Stefan Zweig

Other literary forms

Stefan Zweig, one of the most prolific and, in his time, most widely read authors of the twentieth century, began his literary career as a poet, but his lyric poetry is not among his most important or most enduring achievements. His reputation rests largely on his short fiction, his biographies, his essays, and one of his plays. Zweig the storyteller is noted for his vivid, virtuosic style and his skillful psychological penetration of his characters. His work in the novella form ranges from Die Liebe der Erika Ewald (1904; Erika Ewald’s love) to his last completed work, Schachnovelle (1942; The Royal Game, 1944), which poignantly foreshadows a time of increasing specialization, mechanization, and dehumanization in which men of mind are doomed to be checkmated by brutish technocrats. The collection Erstes Erlebnis (1911; first experience) contains sensitive stories of childhood and adolescence; the stories in Verwirrung der Gefühle (1927; Conflicts, 1927) and Amok (1922; English translation, 1931) deal with adult passions and problems. Zweig’s only completed novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity, 1939), is a haunting portrayal of a crippled girl and her love. Discovered and published in 1982, Rausch der Verwandlung (The Post-Office Girl, 2008) is a fragmentary novel about a lowly Austrian post-office clerk whose penurious life is transformed when she gets a taste of opulent living and again when she is drawn into the vortex of big-city crime.

Another literary form in which Zweig achieved great success and an international readership in more than thirty languages was the vie romancée (biographical novel). As a biographer, Zweig favored the cyclical form, attempting to present a “typology of the spirit.” Drei Meister (1920; Three Masters, 1930) contains biographical studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevski; Der Kampf mit dem Dämon (1925; The Struggle with the Demon, 1928-1930, 1939) examines Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche, poets and thinkers who went insane or committed suicide; and Drei Dichter ihres Lebens (1928; Adepts in Self-Portraiture, 1928) presents the great autobiographers Casanova, Stendhal, and Leo Tolstoy. In 1935, these biographical studies appeared in one volume as Baumeister der Welt, appearing in English translation in 1939 as Master Builders. Another biographical trilogy, Die Heilung durch den Geist (1931; Mental Healers, 1932), explores the lives and influences of Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy (who is debunked), and Sigmund Freud (to whom Zweig felt close intellectually and personally). Other biographical volumes include Joseph Fouché (1929; English translation, 1930), Marie Antoinette (1932; English translation, 1933), Maria Stuart (1935; Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles, 1935), Magellan (1938; Magellan, Pioneer of the Pacific, 1938), and Balzac (1946; English translation, 1946). Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (1934; Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1934) is a very personal book, for Zweig regarded the Dutch Humanist, who disdained political action in a turbulent age, as his spiritual ancestor and mentor. Zweig’s collaboration with Richard Strauss on the comic opera Die schweigsame Frau (the silent woman), based on a work by Ben Jonson, became a cause célèbre in 1935 because of the composer’s refusal to renounce his Jewish collaborator in Nazi Germany. Most notable among Zweig’s several dramas is the powerful pacifist play Jeremias (1917; Jeremiah, 1922), which premiered in Switzerland. In his universally admired autobiography, Die Welt von Gestern (1941; The World of Yesterday, 1943), Zweig self-effacingly keeps his own life and work in the background as he presents a brilliant, poignant panorama of European life, thought, and culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

Achievements

In both his life and his work, Stefan Zweig was a cultural mediator. All his life, he was a translator in an elevated sense, attempting to inform, to educate, to inspire, and to arouse appreciation and enthusiasm across literary, cultural, national, and personal boundaries. He once wrote that it was his aim:

to understand even what is most alien to us, always to evaluate peoples and periods, figures and works only in their positive and creative sense, and to let this desire to understand and convey this understanding to others serve humbly and faithfully our indestructible ideal: humane communication among individuals, mentalities, cultures, and nations.

For fifteen years, Zweig’s impressive home on the picturesque Kapuzinerberg in Salzburg was a shrine to his central idea, the intellectual unification of Europe, and the mecca of a cultural elite, many of whom Zweig numbered among his friends. His world travels as well as his bibliophilic pursuits, particularly his legendary collection of literary and musical holograph manuscripts, nurtured his art and aided his wide-ranging cultural and humanitarian activities. Zweig’s correspondence with Martin Buber during World War I as well as other documents indicates that he prized the Diaspora and interpreted his Jewishness rather willfully as offering him an opportunity to be a citizen of the world: “Perhaps it is the purpose of Judaism to show over the centuries that community is possible without country, only through blood and intellect, only through the word and faith.”

