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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A new collection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day Stefan Zweig was a born eulogist. In this collection of powerful elegies, homages and personal memories, Zweig forms a richly interconnected portrait of key creative figures in the European cultural diaspora up to 1939. Many of those mourned or celebrated here cast a long spiritual shadow over Zweig's own writing life: Verhaeren, Rolland, Nietzsche, Roth, Mahler, Rilke and Freud. Zweig's farewells, souvenirs and declarations of gratitude demonstrate his ardent pan-Europeanism and rich friendships across borders. Elegant and haunting, these tributes are a monument to his reverence for the arts and his belief in the sacredness of individualism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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‘At a time of monetary crisis and political disorder, of mounting border controls and barbed-wire fences… Zweig’s celebration of the brotherhood of peoples reminds us that there is another way’
The Nation
‘Zweig’s accumulated historical and cultural studies… remain a body of achievement almost too impressive to take in’
Clive James
‘Stefan Zweig’s time of oblivion is over for good… it’s good to have him back’
Salman Rushdie, The New York Times
‘Zweig is the most adult of writers; civilised, urbane, but never jaded or cynical; a realist who nonetheless believed in the possibility—the necessity—of empathy’
Independent
‘Zweig deserves to be famous again, and for good’
Times Literary Supplement
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‘Art is an eternal war, never an end, always a relentless beginning’
zweig on toscanini
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I
How can it be, one might be tempted to ask, that none of Stefan Zweig’s corpus of elegant eulogies, elegies and tributes to his fellow artists, musicians and writers has ever appeared in the English language until now? After all, a volume entitled Souvenirs et Rencontres, which contained a number of those texts you are about to encounter here, appeared in France as early as 1951, only nine years after Zweig’s suicide in Brazil. We, however, in time-honoured fashion, have lagged behind. Despite the recent ‘Zweig renaissance’ in the Anglophone world, there still remain a vast number of texts which currently lie beyond the reach of readers, glittering like an inviting estuary that imperceptibly meets the wider ocean of European literature. Here are some of them, a rich selection of those that concern the author’s powerful memories of fellow travellers across European culture in the twentieth century—some, but by no means all, for Zweig relentlessly penned tributes both to his contemporaries and to those he considered great masters of the past, or artists who had represented something personally significant for him in his evolution as a writer. I have selected from this wider body of work texts which to me seemed most intriguing, engaging and vital, or which might harbour some 10prescience of our own time. I have also chosen a range of figures across the arts which includes those who were famous at Zweig’s time of writing and still are today, and others to whom our epoch has shown less generosity of spirit, either for sound reasons or no clear reason at all. One of these is the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. The substantial and eloquently crafted memorial which Zweig dedicates to him I have included partly because it is considered as one of Zweig’s most successful pieces of biographical writing, and although admiring of his subject, eschews the hagiographic style of his earlier biography of Verhaeren (1910). It is important for readers to understand the central role Verhaeren played in Zweig’s early European trajectory, and the friendship which was maintained until the rupture of war in 1914 and the Belgian’s untimely death in Rouen two years later.
Zweig’s book-length biographies are well known if not widely read today, partly due to the lack of modern translations and some of the older ones being out of print. Rather frustratingly, these are the most relevant for our own time. I think of Erasmus of Rotterdam from 1934, and The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin from 1936, back-to-back power plays between tyrannical figures or the state and freedom-loving individuals, with Luther and Calvin standing in for Hitler and Erasmus and Castellio for Zweig. These were symbolic warnings from history superimposed on the totalitarian present. But this compulsion for literary biographies had begun much earlier with a series of monographs. In 1905, Zweig had published an important essay on the French poet Verlaine and in 1910 his major biography of Verhaeren appeared in Germany, soon being translated into French and English. The pre-war ‘golden age’ of 1900–14 was the time of Verhaeren’s 11greatest influence; he was one of the most visible and sought-after European poets, filling auditoriums across the continent as far as Moscow. In addition to the biography, Zweig flung all his energies into establishing the Belgian’s reputation as a major poet in Germany, translating, albeit rather freely, certain works himself, and even attempted to corral a coterie of disciples which included Rilke to translate into German between them a multi-volume Collected Poems of Verhaeren; but this crowning moment for the Belgian poet and high priest of the pan-Europeans was abandoned due to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. The impulsion to ardently support and promote those writers Zweig particularly valued, to render biographical portraits as confirmations of his admiration, continued till the end of his life.
