Messages from a Lost World E-Book

Zweig Stefan

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

As Europe faced its darkest days, Stefan Zweig was a passionate voice for tolerance, peace and a world without borders. In these moving, ardent essays, speeches and articles, composed before and during the Second World War, one of the twentieth century's greatest writers mounts a defence of European unity against terror and brutality.These haunting lost messages, all appearing in English for the first time and some newly discovered, distil Zweig's courage, belief and richness of learning to give the essence of a writer; a spiritual will and testament to stand alongside his memoir, The World of Yesterday. Brief and yet intense, they are a tragic reminder of a world lost to the 'bloody vortex of history', but also a powerful statement of one man's belief in the creative imagination and the potential of humanity, with a resounding relevance today.Translated by Will Stone, with an introduction by philosopher and historian of ideas John Gray.

Leseprobe

STEFAN ZWEIG

MESSAGES FROM A LOST WORLD

Europe on the Brink

Translated from the German by Will Stone

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

What extraordinary changes and advances I have witnessed in my lifetime, what amazing progress in science, industry, the exploration of space, and yet hunger, racial oppression and tyranny still torment the world. We continue to act like barbarians, like savages we fear our neighbours on this earth, arm against them and they against us. I deplore to have lived at a time when man’s law is to kill. The love of one’s country is a natural thing but why should love stop at the border, our family is one, each of us has a duty to his brothers, we are all leaves of the same tree, and the tree is humanity…

PABLO CASALS

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraphForeword By John Gray Translator’s Introduction  The Sleepless World—1914 The Tower of Babel—1916 History as Poetess—1931 European Thought in Its Historical Development—1932 The Unification of Europe—19341914 and Today—1936 The Secret of Artistic Creation—1938 The Historiography of Tomorrow—1939 The Vienna of Yesterday—1940 In This Dark Hour—1941  Details of First PublicationAbout the Publisher Copyright

FOREWORD BY JOHN GRAY

It is not surprising that readers are returning to the writings of Stefan Zweig. Extremely prolific and for a time extremely popular, he has suffered the neglect that often follows extraordinary literary success. The suspicion that he was overrated hung over him for many years. Yet the range and depth of his work—his arresting short stories and novellas, his vivid biographies and wide-ranging cultural commentaries, together with The World of Yesterday, one of the definitive twentieth-century memoirs, and Beware of Pity, his only full-length novel and one of the most darkly penetrating explorations of the human costs of sympathy ever written—belie this reputation. When we read Zweig now, we are rediscovering one of Europe’s great writers.

The quality of Zweig’s work is reason enough to return to him. But it is his quintessentially European outlook that makes him such a necessary writer today. Zweig embodied some of the central contradictions of the twentieth-century European mind. High idealism coexisted in him alongside a painful perception of the fragility of civilization. He believed passionately that Europe could cease to be a continent of squabbling nationalities and ethnicities. Yet his attachment to the old “world of security”—the liberal Hapsburg realm that he described with nostalgic fondness in The World of Yesterday—prevented him from embracing the faith that society could be reconstructed on a radically different model. He never shared the belief—or delusion—that a new civilization was being built in Soviet Russia. For Zweig, a better world could only be an extension of the world he had lost.

If Zweig did not share the faith in Communism of so many interwar European writers and thinkers, neither was he confident that the liberal civilization in which he had been reared could be renewed. Zweig’s professions of idealism sound more like triumphs of the will over an essentially pessimistic intellect than genuine affirmations of hope, and in some ways they blinded him to the extremities of his time. Deeply attached to cosmopolitan ideals, he failed to appreciate how these ideals were already being challenged in fin-de-siècle Vienna, where a virulently anti-Semitic mayor came to power in 1897 after several attempts by the Emperor Franz Joseph to block the appointment had failed. Some of the texts collected here show him struggling with the enormity of the catastrophe that followed Europe’s descent into civil war in 1914. Towards the end of ‘The Tower of Babel’, published in May 1916, he writes of “the monstrous moment we are living through today”. But he was slow to respond to the threat of Nazism, seeing it as merely an extreme manifestation of the familiar evil of nationalism. He repeated this view in his lecture on ‘The Unification of Europe’, scheduled to be given in Paris in 1934 but never delivered, and—failing even then to grasp the unprecedented and radical evil that Nazism embodied—reiterated it again in 1941 in his speech to the New York Pen Club, ‘In This Dark Hour’. The signs of danger were clear, but—unlike Nietzsche, whose conception of a “good European” he admired and attempted to realize in himself—Zweig could not acknowledge that modern Europe harboured a deadly potential for a new type of barbarism.

It was probably only when he had decided to kill himself that Zweig really came to believe that Europe had itself (as he put it) “committed suicide”. Having fled the Nazi-dominated continent where his books were being burnt, first for Britain, then America and finally Brazil, he seems to have come to the decision after hearing of the fall of Singapore. When he and his wife Lotte ended their lives on 23rd February 1942, not much more than a week after Singapore fell, it was as if he were drawing down a curtain on any possibility of a rebirth of the European civilization he loved. To the end he continued writing, finishing and sending off the manuscript of The World of Yesterday to his publisher only days before he ended his life. But his will to go on living had foundered.

