Charles Petzold

Vienna, 1901. A budding 19-year-old author named Stefan Zweig has written something for the feuilleton section of the Neue Freie Presse (“New Free Press”) — the part of the paper that covered literature and art rather than news and politics. He brings his “little prose essay” to the feuilleton editor who, to his surprise, begins reading it on the spot, and when finished, puts the manuscript in an envelope and tells the young man “I am glad to tell you that your fine piece is accepted for publication in the feuilleton of the Neue Freie Presse.”

That editor is Theodor Herzl.

Of course, Zweig knows who Herzl is. Everyone knows who he is. Five years previously Herzl had written a pamphlet Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), the founding document of modern Zionism. As Stefan Zweig recounts in his 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday

Theodor Herzl had an experience in Paris that shook him badly, one of those moments that change an entire life. As Paris correspondent, he had been present at the official degradation of Alfred Dreyfus. He had seen the epaulettes torn from the pale man’s uniform as he cried out aloud, “I am innocent.” And he had known in his heart at that moment that Dreyfus was indeed innocent, and only the fact that he was Jewish had brought the terrible suspicion of treason down on him.

... at the moment when he saw Dreyfus degraded the idea of his own people’s eternal ostracism went to his heart like a dagger. If segregation is inevitable, he said to himself, why not make it complete? If humiliation is always to be our fate, let us meet it with pride. If we suffer from the lack of a home, let us build ourselves one! So he published his pamphlet on The Jewish State, in which he pronounced all adaptation through assimilation and all hope of total tolerance impossible for the Jewish people. They would have to found a new home for themselves in their old homeland of Palestine. (pp. 124, 125)

But Zweig also recounts that the reaction to Herzl’s 1896 tract among “bourgeois Jewish circles in Vienna” was hardly welcoming. Herzl’s proposals were considered to be “stupid stuff":

Why would we want to go to Palestine? We speak German, not Hebrew, our home is in beautiful Austria. Aren’t we very well off under good Emperor Franz Joseph? Don’t we make a respectable living and enjoy a secure position? Don’t we have equal rights, aren’t we loyal, established citizens of our beloved Vienna? And don’t we live in a progressive time which will do away with all religious prejudice within a few decades? (pp. 125-6)

Zweig himself is baffled. It’s not that Zweig denies or minimizes his Jewish heritage. On the opening page of the Foreword he calls himself “an Austrian, a Jew, a writer, a humanist and a pacifist.” (xi) He praises Austria as the ideal place for those Jews with a “desire for a homeland, for peace, repose and security, a place where they would not be strangers” (p 41) and he particularly loves Vienna:

Open-minded and particularly receptive, the city attracted the most disparate of forces, relaxed their tensions, eased and placated them. It was pleasant to live here, in this atmosphere, of intellectual tolerance, and unconsciously every citizen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world. (p. 34)

A cosmopolitan citizen of the world is exactly how Zweig sees himself, with quite a soft spot for his hometown. Indeed, “nine-tenths of what the world of the nineteenth century celebrated as Viennese culture was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna.” (pp. 43-44)

What Zweig omits from his rosy portrait is the more horrific side of Viennese life. The Major of Vienna from 1897 to 1910 was the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger, and in March 1897 (when Zweig was 15 years old), a pogrom of 150 rioters attacked Jewish inhabitants and storefronts in one of the largest concentrations of the Jewish population of Vienna, Leopoldstadt. (This I learned from Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, pp. 41-42.)

Stefan Zweig’s encounter and friendship with Theodore Herzl is just one of the many amazing episodes in The World of Yesterday, originally published in German in 1942 and most recently translated by Anthea Bell in 2009. This is an extraordinary memoir that is ostensibly the education and evolution of a writer who was the most-translated German-language author of his day, and is still well known in the English-speaking world for novellas that will make the top of your head pop off, as well as inspiring the Wes Anderson film The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Zweig takes us from the sparkling Vienna of his youth (he was born in 1881), through the Great War and his travels abroad, his encounters with many remarkable men, mostly men, but also a few women. ("Cosima Wagner, Liszt’s daughter, hard and stern, yet magnificent in her emotional gestures; Elizabeth Förster, Nietzsche’s sister, small, delicate, flirtatious; Olga Monod, Alexander Herzen’s daughter, who often used to sit on Tolstoy’s knee as a child,” p. 188). The book ends in 1939 with Zweig and much of the rest of the world in despair following the ascent of Hitler and Europe on the brink of another world war.

