STEFAN ZWEIG: A EUROPEAN "AVANT L'HEURE" AND A COSMOPOLITAN OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE.

 

STEFAN ZWEIG: A EUROPEAN "AVANT L'HEURE" AND A COSMOPOLITAN OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE.


The first encounter with an author may even bring physical consequences. Stefan Zweig (1881, †1942), the great Austrian writer, first came straight onto my head decades ago in South America. As I was sorting through some items on the top shelf of a bookcase, a book fell, first onto my head, then to the floor. It was a copy in Portuguese (“Brasil, pais do futuro”) of his famous eulogy of Brazil, "Brazil: A Country of the Future" (1941), the country that would offer him refuge and where he would also die. 

The pain was mild, but at the same time I was immediately intrigued by the title. I read it first in Portuguese, it must have been around the end of 1968. Much later, I read it again in German, and I could never have imagined that at the end of 1989 I would be in Brussels, because of a European Commission meeting, and that I would mention the book to some Brazilian journalists. They smiled politely, pointing out that, given the country's "today's" circumstances, Zweig's optimistic statement at the time should be accepted as, perhaps well-intended, but simply "off target". But that's another story, even a "completely different" one. 

 

Only later would I also interpret that "clash" with Zweig in the 1960s as a "warning sign", as an unorthodox "call" to deal with another opus of his: "The Battle with the Demon". Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche” (1925). Had this book landed on my head, instead of the other one, I would have conducted my life much easier and healthier, even sooner than expected.

And the first encounter with that dismantling of the “masked demons” was also especially motivated. Entry in my diary, July 15, 1986, Kiel (then West Germany):

“Just read in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper) about Martin Flinker and his bookshop in Paris on the Quai des Orfèvres. Died a few days ago. It was that humble, semi-hidden but exceptional bookshop with many Thomas Mann’s memories. The last time I was in Paris, I happened to be in front of the closed windows of the Flinker’s bookshop. One could easily recognize the "Mephistophelic" scent (or place...). I also saw a book by Stefan Zweig‒which I am still searching‒about Nietzsche, in French. Flinker was a personal friend of Mann, Hesse, Zweig, Musil, Eluard, Michaux, Zuckmayer…"

 

                                                                 

Only years later would I realize that I was almost certainly standing in front of the closed window of the Flinker’s bookstore shortly after his death.

Under such magical auspices came the first reading, which would unfold in September and October of that year. An example of the many entries in my diary concerning Zweig’s opus:

"September 20, 1986, Kiel, ...///... Stefan Zweig. What a style! Just listen:

"Hölderlin's poetry has three of the four Greek elements‒fire, water, air and earth. The earth is missing in it, the muddy and clinging, the binding and forming, symbol of plasticity and hardness."

The book offer us, first of all, an accurate biographical portrayal. At the same time it unravels the inner turmoil of three writers who, attempting to push the skirmishes with the “spirit” (Geist, though poetically and philosophically of a certain rank) towards a higher and higher level, more and more abstract, in the end simply collapsed, physically and mentally.

"The Battle with the Demon" still holds true today as a high-carat warning, brilliantly written in transparent language, especially to young people. “Thou shall” first, balance emotion and reason, second, not forget to seize that invisible border, that mental "red line" that stands at the edge of the cliffs: This side, the ground with protective trees and scrubs, on the other side, the abyss, the fall into bottomlessness, that is either death or madness.

To crown it all, Zweig's golden recommendation for those who would like to venture into the adventures of philosophizing and high poetry: “Do merge with the crowd..." This sentence was already underlined many times at the time, and should resounds most inner at least once a day.

