THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY: MEMOIRS OF A EUROPEAN, by Stefan Zweig | Book Review 

This is one of my favourite books and no wonder why it inspired Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Great reviews man!

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

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)

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.

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.

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!

Thank you.. you did a really good review here! I just baught the book today.. in Swedish.

Brilliant, Sean! Thank you!

Thank you for this review. Zweig is my favourite author, I higly recommend his short stories. He is such a refined writer.

Well done. Super analysis!

I love this memoir and have gone over it a number of times. I'm really enjoying your enthusiastic discussion and appreciation of it.

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?

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.

A book for all times.

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.

This is my one of the favourite books. He descriped European culture and cities between the years of 1800s and 1940s.

Thanks so much for this video. I'll have to re-read this book. Concerning his fiction I can higly recommend "Schachnovelle"

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".

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".

Great review. Thank you 🌹 Zweig is pronounced ts'vei'g.

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.

A brilliant writer ❤

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.

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

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.

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.

Zweig seems lika a snowflake :d

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