The world of yesterday that Zweig describes is often magical. As a young student he has a circle of friends who are crazy about literature and poetry and music. Vienna is soaked with the rich musical heritage of Haydn and Beethoven, with landmarks of their careers part of everyday life, and where “a poor old lady who was a great-niece of Franz Schubert appeared to us a supernatural being.” (p. 64) Yes,

to have seen Gustav Mahler in the street was an event to be reported to your friends next morning like a personal triumph, and when once, as a boy, I was introduced to Johannes Brahms and he gave me a kindly pat on the shoulder, I was in a state of total confusion for days over this extraordinary event. (p. 63)

Zweig seems to have known or met nearly everyone. In a trip to Paris after university, “I saw Renoir’s studio, and met his best pupils” (p. 157) and he becomes absolutely starstruck when encounting Rodin. (pp. 168-171) While Zweig is still in Rodin’s studio, the artist begins touching up a sculpture and becomes so completely absorbed that he forgets he has a visitor.

But Zweig never lets us forget that that the world he’s reminiscing about is long gone, and the world in which he’s writing his memoir is quite changed. At the beginning of that Paris chapter, Zweig reminds us what’s been happening to Paris more recently:

Just as I began writing these lines, German armies and German tanks were rolling in, like a swarm of grey termites, to destroy utterly the divinely colourful, blessedly light-hearted lustre and unfading flowering of its harmonious structure. And now they are there — the swastika is hoisted on the Eiffel Tower, black-clad storm troopers march challengingly down Napoleon’s Champs-Elysées, and even from far away I feel how hearts must be sinking in the buildings of Paris, how its downtrodden citizens, once so good-humoured, must be watching the conquerors trump through its pleasant bistros and cafés in their jackboots. (p. 149)

But that’s still to come. During the first decade of the 20th century, Zweig visits India and the United States, and he feels so alone and isolated in New York City that he starts playing a game with himself:

I told myself that I was wandering around here all alone, one of the countless emigrants who didn’t know what to do with themselves and had only seven dollars in their pockets. You are voluntarily doing, I said to myself, what they do from necessity. Imagine that you are obliged to earn your bread after three days at the latest. Look around and see how you could start out in life here as a stranger, with no connections or friends, so you must look for a job at once. (p. 211)

Zweig begins visiting employment bureaus, seeing what jobs are available, what the qualifications are, what the pay is, and he compares the pay with “the newspaper ads quoting prices for a room in the Bronx.” He gains

an insight into the country’s wonderful freedoms. No one asked about my nationality, my religion, my origin... Thanks to my job-hunting, I learnt more about America in those first few days than in later weeks, when travelling in comfort as a tourist I saw Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Chicago... (p. 212)

Zweig is back in Europe, lounging in Baden in the summer of 1914, reading a book about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, listening to a band playing, when suddenly the music stops and everyone learns that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife have been assassinated, and Europe begins hurtling towards war. As a citizen of the world, Zweig doesn’t know quite how to react. It is “an anachronistic crime, in the twentieth century, to be trained in the use of murderous weapons.” (p. 251) Yet, there are severe penalties for conscientious objectors. He compromises and gets a job in the War Archive as a librarian.

The wartime nationalism appalls him:

Shakespeare was exiled from German theatres, Mozart and Wagner from French and British concert halls, German professors explained that Dante had really been of Germanic birth, the French claimed Beethoven as a Belgian — in fact the cultural treasures of enemy countries were unscrupulously plundered as if they were supplies of grain or metal ore.” (p. 257)

Zweig makes an oath “never to write a word approving of the war or denigrating any other nation” (p. 269) and finds a refuge in the neutral country of Switzerland, meeting with like-minded French friends and writers, meeting James Joyce in Zurich, and composer Ferruccio Busoni:

He pupils were now scattered all over the world — perhaps shooting each other — and at this time he dared not go on with his real work, his opera Doctor Faust, because he felt too disturbed. (p. 300)

After the war, Zweig gets a house in Salzburg, and witnesses horrific deprivation and hyperinflation preceding the later hyperinflation in Germany. Germans would cross the border in Austria hoping for bargains, only to have goods confiscated.

