As Zweig must have felt in 1935 when the Nazis forbade the production of Richard Strauss’s opera, for which he himself had written the libretto, mankind would become more blinkered and more barbarous yet. World War II simply administered the finishing blow.

Signs of the collapse were still very hazy. Below the Old World charm and velvety composure of Zweig’s narratives or, for that matter, of his farewell note, lurked many demons. Zweig was no stranger to demons. In his book The Struggle with the Demon, about Kleist, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche, he was fascinated by how great artists, including Beethoven and Michelangelo, were stirred by demonic, “volcanic,” mono-maniacal urges. But what lurked beneath these compulsive demons was something more intangible, more sinister, and ultimately more damning, because it found its seat in Zweig’s far tamer, more conciliatory, and depressive personality: the specter of regret, the specter of what might have been if only ... If only one could turn back the clock, if only remembrance didn’t stifle all hope or renunciation foil desire. If only one could do something to stem the course of what seems unavoidable, if only one didn’t give up before even trying, if only one had acted sooner or not acted at all. If only life did not have to end. If only is the unspoken, the unspeakable, the thing that even the most talented writers cannot name, for one can neither rise above it nor put it behind one—only gape and play with tenses. If only is the last stop before we enter the shadow-lands. And into shadowlands Zweig had stepped long before the Veronal. As he writes in the closing lines of The World of Yesterday:

Homeward bound I suddenly noticed before me my own shadow as I had seen the shadow of the other war behind the actual one. During all this time it has never budged from me, that irremovable shadow, it hovers over every thought of mine by day and by night; perhaps its dark outline lies on some pages of this book, too. But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.

The language here may seem a touch too fluent, but it does suggest that the past has ways of reaching into the present and from there into the future to make us the playthings of time. Shadows know more about us than we know ourselves, are more like us than we care to know. They reach into areas where we fear to tread, bear their own secrets, tell their own tales, speak their own tongue. They even foretell what is likely to happen and, as Freud knew so well, reinvent what might have happened and perhaps did indeed happen—who’s to know. Shadows are how we grope and speak of time when we’ve run out of time.

Not surprising, then, that Zweig’s Journey into the Past should, like The World of Yesterday, also end with shadows. It begins at twilight and it ends at twilight, blurred in perpetual soft focus. Even the history of the tale’s publication—it comes out in the United States for the first time this year, almost seventy years after Zweig’s death—bears all the marks of a shadow from the past that happens to be about shadows from the past.

A fragment of the novella, identified as such, was first published in 1929 in an anthology of short fiction by Austrian writers. But a longer version, in typescript with handwritten corrections by Zweig, was discovered in London after his death and subsequently published to great acclaim in Germany, France, and Great Britain. The typescript bore two titles: Wider-stand der Wirklichkeit (Resistance to Reality) and Die Reise in die Vergangenheit ( Journey Into the Past), the latter of which, however, Zweig crossed out. It is difficult to date the final composition of this novella, but it would not be unwise to place it after 1933, once the hold of the Nazi Party seemed secure.

The story itself is, at first, irresistibly formulaic, so readable and fluent that it smacks of a B-grade, black-and-white Hollywood romance from the 1930s or ’40s. A man and woman are on a train headed for Heidelberg. It soon becomes clear that this is a moment both have been looking forward to. They have chosen to remain silent, partly because the compartment is full but also because they are too hesitant to speak the truth that sits between them. Then, as in so many films, the screen starts to blur, and we move back in time and see the young man a decade earlier. He comes from extremely humble origins, studies chemistry, is hired by an industrial magnate, and “initially given menial tasks to perform in the laboratory.” From there the hasty rise of the ambitious young man about to become a most trusted assistant follows a script laid down by Balzac and Dickens—authors to whom Zweig had devoted many pages in Master Builders of the Spirit.