Zweig wrote this memoir in the midst of the Second World War. He would commit suicide before its end. He grew up in a prosperous Jewish family, at perhaps the pinnacle of the Habsburg Empire, in the heart of its capital, Vienna. “Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.” He was also raised with art at his bosom, “Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy…. It was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance…. It was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese…. It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights, because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone in the city.”
Zweig first moved to Paris shortly after finishing university and quickly ran in a bohemian circle. Of his friends, he remembers, “They were not ashamed to live in a modest way so that they could think freely and boldly in their artistic work…. No money was wasted on prestige and outward show.” Eventually moving back to Salzburg, he still traveled back and forth between all the great European cities. Zweig reminisces on his greatest writing mentors, “Think how inspiring it was for us young people to be in the presence of such stern servants and guardians of language, admirably true to themselves, loving only the resonant word, a word meant not for today and the newspapers but for what would last and endure…. One lived in Germany, another in France, yet another in Italy, but they all inhabited the same homeland, for they really lived only in their poetry…. Each also made a work of art out of his own life.”
The interwar years were a time of turmoil for Zweig and his family. With the rise of Hitler and Nazism next door in Germany, Zweig realized his time living in Austria was numbered. “For the first time I really came to understand the eternal character of the professional revolutionary who feels that he is raised from his personal insignificance merely by adopting a stance of opposition.” On persevering in his craft, Zweig offers, “Art was never more popular in Austria than at that time of chaos. Money had let us down; we sensed that what was eternal in us was all that would last.” Eventually emigrating permanently to London, he still stayed away from involvement in politics, “Nothing in me has been stronger since my early youth than an instinctive wish to stay free and independent.” Zweig concludes, “If there is one new art that we have had to learn, those of us who have been hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art and all collections, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy…. In the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.”
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