THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY: MEMOIRS OF A EUROPEAN, by Stefan Zweig | Book Review
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- Опубликовано: 26 авг 2024
- A book review of Stefan Zweig's 1942 memoir, "The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European," trans. Anthea Bell (Pushkin Press, 2011).
Authors mentioned:
JRR Tolkien
Rainer Marie Rilke
Sigmund Freud
Maxim Gorky
James Joyce
W.G. Sebald
Daša Drndić
Jens Bjørneboe
/ travelstoriesyt
This is one of my favourite books and no wonder why it inspired Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Great reviews man!
Thank you! It's such a good book and that connection to Wes Anderson is really interesting. Thanks for reminding me that I need to rewatch that film!
@@travelthroughstories I have made a video about this connection :) ruclips.net/video/8oFIQ8I6QtU/видео.html (Sorry for self-promo here)
@@VashikArmenikus Wow - this is such a good video! Thank you for sharing it here!
Very nice and interesting book review. I’m an Israeli, a grandson to a family that was perished in the holocaust. My aunt and her sister were from Vienna and lived through WW1 and 2. I remember as a child hearing them telling about Vienna and how beautiful it was the culture, the Opera house..etc. When I was older the sister once told me why she never had children. She didn’t want them to suffer from the world. She said “my childhood was destroyed by WW1 and my teenage was destroyed by WW2. It’s a cruel world” Hearing your summary of this book reminded me of my childhood and those stories from my aunt and the old family which have all gone by now… it made me want to read this book. Thank you
Thank you for sharing your story. That's a heartbreaking quote from your sister... It's difficult to understand fully how earthshattering the breakout of WWI really was, but this book definitely helped me understand some of it.
Hi, I know I’m a bit late but I really think Stefan Zweig is a forgotten gem in the Anglo-sphere (luckily still very well known in continental Europe though) and I hope you do read more of him; my favourites of his (besides this book, obviously a masterpiece) are:
1. The chess player
2. Letters from an unknown woman
3. Beware of Pity
4. The Nanny (it’s a short story but intriguing and psychoanalytic)
Thanks for the recommendations! I've been meaning to get back to Zweig ever since reading this - thanks for the encouragement.
Say what you will about the EU, I wish Zweig could have seen this "world of tomorrow" where the French-German border is but a sign, European individual freedoms are among the strongest in the world, and intra-European wars are extremely rare.
It's all fake. Zweig would've seen through it.
As a matter of fact, before WWI Franco-German border was just a sign on the road. Just like now. And then...
Watch Russia, China and Iran. This is the new axis of evil.
This book's account of someone grappling with the question you outlined sounds interesting.
I haven't read any Zweig but in a similar historical vein I'm currently a hundred or so pages into Richard Zenith's Pessoa biography, where the Eurocentrism of the day has really been right at the forefront, given the context of Pessoa's adolescent years in colonial Durban/Natal/South Africa. Zenith is pretty direct in acknowledging that Pessoa was more or less as unquestioning and unreflective as the next person of his day on the subject of Europe's presence in Africa, the social realities and class relations of the city he was in, etc.
So far World War 2 hasn't begun to loom, but as the book goes on I'm looking forward to seeing how 'the real world' asserts itself in the life of a writer so inward and committed to the superiority of the imaginary.
The World of Yesterday and Civilizations = TBR'd.
This makes me even more excited to read Zenith's Pessoa biography! Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It's always interesting to read authors who seem to not allow the "real world" into their art. In some ways, I have great respect for this desire to keep the two separate, but in many other ways, I find it irresponsible. I'd be interested to see how Zenith reconciles this with Pessoa.
Hello! that was a really good review and you have certainly whetted my appetite to read this book that has been sitting on my TBR for some time. I have read his Diaries and some of his fiction (Letter from an unknown woman) and I do recommend them both. The Diaries would certainly make a great counterpoint to The world of yesterday. Thank you!
Hi! I'm glad you found the review helpful. Thanks for the recommendations - it's great to hear that Zweig's other works are still being read! I think I'll check out his Diaries as you suggest before moving onto his fiction.
Watching this video in Britain in 2024. Life on a loop.
Thank you for this review. Zweig is my favourite author, I higly recommend his short stories. He is such a refined writer.
I really need to read his short stories soon! This memoir has stuck with me for a long time. Thanks for watching!
Brilliant, Sean! Thank you!
Thanks, brother!
A book for all times.
Thanks for this great video - I think there's a big interest in Zweig at the moment, maybe Grand Budapest Hotel had something to do with that. And thanks for mentioning Sebald also as a postscript to Zweig - a great point! Impressive range of old and Middle English books behind you! I always look at such things. Maybe do one about Beowulf? SORRY I just saw you did that!! how about old elegies, like The Wanderer/Seafarer?
