The World of Yesterday ~ Stefan Zweig | Autobiography

The World of Yesterday ~ Stefan Zweig | Autobiography

Binding: Hard cover

Book Condition: Fairly good. Some wear to the cover as per photos, and there is a previous owner's stamp on the first page. 

Edition: Second Edition 1944

Wikipedia: The World of Yesterday: Memoires of a European (German title Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers) is the memoir of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. It has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire. He started writing it in 1934 when, anticipating Anschluss and Nazi persecution, he uprooted himself from Austria to England and later to Brazil. He posted the manuscript, typed by his second wife Lotte Altmann, to the publisher the day before they both committed suicide in February 1942. The book was first published in the original German-language by an anti-Nazi Exilliteratur publishing firm based in Stockholm. It was first published in English in April 1943 by Viking Press.

The book describes life in Vienna at the start of the 20th century with detailed anecdotes. It depicts the dying days of Austria-Hungary under Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria and Karl I of Austria, including literature, the arts, the system of education, and the sexual ethics prevalent at the time, the same that provided the backdrop to the emergence of psychoanalysis. Zweig also describes the stability of Viennese society after centuries of Habsburg rule.

Goodreads: The World of Yesterday, mailed to his publisher a few days before Stefan Zweig took his life in 1942, has become a classic of the memoir genre. Originally titled Three Lives, the memoir describes Vienna of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, the world between the two world wars and the Hitler years.

Translated from the German by Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger; with an introduction by Harry Zohn, 34 illustrations, a chronology of Stefan Zweigs life and a new bibliography, by Randolph Klawiter, of works by and about Stefan Zweig in English.

The best single memoir of Old Vienna by any of the citys native artists. Clive James

A book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942. The Guardian

It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age. The New Republic

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