Stefan Zweig has built a brilliant literary work on nostalgia and amazement. Nostalgia for the old world lost during the Great War (1914-1918), amazement at the new nationalist and militarist world which emerged subsequently. We can’t say he had a bad life. His most creatively fruitful years were the “Roaring Twenties,” the frenzied decade that led to the crisis of 1929 and the horrors that followed.
Today, many voices are heard that echo Zweig’s nostalgia and amazement. Current nostalgia refers to the post-war West and the Cold War or, more intensely, to those years after 1989 when liberal democracies, globalization and the speculative economy seemed to have definitively triumphed. For those who believed and believe in certain democratic values, certain economic priorities and certain international rules, the evolution of history becomes almost incomprehensible.
