Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories, by Stefan Zweig – review

Do men or women of the world still exist? Well-educated, they are from families that value taste, manners and intellectual cultivation, and with enough money to allow their children to acquire these qualities; they attend concerts, look at paintings, travel and meet men and woman of distinction. They could, for example, while still young, watch Rodin perfecting his sculpture, write operas with Richard Strauss or help James Joyce find the perfect words for turning something he had written into other languages.

Stefan Zweig was just such a man. He was born in 1881 to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, during the last Golden Age as he put it. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942 in despair at Hitler’s destruction of their civilisation.

Zweig’s abiding masterpiece, in my opinion, and he wrote vastly, is The World of Yesterday, his autobiography of life during the Golden Age — travelling comfortably through the main European capitals, to the United States and as far as India, seeking out what was most valuable for the mind and the senses, and perfecting his own writing.