Welcome to Litsy!

This is a collection of essays that reads essentially as a memoir, wherein Zweig details his life as a writer in Vienna and traveling abroad and his meetings and reflections on other artists and their work whom he had struck up friendships with (many it seems). But the real allure of this book for me was to read a first-hand account of culture, politics and daily life in Belle époque Europe, during WWI, the inter-war period and the start of WW2.

@Tanisha_A and me in our natural habitat! Such a shame that the best people live so far away! My heart will forever remember our weekend in Vienna ❤️ hopefully we‘ll meet again soon! Litsy just has the best people as members🥰

The past weekend I met @Tanisha_A in vienna. We went bookshopping, saw amazing art, ate cake and had great conversations- all thanks to Litsy! I‘m so grateful that an app like this made this friendship possible!

We bought the tagged book and will buddy read it some day 🥰

The past weekend I met @Tanisha_A in vienna. We went bookshopping, saw amazing art, ate cake and had great conversations- all thanks to Litsy! I‘m so grateful that an app like this made this friendship possible!

We bought the tagged book and will buddy read it some day 🥰

A personal account of what it was like to watch your country slide into war (twice). Plus lots of name dropping about the artists and writers he knew.

...when has reason ever had the upper hand of your own feelings? It has not been any help that for almost half-a-century I trained my heart to beat as the heart of a citizen of the world. On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders.

It is difficult to rid yourself, in only a few weeks, of thirty or forty years of private belief that the world is a good place.

Not one of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of my works... can be bought in Germany today. Anyone who still has a copy of one of them keeps it carefully concealed..... in France, Italy... where my books used to be widely read in translation, they are also banned today by Hitler‘s orders. I am now a writer who, as Grillparzer said, “walks behind his corpse in his own lifetime”.

Image from an ebay 1st ed online.😍

I will never forget what operatic performances were like in those days of our greatest need. You groped you way through dimly lit streets, for street lighting was feeling the effects of the fuel shortage, you paid for your seat in the gallery with a bundle of banknotes... You sat in your overcoat, because the auditorium was unheated .... But then the conductor raised his baton, the curtains parted, and it was more wonderful than ever before.

And all around was the throng of those whose loyalties were divided... families where sons were fighting on opposing sides, and where parents on both sides were waiting for letters. Here, what little they had was confiscated; there, they lost their jobs. All these people between two camps had taken refuge in Switzerland. ... Afraid of compromising those on both sides, they avoided speaking either French or German, and stole about like shadows...