The literary and essayistic work of Zweig is of such a colossal scope that any attempt to approach the human-being and his authorship must remain fragmentary and perhaps also subjective, especially in the limited format of a blog. Since the end of the 1960s I nursed a special sympathy for Zweig, and read many of his “historical” monographs, biographies and essays, especially “Sternstunden of mankind. Five Historical Miniatures” (1927). From the late 1980s, first in London and then in Paris, I studied his novellas and short stories more intensively and systematically, as well as his correspondence and diaries. Also his autobiography, "The World of Yesterday" (Stockholm 1942, completed the day before his suicide), that fascinating, almost melancholic farewell to the European belle époque that shipwrecked in 1914. Even today, 20,000 copies of this book are sold annually in France alone.¹

                                                         

                                                          
"The World of Yesterday" may strike some as a bit of an "exhibitionist portrait"² but an autobiography is expected to focus on the person in question. It remains‒no doubt shall be dared to suggest that such a status will not be retained in the future‒a brilliant fresco of that "world of yesterday", that European "world of certainty", its shipwreck in the First World War, its temporary renaissance in the Twenties, and its fall into the darkness of the Thirties and Forties. Stefan Zweig was then at the heart of the centre of cultural life in Europe, even of the world. Hardly any other writer or artist had been bestowed such a privileged position. He was, by definition, a European "avant l'heure", an Austrian and Viennese Jew who reigned as a cosmopolitan in the German language, and who, we may assume, most decisively shaped German as a cosmopolitan language, at the time, and through the translations, into a " world language”. But the latter just for a short time.

One only has to go through the list of “guests” in his Salzburg residence: Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland, Franz Werfel, James Joyce, Paul Valery, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, musicians like Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Alban Berg , Bela Bartok, conductors like Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, et cetera.

And how he was received in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in 1940:

"Letter to L.F., Rio, 09/20/1940... //... Yesterday I spoke French here, in Buenos Aires (and in the other places) I have two Spanish lectures, one English, one German and dozens of people are waiting for me, all in all 9-10 lectures in 14 days, including Córdoba, Rosario Montevideo.”³

"Letter to L.F. Buenos Aires, October 30, to Paris (1940). L.F. In a hurry. Yesterday, the first lecture in Spanish was faced with a lot of difficulties‒of course, of a highly flattering kind. The hall with 1,500 people was so stormed that firstly 3,000 people squeezed in and the police had to intervene. - 2. I have to repeat the same lecture the day after tomorrow and the hall is already sold out today. It's just a sensation here that an (European) author should speak Spanish and, miracle of miracles, I spoke well. The audience was fantastic...”⁴

Not to be underestimated: His generosity and his impressive ability to "capture" and "portray" people of all kinds, from all countries, "from outside" and "from inside the soul", photographically and literary. For example:

"The most touching of these people were for me‒as if I already had a glimmer of my own future fate ‒were the people without a homeland, or worse: who had two or three fatherlands instead of one and didn't know inwardly to which they belonged. There was usually a young man with a small brown beard sitting on a corner of the Café Odeon, with conspicuously thick glasses over his sharp dark eyes; I was told that he was a very gifted English poet. A few days later, when I met James Joyce, he bluntly denied any affiliation with England. He is Irish. He writes in English, but he doesn't think in English and didn't want to think in English - "I want," he said, "a language that is above languages, a language that they all serve. I can't fully express myself in English without embracing a tradition”. It wasn't quite clear to me, because I didn't know that he was already writing his Ulysses at the time. He only lent me his book Portrait of an artist as a young man, the only copy he owned, and his little drama Exiles, which I even wanted to translate at the time, to help him. The more I got to know him, the more he amazed me with his fantastic knowledge of languages; behind that round, firmly hammered forehead, which gleamed smooth like porcelain in the electric light, all the vocabulary of every idiom was stamped in, and he played them brilliantly together. Once when he asked me how I would render a difficult sentence in German in Portrait of an artist, we tried it first in Italian and French; he had four or five expressions for every word in every idiom, even the dialectical ones, and he knew their value, their weight down to the smallest nuance.”⁵

Stefan Zweig remains, without a doubt, the most widely read German-language writer in the world, with the possible exception of Karl May (*1842-†1912). Others situated him, along with Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, as the world's best-known and most-read German-language writer of the 20th century⁶. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most-read and most-translated authors on earth. Although, like many other artists, there was “ebb and flow” in his reception across the ages, today he is the most widely read foreign author in France⁷, more than three million copies in ten years⁸, and in Turkey even simply the most read (2017)⁹.

