I first read Stefan Zweig in 1988 when I came upon his The Royal Game and Other Stories in a Greenwich Village book store. I purchased a copy from the Village Chess Shop on November 12th of that year. As a chess player I had long known about the eponymous story. It delighted me as much as “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” from the same collection, moved me.
So when our long-time friend Spencer Case mentioned The World of Yesterday on his Facebook page, I knew I had to have it. It does not disappoint. Here is a taste to whet your appetite:
If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is not one sensible reason to be found, nor even any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved, it was not really about drawing minor borderlines; I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of that internal dynamism that had built up during those forty years of peace, and now demanded release. (220)
To appreciate this passage, it must be savored n the context of the chapter ‘Brightness and Shadows over Europe’ which deals with the run-up to the Great War and the mentality of the individuals and peoples who prepared it and suffered unspeakably in its aftermath.
The sensitive Zweig, born in 1881, couldn’t bear the aftermath, even from afar, and committed suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942.