The World of Yesterday - Memoires of a European (2009) [= Die Welt von gestern (1942)]

The World of Yesterday: Memoires of a European (German title Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers) is the memoir of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. 

It has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire. He started writing it in 1934 when, anticipating Anschluss & Nazi persecution, he uprooted himself from Austria to England & later to Brazil. 

He posted the manuscript, typed by his second wife Lotte Altmann, to the publisher the day before they both committed suicide in February 1942. The book was first published in Stockholm (1942), as Die Welt von Gestern.

The book describes life in Vienna at the start of the 20th century with detailed anecdotes It depicts the dying days of Austria-Hungary under Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, including the system of education & the sexual ethics prevalent at the time, the same that provided the backdrop to the emergence of psychoanalysis. Zweig also describes the stability of Viennese society after centuries of Habsburg rule.

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STEFAN ZWEIG (1881-1942) was born in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He was first known as a poet & translator, then as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, & was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok, and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he moved to London, where he wrote his only novel, Beware of Pity. He later moved on to Bath, taking British citizenship after the outbreak of WWII. After a short period in NYC, Zweig settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he