"I found it terrible, yet at the same time touching, for in all the years of the war I had not seen so perfect and pure an expression of bliss on any German face." Stefan Zweig's deceptively simple tale begins with an art dealer's routine visit to a provincial collector—and unfolds into something far more profound.

Zweig sets his story in the economic devastation of post-WWI Germany, where a family guards their most valuable possession with desperate pride. What starts as a transaction becomes a meditation on value itself: what we preserve, what we sacrifice, and the curious relationship between material reality and the life of the mind. Written in 1927, the story captures a historical moment while asking timeless questions about art, dignity, and self-deception. 

Eris Gems are small pamphlets that capture brilliant ideas in their most distilled form—arguments substantial enough to challenge, compact enough to finish in a single sitting. Each pamphlet presents a single thesis from contemporary thinkers. Stefan Zweig (1881-1941) was an Austrian novelist and memoirist who remains renowned for his depictions of life in Europe before and after the First World War.

By Stefan Zweig, 36 pages, published by Eris Editions