AFTER this bleakest of years for Europe, glib talk of the 1930s is in the air. The bonds of trust between nations are fraying, and the old saw that the European Union advances only in times of crisis is being tested to destruction. Populists are on the march. Britain is on the way out. And Europe’s neighbours are either menacing it (Russia) or threatening to flood it with refugees. One hyperventilating Eurocrat recently confided to your columnist that he feared another Franco-German war.
Small wonder that gloomy Europeans are starting to dust off their Stefan Zweig. A prolific and, in his time, wildly popular author of novels, biographies and political tracts, Zweig incarnated the interwar ideal of the cultivated European. A Jew who saw his books burned by the Nazis, he was exiled first from his Austrian home, in 1934, and then from Europe. Zweig’s literary star was eclipsed by contemporaries such as Thomas Mann and Joseph Roth. But his witness to Europe’s catastrophe, and his dedication to the cause of its union, have helped restore him to popular affection. (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”, a 2014 film inspired by Zweig’s writing, may also have had a…
