Ricardo Lugo

And for a humanist character like him, that was like an amputation.

He once said, the language in which I write was reduced to ashes in the country where he had had millions of readers.

And he refers, of course, to the book burn that was much more pronounced in Nazi Germany.

So he loses many things at the same time, his family, his public, his language, his culture and his faith in the continuity of civilization.

Creo que muchos nos podemos relacionar con eso si hemos venido de países que han colapsado.

También creo que hay un poco de idealismo de parte de Stefan Zweig en el sentido de que, si me permiten el anacronismo, escucho a muchas personas en Venezuela hablar de la época pre-Chávez como una especie de paraíso y eso no fue así.

We are talking about that in 1997, 55% of the population was in poverty.

There was inequality, there was violence, there were structural tensions.

All of that got worse, of course.

That's not an excuse, but you can't look at the past with that romanticism.

And I think Stefan Zweig does a little of the same.

His vision of Europe of 1914, stable, cult, safe, has something of truth.

but also something of a lie.

That security is more of its class, of the bourgeoisie, of the rich, of the educated, of the intellectuals, Jews already assimilated in Vienna.

It was not that of all Europe, much less that of all Austria.

Europe at that point was not a modern democracy, it was an empire, aristocratic elites, little real representation.

Hay un historiador que investigando para este episodio llamado Arnold Mayer, que él decía, la modernidad económica avanzó, pero el poder seguía en manos antiguas.

Había pobreza urbana, explotación obrera, migraciones masivas.

Europa ya estaba enferma ante el fascismo.

En parte por eso llega el fascismo.