For example, in Brazilian exile, mired in morbid depression over the perceived annihilation of Europe, he by chance rediscovered Montaigne, seizing on him as his last guiding master, and set out to write the necessary tribute. Shorn of his European friends, desperate for a supportive and sympathetic voice from history, Zweig found in the lonely vigil, the apartness of Montaigne something he needed, both a fraternal counsel and an exemplary advocate of free thought. It seems that whenever Zweig was touched at the deepest point by another writer or artist, their life story or creative example, he felt an overwhelming urge to explore them further through such portraits, to flesh out the elements of his veneration. This is why, when exiled in London during the 1930s, he was often installed in the British Museum library gathering material for the works on Marie Antoinette, Magellan or Mary Queen of Scots. The public or private library was essentially Zweig’s club; he had to be surrounded by books, have access to books, 12and whenever he was about to embark on a project he would ask his wife, Friderike von Winternitz, to order a whole list of secondary literature on his subject. A poignant photograph of Zweig taken in the summer of 1940 shows him descending the empty steps of the New York Public Library. As is well known, Zweig was an astute collector of rare books and manuscripts, some of which were lost in the traumatic years of journeying, but a significant portion of which survived and, fittingly, are now safeguarded in a library, the British Library in London. Beyond the book-length biographies, Zweig also wrote countless portraits of writers outside his own time, some almost expected and others intriguing: Goethe, Chateaubriand, Rimbaud, Dante, Jaurès, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve…
After the trauma of the 1914–18 war had faded, Zweig’s literary output was beyond prolific. From 1919 to 1934 he based himself in an initially unheated yet palatial villa atop the Kapuzinerberg in Salzburg known as Paschinger Schlössl, but later known as Villa Europa. Here, for fifteen largely stable, trouble-free years, the great and the good of European letters ascended the steep, winding lane of the hill to the gate of No. 5. Though ever on the move, zigzagging the continent, taking advantage of the ever-denser web of Europe’s railways and making regular trips to Paris, Zurich, Brussels, Rome, Berlin and Vienna, Zweig now had an anchorage, a central base, the well-oiled hub of a many-spoked wheel, not to mention a generously assisting partner who proved highly effective in promotional and organizational terms. Zweig’s literary production went up a gear. In these years he wrote the portrait of Marcel Proust’s bedridden resistance and Frans Masereel’s Expressionist craftsmanship, issued fulsome gratitude to Romain Rolland and erected his lyrically 13decorous memorial to Rilke found here, but he was also busy publishing his finest short stories and novellas. During the 1920s Zweig treated his readers to a procession of great miniatures including Compulsion (1920), Amok and Fantastic Night (1922), Fear (1925), Confusion (1927), The Invisible Collection (1927) and Mendel the Bibliophile (1929). But alongside all this he still managed to produce his ambitious series of trilogies on world writers, Master Builders: An Attempt at a Typology of the Spirit. The first, Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, appeared in 1920. This was followed by The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche (1925), and finally Adepts in Self-Portraiture: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy (1928).
Zweig possessed an indefatigable ideal of a progressing creative humanity that was incrementally elevating consciousness for the greater good of mankind, despite twists in the road in the form of episodic acts of barbarism, war and imperial conquest. This vast historical network of artists, writers, poets, musicians and philosophers Zweig viewed as a literary and artistic family, an interlocking fraternity all working towards the same end, whose individual talent fed into the universality of cultural enlightenment, with each generation handing on a baton they had been privileged to receive from their illustrious forebears. This romantic premise forms the bedrock beneath all Zweig’s works, but comes through most visibly in the historical biographies, essays on the importance of European unity, the enigmas of artistic creativity and here, in these personal tributes to his contemporaries. The reader will soon note that the language in these pieces, culled from different periods of his life, bears a simultaneous message and that there is a noticeable repetition and reinforcement, both within one piece and across others. Zweig’s central tenet remains constant, like an 14electrical current that cannot be diverted or switched off. Always he returns to the same countenancing of his ideals of universalism, of the responsibility, the necessity of actively tending culture, hard won over a millennia, and not only of admiring it but—crucially—reseeding it. Faced with external threats, with indifference or hostility, this demands an individual act of heroism, but for Zweig not in an isolated, inspired act, in a moment of fiery convulsion, but through a kind of drawn-out inspirational labour, where commitment and patience carry as much weight as the visionary element.
