In 2016, Zweig’s epiphany painfully paralleled my own incredulous reactions to Brexit and Trump. Because I did not share his before-the-fall optimism, I was surprised by my own shock—and saw that it was indicative of the problem. At the time of the election, I had been “based” in Berlin for several years; my people were the urban, international, and largely English-speaking art world, the self-aware target demographic for the cringeworthy “easyJet Generation” marketing campaign. Whenever we could afford it, we traveled to other cities, mostly to meet up with the same people we already knew.

We recognized that this kind of travel was wasteful, unsustainable, even counterproductive—we held many panel discussions critiquing globalization and marketization—but we didn’t stop. Our careers and value system were built on mobility, the principles behind it, and the sociopolitical formations that guaranteed it. We knew we were inside something, but we told each other that what we were doing inside would have effects outside. Occasional mainstream news reportage on insider art events, no matter how one-dimensional or misinterpreted, offered sporadic confirmation of our work’s relevance.

Berlin, where I lived for seven years, has long been ground zero for this we. As a prototypical hub for revolving artists (and now techies), the city’s brand exploits the fantasy of freedom and collaboration with minimal commitment or responsibility. As the story goes, nobody is really “from” Berlin; everyone gets by in English; the party never stops; you only need a part-time job. But these are myths, myths that exist to serve people like me—white, entitled, and in possession of a U.S. passport. In reality, plenty of people are from Berlin; plenty are from elsewhere but do not work in the arts or for a start-up; plenty do not come by choice; plenty can’t afford to live remotely close to the city center; and plenty speak no English (and maybe no German, either). Anyone aware of these truths probably noticed the resurgence of intense nationalistic, racist tendencies in Germany and across the hemisphere long before we did.

In this scene and others, Zweig begins to question the implicit we of liberal intellectuals and artists as a group, while still unable to let go of the mythos—or to really consider that other members of his circle may not have been so “optimistic” (nor so self-serving) as him. He rues his rosy naiveté while waxing sentimental about the world that made his success possible. He seems to realize that his optimistic cosmopolitanism unwittingly fed into rising ethno-nationalism—not only because of the high-culture world’s belief in its own outsized effects on the political landscape, but simply because he, and others, took their ability to travel for granted.

Pan-European mobility a hundred years ago allowed for a filter bubble of sorts: an international community of like-minded, mostly white people, mostly of a certain class. Zweig never lived anywhere long enough to engage with local politics, and if things got tough, he could always leave. But nationalism, it turned out, could not be combatted through Zweig’s brand of internationalism. They had been flip sides of the same historical development.