In the midst of a global tragedy, a man remembers. This man is Stefan Zweig, in exile since Nazi Germany reigned over Europe, and his book is called The World of Yesterday . Its reading today strikes so much it opposes the world of its youth and that which appeared as of the victory of Hitler. Uprooted, even desperate, he evokes the past by giving it all the more charm as he remembers a time when he was at home in Vienna, where life had the sweetness of a refined spectacle. He analyzes this era with a sociologist's eye that was not suspected in this great novelist.
Vienna and pre-1914 Europe
If Zweig idealizes the Vienna of the beginning of the century, it is also because he lived there, in a rich and cultivated family, on the sunny side of existence. Only downside, his school education, which he considers retrospectively rigid and formal. He describes his youth as a long air of opera, in an empire ruled with wisdom, which crosses a time of prosperity. Her father is at the premiere of Lohengrin
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