Stefan Zweig, Viennese and patient of Sigmund Freud: one of Zweig's last books, written when he was already in exile, Die Welt von Gestern, is a depiction of his youth in pre WWI Vienna which is one of the best in terms of atmosphere and description you're likely to get. Not nostalgic in the usual sense - he very much points out the decay and the factors contributing to the up and coming war catastrophe - which he experienced, and which changed Zweig in a life long radical pacifist, btw, which in turn made him massively unpopular with his fellow exiles in WWII, because he didn't want to make a Hitler exception - but there is still a sense of longing there for an irretrievably lost world (again, this was written in WWII, and he had to assume that the Nazis had destroyed the Viennese Jewish artistic and intellectual culture from which Zweig himself had come for good), and he captures the charm as well as the decay perfectly.
Emil Ludwig: Not his play or short prose portrait about Fritz, though the Voltaire portrait in the same book is quite good. (With the caveat of outdated research.) I liked some of Ludwig's miniature portraits well enough - the one about Byron, for example, got me interested in Byron when I was in school - but his biographies, like the one of Bismarck, are way too hero worshipping for my taste. And the miniatures, written as they are in direct competition to Stefan Zweig's bestselling Sternstunden der Menschheit, don't manage quite the same style. (Otoh, Emil Ludwig, also an eventual exile, definitely had no problem declaring that war against Hitler: More than okay! Go get him!)
Speaking of Sternstunden der Menschheit, I'm not sure whether you'd like the whole book, but the story about Scott and the race to the Pole should be in your interest. If you like to try your hand on listening to spoken German, here is this story (and this story only) read by a very good actor. The entire text of Sternstunden der Menschheit is here; the Scott and Amundsen story starts on page 100.
So when he gets his walk-on part in Zweig, and he's not successful, and Zweig is rolling his eyes at him, my immediate reaction was: "Well, that's different."
As the reviewer said, in both cases (American and French perspective), Lafayette is very sympathetic - he isn't one of those young revolutionaries who later become reactionaries, he stayed the hell away from both the extreme Jacobinism which led to the Terreur and Bonapartism (without, it has to be said, making Napoleon his enemy; Napoleon had demanded his release from Austrian prison along with everyone else's, but when Lafayette thereafter refused to work for him and retired to the countryside, he accepted this); post-Napoleon, when he got active again, he didn't became a reactionary, either, while most of Europe did, but to the end of his life tried (in vain) to find a way to steer France into the constitutional monarchy plus parliamentary republic of his dreams.
But since none of what he wanted to accomplish for France actually worked out in the way he wanted it to after the first six months or so of the French Revolution, he managed to piss off both sides (the monarchists and the Republicans) in the early French Revolution by his attempt to save the completely not grateful Royal Family from themselves, and both he and Beaumarchais got completely screwed over by the new US not paying any of its debts to France (courtesy of what the musical Hamilton lets is hero say, that the contracts with France and all the debts had been with Louis XVI.) - well, he's more Don Quixote than Lancelot from a French perspective.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: Zweig
Date: 2021-09-05 02:06 pm (UTC)Emil Ludwig: Not his play or short prose portrait about Fritz, though the Voltaire portrait in the same book is quite good. (With the caveat of outdated research.) I liked some of Ludwig's miniature portraits well enough - the one about Byron, for example, got me interested in Byron when I was in school - but his biographies, like the one of Bismarck, are way too hero worshipping for my taste. And the miniatures, written as they are in direct competition to Stefan Zweig's bestselling Sternstunden der Menschheit, don't manage quite the same style. (Otoh, Emil Ludwig, also an eventual exile, definitely had no problem declaring that war against Hitler: More than okay! Go get him!)
Speaking of Sternstunden der Menschheit, I'm not sure whether you'd like the whole book, but the story about Scott and the race to the Pole should be in your interest. If you like to try your hand on listening to spoken German, here is this story (and this story only) read by a very good actor. The entire text of Sternstunden der Menschheit is here; the Scott and Amundsen story starts on page 100.
So when he gets his walk-on part in Zweig, and he's not successful, and Zweig is rolling his eyes at him, my immediate reaction was: "Well, that's different."
As the reviewer said, in both cases (American and French perspective), Lafayette is very sympathetic - he isn't one of those young revolutionaries who later become reactionaries, he stayed the hell away from both the extreme Jacobinism which led to the Terreur and Bonapartism (without, it has to be said, making Napoleon his enemy; Napoleon had demanded his release from Austrian prison along with everyone else's, but when Lafayette thereafter refused to work for him and retired to the countryside, he accepted this); post-Napoleon, when he got active again, he didn't became a reactionary, either, while most of Europe did, but to the end of his life tried (in vain) to find a way to steer France into the constitutional monarchy plus parliamentary republic of his dreams.
But since none of what he wanted to accomplish for France actually worked out in the way he wanted it to after the first six months or so of the French Revolution, he managed to piss off both sides (the monarchists and the Republicans) in the early French Revolution by his attempt to save the completely not grateful Royal Family from themselves, and both he and Beaumarchais got completely screwed over by the new US not paying any of its debts to France (courtesy of what the musical Hamilton lets is hero say, that the contracts with France and all the debts had been with Louis XVI.) - well, he's more Don Quixote than Lancelot from a French perspective.