I’d heard a bit about Stefan Zweig but I’d never read any of his work. Ted Gioia’s review of The World of Yesterday certainly makes me a bit more likely to pick up a copy:

Photo from The Honest Broker

My most recent find is Stefan Zweig’s account of how Vienna went from nineteenth century elegance, prosperity and cultural flourishing to warmongering and hyperinflation. His book The World of Yesterday may be the single best memoir from a survivor of societal collapse from the 20th century — and deserves to be far better known.

I call Zweig a survivor, but that’s not entirely true. He somehow managed to stay alive during World War I (not an easy task for a young man in Central Europe), and the subsequent economic crisis. But World War II forced him into exile, and he committed suicide in Brazil in 1942.

He was a broken man by then — and he feared Hitler was too powerful to stop. So Zweig, one of the greatest writers and thinkers of his generation, ended it all with an overdose of pills.

Just a few years earlier, Zweig had gained renown as the most widely translated contemporary author in Europe. In Germany, his books sold 20,000 copies on the first day — even before a single advertisement had appeared. But that now changed.

“Not a single one [of my books] is available in Germany today,” he lamented at the end of his life. “Those who still possess a copy keep it carefully hidden.” And the same was true in France, Italy and other countries under fascist control.

Zweig is best known today as the inspiration behind Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel. “It’s basically plagiarism”, the director has admitted. But Zweig ought to be remembered more for his writings, especially this final work from his pen.

Stefan Zweig is now remembered as the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

His fiction is also sadly under-appreciated. And it’s very readable — Zweig was a specialist in short novels with fast-paced plots. I highly recommend 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman, and Chess as starting points. Zweig also had a knack for mini-biographies (see, for example, his stellar book on Montaigne).

The day before he died, he mailed his manuscript of The World of Yesterday to a publisher. It was released posthumously, and is now recognized as a defining document in how things go bad. Over the course of 500 pages, Zweig starts with the peace, prosperity, and cultural flourishing of the final years of the Habsburg Empire, and then shows, step by step, how a healthy, vital society self-destructed.

The entire book is well worth reading. I will only discuss a small part of it here — covering the hyperinflation following World War I. But this book is so rich in observations and telling details, I could easily devote several articles to it without coming close to exhausting its riches.

Zweig lived through the currency collapse twice — first in Austria (where he lived across the road from an odd young man named Adolf Hitler), when the crown devalued rapidly. Then he moved to Germany, where hyperinflation was even worse.

The stories he tells are so fanciful, you might think he was writing a fable in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider his story of beer-swilling tourists.

The story starts when the Austrian currency collapses in value. Germans quickly learn how to take advantage of this, by crossing the border to buy up cheap merchandise — but with unforeseen consequences:

Finally, at the instigation of the German government, a border guard was appointed to prevent all consumer goods from being bought in the cheaper Salzburg instead of in the home stores … But one article remained free, which could not be confiscated: the beer that one had in the body.

And the beer-drinking Bavarians calculated from day to day on the exchange rate slip whether, as a result of the devaluation of the crown, they could drink five or six or ten liters of beer in Salzburg for the same price they had to pay at home for a single liter.

A more splendid lure could not be imagined, and so crowds of women and children moved over from neighboring Freilassing and Reichenhall to afford the luxury of swilling as much beer as their stomachs could hold. Every evening the station was a veritable pandemonium of drunken, bawling, spitting hordes of people; some who overloaded themselves had to be carried to the carriages on the trolleys usually used to transport suitcases …

Of course the happy Bavarians had no idea that they were in for a terrible revenge. For when the crown stabilized and the mark, on the other hand, plummeted in astronomical proportions, the Austrians crossed over from the same station to get cheaply drunk in their turn, and the same spectacle began a second time, but in the opposite direction.

This imbalance between currencies created other surreal scenes.

Incredible as the fact may seem, I can corroborate it as a witness that the famous luxury Hotel de l’Europe in Salzburg was for a long time rented out entirely to English unemployed people who, thanks to the abundant English unemployment benefits, lived here more cheaply than in their slums at home.