The books by Stefan Zweig that were sleeping soundly in the shelves of our mothers and grandmother's libraries have now come back to life. And they truly are masterpieces, which fully justify the enormous fame and prestige that Zweig enjoyed in his lifetime. His memoir about Vienna, "World of Yesterday" is the single most evocative book about the fading days of the Habsburg empire that I have ever read. His historical biographies (Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen Scots, Erasmus, Magellan, Fouché) are models of concision and psychological insight, told with a keen sense of drama and cinematographic detail. Equally worthwhile are his studies of great literary masters (Balzac, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Nietzche, Holderlin, to cite but a few of those he applied himself to present). Zweig was in some respects a summation of what was best about the European civilization that ended with the two World Wars: the devotion to high culture, the cosmopolitan spirit, the sense of decency and refinement. He committed suicide in Brasil, together with his second wife Lotte, in February 1942, when the carnival was roaring in the streets.
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