‘In the Future of Yesterday' Review: Stefan Zweig's Lost World
Stefan Zweig was probably the world's most famous living Austrian before the rise of Adolf Hitler. Among the most widely translated authors of the 1920s and '30s, Zweig specialized in novellas of doomed romance whose titles sound like prompts for a Freudian case study ('Fear,' 'Compulsion,' 'Confusion') and biographies that insert the speculations of psychoanalysis into the shell of heroic lives ('Montaigne,' 'Balzac,' 'Amerigo').
In his 1934 biography of Erasmus, Zweig presents the Dutch humanist as a European without borders, a moderate in an age of fanatics. Erasmus, Zweig writes, is a 'brilliant star' who was once widely read but whose works now sit 'undisturbed upon the shelves of libraries.' The English title 'Erasmus of Rotterdam' masks the German original's admission that Zweig saw Erasmus as a study in failure: 'Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam.'
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