Part 2: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig; three lives in a three-part review.

2.

The onset of World War I provides the first challenging transition in Stefan Zweig’s comfortable, predictable Viennese world. One lifetime passes, and another begins. He observes that the death of imperial Habsburg heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo barely causes a stir in his own social milieu, and why would it? The heir was the objectionable sort, cranky and scowling, and nowhere near as trustworthy and seemly as the ancient whiskered Emperor and other reliable royal court figures like Karl, the new and far more youthful figurehead in waiting.

Reading between the lines, it’s likely that at some point, Zweig actually did meet Franz Ferdinand at a gala, or while strolling along the Ring, and the latter’s unchanging expression and general disinterest in the welfare of human beings did not provide sufficient grist for another Zweig-cum-Zelig moment. Of course, perhaps the doomed heir’s manner suggested that he didn’t like Jewish writers, whereas former mayor Lueger was overtly anti-Semitic but is given a pass by Zweig as being unthreatening, and merely playing to the crowd.

Perhaps Zweig was so relentlessly self-absorbed that none of it registered, ever. One has to wonder. Perhaps by necessity, all memoirs must display a degree of self-absorption, such is the difficulty in finding perspective between personal and public worlds. The distance seems unsurpassable in Zweig’s autobiographical case.

Naturally, Zweig’s summer holiday in 1914 was planned in advance, and occurs in the vicinity of the Low Countries, because he is right there watching as troop trains roll forward near the beach. Mobilization of the European armies is in full swing, according to secret plans written to the rhythm of railway timetables. The writer barely makes it back to Österreich before the national borders slam shut, ending the blissful eras of peace and passport-free travel.

Back home in Vienna, Zweig finds himself too old to enlist and too young to die, and instead handily nabs a featherbedded sinecure in the library of a military branch, all the while continuing to write, to be published and to get paid as the world around him falls to pieces.

Zweig’s eyes finally are opened (or so he reports) during a public relations junket to the Eastern Front, during which he nominally performs his official duties by pawning them off to local Jewish “factors,” and later, shares a filthy hospital train with the dying flower of Austro-Hungarian manhood in route from the hellish trenches to lovely Budapest, where the juxtaposition of death’s gritty squalor and the Hungarian capital’s seemingly unchanged quaint urban ambience so moves him that he makes an important decision: He’ll depart Vienna and wait out the conflict in Zurich. After all, only in neutral Switzerland might Zweig see his remarkable anti-war play staged. Seems the belligerents weren’t interested in sanctioning peaceniks.

Eventually even Zurich is too close to war’s messiness, infested as it comes to be by refugees, spies and operatives, so Zweig moves even further away from the epicenter of the tumult, to a quiet nearby town. It’s mostly about his work, of course. Granted, he has interesting points to make about art and culture in the context of the war, and how the international fraternity of writers came to be as conflicted by patriotism as the workers abandoning the socialist international. Zweig expresses pain and disappointment, and he watches the clock.

With the war over and the Central Powers in shambles, Zweig drags his bulging wallet back to Salzburg in emasculated Austria, pausing at the border to observe ex-emperor Karl heading for exile in the other direction. It’s very cold those first few months in the foothills of the Alps, as inflation rocks the ruined rump, and rowdy Bavarians flock across the border to drink beer until they drop, never anticipating their own prospective inflationary comeuppance, so soon to come.

It’s hard up there on the hillside, in the former lodge of a bishop, but Zweig always has a check in the morning mail … and across the valley, on the mountain opposite his, up on Berchtesgaden, is the man who’ll soon be taking it all away.

A fellow named Hitler.

1. January 25
3. January 27