Thanks, Allan! I still need to get to Zweig's fiction some day. I'm glad you found the Beowulf videos! I've been meaning to do more on Old English/Old Norse poetry for awhile now -- I'm glad there's some interest. Since medieval lit is kind of my day job right now, I have some trouble actually wanting to sit down on the weekend and talk more about them, haha. I think this summer when I have some more time, I'll start doing more medieval lit videos though as some Old English poetry, especially the elegies that you noted, are some of my favorite English-language poems of all time.
A brilliant writer ❤
Thank you.. you did a really good review here! I just baught the book today.. in Swedish.
Well done. Super analysis!
Thank you so much, Stuart!
I love this memoir and have gone over it a number of times. I'm really enjoying your enthusiastic discussion and appreciation of it.
Thank you! It's easily one of the best memoirs I've ever read. I can't wait to reread it.
@@travelthroughstories It's really about the death of the Austro Hungarian empire and the old European cultural world. I can understand and empathize with Zweig's grief and sense of loss and displacement. There is a marvelous audiobook of this, read by a man with a wonderfully expressive voice. He does such a splendid and convincing job that at times it seemed that it was being read by Zweig himself. The chapter on sexuality was brilliant. It made clear how unhealthy and twisted bourgeois conventions and attitudes toward sexuality and gender were. The great historian George Mosse also discusses this, and describes the utter rebellion and hatred the youth had towards these sick and repressive cultural norms. Their efforts to escape the stranglehold of Victorian codes of morality seemed to play a part in the blatant enthusiasm youth had regarding war, which was, in their minds, an opportunity to demonstrate their masculinity and rage, a chance to escape the overbearing and unnatural crushing of instinctual drives forced on society by Victorian decency and respectability.
@@walterbenjamin1386 I listened to the audiobook as well! There were parts that I went back and reread, but I also found the audiobook performance quite exceptional. And I completely agree about that chapter on gender and sexuality - thanks for your thoughtful analysis of it! It was definitely one of the better chapters.
@@travelthroughstories There is a moving biography of Zweig by George Prochnik. I just finished it, and have to admit that when I got to the end, even though I knew what would happen, tears came to my eyes. This was possibly more for Lotte, and the photo of her lying on his shoulder, with her fingers laced into his already dead fingers was too much ..... Prochnik gives a detailed description of how her suicide may have taken place after his. Sad, to say the least.
This is my one of the favourite books. He descriped European culture and cities between the years of 1800s and 1940s.
Just discovered your site a few days ago and watched the Gormenghast, Oakley Hall and, Tove Johansson posting already..
I have not read the memoir, but have caught up on Zweig's fiction. Zweig was best in the short form, so I loved his stories and novellas like The Burning Secret, The Chess Game, The Invisible Collection and others.
His two novels The Post Office Girl and Beware of Pity, were more of a challenge. POG was easy, B of P had trouble getting started and lost me.
Also look into Zweig's nonfiction.
I'd never heard of Zweig until a few years ago when I saw some mentions of this memoir and put it on my tbr list. Recently I read an historical fiction novel which included him as a side character, that got me interested in finding out more. I'm currently reading Ostend - Stephan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the Dark, by Volker Weidermann, which focuses on the summer of 1936, when Zweig and other European emigres, including other writers famous at the time but whom I had never heard of were together in the Belgian seaside resort town. It makes me interested in reading their books from the time. Ostend is a good translation by Carol Brown Janeway.
Interesting - I'll have to check out Ostend! That sounds like an absolutely fascinating book. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!
I enjoyed your review. Am half way through "Die Welt von Gestern". It is everything I hoped for from the memoir of that younger Viennese (Sephardic) Jew, Elias Canetti, of which I have read half of the first volume and found it interesting but not compelling the way Zweig is. Canetti, a skilled writer and a horrible man, a womanizer who had an affair with brilliant Oxford novelist and "manizer" Iris Murdoch, was contemptuous of Zweig's talent although apparently Zweig helped him get his novel "Die Blendung" / "Auto Da Fe" published. Canetti respected almost no other writer, with a few exceptions, notably the "Austrian Proust'" Musil, whose "Mann Ohne Eigenschaften" / "Man Without Qualities", also depicts retrospectively the Vienna of 1913, in gorgeous but difficult German which possibly translates less well than Zweig. Many books depicting the Europe which was swept away fascinate me, e.g. Artur Rubenstein "My Young Years", and the British WWI memoirs "Goodbye to All That", "Testament of Youth".
Thank you! I've wanted to get to Musil's Man Without Qualities for a while now - it's a rather intimating work though. Interesting points about Elias Canetti. I haven't had a chance to read him either. Thanks for the thorough comment with lots of suggestions for further reading on this subject!
