An Austrian, a Jew, a writer, a humanist and a pacifist. That was how the author Stefan Zweig described himself. But he was, above all, a European, at ease wherever he travelled on the continent, part of a crowd in which nationalities and languages comfortably mingled.
Zweig wrote his searing memoir, The World of Yesterday, in exile from the Nazis, as Europe tore itself apart for the second time in less than half a century. His book is never more poignant than when he reflects on the gulf between his cosmopolitan life and the narrow national instincts of millions of others.
Zweig’s European cultural milieu – he describes his meetings with WB Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke and James Joyce – no longer has the intellectual weight and influence that it did.