World in Trance

by Leopold Schwarzschild

Schwarzschild wrote World in Trance in New York in the early 1940s. It’s a history of the inter-war period and it’s the best book on the subject. As the realities sank in over the next 50 years, his facts and arguments stood the test of time. But he’s also writing about his own life. He was writing about the destruction of his own past – the history of a class embodied in a family whose last representative was him. But he was not just a voice for an old culture. He added to it in a magnificent way. Of course, it didn’t prevent the destruction that followed.