It is important to note that in these fifteen pieces, the western half of Europe is widely represented through the nationalities of those discussed: France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Austria, England, Ireland. Zweig’s wide-ranging travels in ‘his’ Europe and some exotic forays beyond meant the conveyance of ever-greater numbers of writers and artists to his terrace above Salzburg, and when he did not meet them personally, he warmly and enthusiastically received their books and correspondence. Here was a financially secure man of letters purposely based at the heart of the continent, keenly surveying the literary and artistic landscape from his eyrie for initiatives of note which might serve to enrich his life experience, or that pertained to his own work. Then, either by mail, a personal visit or train journey, that creative spirit, that rare manuscript, that fateful book would be absorbed into the whole. But by 1933–34 it was all over: as Hitler in triumph descended from the Obersalzberg some thirty kilometres distant to begin his drive for European subjugation, Zweig descended the Kapuzinerberg to relinquish the privileged life of a man of letters and begin that of a Jewish refugee, abandoning Salzburg for exile in London.15
II
A number of the pieces here were destined to be read at events, such as the funerals of Freud and Roth, at a memorial for Rilke, a ceremonial occasion for Hofmannsthal, a special birthday celebration for Schnitzler and Gorky. Most of those figures represented here were men Zweig knew personally, even intimately, yet the tone of his texts can appear quite different. Compare, for example, the more formal, reverential style of those to Romain Rolland and Rilke, both of whom Zweig had known for long years across the abyss of war and admired profoundly for different reasons, and the less ornate and earnest personal reminiscence of, rather than elegy to, the English writer John Drinkwater, with whom Zweig was less familiar. The Drinkwater text was written midway through Zweig’s London exile, ten years later than the other two, and feels noticeably more modern to our eyes. There is the humanity here of an observer, a newcomer, rather than one penning a devotional eulogy. There is something moving and strangely timeless about this Drinkwater curiosity, with its window into the world of writers and intellectuals in the London of the time, assembling for a private viewing of Drinkwater’s coronation film. But although there is a difference in coloration to all these portraits, a certain darkness is manifest in them all, in spite of Zweig’s strenuous efforts to bring to the fore his subjects’ creative achievements, their stoicism and heroism.
This presence of death suffuses Zweig’s works, whether fiction or non-fiction; the spectre of suicide often makes its entrance, and it was Montaigne’s essay ‘A Custom of the Isle of Cea’ which provided a catalytic historical affirmation or example for Zweig’s decision to exit the world by his own hand.16
But death and its challenging reality of severance is not the only story Zweig is telling in his paean to Freud beside the casket in Golders Green Cemetery, likewise with Roth; but it is what lurks in all the texts as the mortal turning point when the immortal spirit of the work, not the living man, is released from the finite physical debris. In ‘Marcel Proust’s Tragic Life Course’, Zweig issues a rallying cry in the death chamber of a bedridden Proust, swaddled in cravats, who overcomes the fear of death by listening to it so attentively. From the opening line, when we picture the struggling writer seeking to subsist long enough to get down the material which is backing up in his head and heart, everything is moving one way; and although in its passage downstream the log may catch on the bank from time to time, eventually the irresistible flow takes it over the lip of the falls. Likewise, ‘The Return of Gustav Mahler’ is dominated by the moving moment when Zweig, aboard a transatlantic liner which also bears the dying Mahler below decks, finally lays eyes on his hero in the ‘remorqueur’ (tugboat) which carries them to the dockside:
I finally saw him: he lay there, pale as one already in the grip of death, inanimate, with closed lids. The breeze had swept his greying hair to one side, his arched brow projected clearly and boldly, and below was that firm chin, where the power of his will sat. The withered hands lay folded on the blanket, for the first time I really saw him, the fiery one, enfeebled. But this silhouette, unforgettable, unforgettable! was set against a grey infinitude of sky and sea, immeasurable grief was in this gaze but also something transfigured by greatness, something that 17faded into the sublime, like music. I knew then that I had witnessed him for the last time.
