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Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) |
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Austrian biographer, essayist,
short story writer, and cosmopolitan, who advocated the idea of an
united Europe under one government. Stefan Zweig achieved fame with his
vivid and psychoanalytically-oriented biographies of historical
characters. Among his best-known works is Die Baumeister der Welt (1936, translated as Master Builders),
a collection of biographical studies. Zweig was a prolific writer. In
the 1930s he was one of the most widely translated authors in German
language in the world. His extensive travels led him to India,
Africa, North and Central America, and Russia. Zweig's friends included
Maksim Gorky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, and Arturo Toscanini. When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fulness by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability. The rights which it granted to its citizens were duly confirmed by parliament, the freely elected representative of the people, and every duty was exactly prescribed. Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in bright gold pieces, an assurance of its immutability. Everyone knew how much he possessed or what he was entitled to, what was permitted and what forbidden. Everything had its norm, its definite measure and weight. (from The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography by Stefan Zweig, London: Cassell and Company, fourth edition 1947, p. 13; original title: Die Welt von Gestern, 1942) Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna, the son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida (Brettauer) Zweig, the daughter of an Italian banker family. However, religion did not play a central role in his education. "My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth," Zweig said later in an interview in 1931. (quoted in The 'Jewish Question' in German Literature 1749-1939: Emancipation and its Discontents by Ritchie Robertson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 112) His early life Zweig devoted to aesthetic matters, abandoning the idea of entering his family's business. Although his essays were accepted by the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, Zweig was not attracted to Herzl's Jewish nationalism. Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany. By 1904 he had earned a doctorate from Vienna University – his dissertation dealt with Hippolyte Taine. Before settling in Salzburg in 1913, Zweig traveled widely. In 1914 he married Friderike Maria Burger von Winternitz (1882-1971), who had started to send him fan mail already in 1901. She became also a writer; they were together for more than twenty years. Friderike had two daughters from her previous marriage. Zweig's first work, Silberne Saiten, a collection of poems, appeared in 1901. His antiwar play, Jeremiah, which he wrote in 1917 while still in the army, was produced in Switzerland; in New York it was performed in 1939. Zweig's other early plays include Tersites. Ein Trauerspiel (1907), a tragedy written in blank-verse, and Das Haus am Meer (1912), which dramatized the American Revolutionary War. In Salzburg, a city of 17th- and 18th-century houses, Zweig lived
for nearly twenty years, also traveling a good deal. Being a man of
elegance, he used to take with him a tailcoat in his travels. During
World War
I, Zweig worked in the archives of the Austrian War Office. When his
pacifist views alarmed authorities, he had to move to Zürich. Berlin
and especially its nightlife of the Twenties appalled Zweig: "Along the
entire Kurfürstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they
were not all professionals; every high-school boy wanted to earn some
money, and in the dimly lit bars one might see government official and
men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without
any shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had never known such orgies as
the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men costumed as women
and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eyes of the
police." (The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, pp. 238-239) Zweig gained first fame as a poet and translator, and then as a biographer, short-story writer, and novelist. His collection of autographs and manuscripts of writers, composers and artists (Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, Goethe, Shelley, Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Hesse etc.) grew into a unique personal collection, which achieved international renown; it has been viewed as an integral part of Zweig's literary oeuvre. Zweig began collecting at the age of fifteen. In one of his stories, 'Buchmendel' (1929) Zweig portrayed a Galician bookseller, whose customer, Jakob Mendel, "knew nothing about the world; for all the phenomena of existence only began to be real for him when they were moulded into letters, gathered in a book and, as it were, sterilized. He did not read even these books, however, for their meaning, for their intellectual and narrative content: it was only their names, their prices, their