The World of Yesterday (Volume 1)

Book summary

Stefan Zweig begins with the Vienna of his youth, what he calls the world of security: a city that believed in progress and cared more for the theatre than for politics. He recalls an Austrian schooling, the discovery of literature, then travels to Paris, Berlin, London and India. Encounters follow: Verhaeren, Rilke, Rodin, in a Europe crossed without papers. This first volume explores the making of a writer and a generation's confidence in its age. Zweig writes as an exile, and his account stops in the summer of 1914.