At an early age, Zweig became aware of the crisis facing his era, and for many years, he was bedeviled by the growing antinomy between a bourgeois humanism whose position had become undermined by the failure of its adherents to commit themselves to positive action and the ever-rising current of political and social activism which was compelling individuals to commit themselves to some form of action. While Zweig’s knowledge of history and the typology of human motivations and personalities could not have left him blind to the need for change, he consciously adopted and maintained an eminently apolitical stance.

Displaying a becoming awareness of the dignity and spiritual superiority of the dispossessed and the vanquished, Zweig repeatedly and movingly portrayed apolitical individuals (such as that “bibliosaurus,” the transplanted Eastern European Jew Jakob Mendel, called Book Mendel) caught up in the impersonal, unfeeling machinery of world politics and conflicts. Zweig’s biographical study of Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s minister of police, is a great moral condemnation of homo politicus; teaching an object lesson in unprincipled behavior, the author warned the peoples of Europe against falling for politicians of that stripe. In an essay written in 1922, “Ist die Geschichte gerecht?” (Is there justice in history?), Zweig tried to supply a humanistic antidote and alternative to the cult of power, warning the masses against glorifying their oppressors and worshiping their chains. He pointed out that, all too often, history has been rewritten in favor of those who have prevailed by virtue of brute strength and that there is a tendency to create myths about the strong and the heroic, while the infinitely worthier heroes of everyday life remain unsung. Might and morality must be clearly sundered; it behooves people not to be bedazzled by the seductive glamour of success and to reexamine history from a humanistic point of view.

In The World of Yesterday, Zweig said about himself that as an Austrian, a Jew, a writer, a humanist, and a pacifist, he had always stood at the exact point where the global clashes and cataclysms of the century were at their most violent. His response to these blows of fate was an excessive objectivity and feckless neutrality, a reluctance to become involved in political action, and an increasing contempt for merely political adjustments. Zweig’s frequently naïve stance is reminiscent of the inaction and near-paralysis of Viennese intellectuals at the turn of the century; he came to regard Europe as his “sacred homeland,” and his Europeanism ultimately led him to view the tragedy of the Jews as only part of the larger and presumably more important tragedy of Europe.

While Zweig was a physician who could not heal himself, his undogmatic and nonideological humanism is eminently relevant to the present age. While his brand of liberalism is old-fashioned, his contribution to pan-European thought must be regarded as an enduring one. His was one of the first voices to call for a cosmopolitan community of the youth of Europe, and he proposed the establishment of an international university that would function interchangeably in several capital cities. In a lecture delivered in 1932, “Die moralische Entgiftung Europas” (the moral decontamination of Europe), Zweig called for well-organized student exchanges to reduce political tensions and collective animosities. He felt that the history of culture and of the human spirit rather than military or political history should be taught in the schools of the world. Some causes for which Zweig worked tirelessly and that seemed utopian during his lifetime, such as Franco-German understanding, are actualities today. Zweig’s apotheosis of Brazil, his last refuge, shows that his interest was not limited to Europe and that he was alive to both the problems and the potentialities of what the developing world. “Our greatest debt of gratitude,” wrote Zweig in his unfinished last work, a study of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, “is to those who in these inhuman times confirm the human in us, who encourage us not to abandon our unique and imperishable possession: our innermost self.” These words also sum up Zweig’s quest and his achievement.

Biography

The second son of a wealthy industrialist, Stefan Zweig had an early and auspicious start in literature in what he later described as a “world of security,” taking “flight into the intellectual” from his father’s stultifying business mentality and his mother’s overbearing snobbishness. Having an essay accepted by Theodor Herzl, the influential editor of the prestigious Vienna daily Neue Freie Presse, was an important boost to the career of the fledgling writer, who soon became an outstanding member of the literary group Jung Wien (Young Vienna). His first book was published when he was still in his teens.

In 1904, Zweig earned a doctorate from the University of Vienna with a dissertation on Hippolyte Taine. Early trips to Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, England, Italy, Spain, India, and North America served to broaden the horizons of the young man, but what most decisively shaped Zweig’s evolution from an aesthetically oriented man of letters to a “great European” was his encounter with the Flemish poet Émile Verhaeren. Zweig regarded Verhaeren’s intense, vibrantly contemporary, and life-affirming poetry as a lyrical encyclopedia of his age. Zweig tirelessly served Verhaeren as a translator, biographer, and publicist. Zweig’s European education was continued through his friendship with the French writer Romain Rolland, whose exemplary pacifist and humanist activities in wartime were a great inspiration to Zweig. While working at the Austrian War Archives in Vienna, Zweig was able to write his pacifist drama Jeremiah. He went to Zurich to join a group of intellectuals who, like himself, rejected nationalism and worked toward the restoration of the community of European men of mind.

