Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.
― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday(1)
Reading those words now, words that Stefan Zweig wrote in his memoir, a memoir he send to his publisher one day before taking his own life in 1942, is strangely eerie. He, the Jewish intellectual who fled the Nazis in 1934 and spend the last decade of his life in exile; who reminisced about the “golden age of security”(2) in Europe before World War I; who sought to oppose the nationalism of his time with a “consciously apolitical Europeanness”(3) – he could not hold onto his optimism long enough to see the “dawn after the long night”(4). He bequeathed that hope to his friends, in his farewell letter, and told them that he, all too impatient, would go ahead.(5)
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