
What The World of Yesterday does capture extremely well is exactly what its title promises: the life, the feeling, the experience of being in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, on the eve of World War I, in the wake of that war, the interwar period and in the last years before World War II. Zweig does incredible work at helping the reader understand what it was to live through all of it. I think I had hoped the book would also help me understand why he took his own life in 1942, shortly after finishing his memoir, but I can't say that it did – it only made me the more sad for his loss.
