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
Berchtesgaden Provostry it was able to act as a buffer state between its much larger neighbours, the Duchy of Bavaria and the Archbishopric of Salzburg, and to make this situation work to its advantage. Secondly, the Berchtesgaden valley is almost entirely enclosed by high mountains, except for a single point of access to the north, and is thus virtually impregnable. The Berchtesgaden monastery, dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint John the Baptist, was founded in 1102 within the Bavarian stem duchy as a community of Augustinian Canons by Count Berengar of Sulzbach under the directions of the will of his mother, the