The Civilization that Sleepwalked into its Demise

I have lived in the Austrian capital of Vienna my whole life. It is a beautiful city with a melancholic spirit lingering above it. A city whose relatively minor role in the twenty-first century is in an uneasy tension with the still very visible relics of its grand imperial past. The old Kaiser, Franz Josef, who ruled over a far bigger Austria for sixty-eight years, continues to cast a long shadow through statues. Such monuments leave an unmistakable suspicion that one is strolling through the ruins of a great civilization.

It was the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) who introduced me to that vanished civilization. He witnessed the old order at the peak of its glory and its complete destruction during the First World War. When the consolidation of National Socialist power in Germany forced him into exile, he found himself cut off from his notes, library, his circle, and the cultural atmosphere that had sustained him decades. In Brazil, where he eventually settled, he composed his memoirs The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von gestern)—which are also, and perhaps more importantly, a portrait of an entire civilization. His sense of irreversible loss was evidently so overwhelming that he chose not to survive it: he died by his own hand in Petrópolis in February 1942, before the war's outcome was known, persuaded that whatever peace eventually came, the world he had loved was forever lost.