ABSTRACT
The present chapter examines the notion of security in the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig. In The World of Yesterday (1942), a memoir, Zweig expresses nostalgia for the institutions of the nineteenth-century welfare state: the prospect of a well-regulated career and the promotion of insurance schemes, for instance, allowed people to contemplate the future with confidence. His earlier novel Beware of Pity (1938), however, associates the prewar state with feelings of insecurity: in this text, the technologies and media on which the state relies, such as telephone lines and railway networks, are shown to be destructive of the individual subject’s sense of self.
