‘First published in 1943, The World of Yesterday could scarcely be less like the popular confessional autobiographies of our time, which tend to be soft-centred victimologies in which the self is presented as an innocent, child-like entity, while history comes across as a form of abuse…’
An article from Guardian Review, 2 February, 2008.
’A few years ago, at a conference in Istanbul, I heard a speaker raise loud cheers by denouncing the invasion of Iraq with the words “the Enlightenment with bombs”. I felt I understood his fury, but I was disconcerted by the contempt with which he pronounced the word “Enlightenment”. There were, to be sure, many flaws in the Enlightenment ideal. Yet, whether the dismissal comes from an enraged Turkish artist or from critics such as Camille Paglia or John Gray, it should be asked just what it is that is being flushed away…’
Written for the Guardian Review in September 2007, this article was finally published on 2 February 2008. Some quotation marks have been lost in paragraphs 5 & 6 (largely written by Zweig) but it remains a pleasure to place a piece like this in a national newspaper.
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Karen M. Bollman , 7 February 2008
A lovely article on a very well liked and respected writer here in Germany. We read his books in school too. Many people of that time had great difficulties in adjusting to new lives - sometimes identities and surrounding places. I see it in the generation of my mother. Social standing still strongly defined your place in society. When that all broke away, many could not take it. What a shame.
Karen M. Bollman - Taunusstein, Germany
Patrick Wright ends his piece on Stefan Zweig with the joint suicide of the author and his wife in Brazil in 1942. There is evidence that their suicides were some years in the planning. One day in the late 1930s, the Swedish society doctor Axel Munthe, author of The Story of San Michele, received a phone call at his home in Capri from Zweig, who was in Naples and insisted on coming to visit him. ‘He was in Anacapri for exactly three hours,’ Munthe recalled. ‘During and after lunch he questioned me exhaustively about different ways of committing suicide - which ones were most pain-free, and why. I have never met anyone who was so preoccupied with death.’
Harry D Watson
Edinburgh
(from Guardian Review, letter, 9 February 2008)