The story is simple and the clues are clear, but the background is far from what I thought After reading the book, watch the movie again!
【About the story itself】
【About Zweig】
【About social background】
【About director Wes Anderson】
【About Europe World】
【About cultural connotation】
"My true home - Europe, it's my heart's choice - has ceased to exist for me since the second suicidal cannibalism. I reluctantly became a Witnesses of history who have witnessed the most horrific defeats of reason and the wildest triumphs of cruelty in the chronicle of the times. No generation has been through like ours: from the peak of spiritual thought to the abyss of moral depravity. When I say this , absolutely not a trace of pride, but full of shame.
Under my eyes, some large-scale mass ideological trends have gained the opportunity to develop and spread. They are fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and the first is nationalism. The great plague that once deeply poisoned the flower of our European civilization. I can only be an unarmed, helpless witness when people with a conscious, planned program against humanity degenerate into long-forgotten, wicked barbarism in an incredible depravity. After centuries, we are faced with undeclared wars, concentration camps, torture, looting and the bombing of undefended cities. Fifty generations before us have experienced all these beasts, and I hope future generations will not have to suffer them again. Paradoxically, I also see that while the world is morally retreating for a thousand years, the same human beings are rising technologically and intellectually in unexpected ways, surpassing what they have achieved in millions of years. Achievements: airplanes conquered the sky, language transmission can spread all over the world in an instant, and human beings have conquered space; human beings can make atoms fission, overcome the most rampant diseases, and almost every day can make what was impossible yesterday. Before our time, humanity as a whole has never exhibited greater evil or accomplished such a godlike feat.
In one's life, the things that are forgotten are things that have long been condemned to be forgotten by the innermost intuition. So, these memories of you, you come to speak and choose instead of me! At least you will give a mirror image of my life before it sinks into darkness! "
- Stefan Zweig (Confessions of a European)
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