Zweig was most European in his acute self-awareness. It is hard to read Beware of Pity—the story of an Austrian cavalry officer who out of compassion for a crippled girl makes her promises he cannot fulfil and which lead to her taking her own life—without thinking of Lotte, who could surely have made a future for herself if she had not been persuaded to intertwine her fate so closely with Zweig’s. Her self-sacrifice was tragically unnecessary. By the time she and Zweig acted on their suicide pact, the tide of barbarism had started to turn. America joined the war in December 1941, soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Soviet forces were bringing the Nazi advance into Russia to a standstill. If Zweig had hung on only a few months longer and not surrendered to panic, he would have seen that despite all the crimes that Nazism would yet perpetrate—including the supreme crime of the Holocaust—Europe’s self-destruction was not yet final or complete. He and Lotte could have lived on. Instead, the potent and unstable mix of high-minded European idealism and no less European pessimism that infuses Zweig’s work produced the despair that paralysed him and then killed them both.

Zweig’s suspicions regarding Europe are more compelling than his insistent declarations of faith in its future. This is especially so today, when Europe seems to have reverted to an historical mean of chronic crisis. With a resurgence of nationalism in many countries and the inability of European institutions to come up with any coherent response to the migrants who are fleeing to the continent in search of safety, Zweig’s hopes of European unity are remote from any realistically imaginable future. But this is what gives the texts collected here their urgent topicality. Suspended between unrealizable ideals and unmanageable realities, the self-division of Europe finds striking contemporary expression in this brilliant and self-divided writer. His doubts and fears are those of his readers, and resonate as strongly today as ever.

JOHN GRAYOctober 2015 

There is no doubt that the European spirit exists, but it is still in a latent state. We can be as certain about that as the astronomer who sees appear in his telescope a star whose mass has revealed to him existence. Although the European spirit may not be manifest, we know with mathematical certitude that it exists.

                                           STEFAN ZWEIG (From: ‘Response to an enquiry on the European spirit’, published in Les Nouvelles littéraires, 4th July 1936)

What then are the evils which weigh on humanity at this hour? What at this moment is the principal danger? Is it the excess of sangfroid, of reason, of critical acumen? Good God, no! On the contrary, it is the vertiginous development amongst the masses of these new fanaticisms, which are fascism, racism, nationalism, Communism, or the diverse strains measured out from their mix. It is the culture of exaltation as a system of government; it is official production and the procession of gratifications from scientists who conjoin old knowledge with new technological procedures. It is admiration for certain individuals driven up against the most degrading forms of idolatry. It is the savage prohibition of all critical spirit, of all exercise in lucid reason. It is an assemblage of feverishly aroused states who report from the most insanely barbaric ages and who are quite justly terrified of those spiritual worldly leaders of humanity who have safeguarded the essence of its destiny.

JULES ROMAINS                                          

(From: Stefan Zweig, grand Européen, 1939)

Thanks to the pathological alienation which the nationalistic idiocy has established and still establishes among European peoples, thanks as well to the short-sighted politicians with hasty hands who are on top today with the help of this idiocy and have no sense of how the politics of disintegration which they carry on can necessarily only be politics for an intermission, thanks to all this and to some things today which are quite impossible to utter, now the most unambiguous signs that Europe wants to become a unity are being overlooked or wilfully and mendaciously reinterpreted.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE                     

(From: Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

I

In the course of his long and creatively buoyant period of exile through the 1930s, Stefan Zweig expressed, in a slew of speeches and articles presented in conferences across Europe, one thing more than any other: his ardent desire to see a unification of European states, a Europe pledged to friendship, united around pluralism, freedom of thought and movement, a vigorous pan-Europeanism to offset the mounting threat of nationalism, totalitarianism and imperialism. Despite the increasingly desperate situation during the 1930s as Nazism consolidated its grip and prospects for peace faded, Zweig kept up his utopian mantra well beyond the point of no return, for presumably no other reason than that it was in his view right and honourable to do so, advancing the humanistic argument, the only rational and dignified response in his eyes to the deranged machinations of Nazism. But Zweig was an internationally famous author, perhaps more widely read than any other in these years; his historical biographies and fine-cut gemstones of fiction were devoured the world over, and people waited on his word—the Jewish community, the top tier of European artists and writers—for it was expected of the great cosmopolitan author that forceful anti-Nazi statements would be made, denunciations of Nazi crimes, perhaps even a veiled call for a Jewish homeland. But Zweig did not deliver any of these things, visibly shrinking back from the of the hour; and this failure to weigh in publicly and visibly like other writers such as Thomas Mann, who made radio broadcasts denouncing the Nazis, was seen as indefensible by the majority of his contemporaries, casting a partial shadow over his exile and later colouring responses to his suicide.