However, there was one item that couldn’t be confiscated: the beer you had already consumed. And every day the beer-swilling Bavarians worked out, from the rate of exchange, whether the devaluation of the [Austrian] crown enabled them to drink five, six, or even ten litres of beer in and around Salzburg for the price they would pay for a single litre at home. No greater temptation could be imagined, and whole troops of visitors came over the border from nearby Freillassung and Reichenhall, complete with their wives and children, to indulge in the luxury of pouring as much beer down their throats as their bellies would hold. The railway station was in pandemonium every evening, crowded with hordes of intoxicated, bawling, belching and expectorating Germans. Many of them, having overestimated their capacity, had to been wheeled to the carriages on the trolleys generally used to transport baggage before the train took them back to their own country, to the accompaniment of bacchanalian shouting and singing. These cheerful Bavarians, of course, had no idea that a terrible vengeance lay in store for them. For when the crown stabilized, while the fall of the [German] mark assumed astronomical dimensions, the Austrians travelled over from the same station to get drunk on the cheap in their own turn, and the same spectacle was repeated, although in the opposite direction. (pp. 317-8)

The decade between 1924 and 1933 is a short respite for Zweig and much of the rest of Europe. At the beginning of the ominous penultimate chapter, Zweig reports “I cannot remember when I first heard the name of Adolf Hitler ... the name of the man who has brought more misfortune on the world than anyone else in our time.” However much we readers might know about the history of this era, Zweig’s observations are always fascinating and illuminating.

As an Austrian, Zweig is initially not directly affected by Hitler’s ascent in Germany, but as a Jew, he knows that’s only a temporary illusion. His books are banned and burned, sharing the same “literary annihilation in Germany, with such eminent contemporaries, including Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Freud and Einstein.” (p 392)

Even so, work still continues, and Zweig begins collaborating with Richard Strauss on an opera. Zweig writes a libretto based on Ben Jonson’s The Silent Woman, and Strauss loves it and writes the music with nary a change to the text.

History has not been kind to Strauss’s reputation during this period. Partially to protect Jewish relatives, and partially to remain in Germany, he cooperated with the Nazi regime to certain extents. One payoff is that through his high status as a composer, he’s also able to work with Zweig. Die schweigsame Frau with Zweig’s libretto premiered in Dresden in 1935 and managed to survive for three performances before being permanently banned — not for content, of course, but because the librettist was Jewish.

In 1934, Zweig and his wife move to England. When Austria falls in 1938, Zweig becomes officially stateless.

It has not been any help that for almost half-a-century I trained my heart to beat as the heart of a citizen of the world. On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders. (p. 439)

Yet there are still opportunities for friendship. Also in London having fled Vienna is an old acquaintance, Sigmund Freud, and Zweig rediscovers “how even in the darkest days a conversation with an intellectual man of the highest moral standards can bring immeasurable comfort and strength to the mind.” (p. 445) In one of his last visits to Freud, Zweig brings along Salvador Dali, who draws a sketch of Freud that they can’t show to Freud because Dali has drawn him with “death in his face” (p. 449)

Zweig is not alone, of course.

I will never forget the sight I saw one day in a London travel agency. It was full of refugees, nearly all of them Jewish, and they all wanted to go somewhere, anywhere.... They were all crowded together there, former university professors, bankers, businessmen, property-owners, musicians, all of them prepared to go anywhere, over land or sea, with the pitiful ruins of their lives, to do anything and put up with anything just to get away from Europe. They were like a company of ghosts. But what shook me most was the thought that these fifty tormented people represented only a tiny advance guard of the vast, scattered army of five, eight, perhaps as many as ten million Jews already setting out in their wake, millions of people who had been robbed and then crushed in the war, ... cruelly expelled and fleeing in panic from the forest fire started by Hitler ... an entire disenfranchised nation forbidden to be a nation, but a nation all the same, wanting nothing so much, after two thousand years, as not to be made to go on wandering, to find quiet, peaceful ground on which they could venture to rest their feet.” (p. 452-3)

Of course, writing in the early 1940s, Zweig has no idea of the fate of the six million Jews who would not make it out, and who would die in mass executions and extermination camps. But for a few pages at least, Zweig seems to become a Zionist:

What was the reason for this pointless persecution, what was its aim? They were driven out of the lands where they had lived, but never given any land of their own. They were told: “Don’t live here with us", but no one told them where they were to live. (p. 454)

This is near the end of the memoir. From other sources we known that after spending some time in New York City and New Haven, Stefan Zweig and his wife moved to Petrópolis in Brazil. Zweig sent the manuscript of The World of Yesterday to his publisher in February 1942, and shortly thereafter, he and his wife died of a barbiturate overdose in a suicide pact.