“The world of yesterday”: the cultural values of Habsburg Vienna
The time of Habsburg Vienna contained in the book “The world of yesterday” by Stefan Zwieg, published by Oscar Mondadori.
Milan – Narrating its own existence ne “The world of yesterday” (Oscar Mondadori, pp. 349, Euro 13) Stefan Zwieg defines at the same time a cross-section of Habsburg Vienna whose cultural level by the entire European intelligentsia.
Posthumously in 194 books4, two years after the double suicide published, a place where he was exiled due to Nazi persecutions that went so far as to set his own on fire, “The world of yesterday” proceeds step by step comparing three generations in a succession of historical and social passages where young people, in an aura to give to good manners the everyday life of common life, measured their knowledge through literature, theater, applied arts, up to the total disintegration due to Hitler’s seizure of power.
The systems of oppression put in place by the führer, start with the prohibition to start on the benches for Jews and travelers, continuing in a more orchestrated way towards the opponents who, come write Zwieg “It had to be much stronger hands to push this movement forward. The uniforms were in fact brand new and the assault troops had an amazing fleet of impeccable new cars, motorcycles and trucks ”.
Times change but for some the methods remain unchanged, iThe Mayor of Lucca in an ordinance of 25 August, taking urban decor as a pretext, inhibits the possibility for anyone to sit on the “street furniture” between these steps of the churches which, as Professor Tommasori specifies in an article that appeared in the Fatto Quotidiano of 9 September, since the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance had the purpose of offering rest to travelers.
Zwieg’s lucidity of analysis shows, at the end of the text, the awareness and resignation of the inexorable disappearance of those values that were a unique moment of cultural stature at that time and never reached until today.
Stefan Zweig – “The world of yesterday” (Oscar Mondadori, pp. 349, Euro 13)
Mauro Bianchini
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