4 ideas
Zweig names pre-1914 Habsburg Vienna the 'world of security': a society where the currency was stable, progress was assumed to be continuous, and a man could plan his whole life, pension, and inheritance with confidence. Because stability had held for generations, people mistook a contingent political arrangement for a law of nature. That belief made them unable to imagine collapse, and so unable to prepare for it.
Zweig argues that before 1914 he travelled to India and America without a passport, and that the passports, visas, and permits that came after the war show how far the state had taken over the individual. Each new document requirement moves freedom of movement from a default right to a privilege the state grants, and the person without papers becomes a suspect. For Zweig, how easily an ordinary person can cross a border is a direct measure of a civilization's liberty.
Zweig describes how Austrians and Germans read each new Nazi measure as the worst that could happen. People adjusted their sense of normal step by step instead of adding up the danger and leaving. Because each outrage arrived as a small increment, it never set off the alarm that the whole program would have set off if announced at once. Seen this way, the question to ask is where a trend is heading, not whether today's step can be tolerated.
Zweig was a Jewish Austrian who was among the most translated authors in the world. Anticipating the Anschluss, he left Salzburg in 1934 for London, then went to New York and on to Brazil as his books were burned and his nationality became meaningless. In February 1942 in Petrópolis, a day after mailing the finished memoir to his publisher, he and his wife Lotte took their lives together. His farewell note said that at sixty he lacked the strength to begin again after losing his 'spiritual homeland,' Europe.