The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography

As the war raged and many of his friends produced writing that was markedly nationalist in character, Zweig recalls feeling duty-bound to speak out on behalf of “a common European culture” (261). He published an essay to that end titled “To Friends Abroad,” and although it was heavily altered by censors, it was widely read. His friend Romain Rolland, living in Switzerland and working for the Red Cross, read it and was moved to write to Zweig. He was happy to hear from a like-minded fellow intellectual and wrote another essay detailing his friend’s heroic efforts to help the wounded, entitled “The Heart of Europe.” Romain Rolland himself spoke out against the war and the way that nationalism had supplanted cosmopolitanism both in intellectual circles and in general public sentiment. Zweig is struck by how much more weight the words of writers carried during World War I than during World War II, and laments the loss of a class of public intellectuals still committed to pan-European unity.

The drama that Zweig wrote while touring war-ravaged Austria-Hungary, called Jeremiah, was better received than he anticipated, given how at odds the book was with prevailing sentiment about the war.