validity Stefan Zweig (Vienna, 1881-Petrópolis, Brazil, 1942) surprising but not strange; His extensive culture, immense curiosity, Renaissance education, European knowledge, and a language-based literary style adapted to everyone’s understanding allowed him to write exciting biographies, memorable essays, historical accounts, short stories, poetry, drama, poetry. The newspapers, and what interests us here now, are some recollections that tell us of his status as a brilliant European and the events that brought Europe to the brink of suicide only fifty years later.
The best example of these memoirs is found in El mundo de ayer, now rescued by Alianza Editorial, a testament to what the collapse of Europe had been and which also circulated the author’s other books. Stefan Zweig’s description of yesterday’s world is a description of a vanished Europe, a Europe that represents Western culture and humanist thought. But this Europe was long lost in the trenches of the First World War. Zweig calls the period before 1914 the “golden age of security,” and more than half of the book refers to this period.
What makes this book so valuable is the perspective of people, not historians, whose many of the books currently in publication about the First World War shed predominantly upon political events: what they thought, what they felt, what they feared and what they expected. It’s a lucky coincidence that it was written by a talented writer who wrote everything very real, very concrete. His story, this book about his life, is undoubtedly one of the most important keys to understanding this time when Europe almost committed suicide.
He lived and witnessed everything. First, disaster broke out on the Austro-Hungarian borders, which did not seem to threaten the population, leading to the collapse of the great Austro-Hungarian empire and the catastrophe of the First World War. They watched the dark years of the rise of fascism in Italy, Austria, Greece, Spain… The eruption of primitive hatred, monstrous brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi era, which finally ended with the other great world war.
In the book, the man of the Renaissance culture, the great social and worldly cosmopolitan Zweig describes the world before the shipwreck, which he initially called the world of security. Like other European states, Austria had a stable political system, a well-established society, and everyone could see the future easily. Many inventions had radically changed life: telephone, electricity, radio, car.
Written by Zweig himself, the foreword is an outstanding summary of what he will tell in 15 chapters, from the first chapter – the world of Security – to the final chapter, The Suffering of Peace.
Zweig points out that he witnessed “the most terrible defeat of reason and the savage triumph of savagery” against his will in the history of time.
He describes how the greatest mass ideologies such as fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia have grown, and how he sees “above all, the greatest scourge of nationalism to poison the flowering of our European culture”.
It also points to humanity’s unimaginable fall to barbarism and paradoxically witnessing, at the same time, humanity is also technically and intellectually the invasion of air by plane, a word to all in a second, victory over very harmful diseases and something that was impossible yesterday. Never before had humanity acted in such a demonic way or achieved similar achievements to the divine.
Undoubtedly, it is necessary to learn from history in order not to repeat mistakes. Reading Yesterday’s World is a necessary addition to this essential learning.