(p. D12) Most people remember Mr. Drucker, a longtime contributor to the Journal who died in 2005, as the most influential management consultant of the 20th century. What they may not know is that, like Mr. Zweig, he was born in Austria and fled from the Nazis when Hitler came to power. What’s more, Mr. Drucker’s memories of prewar Vienna, which he compared in “Adventures of a Bystander” to Atlantis, Plato’s imaginary island paradise that fell from favor with the gods and disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean, are no less richly evocative than those in “The World of Yesterday.”
. . .
Born in 1909, three decades after Mr. Zweig, [Drucker] concluded as a young man that Europe’s nostalgia for its prewar past was a “miasmic smog” that stifled the imaginations of those who stayed there. So he emigrated to the U.S., where he found an open society that was bumptiously naive but also vital and forward-looking: “Unlike Europe, where it was felt that ‘the center cannot hold,’ the ‘center’ held in America. Society and community were sound, hale, indeed triumphant.” And whereas Mr. Zweig succumbed at last to despair, Mr. Drucker unhesitatingly embraced America’s democratic culture and flourished, building a new career for himself.
For the full essay/review, see:
TERRY TEACHOUT. “SIGHTINGS; One War, Two Fates.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 6, 2014): D12.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the essay/review has the date June 5, 2014.)
The Drucker book discussed by Teachout is:
Drucker, Peter F. Adventures of a Bystander. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.