Gabrielle's Reviews > The World of Yesterday

I am clearly a bit of a sucker for nostalgia: I am mildly obsessed with vintage-style clothes, mid-century modern kitchen knick-knacks and I am actively looking for an antique typewriter and gramophone to decorate my library. But my nostalgia is purely aesthetic: I know good and well that everyone wearing hats and gloves did not make the world a more wholesome place (just a more elegant one), and that beautiful old cars are an environmental disaster no matter how cool they look. But it is hard to resist the appeal of the illusion that there was a time when things were simple, more civilized and more – for lack of a better word – tasteful. Some might argue that makes me the ideal audience for the Zweig “revival”.

Call me a hipster, but I got interested in Zweig’s work because of the Wes Anderson movie “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, especially after reading that Anderson created the character of M. Gustave to represent Zweig himself: someone deeply attached to a set of values and code of conduct that might feel old-fashioned, but that certainly represented a more elegant and liberal civilization than the one they were forced to live in. A man with very high standards and a kind heart. I just had to know more about a man like that, especially after reading “Chess” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). This book being a blend of memoirs and recounting of how the Austro-Hungarian empire went from a sophisticated realm with a refined culture to being the Third Reich’s backyard, I knew it would be interesting and also heartbreaking. Having had to flee his homeland, and eventually Europe altogether, I also knew that Zweig would be looking back at his old life with rose-coloured glasses. I can’t say I blame him.

The first thing that struck me as I made my way through this memoir was the absolute beauty of the prose. I know it’s a translation, but wow! This is the kind of book that reads like soft, chewy candy to me: I want it to go on forever and I’m kind of bummed when it’s all gone. Zweig’s love for Vienna shines through the writing vividly. He was brought up in a city and a family that valued culture tremendously, and made intellectualism a holy value, more important than money and politics, and his character is very much a reflection of the time and place of his birth and early life. It made me wish I had lived there and then, in that incredible place where people sought enlightenment in books and art.

Zweig was a realist, who saw the quirks and contradictions of human behavior with a compassionate eye, and until the Great War, was more often amused at people’s less admirable sides that appalled or weary of them. The way he talks about Vienna, Berlin and Paris, and the advent of a more modern way of living and a greater equality between sexes and classes, has the exuberant enthusiasm of someone who witnesses spring for the first time. Everything was fresh and bright in his eyes, and his love for the time and places is infectious. He was also fiercely admiring of the artists, writers and actors he met and befriended: it could sound like shameless name-dropping to talk about one’s friendships with Rilke, Freud and other turn-of-the-century luminaries, but Zweig is too earnest in his admiration of the great minds he frequented to ever sound like he’s bragging to have known them: he just wants everyone to love them as much as he did.

When he switches gears and turns his narrative to the Great War, and the way it broke Europe’s (and his generation’s) innocence, I suddenly had a pit in my stomach. Lines such as “Our common idealism, the optimism that had come from progress, meant that we failed to see and speak out strongly enough against our common danger” felt too close to home for me, too close to the way I have felt at the back of my head for the past couple of years.

I was brought close to tears more than once by the way he describes the devastation war left in its wake through Austria, when he mentions the letter someone secretly slipped in his pocket when he visited post-Revolutionary Russia – to tell him not to believe everything he heard – and of course, when he suddenly finds himself forced to leave his beloved country behind when Hitler’s regime makes being a Jewish writer in Austria extremely dangerous.

It’s hard to read a book like that, a book that paints such a vivid picture of all the good and beautiful things that greed, intolerance, hate, and ignorance can ruin, especially when all we seem to hear about on the news is the resurgence of greed, intolerance, hatred and ignorance. It’s frightening to think of the historical parallels, to imagine what could happen (again!) if things go south… As much as I loved this book, I would lie if I said it didn’t also break my heart. I feel like I found a long-lost friend in Zweig, and then all I could do was listen to him tell me about all the things he lost. He deeply believed in what one could call the brotherhood of people, and that arbitrary divisions would cause nothing but pain on either side: seeing his ideals blown apart was too much for him.

As I have learned watching “Mad Men” obsessively, the word nostalgia means “the pain from an old wound”. Never has this definition felt more appropriate than reading “The World of Yesterday”. A beautiful, bittersweet and still very relevant book.

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I was talking with a colleague last week who told me Zweig is his favorite writer: I am often tempted to judge people by the books they read (and the music they listen to, because I’m basically a “High Fidelity” character), and based on that, I think well of this guy: if your favorite writer is a humanist who believed in the importance of art and peace, you can’t be a bad person in my eyes.