Stefan Zweig: la lotta per la fraternità spirituale

Abstract

The Viennese Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) wrote his autobiography The World of Yesterday in exile in the early forties, soon before his suicide. The book can be seen as Zweig’s war memoirs. During the First World War the writer, a vehement anti-nationalist and pacifist opponent of the war, occupied a post with the War Archives, and he accepted a mission to collect proclamations issued near the front, in Galicia. In this book and in several writings he described horrific visions of the wounded and the dying. His only weapon against the war was a spiritual struggle through literature. In 1917, during the Great War, he produced the successful anti-war drama Jeremiah.