In Austria and England including Australia, (Australia continues to talk about the heroism) men, women and children, danced in the streets with their beautiful uniforms and swords, flowers and dreams of romance, imagining war as a great opera or novel. War is pure evil causing suffering for all, there’s nothing virtuous about killing one’s fellows. Zweig tells the reader from an Austrians point of view, his historical milieu as a young man and old.
Austria and particularly Vienna, pre and post WW1, was the “hub” of artistic, philosophical and literary achievement: Freud, Brahms, at al. Zweig describes this extraordinary “epoch” as “first witness”, because as a popular writer, he met and became friends with many of these luminaries throughout Europe.
This narrative is sad and disturbing.
Zweig crossed paths with many historical significant individuals, writing, traveling to the States, South America, and even Texas…all the publishers. He was on a lecture tour, hearing in a cab on a crackling radio, travelling through Houston, a strange accident, the rants of Hitler before nailing the Check’s to then punish Poland, pushing the Brit’s to declare War.
Zweig knowing this evil understood again, a terrible war was happening again.
A true artist, this narrative gives us a gateway, a view into a small window of a moment in life that is important.
Follow the Money!
Reading closely, Stefan Zweig made an important observation while WW2 was at its beginnings and rising.
Despite the poverty, the fascists had new uniforms, new trucks and guns before Hitler came to power. . Zweig asks: “Who was supplying those uniforms, who is paying for them, who is organising these obviously young rustics to go and fight their own legally elected represented body, the parliament in power?” (P. 424)
Good question!
Fascism like football is a sponsored exercise.
An eye witness account of War and the dilemma war imposes into the view, the inner world of an artist, a writer, a man and his epoch.
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