As a kid I never wanted to visit Vienna. I’m not sure why. I think I associated it with boring, gray skies, mediocre food, and a lack of liveliness. So when my uncle proposed visiting the capital of what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I wasn’t overly excited. But I sure didn’t return home feeling the same way.

I never knew Vienna was founded as a Roman city, and functioned as a garrison on the Danube for centuries. I’m not sure how that chapter ended, but something must have gone wrong, because today, most of the city seems to be speaking German of some description. Be that as it may, the new occupants left very little of the Roman monuments, and instead replaced them with a much different city.

Instead of seeing the Danube as a border between the civilised and barbarian world, the Viennese saw the waterway for what it really was: a vital trade route through the heart of Central Europe, and Vienna its most important stopover, nestled between the snow-covered mountain ranges and fertile, trade-inducing plains. 

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, a certain family got hold of the city and the surrounding fiefs. These Habsburgs quickly figured out that if they married into all of the European royal families, things might go well for them. Eventually they had to start marrying each other, with less elegant consequences, but by that time, a continent spanning empire had been born.

No one has ever painted the city he loved as beautifully as Stefan Zweig depicts the magical cosmos of Vienna in the late nineteenth century. His flowing prose retells the story of his childhood, youth, and adolescent explorations of a place built by Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Slovaks and Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, and of course his own community of Jewish city dwellers. I hope I didn’t forget anyone there. 

His love letter to Vienna, melancholically titled ‘The World of Yesterday’ affectionately explores a city that nurtured musical geniuses like Mozart, Schubert, and Strauss, but also the world-famous Klimt and his many associates. At the same time, eccentric figures like Freud or the fragile Rilke formed part of his inner circle. It is stimulating to experience Zweig’s familiarity with such grand names through his eloquent stories. 

Quite crushingly, the book slowly unravels just like Vienna did after first the fall of the Empire, then extreme instability of the Great Depression, and finally the humanity destroying rise of Nazism. Well aware of where the world was heading, Zweig left his city years before the hammer fell, fleeing to the far-off and warm solace of Brazil. But I believe the death of his magnificent home, the unmaking of its cultural whirlpools and the fading of its vibrancy, was a blow too heavy to bear for Zweig. 

Stefan posted the manuscript of his memoir to his publisher in February of 1942. One day later, he was dead.