This rank has been retained into our days, despite many attempts to downgrade Stefan Zweig as “kitschy sentimental”, “old-fashioned romantic”. There are attempts to explain this contradiction, for example one in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 19, 2014:

"Why Stefan Zweig? There is no other author as kitschy, ladylike, old-fashioned and out of date as this Austrian who was born more than seventy years ago. But his books are successful all over the world. Now even the Americans are celebrating it. How can that be?”¹⁰

A polemic that unfolded earlier (2010), above all in England¹¹, was even more drastic and the echo more bombastic. Zweig was even attacked as being he “Pepsi Cola” of Austrian literature. Others said he was "just a pedestrian stylist"¹²

It is understandable that this sometimes "overloaded", sometimes "overly-perfumed" prose of Zweig, garnished with an "exaggerated abundance of metaphors", might come across to some readers as "abstruse" and "old-fashioned". But millions of people don't seem to mind. On the contrary, as Dr. Sigmund Freud once declared, while writing a letter to Zweig, praising the biographies of Balzac and Dickens (but not Dostoyevsky's):

"The perfection of empathy combined with the mastery of verbal expression leave an impression of rare satisfaction. I was particularly interested in the repetitions and the incessant upgrading, with which your sentence gropes ever closer to the most intimate essence of what is being described. It is like the accumulation of symbols in a dream that allows what is veiled to shine through, more and more clearly.¹³”

Perhaps this reference to the "accumulation or repetitiveness of symbols" (Symbolhäufung) explains the colossal success of his "novel-like" biographies. Admittedly, in his "historical" monographs and biographies, there are now and then risky generalizations, which today's "scientific" historiography might relegate to "romantic essay-writing." All in all, nolens volens, he has given millions and millions of people, especially young people, an impartial introduction to the life and work of important artists and relevant “doers”, while transmitting at the same time a refined taste for such reading. Such an aim corresponds to the German concept of “Bildung”. “Popularization” does not necessarily have to lead to superficiality, "simplification" can also maintain the "substantiation". Not to be forgotten, above all: "...merging with the crowd…"

Let then just be there, that "excessiveness" and "overloadedness". If such were to be the case, it does not inhibit the enjoyment of his narrative works. And that because the substance of what is narrated is solid, exciting, charming, ambiguous, seductive. The objected weariness of adjectives and repetitions only resembles a dense jungle, behind which a gold mine is waiting for us.

The novellas (Novellen) constitute one genre of the literary work of Stefan Zweig that received a formidable response, right from the very beginning. Some remain hitherto unavoidable, still worth reading and robust examples of Zweig's style, be it in the way he accomplished his metier as a narrator, be it in the shaping of a world-view (Weltanschauung), which concedes great importance to capturing the turbulences of the soul, to reflect them in literature, allowing them to "ignite". In the volume Confusion of Emotions (Verwirrung der Gefühle, Insel, Leipzig, 1927), there are three novellas (Verwirrung der Gefühle Insel, Leipzig, 1927, gibt es drei Novellen (Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau, Untergang eines Herzens, Verwirrung der Gefühle), which are simply successful. One of them is prodigious:

Twenty-four hours in the life of a woman.


“Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman,” unfolds through a first-person narrator, a cosmopolitan man (Zweig himself, no doubt) staying in a pensione on the French Riviera.

“...but actually it was nothing but the cheaper dependance of the large Palace Hotel and connected directly to it through the garden, so that we residents lived in constant contact with its guests. (...). In fact, a young Frenchman had arrived on the noon train at 12:20 (I can't help but to give the time accurately, because it is as important for this episode as it is for the subject of that excited conversation).”¹⁴

                                                       
 

The young Frenchman seems, ad initium, to be the perfect specimen of a beautiful, elegant, refined, respectful, soft-spoken, extremely polite man, to whom no person would give the slightest chance of causing the slightest evil to others. He was highly praised by all the guests as the "loveliness" itself.

