Stefan Zweig was a famous and widely read Viennese author of Jewish descent born into a bourgeois industrial family during the waning days of the Habsburg Empire. In this memoir, he characterizes himself as a cosmopolitan intellectual deeply committed to supporting the world of arts and letters, a friend to other like-minded thinkers, a reluctant witness to the horrors of World Wars I and II, and an unhappy exile.

His family’s affluence and his youth in Vienna both greatly shaped the intellectual and writer that he was to become, for he came of age during a time when education and intellect were valued among his social circle of bourgeois Jewish Viennese, even more than financial well-being. He remarks early in his memoir that business and industry, necessary as they were to secure a family’s financial stability, carried with them the stigma of overwork and the survivalist character of Europe’s ghettos and shtetls. It was seen as the highest form of success for the sons of the family to obtain doctorates, and Zweig, as a second son not destined to run his family business, was allowed to pursue whichever course of study he found the most interesting.