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These days, Stefan Zweig’s name seldom appears in lists of important 20th-century writers, and yet between the two world wars, he was prolific, and a veritable monolith of the written word. The Austrian-born Zweig wrote poetry, plays, fiction, biographies and newspaper commentaries, which were translated into numerous languages and sold across the planet.
Oddly, Zweig is remembered now primarily for his strange end. Displaced and disoriented by the conflagration of anti-Semitism unleashed by Nazi Germany, he fled Europe and wandered from place to place, eventually settling in Brazil. There, in 1942, in a famously documented final act, Zweig and his wife committed suicide together.
Among Zweig’s final achievements was to complete his autobiography, which he originally intended to call “Three Lives,” in reference to the three distinct periods in his life: Birth and youth to the commencement of World War I; from war’s end through the advent of the Anschluss (Austria’s forced absorption into Nazi Germany); and finally, exile. The proposed title is telling in light of Zweig’s sad demise, for apparently he was not able to envision a fourth life.
Given the eventual choice of The World of Yesterday as the book’s title, one might reasonably inquire: The yesterday of which of Zweig’s lives?
The “yesterday” of most relevance to me is the one prior to World War I. In the absence of closer examination, I mistakenly imagined the entire book as dealing with this period, which is of interest owing to the imminent approach of the Great War’s centennial. How did a continent seemingly so progressive and at peace with itself erupt into such a bloodletting?
Zweig is right there, on the scene, at 33 years of age in the summer of 1914. His explanation of the events leading to war is little different than most offered during a century of post-war analysis: Societal dynamism constrained by top-heavy monarchical systems, which led to what can only be referred to as boredom on the part of those ignorant of war’s true costs, and when pent-up demand for action (an sort of action) was released by inbred dunderheads scheming at the top of the societal pyramid, catastrophe was the result.
To be fair, there is an elegiac tone to Zweig’s pre-war ruminations. He trumpets the seemingly settled, hierarchical, perennially ordered nature of Viennese society (easier to do nearer its top than the bottom), exalting the abundant theatrical and musical scenes, which interest ordinary citizens as sports do now. One depends on favorite cafés, newspapers and stage luminaries. Life passes. Change seems unlikely.
As to Zweig’s own background, his memoir is conspicuously absent the usual rise from hardscrabble poverty by sheer force of will. In fact, it emerges that he is fairly well off from the very start. A pattern is established: The world is a rosy place for bright young men, and bright young men are far too busy reaping their effortless opportunities to be very much concerned with messy everyday disagreements. Zweig’s is a halcyon world, and this wouldn’t necessarily be noteworthy if not for one small point: He is Jewish.
Jewish -- though not ardently so in any duty-bound sense of religious ritual; nonetheless, identifiably Jewish in pre-war Vienna, and pre-war Vienna is famed as the place where modern anti-Semitism gets its (non)-intellectual bearings. Adolf Hitler, who spends his Vienna period as underemployed and angry as Zweig is ascendant and serene, lives in a miserable flophouse not far from Zweig’s cultured block, and takes his formative ideological cues from the stridently anti-Semitic Viennese mayor, Karl Lueger.
What’s more, while the multi-ethnic and polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire functions with charm and aplomb at the heap’s top, working class Vienna is by most contemporary accounts a rough and tumble, seething reflection of the empire’s considerable intramural tensions. But Zweig notices little of it. Rather, the citizenry is united in respect for the elderly emperor Franz Joseph, and even Lueger isn’t always such a bad chap, after all. Vienna’s relative smallness means that pastoral picnics or woodland strolls await at the end of the tram line.
Is everyone happy in his or her place? It seems so to Zweig, who emerges as the effortless prodigy, forever insulated from the unseemly. School is a lark, and everything he touches turns to gold, gained in his youth without palpable blood, sweat or tears. Zweig churns out flawless copy, and everyone wants some of it. He writes plays and coyly hints at their presumed existence, and immediately there come offers to stage them come from directors at renowned theaters. If there were a German language phrase for “Aw, shucks,” Zweig would be uttering it … often.
Thus, Zweig embarks upon a lifetime of happenstance brushes with the famous and powerful. Zweig eerily presages Zelig, title character of Woody Allen’s 1983 mockumentary, by means of the annoyingly repetitious habit of managing always to be where someone “important” is about to stumble past and ask for a cigarette, or directions to the loo, followed inevitably by the author’s earnest ruminations on the epochal slice of history he just witnessed. We expect Albert Einstein to respectfully ask Zweig for assistance with his latest theory, or Mae West to make an offer for the use of her upstairs room.
And then, all of it crumbles.
2. January 26
3. January 27
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