Stefan Zweig's memoir, written in exile in 1941 as the Nazi regime destroyed everything he had known, reconstructs the cosmopolitan European culture of his youth with elegiac precision. Born in Vienna in 1881 to a prosperous Jewish family, Zweig came of age in a world where educated Europeans moved freely across borders, where artists and intellectuals formed international communities, and where progress seemed inevitable. His memoir captures that world's texture: the coffee houses, the opera, the libraries, the sense that culture transcended national boundaries. Zweig became one of Europe's most popular writers, knew the major cultural figures of his era, and observed the catastrophe of World War I, which he initially failed to foresee. The book's second half traces the rise of fascism and Zweig's gradual realization that the civilization he loved was being destroyed. He chronicles Nazi book burnings, the annexation of Austria, and his flight through exile until the writing of the memoir itself in Brazil. Shortly after completing it, Zweig and his wife took their own lives. The book is thus both a portrait of a vanished world and a document of despair, written by someone who saw European civilization's suicide firsthand. Zweig's prose, translated by various hands, conveys both the glamour of his lost world and his grief at its destruction.