Reading Austria: The World of Yesterday

Following Australia, the next stop in my reading around the world tour is Austria.

Austria

I think this is the first time in this challenge that I am reading a book from a country I have actually visited. When I did my college backpacking trip (with my mom!) I spent a day or two in Vienna. Before Sunrise hadn’t been made yet (it might have been filming at the same time, actually), and I Kurt Cobain had just killed himself – I remember because every time I told someone I was from Seattle, they asked if I was okay.

I really wanted to see the ballet while I was there, but tickets were too expensive. The hostels were full, so we ended up in a drab, overpriced hotel with a snobby man at the front desk. But then I passed a string quartet busking and saw St. Stephens Cathedral from the outside at night when the facade was all lit up, and Vienna’s reputation as a cultural hub was cemented for me.

Choosing the Book

According to WorldFinderX, the most popular book in Austria by an Austrian is The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. He seems to be included on every list related to Austrian books. But he doesn’t meet my preferred criteria.

For each country, I try to choose a novel set in the country that is written by an author who:

• Is from that country
• Lived there while writing it
• Wrote in the language of the place
• Is female
• Is indigenous rather than descended from colonizers, where that distinction is relevant

Neither Read the World or The Reader’s Room had a book for Austria yet. Ann Morgan, the original global reader, read Anna Kim’s Frozen Time. A book by an immigrant woman of color, written in German, it sounded very promising. But the description talked about trauma a lot, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a book about war trauma. One of her alternates was Julya Rabinowich’s Splithead. Also written by a woman immigrant (this time from Russia), it deals with the immigrant experience, which I’m particularly interested in. So I checked my local library and they didn’t have either book! Nor did they have any other books by either author.

I turned to the Read Around the World Challenge and searched for Austrian books available in English. The book Lust by Elfriede Jelinek had the tags: fiction, set in Austria, female author, Nobel Prize. But the book description did not interest me at all. When I googled “famous austrian writers” Stefan Zweig was usually the top response.

Finally, I googled “most famous female author Austria” and got the aforementioned Elfriede Jelinek. So I checked the library for her books, and they had The Piano Teacher. Although the blurb mentioned an inappropriate teacher-student relationship, I was running out of patience by this time, so I put it on hold.

Several months later, I was still number one in line for one copy of the book. Coincidentally, around that time I rewatched The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is a great movie. And in the end credits, there was a note indicating that the story was inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig.

Fine. I put The World of Yesterday on hold. At least Zweig was Jewish.

The World of Yesterday

Zweig wrote fiction, but The World of Yesterday is his memoir, which elides his personal life almost entirely and focuses on his artistic development as it related to world history. In the book, he paints a nostalgia-tinted picture of Old Vienna in the last days of the Hapsburg dynasty. Despite the nostalgia for a peaceful time when art was everything, he was not uncritical of the repressed, bourgeoise society he grew up in. He was very clear that it was only idyllic in contrast to the war-torn, fascist-dominated time in which he wrote.

The reader only learns of his two marriages through footnotes added by the editor. But he expounds on his friendships with other writers and artists at great lengths. He describes the arts scene in each city he visited, sharing how it had evolved between his first exposure to it and the time of his writing. It made me yearn to sit in a turn of the century cafe in Vienna and reconsider the exuberance of 1930s Berlin.

Although he is modest about his own skill as an artist, there is a healthy dose of name dropping that indicates a pride in his artistic connections. And many of those connections were very politically active. Zweig himself was much more interested in art than in politics. But that focus on things of beauty led to his unpopular position as a staunch pacifist in the first World War. And art is always political, so his own artistic development and output is inevitably intertwined with politics. When he travels to Switzerland to produce a play, he finds a city filled with spies, but also the very reason the play is produced there instead of his own country relates to the political subtext (however subconscious it may have been) of the story.

As of course, politics had and has very real impacts on everyone, whether they “engage” in politics or not. As a Jew, Zweig was eventually forced to flee Austria, and spends the last third of the book as a refugee in first one country and then another. When he was writing “The World of Tomorrow” the US hadn’t even joined WWII yet, and Austrians still considered themselves German. As a German Jew, Zweig was in the uncomfortable position of being a German who hoped for his country’s defeat and depended on the good graces of his country’s enemies for his own security. Zweig’s contemporary perspective was quite different from all the histories later written by victors, and his memoir included a lot of details that probably shouldn’t be forgotten.

Conclusion

I’ve read some criticisms of Zweig that call his writing stuffy and pretentious. And yes, he is proud of his famous friends. But personally, I can’t remember the last time I read a book that felt more like having a conversation with the author. I loved his voice and wished we could have been friends, drinking strong coffee together and talking about art in a crowded Viennese cafe.

Stefan Zweig has been added to the list of authors I will always by when I spot them on the shelves of a secondhand bookstore.

Details

The World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig
Translated from German by Anthea Bell
University of Nebraska Press
462 pages