In 1919, Zweig moved to Salzburg and was soon able to solemnize his union with the writer Friderike Maria Burger von Winternitz. The years in Salzburg, where he lived with his wife and two stepdaughters, were his most productive ones. In addition to having his works published by the prestigious Insel Verlag of Leipzig, he became a trusted adviser to that publishing house, ever ready to help other writers and artists by introducing and championing their work. His readings and lectures took him all over the world. One of the most notable of these journeys was his trip to Russia in 1928 on the occasion of the Tolstoy centennial.

After 1933, the centrally located Salzburg became an inhospitable and dangerously exposed place, and an almost paranoid uneasiness took hold of the apolitical Zweig. His move to England in 1934 marked the beginning of years of insecurity, restless globe-trotting, and mounting despair. The breakup of his marriage was but one of many symptomatic events and situations that bedeviled the man who had acquired the coveted British citizenship and was materially far better off than most emigrants. Profoundly depressed by the fate of his spiritual homeland, Europe, and fearing that the humanist spirit was crushed forever, Zweig committed suicide in 1942 in a country that he had celebrated in a book as “a land of the future.” He was joined in death by his second wife, Elisabeth Charlotte Altmann, whom he had married at Bath in 1939.

Analysis

The poetry that Stefan Zweig began writing at an early age, published in Die Gesellschaft, Die Zukunft, Die Welt, Deutsche Dichtung, and other newspapers, periodicals, and almanacs, was informed by the zeitgeist of fin de siècle Vienna. The last decades of the moribund Habsburg empire, governed by a six-hundred-year-old dynasty, were characterized by a latter-day Weltschmerz, by overrefinement and an aesthetic cult of beauty expressive of an aloofness from the world’s pursuits, and by surface smiles masking a world-weary abandonment of political solutions. Zweig himself described these early efforts, Impressionistic poems marked by preciosity, as “verses of vague premonition and instinctive feeling, not created out of my own experience, but rather born of a passion for language.” The same may be said of the astonishingly precocious poems of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who published his verse as a schoolboy under the pseudonym Loris and for whom Zweig always had admiration and affection, though it turned out to be a case of unrequited love. While Zweig’s early poems, however, are eminently lyrical and display great musicality as well as a certain mastery of form, they lack the psychological penetration, the poetic intuition, and the linguistic magic of Hofmannsthal’s poetry.

In 1900, Zweig wrote in a letter to Karl Emil Franzos: “I have published to date 150 or 200 poems, written double that number, and now have put together a volume under the title Silberne Saiten which contains 50, that is, a most stringent selection.” That volume appeared in February of 1901 with a dedication “to my dear parents.” It was well received, even by such established poets as Detlev von Liliencron, Richard Dehmel, and Rainer Maria Rilke. The Revue allemande noted that “a quiet, solemn beauty pervades the lines of this Young Vienna poet, a translucence rarely to be found in first works . . . Zweig is a virtuoso in technique; each single poem gives us fresh opportunity to enjoy the fineness of his diction, of immeasurable harmony and wealth of imagery.” A severe judgment, however, was rendered by Erich Mühsam, who rejected “a book that, with its obtrusive sickly sweetness and insipid exaggeration, would hardly be worth mentioning were it not typical of the pretentious manner which is spreading ever more widely through the Young Vienna movement and which seeks to impress by mere playing with form.” Even though Zweig had the satisfaction of seeing the eminent composer Max Reger set to music two of the poems from Silberne Saiten, “Neue Fülle” and “Ein Drängen ist in meinem Herzen,” he soon disowned this early poetry and refused to have it reprinted in later collections.

Die frühen Kränze

Some of the young Zweig’s characteristic feelings, themes, and stances (dreaming, longing, youthful ardor aiming at interpersonal relationships, evanescence, delicate autumnal and nocturnal moods, subtle transitions) are also in evidence in the poetry written in the early years of the twentieth century and published in Zweig’s second collection, Die frühen Kränze (the early wreaths), issued in 1906. This volume is notable, among other reasons, for marking Zweig’s first collaboration with the celebrated Insel Verlag. Here, Zweig presented his more mature, though still rather unoriginal poetry, with its cyclical form adumbrating the later grouping of a number of his prose works. Thus, the series “Fahrten” (journeys) includes poetic evocations of a sunrise in Venice (“Sonnenaufgang in Venedig”), nights on Lake Como (“Nächte am Comersee”), and the city of Constance (“Stadt am See”). The sequence “Lieder des Abends” (songs of evening) contains the euphoric “Lied des Einsiedels” (hermit’s song); the cycle “Frauen” (women) includes “Das fremde Lächeln” (a female stranger’s smile), “Die Zärtlichkeiten” (the caresses), and “Terzinen an ein Mädchen” (terze rima for a girl); and the cycle “Bilder” (images, or portraits) includes one of Zweig’s longest poems, “Der Verführer” (the seducer).

