The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography

Thinking back to the many publications he produced during this era, he is struck by how little they mean to him in the present day. He wrote for many of the “newspapers of the Reich” and was well regarded (201), but he finds little value in his work during that time. He recalls his friendship with Walther Rathenau, a target of the German Reich who was assassinated not long after Zweig’s last meeting with him. The two had struck up a friendship over literature and Zweig recalls helping to get Rathenau published.

Rathenau had encouraged Zweig to “look beyond Europe” (205), and it was because of that advice that Zweig first traveled to India. There, he was struck by the brutality of the caste system and the country’s extreme poverty. He also met a German military man named Karl Haushofer, who was at the time engaged in building the project of a “Greater Germany.” Zweig was surprised to later learn that Haushofer was a friend of Hitler’s. Although Zweig does not now think that his friend had been responsible for the worst aspects of Hitler’s ideology, he is chagrined that many of his ideas were used to provide moral justification for Hitler’s agenda.