Romain Rolland. Thomas Mann. H. G. Wells. Hugo von Hofmannsthal. James Joyce. Jane Addams. Arthur Schnitzler. Richard Strauss. Maurice Ravel. Béla Bartók. Arturo Toscanini.

Question: What do they all have in common?

Answer: They are some—by no means all—of the famous names that appeared in the guestbook at Stefan Zweig’s home in Salzburg between the World Wars, a home that fulfilled a dream of his by becoming “a European house.”

We find them all, together with other famous acquaintances—Herzl, Rilke, Freud, von Suttner—between the covers of Zweig’s extraordinary memoir, The World of Yesterday. It is as if Zweig had captured the spirit of the Viennese coffeehouse, simultaneously intellectual and convivial, and spread it across the entire European continent in a restless search for a border-crossing fraternity of the mind.

Has there ever been a more thoroughly European writer than Stefan Zweig? From Austria to Germany, Brussels, France, England, Switzerland, Italy, even the Soviet Union—The World of Yesterday relates Zweig’s travels back and forth across the continent, his countless friendships, his literary efforts and his translations, his endless affirmation and encouragement of other artists. Perhaps no other book so successfully captures the dynamism and interconnectedness of European culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Zweig’s memoir portrays a tableau of living personalities to match his own famous autograph collection, which contained handwritten manuscript pages from da Vinci, Balzac, Bach, Mozart, Goethe, and Beethoven, a pantheon of European culture crossing time and space.

As Zweig describes his remarkable network of acquaintances, a veil of elegiac melancholy hangs over his words.  For we know where it is all heading. The World of Yesterday is ultimately tragic, because the “world of security” in which Zweig grew up, during the late decades of the Habsburg Empire, is careening toward its destruction in two terrible wars. The tragedy is not simply cultural or political, it is also deeply personal: Zweig finished the memoir less than a year before he committed suicide together with his second wife, Lotte, in Petrópolis, Brazil, his dream of European fellowship crushed by war and exile.

Somehow, Zweig maintained his commitment to personal freedom, a freedom of the spirit, up until the end. “For me,” he writes, “personal liberty was the most important thing on earth.” His sense of that liberty was perhaps too purely internal. “Flee,” he thinks to himself late in the book, “take refuge in your innermost self ... where you are no more than your own being, not the citizen of a state, not a plaything of this infernal game...” It is doubtful that this innermost self can remain free without a more active sense of citizenship than Zweig displays, though one can readily understand his inward turn in the face of what he experienced.

The memoir’s sad ending, however, by no means negates the cheerful, even optimistic spirit that radiates from the pages of Zweig’s book. It is impossible to read The World of Yesterday and not be inspired by his boundless enthusiasm for artistic creativity and an international republic of letters. Zweig’s spirit lives on today in every European striving to build a European people—not just a state, not just governing institutions, but a genuine “we, the people.”

Tucked between pages 140 and 141 of my own copy of The World of Yesterday is a faded but still legible receipt: « 14 March 2016, Café Landtmann, Universitätsring 4, Vienna. » One of the great Viennese coffeehouses, it existed already in Zweig’s day. One imagines he must have visited it sometime. I appear to have paid five and a half Euros for an Einspänner. There would be worse ways to honor Zweig’s memory than by gathering in a Viennese coffeehouse with friends from around the continent to reinvigorate the spirit of intellectual brotherhood that he so loved.