In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig writes about how twice during his lifetime (1914-1918, 1939-1942) the global milieu with which he'd grown up fell apart.

In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig writes about how twice during his lifetime (1914-1918, 1939-1942) the global milieu with which he'd grown up fell apart. Somewhere there's a line about how people who in normal times would have been discussing opera or the latest scientific discoveries found their conversation dominated by discussion of getting visas, to where, and how quickly.