A few days later, however, an unpredictable tragedy exploded, at the heart of which stood a Frenchman, his wife, and the two children of the marriage:

“The slow-moving man, who was otherwise so sluggish, kept running like a bull against the beach, and when he shouted »Henriette! Henriette!”, screaming into the night, this sound had something of the frightening and primeval quality of a huge animal that has been stabbed to death. Waiters and help-boys rushed excitedly up and down the stairs, all the guests were woken up and the gendarmerie was informed. In the middle of it all, however, the fat man with his open waistcoat kept stumbling and trudging, meaninglessly calling the name "Henriette! Henriette!', sobbing and screaming into the night. In the meantime the children had woken up upstairs and in their night-gowns were calling down from the window for their mother, and their father rushed upstairs again to calm them down.”¹⁵

Everything is explained as of sudden, thanks to a letter from the wife to the husband. She decided to run away with the young Frenchman, "forever", leaving behind a husband and children who might consider taking care of their own destiny without her, if one such should happen to fall from heaven. A kind of coup de foudre à la Madame Bovary, more instantaneous and uninhibited than in the case of the female character in Gustave Flaubert's novel. "...at first sight it would have been perfectly understandable that this little Madame Bovary exchanged her portly, provincial husband for an elegant young handsome man”¹⁶.

The conversation between the guests at the dining-table soon turns into a tricky and heated-up discussion, when the first-person narrator dares to suggest, tentatively and mildly that he might have "some understanding" for the impulsive reaction of "Henriette", the wife (formerly) of the French. Most are outraged by such an attitude, except for a relatively old (67 years old), very elegant Scottish lady, widowed too early, who then decides to relate to the first-person narrator her own extremely impulsive experience, which until then has not been shared with anyone else. It concerns "twenty-for hours" of her life, when she was 42 years old. "That episode was so long ago, she wrote, that it hardly belongs to her present life any more, and the fact that I am leaving the day after tomorrow makes it easier for her to talk about something that has been tormenting and preoccupying her for more than twenty years.¹⁷" In a casino in Monte Carlo, she discovers a young man who at the roulette-table was ruining not only his whole fortune, but also his life forever.

         

One of the many successful aspects of this novella is the description of the physical "way of being-in-the-world” of the characters, and the conscious or unconscious expression through the appropriate components of the body. At the green table of roulette:

"...never look at a face, but only at the square of the table and there again only at the hands of the people, only at their special behaviour.”¹⁸

There is then a plot, described linearly, that leads to an ending, but that is just the stage for the novella's substance to unfold: The mixture of feelings, likes, dislikes, hopes, disappointments, passion, shame, hidden longings. From the loneliness and boredom of a rich, pretty woman who became a widow too early, on to the subito birth, or rebirth of a primal feminine need to offer “security” to a young, desesperado man. From fearing disappointment in the true, intimate qualities of an unknown person, to believing that there might still be a chance to find new, passionate love in spite of everything. Plus the eternal question of being “too old” and being “too young”.

“...the disappointment that...that this young man had walked so docilely...so without any attempt to hold me, to stay with me… that he humbly and reverently obeyed my first wish to leave, instead of ...instead of making an attempt to grab me... that he venerated me only as a saint who appeared to him on his way...and not...didn't feel like a woman…"¹⁹

En passant, one senses a very faint aroma of a leitmotif in Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss, the German composer who tried, in vain, to protect Stefan Zweig in the 1930s.

There is more, but we leave that to the readers. This novel by Stefan Zweig is a tour de force, a bravado display of his talents as a writer—and also his knowledge of women. We cannot but agree with Volker Weidemann, when he says in his article:

"I believe there is no other work created by a man in which so many strong, confident, life-wise women appear as in Stefan Zweig" ²⁰

THE CHESS NOVEL


The "Schachnovelle", published posthumously in Buenos Aires in 1942, remains one of Zweig's most widely read works, perhaps the Austrian's best-known book. Last film adaptation 2021, directed by Philipp Stölzl.  

