averyterrible:

“Stefan Zweig, who was nineteen in 1900, has left a picture of his carefree youth. His family was prosperous and indulgent and let him do whatever he pleased at the university in Vienna. […] In the last thing he ever wrote, The World of Yesterday, he chose to call the time of his youth before the Great War ‘The Golden Age of Security’. For the middle classes in particular, their world was just like the Hapsburg monarchy, seemingly stable and permanent. Savings were secure and property was something to be passed down safely from one generation to the next. Humanity, especially European humanity, was clearly moving to a higher plane of development. Societies was not only increasingly prosperous and better organized, but their members were kinder and more rational. To Zweig’s parents and their friends the past was something to be deplored while the future was increasingly bright. ‘People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches, our fathers were unfailingly convinced of the binding power of tolerance and conciliation.’ (At the start of 1941 Zweig, by now in exile in Brazil, sent his manuscript to his publisher. A few weeks later he and his second wife committed suicide.)”

— Margaret Macmillan, The War That Ended Peace
(via st-just)