Best known for his memoir The World of Yesterday—an elegy for the pre-World War I Hapsburg empire—the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig also wrote fiction, biographies, and much else, becoming one of the most popular German-language writers of his day. His work even inspired a 2014 film by the director Wes Anderson. Reviewing Zweig’s diaries from the years 1931 to 1940, recently published in English, Robert Philpot writes:

Zweig’s pessimism about the fascist threat is evident from the outset of his 1931 diary. “The political panorama looks grim,” he writes in October 1931. And, referring to the armed far-right militia formed shortly after World War I: “The Heimwehr acting out in the open worries me. It is all causing me to become obsessed with finding a temporary refuge.” Days later, as the economic crisis worsened, Zweig wrote: “I am sure there’s another coup brewing, and I think it will be successful.”

On a trip from Paris to London four years later—by which time he had fled Austria and Hitler was installed in power—Zweig’s apprehensions about the future had grown. “Each new day we are more prepared for a new cataclysm, always feeling that low underground rumble in our hearts,” he notes. “We are constantly seeing the straight being made crooked and the plain being made rough. It’s as if a drunken madman has taken hold of the world’s rudder and is sending us zigzagging into the abyss.”

Appalled by the growth of National Socialism in his native Austria, Zweig went into exile in Britain in 1934, but he remained on the Nazis’ radar: his books were banned, citizenship revoked, and his name and address in London entered into the notorious “Black Book”—a hit list of prominent Britons and refugees whom the SS intended to round up after it occupied the UK.”

Fearing just such an occupation of Britain, Zweig fled to Brazil in 1940. Two years later, he committed suicide.

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with Donald Trump in the White House. Robert Satloff argues that the two have an opportunity not merely to address the most urgent issues concerning the war with Hamas, but to craft a strategy that can reshape the region:

When President Trump welcomes the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Tuesday, their conversation will focus on a Middle East where Israel’s stunning military prowess—supported by its American patron—has tilted the balance of power more heavily in favor of the U.S. and its allies than at any point in decades. The challenge for Trump is how to take advantage of this moment.

Over the next four years, the potential is real for Trump to achieve, with our Israeli partners, peace agreements on five fronts: with Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, [other] Arab and Muslim states, and the Palestinians. . . . With Syria and Lebanon, the first task is to strengthen the nationalist foundations of their new governments so that outside powers, such as Iran or Turkey, are not able to hold power behind the scenes.

All of that would be made easier by progress with Saudi Arabia, where a three-way set of defense and normalization agreements with the U.S. and Israel, negotiated by the Biden administration, is waiting to be signed.