The World of Yesterday but hated politics and shunned political engagement. His autobiography shows some reluctance to analyse Nazism as a political ideology; he tended simply to regard it as the rule of one particularly evil man, Hitler. Zweig was struck that the "Berghof", Hitler's mountain residence in Berchtesgaden, was just across the valley from his own house outside Salzburg. Berchtesgaden was an area of early Nazi activity. Zweig believed strongly in Europeanism against nationalism. Zweig also describes his passion for collecting manuscripts, mostly literary and musical. Zweig collaborated in the early 1930s with composer Richard Strauss on the opera "Die schweigsame Frau", which
The Mistress of the Copper Mountain commented that the Mistress is a universal mytheme, while the Copper mountain is the specific location: the Gumyoshevsky mine and Mount Azov. The origin of the character is unclear. A concept of a mother goddess or Mother Earth was very popular in every culture, including the local Mansi and Khanty people. The Ural ethnographer A. Sagalayev suggested that the character originated from the goddesses Umay and Kaltes-Ekwa. He noted that the figure of a mother goddess in people's perception sometimes shrinks to the size of a rock and a sculpture or expands to the size of a mountain. The Mistress