In 1941, Stefan Zweig released his memoirs The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern) for publication, one of the last manuscripts he wrote. In place of a merely self-centered description of his own life, he drew the personal portrait of a vanished era, a “world of emotional security” as he put it, which he sadly mourned in the face of a present in the midst of war and an uncertain future. “It’s out of despair that I am writing the story of my life”, he wrote to his colleague, the writer Max Hermann-Neiße, in May 1940. “I can’t concentrate on my work. Therefore I want to at least leave a document of what we believed in and what we lived for. In these times a testimony is perhaps more important than a work of art.”

Structurally, Zweig’s memoirs are based above all on the “three lives” he purported to have lived until then: in the bourgeois world of old Vienna before World War I; the period of his great success as a writer and then the years of exile from 1936 onwards. To a large extent devoid of private details (his two wives aren’t once mentioned by name), The World of Yesterday appeared a few months after his suicide on 23 February 1942 and was published by Bermann-Fischer in Stockholm.