Message/warning for today--Stefan Zweig's work The World Of Yesterday, i.e., pre Nazi Europe

[bobbieinok]

Zweig was a world famous author of Jewish-Austrian background.

The book is about the international, European world of literature, of the intellect before it was all destroyed by the Nazis.

Zweig and his 2nd wife fled the Nazis 1st to England, then to the US, and finally to Brazil. There they committed suicide, believing that what the Nazis had destroyed and were destroying was permanently gone and could never be replaced.

Zweig was not the only internationaly famous German or Austrian intellectual who committed suicide in despair at the Nazi destruction of a civilization it had taken centuries to create.

[bobbieinok]

1. Ernst Toller and Walter Benjamin were 2 who committed suicide

Toller was a left-wing playwright. He committed suicide in New York when he learned his brother and sister had been sent to concentration camps.

Benjamin was internationally known as a philosopher and literary critic. He committed suicide on the French-Spanish border while trying to escape the Germans taking over France.