Then there is the affecting ‘Mater Dolorosa’. Zweig had already written an inspired portrait of Nietzsche drawn from the period of the philosopher’s wanderings in the Engadine and latterly in Turin in The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche in 1925. Here Zweig pinpointed Nietzsche’s malaise, his gradually ebbing strength and desperate fate, artfully portraying the hushed exits and entrances of the solitary, the myopic ‘Professor’, socially adrift in the austere dining rooms of Alpine pensions and boarding houses. ‘Mater Dolorosa’ stands as an addendum to the earlier text, but focuses on the heroism of Nietzsche’s mother, who, though locked in her provinciality and deeply ashamed of her troubled son’s blasphemy, nevertheless devoted what remained of her life to caring for the stricken philosopher–leviathan. One feels here that Zweig’s sympathy for his subject is authentic:
The unintentional gesture proves always the most beautiful and the most human. The purest emotions always issue from the simple, from the unadorned and factual truth and therefore we know more from these records of a simple woman than from all the clinical evidence and scholarly dissertations around the downfall and death of this mighty spirit of the past generation.
‘Arturo Toscanini: A Life Portrait’ presents the legendary composer as the single-minded battler for elusive perfection, the loner and derided obsessive ploughing on in the face of a hurricane of criticism, suspicion and misunderstanding, 18desperately trying to meld his new personal vision with the greater unifying forces of art, where it will be accepted if only the contemporary doubters don’t sink the knife in. Zweig’s Toscanini, like Zweig’s Mahler, is a visionary wildly out of his time, shipwrecked on an island called earth in the first decades of the twentieth century where few of the native creatures understand what he is creating. Toscanini is a man with a divine mission, whose fury and crazed gestures of frustration in the rehearsal room are almost lost on the orchestra and those who have not yet caught up with his vision racing ahead of the present. This makes for a dramatic spectacle where Zweig can summon all his own imaginative forces to unleash a firestorm of imagery to communicate the mysterious, overarching tension and straining will that accompany the creative act and whose progeny is the longed-for perfected work. But that perfection, as Zweig is at pains to state here and in the Rilke piece, is off-limits to mankind and is the sole property of the gods. Yet this does not matter, because Toscanini will nevertheless hammer away, and through sheer commitment to his cause will reach by sheer force of will, if not perfection, a higher realm.
As already indicated, Zweig enjoyed long-standing close friendships with around two-thirds of those represented here, the exceptions being Mahler, Nietzsche, Proust, Gorky and Hofmannsthal. Zweig’s long friendship with the Belgian woodcut master Frans Masereel is little known, yet Zweig vaunted Masereel’s art, as well as that of another Belgian artist, Léon Spilliaert, from the moment he was introduced to them through Verhaeren. He made generous purchases of their work as an enthusiast rather than a dealer, and formed lasting friendships. Zweig’s eloquent overview of Masereel’s woodcuts feels penetrating and must have been groundbreaking. Zweig extols his 19friend’s modernity—‘Masereel is as refreshing as anything in the natural world’—and makes a case for the Belgian artist’s unflinching scenes of modern city life as being something genuinely new in art, and his method of production as bearing a direct link to the patient labour and eye for detail of the old masters of German art. But above all Zweig argues that, like Rubens, Tolstoy, Whitman and Balzac, Masereel is an organically unifying force, one who strives for truth in his own time so as to join a common truth for all time, a spiritual universality to which he is adding his individual effort; and he achieves this through dogged labour and the stringent acceptance of all realities, by recording every detail as he passes:
In his wordless picture-novels 25 Images of a Man’s Passion, The Idea and The Sun, in his imaginary autobiography, he laid bare all the drives and impulses around the freedom of the individual faced with hostile powers, employing grotesque caricatures he paraded the warmongers, speculators, judges, police, all the representatives of a selfish morality, a selfish motive. His idea of the world tolerates nothing that violates the world, any single group that stymies the sacred unity of the universe. His genius is always targeted at the whole: like Whitman, who seeks to distil the world into a thousand stanzas, he wants to distil the world into images, to portray them in boundless complexity through thousands of details, without ever compromising that sense of unity.