 

                                               .

We are on board a passenger liner from New York to Buenos Aires, and the first-person narrator, an Austrian emigrant, learns that there is also a celebrity on board:

»Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He's toured America from east to west playing tournament games and is now heading to Argentina for new triumphs.«²¹

Czentovic was born in Eastern Europe into a very humble background, and despite his achievements and status, as soon as he took distance from the chessboard he became:
“...a grotesque and almost comic figure; in spite of his solemn black suit, his pompous tie with the somewhat obtrusive pearl-pin and his painstakingly manicured fingers, he remained in his demeanor and manners the same dull peasant boy who swept the parson’s room in the village.”²²

During the chess game between the world champion and a wealthy, boastful Scotsman, an almost sickly figure appears out of nowhere, a man who turns out to be a connoisseur of the game, and whose advice enables the Scotsman to even win a "draw" from the world champion. 

"Dr B.", also an Austrian, tells the first-person narrator his story and why he refused to play against the world champion. A member of a well-known family from Vienna who ran a law firm, he was arrested by the National-Socialists after the Wehrmacht invaded Austria in 1938. He is said to have hidden and camouflaged assets from the Catholic monasteries, so the Nazis lock him in a hotel room without communication with the outside world”²³

"You probably assume that I am now going to tell you about the concentration camp, to which all those who remained loyal to our old Austria were transferred, about the humiliations and tortures that I suffered there. But nothing of the sort happened. I was put in a different category (...) But the interrogation wasn't the worst part. The worst part was coming back after the interrogation into my nothingness, the same room with the same table, the same bed, the same washbasin, the same wallpaper (...) To keep myself busy, I tried to recite and reconstruct everything I had ever memorized, the folk hymn and childhood rhymes, the Gymnasium Homer, the paragraphs of the Civil Code. Then I tried to do arithmetic, to add any numbers, to divide, but my memory had no staying power…”²⁴

At yet another interrogation, “Dr. B.” manages to steal a book from the pocket of an overcoat of one of the officers.

"At first glance there was disappointment and even a kind of bitter anger: this book, captured with such immense danger, saved with such ardent expectation, was nothing more than a chess-review, a collection of one hundred and fifty master games."²⁵

For months he will occupy himself with these master-games, learn them by heart, play as "Black" against himself as "White", a kind of "chess poisoning" until he collapsed amidst a nervous breakdown. That throws him into the hospital, and then into exile.

And now "Dr. B.” is confronted with the opportunity to test his mastery of chess, which he had gained under dangerous psychological circumstances, against a “world champion”. 

Unlike the millions and millions of victims of the madness of the 1930s and 1940s, who were mentally and physically exploited, tortured and then murdered because of their ethnic, religious origins, or because of their political or sexual orientation, “Dr. B.” seems to be "just" a victim of psychological torture. And yet, this could also lead to total destruction, perhaps also to "self-destruction".

Stefan Zweig had to leave Austria in 1934 because he was a well-known “Jewish writer” and went into exile, first in England, living in London and then in Bath. Soon after, all his books were banned in Germany, and later also in Austria.

He became an English citizen, but the material and legal prosperity in which he found himself could not assuage him. When the war started, in 1939, he decided to travel to South America, first Argentina and then Brazil, where he was warmly welcomed. In February 1942 he took his own life, along with his companion.

Similar to "Dr. B" in the "Schachnovelle", Stefan Zweig suffered a different kind of "spiritual, psychological torture", not in a "hotel-room", but in a harrowing and tumultous exile. 

His affliction corresponded to a special relationship with the German language, which tolerated no substitute, although Zweig could lecture in four or five European languages. Others, however, managed to appropriate themselves of English or French, or other languages, in order to construct a "new life" outside the dictates of Nazism. Stefan Zweig was a man who was murdered "in the soul" and a photograph of him in Paris, viewed by the author of this blog in London in 1990, shows the saddest face ever of a man who knew he would not live long. His attempts, while he was already resident in England, to write in his diaries only in English, and no longer in German, aroused pity, as it was a blatantly fragmentary, tentative and imperfect attempt. In the end he returned to the German language in his diary.

