The World of Yesterday - Memoirs of a European

The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest testimonial books of our time. In it, Zweig retraces the evolution of Europe from 1895 to 1941, the destiny of an entire generation of men confronted more brutally than others with History and all "imaginable catastrophes."

Written in 1941, when, having emigrated to Brazil, Stefan Zweig had already decided to end his life, The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest testimonial books of our time. In it, Zweig retraces the evolution of Europe from 1895 to 1941, the destiny of an entire generation of men confronted more brutally than others with History and all "imaginable catastrophes."

As a chronicler of Europe's Golden Age, Zweig happily evokes his life as a privileged bourgeois in pre-1914 Vienna and some of the great figures who were his friends: Schnitzler, Rilke, Romain Rolland, Freud, or Valéry. But he also reveals the rise of nationalism, the tremendous upheaval of ideas following the First World War, then Hitler's ascent to power, the horror of state antisemitism, and, finally, the "suicide of Europe." "I have been a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason," he writes.

As an analyst of the failure of a civilization, Zweig blames himself and his contemporaries. But, with the hindsight of time, the lucidity of his intellectual testament strikes today's reader, as does the relevance of his denunciation of nationalisms and his plea for Europe, which Serge Niémetz's new translation restores in all its vigor.