@@travelthroughstories For Brits like me I think that WWI casts a very long shadow. I am old enough to have known people involved although they never talked about it, and to have had great aunts who lost their sweethearts and remained single into their nineties. The fact that Faulks' novel Birdsong is set as a school book--and probably the WWI war poets still are too--suggests to me that this is also true for a younger generation. My mother told me that T S Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" summed up the psychology of men who came back from WWI. Our WWI stories were all about the Western front of course. If you talk to Austrians, and look at the monuments "they died for the fatherland", often the Italian front, artillerymen on skis, the loss of South Tirol (part of Italy where the speak a variety of Austrian German), may come to mind. Or the Russian front, about which Fritz Kreisler, the violinist whose sound recalls pre-WWI Vienna, wrote a short book--it's nothing special but his playing is! I must stop writing now or I never will!
@@johnbirchall7077 Thank you for sharing your thoughts, John. As you say, WWI casts a long shadow over the literary world as well. Zweig's memoir still haunts me in how it effectively depicts just how devastating to all of Europe it really was.
Thanks so much for this video. I'll have to re-read this book. Concerning his fiction I can higly recommend "Schachnovelle"
Thanks for watching! And thanks for the recommendation - I'll pick that one up first!
Zweig contemplates with sadness the end of a 2000 year old empire that turns Austria into a provincial German city. Hadn’t the world always changed every few decades. My relatives had to leave Europe in 1892, leave the Austro-Hungarian empire that is, because they were Jews. I wonder how zweig was able to avoid that in 92.
Great review. Thank you 🌹
Zweig is pronounced ts'vei'g.
I think compared with ww1 and ww2 , the rising of pop culture is more devastating to the world of Zweig nowadays people prefer to go to night clubs, pubs and dancing for the nonsense just smaller numbers of them go to concert hall and theater and most of them have little understanding of orchestra as well as opera, they came with girl friends to show off rather than enjoying music
Great review, just found your channel and really like your videos about Scandinavian books. Just a comment about pronunciation: In German "Z" sounds like "ts", like in "let's go".
Thanks for watching! And thanks for the correction!
Zweig is very much my kind of writer. The experiences he went through I had to go through. The thoughts he had I had too.
This is a very good review.
"Zweig is nationally Austrian, but he is also a Jew. So is he actually Austrian?"
No, he is not. How do I know? Because I am a Jew. Believe me, I've carried that weight. Since as long as I can remember, everywhere I went I heard, "This is not your country. Go to your Israel." I moved from Soviet Ukraine to the United States, and I still hear it sometimes.
My only request to you is not to succumb to today's banalities: "anti-colonial," "anti-capitalist," "progressive," "internationalist," etc. We are not in any way superior or more evolved than people 100 years ago. We live in very much the same time, on the edge of new wars not really different from the old ones. We haven't made any progress. We are controlled by very much the same instincts. We are heading in the same direction.
Here is a story from Germany in 1920s or early 30s. A modern art exhibit is organized. In the corner hangs from a noose a lifesize human doll from a sex shop, it's head replaced with that of a pig, and it is dressed in police uniform. "Ha-ha, we hung a pig." (Yes, in Germany they call police "pigs," just like in the US.)
How is that for art?
People were looking at that, and many were voting for H...er.
The extreme left and right were stuck in a dialectic relationship, they h..ed each other, but in their h..red supported each other.
Same thing regarding extreme nationalism and internationalism -- another dialectic pair, each supporting the other.
Zweig was Austrian, but in Russia many people, the very best people had to go through very similar hell in 1917. Emigration, exile, camps and all. Only, there it was for the most part internationalist class h..ed. Extreme left. Which didn't make much difference in reality.
Please think with your own head.
Brilliant memoir. Very poignant read (especially reading it now) which reveals what was trashed by WW1. It was not a perfect world- as Zweig himself will concede- but his childhood and early adulthood was one of security and peace. The descriptions of Paris in the early 1900s were lovely.
Agreed! This "world of yesterday" sounds like a pretty nice place.
@@travelthroughstories not for everyone though. Although I admire Zweig as a writer his view of the world pre 1914 was as naive and rose coloured as the views of globalists like Tony Blair and Nick Clegg in our century. It amounts to 'me and my mates are OK so what's the problem?'
Yet surely as much as nationalism played its part in the rise of fascism it also brought together the forces which defeated Hitler? I’m not decrying Zweis, rather the risk of taking overly simplistic lessons from his experience.
my man zweig kicked it before hitler was defeated so he wouldnt know
Zweig seems lika a snowflake :d
Brilliant analysis.
Because the world is different, countries are now running by opportunists, ideologists, fat cats and ignoramus, rather than ladies and gentlemen who received proper education and dedicated themselves into deep thinking
Nowadays involution is everywhere and you can do very little improvement to write your own life story that is why the elegant lifestyle has gone and the interesting souls have gone and no great litterateur existing
"ladies and gentleman" 🤡