Ricardo Lugo

But despite being at that time, he was always writing with a correct intuition that civilization can break from one day to the next.

Everything that seems extremely solid can fade at any time.

There are memories of him that were published after his death, called The World of Yesterday.

In German, Die Welt von Gestern.

And if you read them in the purest sense of the word, a duel.

The duel of a European who sees the soil of his land burn his own culture.

The Europe that Stefan Zweig knew, refined, cosmopolitan, cult, was being defeated by fascism and war.

He was running out of what I would call his spiritual home.

A place where the different facets of his person could coexist in harmony with the world.

He defined himself as Austrian, Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist.

Everything, I repeat, enters the First and Second World Wars and in that context he writes this work, Mendel, the one of the books.

published in 1929, which works as an elegy, a moral miniature about the fragility of memory, about how the state could become something military, nationalist, that could crush those who embody the life of the spirit, which was what Embera Zweig felt that he was trying to live.

That's why I mentioned that it was a prophecy, because he doesn't know that the Second World War is going to happen.

But he already sees the most mythical, most human elements of European culture that are failing, that are going to bring a collapse similar to what came later with the Second World War.

Ahora, ¿por qué este libro me da miedo?

Porque es una advertencia para mí personalmente.

Bueno, porque el personaje principal del libro se llama Jacob Mendel, que es un hombre que ama tanto los libros, está tan concentrado en los libros, que cae en una especie de ceguera social.

Se divorcia de la realidad que está allá afuera e inevitablemente va a tener que enfrentarla.

But he's not going to decide when he faces reality, he's going to decide for himself.

And there he will be face to face with bureaucracy, the administrative normality, the seal, the form, the suspicion and eventually the violence.