Montaigne E-Book

Zweig Stefan

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

'He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.'Stefan Zweig was already an émigré-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation, helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom, with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide, he would also, finally, lead Zweig to his death.With the intense psychological acuity and elegant prose so characteristic of Zweig's fiction, this account of Montaigne's life asks how we ought to think, and how to live. It is an intense and wonderful insight into both subject and biographer.

Leseprobe

STEFAN ZWEIG

MONTAIGNE

Translated from the German by Will Stone

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

Contents

Title PageINTRODUCTION123456789TRANSLATOR’S NOTESAbout the PublisherCopyright

INTRODUCTION

For it’s always that way with the sacred value of life. We forget it as long as it belongs to us, and give it as little attention during the unconcerned hours of our life as we do the stars in the light of day. Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads. It was necessary for this dark hour to fall, perhaps the darkest in history, to make us realize that freedom is as vital to our soul as breathing to our body.*

—

From ‘At This Dark Hour’, a speech given by Stefan Zweig to the US PEN Club in New York, May 1941

I

During his prodigious writing life the perennially curious Stefan Zweig was drawn to certain historically influential figures in the fields of art and music but especially literature. Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche—Zweig wrote something substantial on them all, but he also penned shorter portraits of a range of less iconic Europeans, most of which have yet to find their way into English. Often these biographical studies seemed intricately bound to Zweig’s own destiny or came about in unforeseen ways. Despite his late-found love for the relative calm of fog-bound London and the merits of the British obsession with gardening, Zweig states in his autobiography The World of Yesterday: “My books had all been translated into English but were little known there. Britain had always been the country where they made least impression.” But it was in London during the winter of 1934, in the aftermath of his hasty evacuation from Salzburg, that, charmed by the library of prints and manuscripts in the British Museum, Zweig happened upon a handwritten account of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. This discovery led to yet another biography, even though Zweig professed to be tiring of the genre, having just completed the study of Erasmus in which he used the great humanist and theologian as a template to espouse his own convictions. Again and again Zweig’s curiosity got the better of him, and he could not help but be deflected to follow an interesting scent. It was this fascination with the personalities of history, and in many cases his realization of the parlous state of existing literary biography around a subject, that impelled Zweig to deliver his own psychologically tinted verdict.

Zweig tended to explore controversial, heroic or, in rare cases, demonic personalities beyond the world of literature, those who harnessed themselves to justice or a moral crusade, those battling against religious authority or state, or controversial women of note destined to become the figurines of popular history, trapped in a glass case of skewed public perception. But humanists and ill-fated queens aside, Zweig also delved into the darker recesses of history, one of his most successful books being an account of the exploits of Joseph Fouché, the ruthless enforcer in revolutionary France who took down Robespierre. Unsurprisingly, this book, Zweig tells us, was widely discussed and admired in Nazi circles, since it dealt with a man without scruples.

Like any writer, Zweig strongly identified with those who had passed before him on a similar path, and sensed a fraternal bond with these fellow travellers. In significant moments of upheaval in his life, it tended to be those harbouring a noble-minded, humanistic agenda, a unifying spirit, an inner belief in the betterment of man, who garnered Zweig’s admiration and support. The lone figure who shrank from sectarianism and struggled to remain true to his own values in epochs which seemed to foreshadow his own, drew Zweig’s avid attention. Along with Erasmus, one may add Sebastian Castellio, who occupied Zweig at the same time, in the period when his exile was not complete and he could still travel widely. As Hitler primed Europe for an unrivalled explosion of barbarism, Zweig looked to history to provide comparisons, in order to make sense of the catastrophe engulfing the continent. A decade earlier he had been immersed in an altogether different question, the conundrum of the destructive yet creatively enabling “demon”, residing in such eminently tortured spirits as Nietzsche, Friedrich Hölderlin and Heinrich von Kleist, whose unavoidable, self-destructive trajectories provided him with his trilogy The Struggle with the Daemon (1925). This was the second of his three ‘Master Builders of the Spirit’ trilogies. Preceding this had been a volume containing studies of Dostoevsky, Balzac and Dickens (1920), and the series concluded with Casanova, Stendhal and Tolstoy in 1928.