The Zweig–Roth friendship, with its shadowy elements of interdependence, has been pored over and confused by sometimes unhelpful subjective interpretations. However, if Zweig’s 20genuine love of Roth as a man and as a writer could ever have been in doubt, then this eulogy must surely silence any such aspersions. The tribute to Roth is one of the most complete and rewarding graveside encomiums, for one can vividly sense the personal emotion, the genuine sorrow at losing such a beloved companion of the road, an exceptional writer, whom Zweig was the first to admit wielded literary powers that outstripped his own, in such deplorable circumstances. Zweig acquits himself tactfully yet truthfully through the grim terrain, expressing the haunting reality of Roth’s decline and the futility of being a spectator, the horror of looking on as a loved one pursues a path of self-destruction: ‘Unbearable to watch a friend’s heart murder the rest of his being and not be able to haul him to safety.’
Zweig paints a plausible picture of Roth’s background and complex make-up—the Jewish man, the Russian man and the Austrian man—and how these elements interacted even in their antagonism to each other to produce a writer of genius. He reconstructs the fateful apparatus of Roth’s existence, the succession of cruel life blows he received, culminating with his wife Friederike vanishing into the sanatorium stricken with schizophrenia, and Hitler’s arrival in the Chancellery in 1933. Once again Zweig reaches for the familiar motif of the solitary misjudged perfectionist, toiling against the mediocrity around him. Like Nietzsche bent low over his manuscript in his pension room, Roth scribbles into his notebook at his table in Austrian coffee house, Amsterdam bar, Ostend hotel terrace or Parisian café:
I would often run into him scribbling away at his beloved coffee-house table and knew that the manuscript had been sold in advance: he needed money, the publishers 21were pressing him. But pitilessly, the most severe and sagacious judge, he ripped the pages apart before my eyes and began all over again, just because some minor epithet did not seem to have the right weight, a sentence did not exude the fullest musical sound. Faithful to his genius as to himself, he has gloriously exalted himself in his art and risen out of his own death.
Finally, there are three men here who were not only close friends at particular points of Zweig’s life but older masters to observe, listen to and learn from, for Zweig was always in need of such models. The first was Verhaeren and the last Freud. In the middle was Rolland, who takes up the greatest number of years. Only Freud appears to have a bearing on the intellectual climate today, for Verhaeren fell out of favour with the reading public soon after his death: in a post-war world his ardent pantheistic verses praising human endeavour in a technological age did not appear relevant to a devastated European society struggling to explain the industrial slaughter of its young men. However, Verhaeren’s earlier poetry, a unique melding of morbid symbolism and fiery evocations of nature, found favour with German Expressionist writers and even Russian Futurists. In a similar way, Rolland, author of the then widely read Jean-Christophe series of novels, and the controversial ‘Above the Mêlée’ pacifist of 1914, was later compromised for Zweig by his ill-starred flirtations with communism and fell into relative obscurity after the next world conflagration.