                                                   

That such an author, who like no other had helped the German language to “feel at home” in the world, had to perish in the end because an ugly clique tried to alienate him from the right to be a German-speaking author, remains a tragedy of the first order. Could the German language finally free itself from such a black chapter? Let us hope so.

And the feeling, when a book by Stefan Zweig accidentally catches your eye, that "...you can always learn something new…”, will remain perennial.

1« “Le Monde d’hier” de Stefan Zweig résonne avec le monde d’aujourd’hui » CHRONIQUE auteur Michel Guerrin. Rédacteur en chef au "Monde". Vendu à 20 000 exemplaires chaque année, « Le Monde d’hier », écrit par l’écrivain autrichien en 1942, est d’actualité par son lien, rare, entre politique et culture, décrypte Michel Guerrin, rédacteur en chef au « Monde », dans sa chronique.Publié le 30 août 2019 à 00h24 - Mis à jour le 30 août 2019 à 06h56

2Hofmann, Michael (2010). "Vermicular Dither". London Review of Books, 32 (2): 9–12.

3Brief an Friderike Zweik, Friderike Zwei, Stefan Zweig. Unrast der Liebe. Ihr Leben und Ihre Zeit im Spiegel ihres Briefwechsels. Fischer Verlag, 1987, pg. 396. Translations from German into English are by the author of this blog, unless otherwise indicated.

4Ibid.

5Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern, Erinnerungen eines Europäers, Fischer Verlag, 1988, Seiten 315-316.

6https://www.inhaltsangabe.de › Autoren „Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) ist neben Thomas Mann und Hermann Hesse der weltweit bekannteste und meistgelesene deutschsprachige Schriftsteller des 20."

7BibliObs „Pourquoi Stefan Zweig est-il l'écrivain étranger le plus lu en France?“

8„Stefan Zweig a vendu plus de trois millions de livres en dix ans“. France Culture, Par Mohammed Aïssaoui. Publié le 11/04/2017 à 15:31

9Ankara named most well-read city as Stefan Zweig becomes most popular writer in Turkey“. BY DAILY SABAH ISTANBUL NOV 27, 2017 - 12:00 AM GMT+3

10FAZ, 19.06.2014. Artikel von Volker Weidemann, S. 35.

11Stefan Zweig, Austrian Novelist, Rises Again - The New York … https://www.nytimes.com › book 28.05.2014 — The enthusiasm about Zweig is by no means universal, as evidenced by a notorious takedown in The London Review of Books in 2010, Hofmann, Michael (2010). "Vermicular Dither". London Review of Books. 32 (2): 9–12.

12Stefan Zweig? Just a pedestrian stylist. Stefan Zweig was the most translated author in the world, yet Michael Hofmann has called the Austrian's literary output 'just putrid'. A tad harsh, perhaps, but he has a point, The Guardian, 26.03.2010, by Stuart Walton.

13Briefwechsel, Seite 95. Wien, Letter of 19.10. 2020.

14Stefan Zwei, Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau, © 2014 Sporer Peter Michael für ngiy aw eBooks. Földvári u. 18, H – 5093 Vezseny, pg. 5

15Pg. 11.

16Pg. 12.

17Pg. 30.

18Pg. 33.

19Pg. 95.

20FAZ, 19.06.2014. Artikel von Volker Weidemann, S. 35.

21Ebook, “gemeinfree”, Erste Auflage, 2018, pg. 4.

22Pg. 10.

23Der Historiker Roman Sandgruber sieht im Schicksal des jüdischen Wiener Bankiers Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild, der ab März 1938 insgesamt 14 Monate im Hotel Metropole in Gestapo-Einzelhaft war, das historische Vorbild der Schachnovelle. Wikipedia, Deutsch.

24Pg. 31.

25Pg. 40.