Arguably the most important encounter, and the one whose implications remain hitherto unsung, especially in the English-speaking world, occurred in the autumn of 1941, in Petrópolis, Brazil, when, at the eleventh hour, Zweig discovered one Michel de Montaigne. For it was here in the spartan bungalow perched above the jungle, where the Zweigs were to spend the last pensive months of their lives, that Stefan, exploring the damp cellar soon after arrival, stumbled upon a “dusty old edition” of Montaigne’s famous Essais. The seemingly random discovery, “einengrossen Fund”, as he excitedly called it later in a letter to his ex-wife Friderike von Winternitz, proved a fateful intercession, and the sudden all-encompassing focus on Montaigne would eclipse competing works in progress during Zweig’s final months. More than any literary seduction, the stricken exile, so bereft of comradeship, was spiritually rewarded with a new-found friend, a fraternal counsellor speaking from a distance of four centuries, whose example chimed with Zweig’s ever more powerful inward convictions concerning personal freedom in the face of tyranny and the absolute necessity to remain true to oneself.

Zweig writes to Friderike from Petrópolis on 14th October 1941, striving to maintain the facade of a blessed rural bolthole: “I hardly ever venture into Rio; rather, I savour the reading of Montaigne, Goethe, Shakespeare and continue my work, that is to say lead that normal life of which I have been deprived since the arrival of the war.”

Suddenly Montaigne has joined the list of great men. The new discovery swiftly became the crutch that Zweig, with waning fortitude, reached for over that final winter, as any prospect of a future in which a scrap of magnanimity might be salvaged seemed lost to a brutalizing present. For Zweig the abyss left in the terrain of world history by Nazism was just too big to bridge or circumnavigate and any attempt to do so would be grotesque. Mauled by depression, starved of European blood, Montaigne provided the last vital vein to a European heritage which had formerly sustained Zweig’s whole being. But ironically it was also his avid reading of Montaigne which contributed to Zweig’s decision to take his own life in February 1942.

The latent pessimism which had dogged Zweig for years, the sense of a closing nameless threat, was seeded after the perverse mass slaughter of the First World War and break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Zweig’s fears were confirmed by the nationalist agitation which preceded his departure into exile in 1933. Once the initial 1918 armistice optimism had ebbed, Zweig became ever more aware that the interwar period was merely a vestibule to an even greater convulsion of destruction, which had not yet revealed its contours. Yet during the 1920s Zweig was at his zenith, in terms of literary acclaim, global fame and material reward. He pertinently describes this glittering period before the 1933 collapse at some length in The World of Yesterday: the beatified writer ensconced in a beautiful and ancient city at the peaceable heart of Europe, felicitously holding court in his Kapuzinerberg eyrie, the swollen library and extraordinary rare-manuscript collection gathered protectively around him, his achievements as yet untainted by the trickle of militancy and bestial hatred seeping into the valleys below. Then his near neighbour descended from his own peak on the Obersalzberg and Zweig was impelled to dismantle his life almost overnight, uprooting himself from his home in Salzburg and leaving his precious library mothballed.

II

Zweig’s passion for travel and new horizons was not just about the conventional pleasure of discovery of the new, or of escape from the familiar, but was a physical articulation of the spontaneity and unpredictability he needed for the creative process. He blossomed on the move. He was productive in motion. Countless letters to friends are penned on lavishly headed hotel writing paper from all corners of Europe. For the European honeycomb itself was Zweig’s office, the train compartment and the hotel room, the lobby, the ship’s cabin, the station waiting room. This restless, almost febrile fluidity, this suppleness of day-to-day existence, the power to alight then lift off at will, extended to his possessions. Zweig always maintained he was not a collector for its own sake, that he did not amass objects to savour them in private; rather, he saw himself as a temporary guardian, whose thrill was in tracking down a key treasure and, by securing it, creating a spiritually ennobling ensemble with other treasures, a cultural edifice that furthered a humanist set of values. Even here Zweig was attempting unification, a harmonious realignment of elements:

Of course I never considered myself the owner of these things, only their custodian… I was intrigued by the idea of bringing them together, making a collection into a work of art. I was aware that in this collection I had created something that in itself was worthier to last than my own works.

But as European conflict again snapped at Zweig’s heels, his inner despair reasserted itself, the great despair that Europe, the Europe he and his high-minded friends had striven to unite in the sharing of culture, was destined now to destroy itself. Zweig mentions this overriding presentiment throughout the latter stages of his autobiography: “I felt that Europe, in its state of derangement, had passed its own death sentence, our sacred home of Europe.”

