Challenges are rarely as bewildering as those confronting Stefan Zweig in 1942. He succumbed to them—a tragedy that coincided with the publishing of his memoir, The World of Yesterday. Read it and you will learn about a kind man who cherished personal freedom for everyone. All he wished for was the opportunity to study, to create and to share. You will be carried to peaceful Vienna in the 19th Century. And you will be dragged into war in the 20th, when certain doctrines robbed millions of their freedom, their opportunity and their very lives.
Words of Stefan Zweig:
“Today, now that the word ‘security’ has long been struck out of our vocabulary as a phantom, it is easy for us to smile at the optimistic delusion of that idealistically dazzled generation, which thought that the technical progress of mankind must inevitably result in an equally rapid moral rise. We who, in the new century, have learnt not to be surprised by any new outbreak of collective bestiality, and expect every new day to prove even worse than the day just past, are considerably more skeptical about prospects for the moral education of humanity. We have found that we have to agree with Freud, who saw our culture and civilization as a thin veneer through which the destructive forces of the underworld could break at any moment. We have had to accustom ourselves slowly to living without firm ground beneath our feet, without laws, freedom or security. We long ago ceased believing in the religion of our fathers, their faith in the swift and enduring ascent of humanity. Having learnt our cruel lesson, we see their overhasty optimism as banal in the face of a catastrophe that, with a single blow, cancelled out a thousand years of human effort. But if it was only a delusion, it was a noble and wonderful delusion that our fathers served, more humane and fruitful than today’s slogans. And something in me, mysteriously and in spite of all I know and all my disappointments cannot quite shake it off. What a man has taken into his bloodstream in childhood from the air of that time stays with him. And despite all that is dinned into my ears daily, all the humiliation and trials that I myself and countless of my companions in misfortune have experienced, I cannot quite deny the belief of my youth that in spite of everything, events will take a turn for the better. Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.”[1]
Image: Cover art for the English translation © 2009 by Anthea Bell and Pushkin Press; Manufactured in the United States of America; First Nebraska paperback printing 2013[2]
[1] From The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, edited by Anthea Bell; opening chapter “The World of Security”
[2] Used here without the artist or editor’s permission for educational purposes only.