A long lament for a lost world, a testament to the values of decency, toleration, humanism, and artistic and cultural endeavour.
For it was as an enthusiast for the pan-European cultural project that Zweig found his greatest motivation and, eventually, his greatest pain; never one to be moved by nationalism or ideology of any kind, he was a brave and outspoken pacifist in the first world war but the rise of Hitler represented the absolute, nightmarish opposite of every value he believed in and held dear. Published in 1942.
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