Zweig had been dragging this despair along with him from country to country throughout the 1930s, and like a snowball it became greater and heavier the further it travelled. Zweig knew this travelling might be his last in Europe, and so he tried to make the most of it, but everywhere he went in Spain, in Italy, in France, he witnessed disparate omens of oncoming disintegration. Zweig was aghast to observe, while holed up in his London flat, how the British were ruthlessly outmanoeuvred by Hitler, “abused by brilliant propaganda”. Zweig had grimly observed Hitler’s proven method of pushing a little more with every gain, and how each time “the hook was skilfully baited”. The tragedy is that Zweig only witnessed the tyrant’s brilliantly diabolical ascension and not his catastrophic and ignominious descent.

After Hitler’s annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia the heavy-duty exile began. Then came the shock wave of Poland, the unthinkable fall of France, the threat to Britain of imminent invasion, news of mounting atrocities against Jews in Reich-occupied territories. The wall of circumstance which the newly registered “enemy alien” Zweig now had to scale, just to reach a sprig of hope, grew ever higher. Severance with Europe was now inevitable and would perhaps be irrevocable. Zweig’s hopes turned to continents beyond Hitler’s reach. These vast countries brimming with natural resources and populations untainted by the poison of European nationalism seemed to hold new promise: “But travelling, even as far as to other worlds under other stars, did not allow me to escape Europe and my anxieties. However far I went from Europe, its fate came with me.”

Disillusioned by the American way of life and the sapping heat of New York during the summer of 1941, Zweig opted for Brazil, which he called the “land of the future”, where he had been feted before. Here Zweig, stripped of the weight of possessions left behind in England, sought a newly productive solitude, a chance to reacquaint himself with his vocation on the most elemental level, to leave the European madhouse behind and simply to write, to complete his study of Balzac… Then, like a man who during a long illness suddenly appears to recover for a moment and glow with renewed hope, Zweig carried Montaigne up from the cellar, and without delay set out to tell the world why this incomparable man of letters, four centuries dead, mattered now in moral terms and how, in an intolerable period of history, Montaigne showed better than anyone else that one could still remain free.

Zweig always saw himself as a lesser figure in his relationship with the great artists he chose to illuminate, learning from, championing, but never equalling them. He seems, according to remarks made in letters and elsewhere, to have had little faith that his own work would survive and to have been more committed to ensuring that the work of others deemed greater did. This impulsion began with his almost fanatical championing of the work of the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren before the First World War. Zweig’s role was as committed servant, a willing mediator between master past and apprentice present, diligently escorting the chosen gilt minds across to new generations, tending their achievements on European soil in order to stimulate future harvests. This zealous talent scout of history revealed at the opportune moment the key elements of a subject’s character, their position in a particular epoch, the example they left, their heroism or heroic failure, elements which chimed with his own inward preoccupations, sustained his conception of solitary labour as artistic sacrifice, or lent credence to the trajectory of passionate engagement with life he sought to follow. Ever since extricating himself from the stifling enclaves of self-regarding Vienna at the turn of the century, then slumming it in the shabbier avant-garde dens of Berlin, Zweig had resisted any facade and sought out the vital creative spark. He swooped on the adventurer, the square peg in a round hole, the lonely individual battling against the unseeing masses and forcing a way through to authenticity. He enthused over the vitality, the courage and single-mindedness of those poets, writers and humanist thinkers who followed their undeviating path, even unto banishment, morbid isolation, the asylum or early death. In Europe’s collective cultural achievement, its historic cornerstones laid by the genius of select individuals, Zweig saw the European ideal he treasured above all else. Whatever he himself produced were but single bricks placed here and there in the edifice. Without them the rest would still stand.

In his biographical portraits Zweig demonstrated the psychological prowess so successfully employed in his short stories and novels. By doing this he presumably felt he had performed a “deeper reading” of the text, grasped the subject’s underlying vision, inner spirit or humanistic resonance. It was not enough to enjoy just reading and rereading the works; Zweig was determined to explore the path his subject took from dark to light, or vice versa. No sooner had Zweig stumbled on a subject, whether Erasmus, Kleist, Marie Antoinette, Magellan or Montaigne, than he was frantically scouring the libraries for research material, having the faithful Friderike compile a list of books and studiously re-examining the period in which the subject lived and their place in it.