physical appearance, and their title-pages, that attracted his passion." (The 'Jewish Question' in German Literature 1749-1939: Emancipation and its Discontents, p. 127) The narrator's ambivalence towards Mendel has been interpreted as a kind of self-criticism, Zweig's tendency to "conceive culture as a glass bead game of the the spirit." (Ibid., p. 127) Zweig was interested in the teachings of Sigmund Freud, which influenced also his biographies, and translated works from such authors as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Émile Verhaeren. Among Zweig's publications from the 1920s are a study of Friedrich Nietzsche (1925), Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928), a biography of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), and short story collection Conflicts (1925). Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927) was described by Freud as "a little masterpiece." Zweig's essays include portraits of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich von Kleist. In Casanova, whom Zweig dismissed as "a mere pretender in the world of letters," he admired his ability to make friends with emperors and kings, and secure immortality. The essay was published in Drei Dichter ihres Lebens (1928, Adepts in Self-Portraiture). Erasmus, the famous Duch humanist, who dreamed of a united civilization, Zweig considered his spirirual ancestor, and portrayed him in Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (1934, Erasmus of Rotterdam). Luther represented the opposite of learned humanism, "a man of action, a revolutionary . . . an emanation of the dark, daimonic forces of the Germanic peoples. Dr. Martin Luther's heavy peasant fist destroyed at one blow all that Erasmus's delicate penmanship had so onerously and tenderly put together." (Esasmus of Rotterdam, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, New York: The Viking Press, seventh printing 1969, p. 16) With his views about Germany's "national spirit" Zweig was not alone – the book was published a few years after the Nazis had seized power. During the years at Salzburg, Zweig began to suspect that Hitler's
persecution of Jews was directed at him personally. He never recovered
from this paranoia. Acccording to a story, Zweig personally witnessed
how the Nazis burned his books. Eine blaßblaue Frauenschrift (1941), set
in prewar Vienna, showed how anti-Semitism had spread into all levels of the state apparatus. The
protagonist, an influential government official and an opportunist, is morally too weak to change
anything in his life or restore his integrity. Die schweigsame Frau (1935), an opera for which
Zweig wrote the libretto and Richard Strauss composed the music, was banned by the Nazis. Zweig did
not attend the premiere. He wrote to his wife: "As for the opera, one thing is certain, it is very
much too long, secondly it is an atrociously difficult work and so the
very opposite of my original conception of it – not a light opera, but
loaded with all the raffinements and really oppressive because it it too replete." (Richard Strauss: Man, Music, Enigma by Michael Kennedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 302)
Goebbels sacked Strauss from the presidency of the Reich Music Chamber.
Privately, Strauss regarded Goebbel's Jewish propaganda as a disgrace
to German honour but in a letter to Hitler he called him "the greatest designer of German existence." (The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p. 355) It was clear that Zweig could not openly work with Strauss. Strauss's Friedenstag, or Day of Peace
was based on the scenarion of Zweig, the libretto was written by the
theater historian Joseph Gregor. If the Nazis had known that its plot,
about a commander determined to follow his orders and burn his own
city, was Zweig's idea, the opera would never have been staged. Hitler
attended a gala performance of Friedenstag in Vienna in 1939. Zweig immigrated first to England to do research work for the book on Mary, Queen of Scots. He also visited Freud, whom he had met already in the 1920s. Ungeduld des Herzens (1938), a black love story, shows Zweig's familiarity with the psychoanalytical idea of the sense of guilt. Anton Hofmiller, the narrator, is drawn into the life of a young, crippled girl. Hofmiller responds to her need to be loved with feelings of guilt and pity, eventually defects her and she commits suicide. While touring in the United States in 1935, Zweig complained the
lack of cafés, found New York unbearable, and had no desire to go back
after retuning to Europe. In 1938 Zweig became a British citizen, in
the same year when Germany annezed Austria. He had a valid German
passport, but he could not return to Germany. Moreover, the property of
his major Viennese publisher was confiscated. In
1940, following a successful lecture tour in South America, he
settled in Brazil. "I would not have believed", he said in a letter,
"that in my sixtieth year I would sit in a little Brazilian village,
served by a barefoot black girl and miles and miles away from all that
was formerly my life, books, concerts, friends, conversation." In Brazil: Land of the Future (1941) Zweig
examined the history, economy, culture of the country, and depicted his