Verhaeren’s influence on Zweig’s early years cannot be underestimated, and the importance that this shepherd of transnationalism (popularly perceived as a ‘European Walt Whitman’) held for Zweig is encapsulated in the ‘Memories 22of Emile Verhaeren’, which he wrote seven years after the biography, in the year following Verhaeren’s unexpected death. For the war had intervened, Verhaeren was now gone and the two friends had been unable to restore their friendship throughout 1914–16, due to the sealing of borders and breakdown in communication. In 1914 Verhaeren, contrary to his whole moral ethos, learnt of the invading Germany army’s depraved massacres of 6,500 Belgian civilians and the burning to the ground of the priceless ancient library of Louvain. The most widely read foreign poet in Germany in 1913 was reeling in shock, his internationalist dreams shattered. This malaise culminated in his book La Belgique sanglante (‘Belgium Bleeding’) published in 1915, a vicious and lurid nationalistic harangue against German culture. His great friend and supporter Zweig was suddenly persona non grata, though the more hermetic Rilke was spared. But in the months leading up to his death Verhaeren appeared to have mellowed, having been counselled by friends on Zweig’s behalf. At the eleventh hour he realized his bellicose rhetoric for what it was, his guard was lowered, the bitterness gave way, it seemed the two men were poised for a reconciliation. It was this pain of what might have been and the two years lost before Verhaeren’s fatal accident in Rouen in November 1916 which propelled Zweig to write his memorial text. Zweig wished painstakingly to articulate what Verhaeren’s presence had meant to his development as a writer, from the moment he chased him down like a hunter his quarry, meeting him in the summer of 1902 at the house of the sculptor Van der Stappen, where Verhaeren was sitting for a bust, until the moment in August 1914 when he was forced to break off his annual visit to Verhaeren’s cottage in the Borinage and hurry back to Vienna from Ostend on one 23of the last trains out before the border closed. A passage in The World of Yesterday (1941) was evidently sourced from these ‘Memories’. The following excerpt encapsulates the qualities of Verhaeren which so impressed the young, untested Zweig, keen to wrest himself from the suffocating and precocious literary atmosphere of Vienna. Zweig was seeking a less constrained world beyond, and Belgium, with its influx of cultures, felt like it lived up to its name as ‘the crossroads of Europe’—he was inexorably drawn there. But once more Belgium was also to be a crossroads for warring enemies and the scene of some of the first episodes of modern barbarism in Europe:
He always returned home from every place and every thing enriched by random experience, and this enthusiasm had become a divine custom… With the first word, he reached right into the person, for he himself was open and accessible to every new thing, never negative, always prepared to embrace all. He launched himself with his entire being, so to speak, out beyond himself, and hundreds of times I have seen this overwhelming, stormy impact of his being on others. Of me he still knew nothing, yet he was already filled with gratitude for my sake, he already took me into his confidence simply because he had learnt that I had some connection to his work. And spontaneously, before that powerful impact of his being, all sense of shyness left me. I felt free as never before in the presence of this curious, open man. His gaze, strong, steely and clear, unlocked the heart.
It is the 26th of September 1939, twenty-two years later and the opening month of a new world war in a Europe which appears 24radically different. Zweig, an exile in London uncertain of his future, has been invited to read the eulogy at the memorial service for his friend Sigmund Freud. What is interesting in this address is that although Zweig liberally praises Freud’s achievements in intellectual terms and confirms his immortality through his works, it is the repeated insistence of his moral compass, his concern for humanity which shines through. In the end it is the humanistic element, freedom of thought and the sanctity of the creative impulse, that interests Zweig and is reiterated here. Zweig slips back to his childhood in Vienna to the moment when this craving began:
We all dreamt, as boys, of meeting such a spiritual hero on whom we could model ourselves and whom we could aspire to, a man indifferent to the temptations of fame and vanity, a man with a full and responsible soul purely devoted to his task, a task which in turn serves not itself but the whole of humanity. This impassioned dream of our boyhood, this even more severe postulate of our mature years, was filled by this dead man’s life in an unforgettable way, granting us an unprecedented spiritual contentment.
In this single excerpt Zweig reveals the ambition for his own self, the discipline required for greatness: to draw from the source of inwardness and exploit the gift in a creatively defined way, to connect with the universal spirit, to relinquish the vanitas of fame, to show responsibility to something greater than oneself, in the service of art, not divisive nationalist utopias, to dedicate oneself to patient labour in order to achieve such a task. If we turn to the book on Erasmus, defending his impartiality, or the 25free thinker Castellio, courageously resisting alone the monomaniacal Calvin, if we look again and again at Zweig’s characters and subjects, the same message is present: the solitary artist somehow forcing his vision through the clay of his too slowly registering time, carving out a narrow space in history even through personal sacrifice, to overcome the always re-forming reactionary forces which seek the imagination’s confinement.
will stoneExmoor, 2020
