Stefan Zweig. The World of Yesterday (1943)

     Stefan Zweig. The World of Yesterday (1943) I picked this up at a yard sale, and have read the preface, chapter 1 and parts of chapter 2. Chapter 1 is an interesting survey of Viennese life around the turn of the century, when the “better classes” of the Hapsburg Empire (and indeed all of Europe) were enjoying the last few decades of a secure and pleasant life. That Zweig seems oblivious to the actual conditions of the working classes that supported this petit-bourgeois lifestyle (one that was also enjoyed by the aristocracy, actually) is symptomatic: he loves grand generalisations, which no doubt express his impressions accurately, but don’t tell us much about what was really happening.
     For what was happening was of course the working out of ideas that would cause revolutions and the overthrow of the old order. Europe sleepwalked into the First World War, and Zweig seems unable to accept the fact that the ideals that he espouses (centred around personal freedom) were largely irrelevant to these events. I’ve not read any of his other work – he seems to have had a small reputation as a historian of ideas and literature – and I probably won’t. I may read a few more pages of this work, but there are other books I want to read first.
     Zweig’s talent seems to consist mostly of making accepted platitudes sound profound, which was no doubt a comfort to his readers. His childhood reminiscences have some value as a record of the way life felt before the First World War, but the absence of concrete details unfortunately robs them of real interest. One has to have some prior knowledge in order to understand Zweig’s generalities, which is always a bad sign. * (2003)