Rescuing Stefan Zweig

A new and beautiful translation of ‘The World of Yesterday’ is an occasion for rejoicing.

By MATT NESVISKY
WRITING IN 1981 ON THE centenary of the birth of Stefan Zweig, an admiring John Fowles encapsulated rather well the Austrian writer by noting: “Certainly the psychological sign of the zodiac that dominated his life was Angst. It explains all the paradoxes about him – the yearning for a motherland, a ‘home,’ his obsessive need to travel; his internationalism, his despair in exile; his constant grumbling about the pressure of work, his constant taking refuge in it; his curiosity about the secrets of other lives, his acute shyness about revealing his own; the eternal self-doubt, his need to cultivate his own success; his extraordinary generosity to other writers (he was deeply hurt when he discovered how much Hugo von Hofmannsthal disliked him, yet refused to change his high literary opinion of the poet), his final lack of it for his own work; his selfless conscientiousness over countless public things, his sometimes alarming insensitivity at home, as a husband and stepfather.”
Yes, the English novelist identifies numerous components of Zweigian anxiety, although perhaps not quite all the paradoxes. Fowles neglects the Austrian writer’s Jewish identity.
That however may be forgiven – or perhaps it’s simply a given. Even in “The World of Yesterday,” Zweig’s memoir, the matter of Jewish identity is only glancingly mentioned – until contemporary events demand otherwise.
“The World of Yesterday” has just appeared in English in a beautiful rendering by Britain’s award-winning translator Anthea Bell and is an occasion for rejoicing. But the book inevitably arrives wrapped in a multilayered atmosphere of sadness. The first of these layers arises from the fact that Zweig, who in the 1920s and 1930s was a wildly successful author and reportedly the most widely translated writer of his era, today no longer has a fraction of the recognition and appreciation that he once enjoyed. Another level of melancholy is prompted by our knowledge that this memoir was completed just before Zweig and his wife in early 1942 carried out a suicide pact.
All of this adds poignancy to the already regretful tone of “The World of Yesterday.” And if the translation is beautiful, so is the elegiac tone of the memoir – as is the sensibility of the gentle and o p e n - h e a r t e d man behind the prose.
Born into a wealthy, bourgeois and decidedly non-observant family, Zweig tells us early on how his “world of yesterday” was more than once pulled out from under him. In Petropolis, his Brazilian city of wartime refuge, he writes: “For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without a trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends... In the brief interval between the time when I first began to grow a beard and today, when it is beginning to turn grey, more radical changes and transformations have taken place than in ten normal human generations... My today is so different from all my yesterdays.”
Well, many of us maintain – and often as not with regret if not downright distemper – that our today is radically different from the days of our youth. But Zweig surely does not exaggerate. The Vienna of his childhood that he recalls seems not so much of a faraway time as of a faraway planet. This was a society of order, solidity, decorum and dignity, the model set by a venerable imperial family and aped by thousands of obedient citizens. It supported a rigorous education system (pupils in the better schools had to learn five languages), and expected its middle-class sons to earn doctorates, at a time when, Zweig asserts, foreign affairs had little or no impact on citizens’ lives and everyone revered the status quo.
Additionally, in his memoir anti-Semitism is barely mentioned and the Zweig family’s nominal Jewishness is simply taken as just another biographical datum and one not much worth contemplating.
In these sweet recollections Zweig also makes virtually no reference to Vienna’s underbelly, although in his fiction he certainly did. Instead, his city was one in which the arts flourished, in which the literary pages of the newspapers were of enormous importance, where theater and opera had fanatical followings. And indeed: “Nine-tenths of what the world of the 19th century celebrated as Viennese culture,” he notes, “was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna.”
As Zweig recalls it, in fin de siècle Vienna he and his fellow schoolboys spent every last penny on classic and contemporary literature, crammed the coffee houses to pore over the latest international arts magazines, never missed a play or concert or exhibition, translated foreign works for their own pleasure and edification. “Printer’s ink,” Zweig waxes, “seemed to me the finest smell on earth, sweeter than attar of roses from Shiraz.” His was a planet furthermore in which athletics and especially courtship had no allure, at least for these upper-class Jewish lads, “since in our intellectual arrogance we regarded the opposite sex as intellectually inferior by their very nature, and we didn’t want to spend our time in idle chatter.”
At age 19 Zweig distinguished himself by having a book of poetry accepted by a top publishing house. (He later said the verse embarrassed him.) Shortly thereafter the first of his essays was accepted by the feuilleton editor of Neue Freie Presse, the most prestigious Viennese daily. That editor was Theodor Herzl, a man whom Zweig admired enormously but whose Zionism Zweig could embrace only in the abstract. (Towards the end of his life the stateless Zweig dashed from country to country and from continent to continent seeking refuge, but apparently never even considered Palestine.) Zweig’s portrait of a kindly but brooding Herzl is wonderful, as are his subsequent reminiscences about such figures as Freud, Joyce, Rilke, Yeats, Shaw, Richard Strauss and a host of others. The man obviously had a talent for friendship, and he generally recalls people with kindness. Many of his artistic and literary friendships were of course with figures that in 2010 are no longer household names; even Nobel laureates can fall into obscurity.
