Journeys

Description

By (author) Zweig, Stefan; Translated by Stone Will

Short /annotation
A collection of the great writer”s observations, made during his travels across the Europe he loved so much.


When I am on a journey, all ties suddenly fall away. I feel myself quite unburdened, disconnected, free – There is something in it marvellously uplifting and invigorating. Whole past epochs suddenly return: nothing is lost, everything still full of inception, enticement.For the insatiably curious and ardent Europhile Stefan Zweig, travel was both a necessary cultural education and a personal balm for the depression he experienced when rooted in one place for too long. He spent much of his life weaving between the countries of Europe, visiting authors and friends, exploring the continent in the heyday of international rail travel.Comprising a lifetime”s observations on Zweig”s travels in Europe, this collection can be dipped into or savoured at length, and paints a rich and sensitive picture of Europe before the Second World War.

Review quote
Zweig”s accumulated historical and cultural studies [are] almost too impressive to take in

Review quote
A fascinating glimpse into interwar Europe that still feels fresh today.

Review quote
[The pieces] blend travel writing with a journalistic dedication

Biographical note
Stefan Zweig was one of the most popular and widely translated writers of the early twentieth century. Born into an Austrian-Jewish family in 1881, he became a leading figure in Vienna”s cosmopolitan cultural world and was famed for his gripping novellas and vivid psychological biographies.In 1934, following the Nazis” rise to power, Zweig fled Austria, first for England, where he wrote his famous novel Beware of Pity, then the United States and finally Brazil. It was here that he completed his acclaimed autobiography The World of Yesterday, a lament for the golden age of a Europe destroyed by two world wars. The articles and speeches in Messages from a Lost World were written as Zweig, a pacifist and internationalist, witnessed this destruction and warned of the threat to his beloved Europe. On 23 February 1942, Zweig and his second wife Lotte were found dead, following an apparent double suicide.

Excerpt
The Season in Ostend
The season in Ostend signifies a colourful and unbroken alternation
of festivals and public events. For all who frequent this,
the largest and most elegant among the Belgian coastal resorts,
the motivation, officially at least, is that which otherwise incites
most people to visit bathing resorts: the need for peace and
relaxation. The person who, through the course of a year, has
the sense of being dragged through the stimulating and thrilling
round of metropolitan pleasures, who feels the pulse of life and
all their resilience stretched to the limit and is, one might say,
bloated with culture and refinement, becomes accustomed to
profiting from summer weeks of harmonious relaxation in the
calm contemplation of nature cut off from these energies. But
for the clientele of Ostend it’s different. For them, this summer
halt is not a rest, a chance to switch off, on the contrary it’s only
another shining link in the endless chain of society distractions,
an ersatz for the broiling boulevards of the metropolis, for their
theatres, their festivals, their gardens, which summer renders
unapproachable. Little by little Ostend has become the unofficial
rendezvous-location for the real and bogus aristocracy that
one sees floating like a spume above the waves of capitals,
everywhere encountering and recognising itself, and for whom
a home-town is merely a station in transit from which they
seek to reach the great international centres of pleasure. Oste