Woeful exile …

… Stefan Zweig, European Man by Joseph Epstein | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The political victory of Adolf Hitler in 1933 meant the personal defeat of Stefan Zweig. With fascism in the saddle, Zweig’s books were banned in Germany and Austria and often burned by fascist youth; he lost his house in Salzburg and with it much of his collection of rare literary and musical manuscripts and artifacts (he owned, among other notable items, Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen); and his first marriage collapsed. Zweig was an internationalist by instinct and political philosophy—that is, a believer in the compatibility of all nations—but Hitler’s Germany put paid to that dream. On the attack throughout Europe, Germany, a nation to which, Zweig said, “good order had always seemed more important than liberty and justice,” had turned Stefan Zweig from a contented cosmopolitan into a woeful exile. “It is over,” Zweig wrote in his diary, “Europe finished. Our world destroyed. Now we are truly homeless.”