impressions of the cities. Quoting Amerigo Vespucci, he describes how
the first European seamen saw the new land: "If anywhere in the world earthly paradise exists, it cannot be far from here!" (Ibid., p. 17) Zweig
had divorced Friderike in 1938 and the next year married in a civil
ceremony Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann, his secretary from 1933; she was
twenty-seven years his junior. Like her husband, she was
multilingual. The fall of Singapore in 1942 made Zweig fear that Nazism
would eventually conquer the world. Disillusioned and isolated, Zweig
committed suicide with his wife in the mountain resort of Petrópolis,
near Rio de Janeiro, on February 23, 1942. At his side, with her arm
wrapped around him, was Charlotte. Brazil's populist dictator, Getulio
Vargas, who attended the funeral, ordered that the burial expenses
should be paid by the state. Thomas Mann considered Zweig's final act
of desperation an act of cowardice. Zweig's nostalgic but rather impersonal memoirs of the "Golden Age of Security", Die Welt von Gestern (1942, The World of Yesterday), was published posthumously. The work did not have any reference to his marriage, but it nevertheless condemned puritanical attitudes and sexual hypocrisy. Like Joseph Roth in Radetzkymarsch (1932), Zweig could not accept cultural values of his day, but did not idealize the prewar Hapsburg Empire. "Even in the abyss of despair in which today, half-blinded, we grope about with distorted and broken souls, I look again and again to those old star-patterns that shone over my childhood, and comfort myself with the inherited confidence that this collapse will appear, in days to come, as a mere interval in the eternal rhythm of the onward and onward." (The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, p. 16) The Royal Game, also published in 1942, used two types of chess players illustrate the psychology of Nazism. Mirko Czentovic, a semiliterate son of a Danube boatman, "incapable of writing any sentence in any language without making spelling mistakes," travels on a ship from Europe to South America. However, he is the world chess champion. "But are we not already guilty of an insulting limitation in calling chess a game? Isn't it also a science, and art, hovering between these two categories like Muhammad's coffin hovered between heaven and earth?" (from The Royal Game, in The Royal Game & Other Stories, introduction by John Fowles, translated from the German by Jill Sutcliffe, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983, p. 8) He wins the first match, but the second against Dr. B., a Viennese lawyer and refuge, occupies the central part of the story. Dr. B. has started to play chess with himself in solitary confinement, when he was arrested by Gestapo. During his match against Czentovic he breaks down and says he will never play chess again. As characters in Vladimir Nabokov's novel The Defense (1930), he acts like a piece on a giant chessboard – in his schizophrenic world he is at the mercy of forces he cannot control. The popularity of Zweig's biographies has gradually declined and his humanism, based on the values of the late nineteenth-century Viennese liberalism, has been an easy target for criticism. "Zweig had an acute sense of historical crisis, but could not respond adequately to it in creative terms; so it was his vulgarity that came to the fore, in a series of worked up biographies, brilliant and intelligent, but lurid, over-simplified and ultimately little more than autobiographical in significance." (Guide To Modern World Literature by Martin Seymour-Smith, London: Papermac, 1986, p. 604) However, his work still offer inspiring insights into the lives and personalities of great historical figures and are good sources for further investigation. Several of Zweig's stories have been filmed – the best-know is perhaps Letter From an Unknown Woman, directed by Max Ophüls (1947), starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan. Zweig's manuscript collection is now preserved in the British Library. For further reading: Moral Values and the Human Zoo: the Novellen of Stefan Zweig by David Turner (1946); Stefan Zweig: A Tribute, ed. by H.annsArens (1951); Stefan Zweig: A Bibliography by Randolph J. Klawitzer (1965); European of Yesterday:A Biography of Stefan Zweig by Donald Arthur Prater (1972); Stefan Zweig: A Critical Biography by ElizabethAllday (1972); Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginalty in a Century of Assimilation by Leo Spitzer (1990); Stefan Zweig: An International Bibliography by Randolph J. Klawiter (1991); Stefan Zweig und Hippolyte Taine. Stefan Zweigs Dissertation über Die Philosophie des Hippolyte Taine by Natascha Weschenbach (1992); 'Zweig, Stefan,' in World Authors 1900-1950, Volume 4, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World by George Prochnik (2014); Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought: Twentieth-century Central Europe and Movement to America by Bronislava Volková (2021): Das Nachleben des Propheten Jeremia bei Stefan Zweig und Franz Werfel by Lukas Pallitsch (2024) Selected works:
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