(Pontoppidan? Eizaguirre?) Zweig acknowledges this even as he was writing in 1941.
(Leon Bazalgette? Ludwig Speidel?) But both those upon whom posterity has smiled and those who languish in the waters of Lethe are all part of Zweig’s rosy yesterdays.
“The World of Yesterday” however is no mere literary catalog. Zweig was fiercely nonpartisan, but as a humanist, pacifist and internationalist, he could hardly ignore the political currents that so altered his world. Thus we get a devastating report on the impact of Austria’s defeat in World War I, part of which Zweig spent in Switzerland. When he returned to his native land, one of the first things he noticed was that his railway car had been stripped of all leather upholstery and trimming (stolen to repair shoes). Then came the years of unemployed masses shuffling about in shabby army coats, of staggering inflation, of loose morals and louche tastes.
He condemns the abasement of language (“…everything was written in abbreviated, telegraphese style, with excitable exclamations…”), making him sound precisely like a traditionalist of today despairing of Twittertalk).
He writes of Austria’s painfully slow recovery, then of the worldwide Great Depression, the rise of Hitler (very astutely described) and, finally, Anschluss.
Through it all Zweig wrote highly successful fiction, plays, essays and biographies, traveled throughout Europe, India, and North and South America, and in his civilized manner agitated for international understanding. Yet Zweig focuses much more on the world around him than on himself. This is a memoir, but not an autobiography. We learn nothing about the married woman with whom he took up and eventually wed, nor of their subsequent and apparently amicable divorce, nor of Zweig’s second marriage to his secretary.
UNTIL HITLER TAUGHT HIM otherwise, Zweig unquestionably thought of himself much more the Viennese than the Jew. His most “Jewish” work was his internationally successful pacifist play, “Jeremiah,” written in 1917. In the memoir Zweig notes: “Unconsciously, however, by choosing a Biblical subject I had touched on something that so far had lain unexplained – my common ground with the Jews and their story, founded in either blood or tradition.”
But although Zweig called the play “the first of my works that I myself thought was really worth something,” his Jewish consciousness for most of his career would remain, well, unconscious and unexplored. Even at the end of the book, when he is more or less forced to contemplate Jewish matters, Zweig has difficulty including himself in the tribe: “…the Jews of the twentieth century were not a community any more nor had they been for a long time. They had no faith in common with each other, they felt their Jewish identity was a burden rather than a source of pride… They lived at several removes from the commandments of the books that had once been sacred to them and they did not want to speak the old language they used to share.” They? Finally, nothing in “The World of Yesterday” comes close to explaining – if any explanation were possible – the Zweigs’ double suicide. As Anthea Bell points out in her brief introduction, Zweig had indeed lost the ground beneath his feet and seen his cherished world of culture destroyed once more. But at the same time he was in a safe haven in South America, the horrors of the Holocaust were still largely yet to come, the German advance in the East looked uncertain and the United States had just entered the war against Nazism, which should have given Zweig hope.
But evidently it didn’t. Whatever the cause, immediately after Zweig sent off the manuscript of “The World of Yesterday” to his publisher in Stockholm, he ended his life a world away in Brazil.
INTERESTINGLY, ONE MAJOR literary figure whom Stefan Zweig never mentions in his memoir and evidently never met was Henry James – interesting because much of Zweig’s fiction, stylistically, thematically and psychologically, has much in common with that of James. This is readily evident in Zweig’s “Selected Stories,” which in fact mainly contains not short stories but novellas (a form that James also loved – but I’ll take Zweig over James any day).
Four of the six stories here are in earlier translations by Eden and Cedar Paul. Over the years Zweig has been translated into English by numerous hands; the Pauls’ versions on view are quite serviceable, if prone to the occasional slip (“unmeaning words” for “meaningless words”). The best known of the Paul selections is “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” which was the basis for a noted 1948 Max Ophuls film of the same name. Like several other Zweig stories, this is a tale of pathological obsession – so Freudian, so Viennese, so Zweigian, so gripping. (And yes, I see this theme striking a chord with John Fowles, the author of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”) Another in this vein is Bell’s translation of “Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman,” this time dealing not with obsessive love but with obsessive gambling and also plain terrific.
Equally seductive is “Fantastic Night,” a dark Viennese underbelly novella whose theme might be termed excessive honor.
Then there’s “Buchmendel,” the only story that has a Jewish protagonist: the eponymous book peddler, an impoverished, otherworldly genius whose compulsive bibliomania proves his undoing. Sighs the Zweig-like narrator at the story’s end: “I, a man of education and a writer, had completely forgotten Buchmendel for years – I, who at least should have known that one only makes books in order to keep in touch with one’s fellows after one has ceased to breathe, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives – transitoriness and oblivion.”
Thirty years ago novelist John Fowles wished to rescue Stefan Zweig from oblivion.
Thirty years on we just as vigorously second that motion.