Gesammelten Gedichte

Many of these and other groupings are included in the more ambitious collection of his poems that Zweig published in 1924, Gesammelten Gedichte. Its first section, “Musik der Jugend” (music of youth), presents a selection from the early poems. The cycle “Die Herren des Lebens” (the masters of life), placed toward the end of the volume, gathers eleven of what may be described as lyric statues. Notable among these is the only poem (or work of any kind) of which Zweig is known to have made a recording: “Der Bildner” (the sculptor). This poem memorializes Zweig’s visit to Maison Rodin at Meudon in 1913. He depicts the aged sculptor surrounded by his timeless and changeless works, those “frozen crystals of infinity,” and describes his astonishment in the petrified forest of his studio as he prayerfully comes to realize what his true mission is: to represent, shape, and complete something more permanent than he is, to create life beyond his own life. “Der Kaiser” is a poetic evocation of Emperor Franz Joseph, and “Der Dirigent” (the conductor) was written in memory of Gustav Mahler.

Two of the most powerful poems in this collection were born of Zweig’s vibrant pacifism. “Der Krüppel” (the cripple) is a sensitive poetic depiction of a war-injured man on crutches, and “Polyphem” evokes the mythical monster Polyphemus, the cannibalistic giant who comes under attack as the demon or bringer of war. The long “Ballade von einem Traum” (ballad of a dream), written after World War I, which concludes the Gesammelten Gedichte, may be read as a highly personal allegory. In a nightmare, the poet feels that his vaunted private sphere has been invaded and his most secret self exposed. He reads the fiery handwriting on the wall: “Du bist erkannt!” (You are known!). Tormented by this revealing refrain, he finally awakes, grateful that his innermost thoughts have not, in fact, been betrayed and that his deepest self remains inviolate.

Translations

Zweig’s activities as a cultural mediator, and in particular as a translator of poetry, significantly shaped his own creativity as a poet. His first great idol was Verhaeren, and Zweig’s initial lack of self-sufficiency may have made him respond all the more strongly to certain antithetical traits that he found in the Belgian poet: a hymnal spirit, a prodigious strength, universal love, enthusiasm, and a feeling of exaltation. What others regarded as a barren field for poetry—the machines, the big cities, the industrial life, the masses of people, the entire ferment of modern civilization—Verhaeren considered eminently fertile material for poetic expression. His example purged Zweig’s own poetry of the last vestiges of fin de siècle Decadence. After the decisive caesura of World War I, however, Zweig did not attempt to emulate Verhaeren’s poetic style. The three-volume edition of Verhaeren’s writings that Zweig translated and edited for the Insel Verlag in 1910 included a volume containing his translations (from the French) of fifty-one of Verhaeren’s poems; another volume had preceded it in 1904. Other French poets for whom Zweig served as a sensitive translator and commentator are Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. His translations from Verhaeren, Baudelaire, and Verlaine are rightly reprinted in the edition of Zweig’s collected poetry issued in 1966.

“Der Sechzigjährige dankt”

After the appearance of Gesammelten Gedichte in the mid-1920s, Zweig concentrated on his fiction and biographies, writing poetry only occasionally. Particular poignance attaches to his last poem, “Der Sechzigjährige dankt” (the sixty-year-old gives thanks), which Zweig sent a few months before his death to close friends who had congratulated him on his birthday. This widely admired poem has been set to music by Henry Jolles and by Felix Wolfes. It bespeaks serenity despite the poet’s presentiment of death, expresses calm detachment and resignation as “farewell’s blazing gloss” opens up new vistas, and says that what remains of life can be enjoyed sub specie aeternitatis, for the approach of old age frees one from the constraints, burdens, and goads of desire, ambition, and self-recrimination.

Bibliography

Arens, Hanns, ed. Stefan Zweig: A Tribute to His Life and Work. Trans. by Christobel Fowler. London: W. H. Allen, 1951. Print.

Gelber, Mark H., ed. Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on His Literary and Biographical Writings. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007. Print.

Klawiter, Randolph J. Stefan Zweig: An International Bibliography. Riverside: Ariadne, 1999. Print.

Spitzer, Leo. Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginality in a Century of Emancipation. New York: Hill, 1999. Print.

Vanwesenbeeck, Birger, and Mark H. Gelber. Stefan Zweig and World Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. Print.

Weidermann, Volker. Summer before the Dark: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Ostend 1936. London: Pushkin, 2016. Print.

Wright, Patrick. “Enemy Alien: Lives and Letters.” Rev. The World of Yesterday. The Guardian 2 Feb. 2008. Print.

Zweig, Stefan. Stefan Zweig, Joseph Gregor: Correspondence, 1921-1938. Ed. Kenneth Birkin. Dunedin: U of Otago P, 1992. Print.