Welcome to Litsy!

This is a collection of essays that reads essentially as a memoir, wherein Zweig details his life as a writer in Vienna and traveling abroad and his meetings and reflections on other artists and their work whom he had struck up friendships with (many it seems). But the real allure of this book for me was to read a first-hand account of culture, politics and daily life in Belle époque Europe, during WWI, the inter-war period and the start of WW2.

A personal account of what it was like to watch your country slide into war (twice). Plus lots of name dropping about the artists and writers he knew.

...when has reason ever had the upper hand of your own feelings? It has not been any help that for almost half-a-century I trained my heart to beat as the heart of a citizen of the world. On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders.

It is difficult to rid yourself, in only a few weeks, of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place.

Not one of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of my works... can be bought in Germany today. Anyone who still has a copy of one of them keeps it carefully concealed..... in France, Italy... where my books used to be widely read in translation, they are also banned today by Hitler‘s orders. I am now a writer who, as Grillparzer said, “walks behind his corpse in his own lifetime”.

Image from an ebay 1st ed online.😍

I will never forget what operatic performances were like in those days of our greatest need. You groped you way through dimly lit streets, for street lighting was feeling the effects of the fuel shortage, you paid for your seat in the gallery with a bundle of banknotes... You sat in your overcoat, because the auditorium was unheated .... But then the conductor raised his baton, the curtains parted, and it was more wonderful than ever before.

And all around was the throng of those whose loyalties were divided... families where sons were fighting on opposing sides, and where parents on both sides were waiting for letters. Here, what little they had was confiscated; there, they lost their jobs. All these people between two camps had taken refuge in Switzerland. ... Afraid of compromising those on both sides, they avoided speaking either French or German, and stole about like shadows...

Among them was Frans Masereel, carving an enduring graphic monument of protest against the horrors of war before our eyes in his woodcuts, haunting images in black and white... Day and night, he worked tirelessly cutting new scenes and figures out of the silent wood, his small room and his kitchen were both full of his woodcut blocks, and every morning La Feuille printed another of his graphic accusations.

It was one of those bright, sunny days...and Budapest was as beautiful and carefree as I had ever seen it. Women in white dresses promenaded arm-in-arm with officers.... With the smell of iodoform from the transport of wounded soldiers still clinging to my clothes, still in my mouth and my nostrils, I saw them buying little bunches of violets and presenting them gallantly to the ladies, ...

From 1900 to 1914 I never saw the name of Paul Valéry mentioned as a poet in Le Figaro or Le Matin; Marcel Proust was considered a mere dandy who frequented the Paris salons, and Romain Rolland was thought of as a knowledgeable musicologist. They were almost fifty before the first faint light of fame touched their names, and their great work was hidden in darkness in the most enquiring city in the world.

...for thousands and later hundreds of thousands of readers, the Insel Verlag colophon on a title guaranteed both high literary quality and perfect book-production.

[A] poetic discovery I made in London was ...of one almost forgotten at the time—William Blake, that lonely and difficult genius, who fascinates me to this day with his mixture of awkwardness and sublime perfection. A friend had advised me to go to...the British Museum... and get them to show me Blake‘s colourfully illustrated books Europe, America and The Book of Job."

Weird book connections: Blake features heavily in Drive Your Plow

Stillness, so to speak, formed around him wherever he went and wherever he was. Because he avoided any kind of fuss and even his own fame—that “sum of all the misunderstandings gathering around his name”, as he once aptly put it himself—the wave of curiosity surging around him in vain reached only his name, never the man himself. ... He had no house, no address where he could be visited....He was always travelling through the world

I came to know those artists and writers who, in the midst of this lively and opulent city, lived in creative quiet as if on a desert island with their work; I saw Renoir‘s studio, and met his best pupils. To all outward appearance, the life of these Impressionists whose work now fetches tens of thousands of dollars was just like the life of a petit bourgeois living on a small income..."

This personal contact with "historical" $$$ artists?

I remember how André Gide once visited me and, amazed by such silence here in the heart of Paris, commented, “We have to ask foreigners to show us the most beautiful places in our own city.”

One day, for instance, the delightful Swede Ellen Key came to see me—a woman who, with extraordinary courage in those still blind and backward times, was fighting for the emancipation of women, and in her book The Century of the Child pointed a warning finger, long before Freud, at the mental vulnerability of young people.

I felt there was a whiff of scented notepaper about my first novellas. Written in total ignorance of real life, they employed other people‘s techniques at second hand.

...of the comrades of my adolescent years [hardly one] did not at some time look pale and distracted—one because he was sick or feared he would fall sick, another because he was being blackmailed over an abortion, a third because he lacked the money to take a course of treatment without his family‘s knowledge, a fourth because he didn‘t know how to pay the alimony for a child claimed by a waitress to be his...

Our curious nostrils sniffed at everything and anything. We stole into the rehearsals of the Philharmonic Orchestra, we rummaged around the second-hand bookshops, we looked at the booksellers' display windows every day for instant information on what had just published. And most of all, we read; we read everything we could lay hands on. We borrowed books from all the public libraries, and lent anything we could find to one another.

Vienna, as everyone knew, was an epicurean city—however, what does culture mean but taking the raw material of life and enticing from it its finest, most delicate and subtle aspects by means of art and love?

5⭐️ This is the best memoir I‘ve ever read. Zweig grew up in the glorious golden age of Vienna, and he had to experience the horror of both world wars 😰 It is another version of War and Peace, an important book that must be read by everyone; a good reminder about our lost world, and the forces behind it

I believe in this, too 🥰

I need to read for school, but Zweig‘s also calling me 😪

Just finished Beware of Pity, and I want to read another Zweig

March TBR stack 🤩

Trying to beat the heatwave: air conditioning, orange juice, ice, and Stefan Zweig's memoir.

Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.

Stefan Zweig - The World of Yesterday
#litsy #literature #reader #reading #currentlyreading #book #stefanzweig

Das Buch stellte einen tollen Streifzug durch das alte Europa am Ende des 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts dar. Der Blickwinkel ist stellenweise sehr subjektiv, so dass die Epoche der alten Habsburger ein wenig romantisch verklärt wirkt. Unter Strich bleibt es aber ein sehr lesenswertes Buch.

I know many of us Littens depend on books to help us understand and process tough issues. Here are a few important books about slavery, race, Nazism, and surviving the Holocaust that have just become necessary reading: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/culture/2017/8/15/16145380/post-charlottesville...

Stefan Zweig's memoir, describing life in Europe from the turn of the century to WW2 - he considered himself a European, moving freely from country to country; until borders closed, passports & bureaucracy were introduced & it became unsafe for Zweig (Jewish) to stay in Austria. He & his wife were #refugees in England before moving to Brazil. A beautiful humane book, relevant today. #JuneBookBugs

Another book from my TBR. I will need to live another 509 years to a make a dent in that thing. #soyesterday #melodicmay

#readJanuary- Stefan Zweig has fast become one of my favorite authors, so I'm going to read his #autobiography soon.

One of my favourite books. Die Welt con Gestern tells the story of a world that has disappeared and is fascinating. Strongly recommended.