Zweig ... again.

In January, I reviewed Stefan Zweig's three lives in a three-part review of "The World of Yesterday."

1. January 25
2. January 26

3. January 27

Lezard's essay is to be considered equal time; in particular, his point about Zweig's thoughts on sexual repression is well taken.

Why Stefan Zweig deserves Wes Anderson's praise ... Zweig peeled back the veneer of Austro-Hungarian culture to expose sexual repression and the nature of love – no wonder he inspired Anderson's latest film, by Nicholas Lezard (Guardian)

... For Zweig was very much the product of mittel-European bourgeois culture. He might even be said to have embodied it – and this may well have been one reason why others who were not Nazis resented his fame and success. Zweig knew everyone worth knowing, but whether they thought him worth knowing is another matter. Thomas Mann was catty about him behind his back, calling him second-rate; as well one writer might say of another whose sales and royalties outstrip one's own.

Part 3: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig; three lives in a three-part review.

3.

With the Great War passed, Austria fatally diminished, and the postwar inflationary period finally behind him, Stefan Zweig is in the prime of his professional life, and in his memoir, he’s ready for a spate of industrial-strength name dropping. Forever preoccupied with a comfortable, respected, bourgeois existence of art, writing, music and punditry, during the 1920s he thoroughly insulates himself from the approaching storm clouds.

Granted, there are hints of bad times around the corner. A trip to Italy provides a glimpse of Mussolini’s black-shirted thugs in action, amazing Zweig by their mobility and skilled training. Later, two weeks in the fledgling Soviet Union impress him, so determined are the workers there, ostensibly forging a new society, but with the providential assistance of a surreptitious note belatedly passed to him on the penultimate night abroad, he departs with the realization that it’s all just a Potemkin village under rapid construction by a looming Stalin.

Everywhere he travels, Zweig is enamored of the kindness and nobility of ordinary, simple folk, evidently never seeing in the hearts of the masses an innate, vocational ability to drop their pitchforks at a whistle’s notice and man the concentration camp guard tower – as many were about to do, and with pure glee. As could be seen even then, the period after the end of World War I was filled with societal trauma on a massive scale, which contributed mightily to another global war to address unfinished business. Zweig sees these things, but doesn’t. Even after the fact, he isn’t quite able to put them into perspective.

This, then, is my major annoyance with The World of Yesteryear. Looking back from the vantage point of his own exile and disabling, demeaning statelessness, he can see only that numerous others also ignored the earning warning signs of Hitlerism, while at the same time generally exempting himself from responsibility – as though to say, well, after all, I was so very busy rubbing elbows with the creative classes that I never bothered to exercise my voting franchise or take part in any way, so why are they coming after me? I was busy with art and the finer things in life. How could I have known?

Perhaps by opening the window, wetting a finger and raising it to the fetid air, but almost nothing Zweig sensed or saw was permitted to stand in the way of his own meteoric, glittering writing career. If he was prescient on the down-low while others donned blindfolds, might there not have been the chance of him taking some sort of action to mobilize his numerous loyal readers across the planet in the interest of sounding a warning? Of showing a semblance of a pulse?

At last, somewhat alerted by the muddled fate of his operatic exercise with the scheming composer Richard Strauss during the dawning days of Chancellor Hitler (Zweig pens the libretto and sees the piece performed in spite of his Jewishness, which by this point is virtually outlawed), he makes half-hearted preparations to leave Austria, and finally does, although frequent visits back occur throughout the 1930s as the Anschluss draws ever nearer. Does it ever dawn on Zweig that his own dilettantish artistic tendencies might have dulled his antennae? I think not.

I won’t dispute that in the book’s waning pages, a degree of elegiac reflection often emerges, arguably redeeming the whole exercise. Zweig writes movingly of a dying Sigmund Freud, elderly, pain-ridden and stranded in exile in London, but still plumbing mankind’s inner depths. Without a passport or a country, Zweig exists by the courtesy of his hosts in England, America and later Brazil, and describes the disorienting sensation of statelessness with accuracy and pathos.

Still, throughout, he seems only periodically to grasp that the pain and displacement being suffered by vast swaths of humanity surely outweigh his own surprisingly detached annoyance at a productive routine and successful career unfairly and tragically disrupted. Zweig is curiously narcissistic, and the self-centeredness mars an otherwise insightful tome.

1. January 25
2. January 26

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

Part 1: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig; three lives in a three-part review.

1.

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