Stefan Zweig (1881 1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, ...
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Stefan Zweig (1881 1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about."
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This book is supposed to be one of the definitive descriptions of what prewar Vienna was like, but I did not find it so. Zweig ruminated on his own life in a way which did not do him credit as a person or a spokesman for the European intelligentsia.
The4Rs
Feb 20, 2009
A lesson fro today
This is a wonderful book from a pre-WWII European author, Stefan Zweig who is little known today. He lived through great times of turmoil and this book is his witness to the cultural tectonic shifts between 1900 & 1940. He explains very clearly how the elegant and highly civilized Austrian culture was devastated overnight by economic & political turmoil. It is a must-read for today's times as a reminder that even the best societies can change overnight. In other words, don't take your society for granted!
A wonderful & tragic book. Zweig & his wife on the run from the Nazis committed suicide in 1942.
