Nietzsche E-Book

Zweig Stefan

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

Seitenzahl: 165

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A compelling portrait of one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, by one of the bestselling writers of the twentieth In this vivid biographical study, Zweig eschews traditional academic discussion and focuses on Nietzsche's habits, passions and obsessions. Concentrating on the man rather than the work, on his tragic isolation and volatile creativity, Zweig draws the reader inexorably into the drama of Nietzsche's life.

Leseprobe

NIETZSCHE

STEFAN ZWEIG

EDITED, TRANSLATED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY WILL STONE

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

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I think of myself as a philosopher only in the sense of being able to set an example

Untimely Meditations

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Contents

Title PageEpigraphIntroductionNietzschei. Tragedy without a Castii. Double Portraitiii. Apologia for Illnessiv. The Don Juan of Knowledgev. The Passion of Sincerityvi. Transfiguration Towards the Selfvii. Discovery of the Southviii. Refuge of Musicix. The Seventh Solitudex. The Dance above the Abyssxi. Educator of FreedomAcknowledgementsA Note on the PhotographsBiographical NoteMore From Stefan ZweigAbout the AuthorsAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press ClassicsCopyright

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Nietzsche during his professorship in Basel

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Introduction

My relationship with the present age is from now on to be war of knives.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Stefan Zweig’s essay on Nietzsche constitutes the third part of a trilogy within a trilogy, a vivid and impassioned psychobiographical exploration of one major figure within a group of globally renowned artists who had decisively influenced Zweig’s own spiritual trajectory, or with whom he had travelled across his maturing literary life in a protracted fraternal kinship. As in his other profiles of more modest length, dedicated to numerous artists, writers and musicians, many of which have never been translated into English, Zweig employs the same deft psychical probing and an almost febrile passion for unearthing his subject’s inward anxieties and necessarily thwarted ambitions, the very skills that entranced so many readers of his fiction both in his lifetime and to the present day. Through the 1920s, at regular intervals, Zweig published successive installments of these trilogies to be known as Die Baumeister der Welt, which in English became known as the Master Builders series. Each triumvirate was selected due to an espoused spiritual or visionary commonality, a correspondence of temperament or psychology. The first of these, Drei Meister (Three Masters) (1920), comprised Balzac, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, then came Der Kampf mit dem Dämon (The Struggle with the Demon) (1925), focusing on Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, and finally Drei Dichter ihres Lebens or (Adepts in Self-Portraiture) (1928), which turned to Casanova, Stendhal and Tolstoy. The whole series was then assembled and published as one in 1935. The Struggle with the Demon appeared viiiin English for the first time in 1939, at a moment of great upheaval and uncertainty for its author as Europe prepared to face Hitler’s threat. One name notably absent from this list of literary grandees is that of Montaigne, whom Zweig only properly absorbed in exile in Brazil at the end of his life, when, in a desperate search for mental sustenance, he stumbled on a copy of the essays. Had he come to Montaigne earlier it would seem inconceivable, given his eleventh hour reverence for the great essayist, that he would not have been included. Zweig’s last literary ‘portrait’ essay was in fact dedicated to Montaigne, whose eloquent thoughts on suicide and nobleness, notably in the essay ‘A Custom of the Isle of Cea’, crucially influenced Zweig’s decision to take his own life.

Of the three trilogies, it is arguably those peculiarly extreme demands foisted on the tortured spirits depicted in The Struggle with the Demon that make it appear the most compelling and relevant to a contemporary audience, perhaps too because the three spirits selected represent an artistic and intellectual phenomenon at odds with the seemingly restrained and financially secure existence of Zweig himself and what appears to be the incremental literary advancement of a prolific ‘man of letters’. Having said this, inwardly Zweig himself was no stranger to his own demon, that of angst, periodic bouts of withering depression and a latent suicidal impulse, a preoccupation that perennially leaked into the trajectories of his fictional characters and eventually crystallized in his own demise. Though it should be remembered that Zweig in contrast to outward appearances, never considered himself a calmly advancing, measured person, but quite the opposite, a man afflicted by delirious passions and anxieties which he could barely restrain. This dichotomy between Zweig’s inner propensity to morbid despair and his outward appearance of composure, personal warmth and his qualities as a literary ixstatesman and spokesman only heightened the shock, outrage and disbelief at his suicide in Petropolis in February 1942.

Zweig has, not unsurprisingly, been criticised for elements of hagiography in some of his biographies and a glance at portions of rhetorically exultant prose makes such a criticism inevitable. It is true that, especially in his early biographies of those he revered, such as the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, or the French writer Romain Rolland, these works might appear today as mere indulgent opportunities to lavish praise on these chosen overseers of Zweig’s own spiritual odyssey for their perceived literary ‘purity’. But if one looks closer at such ‘biographies’, which are in fact nothing of the kind, but more ardently persuasive romantic hymns to their subject, there are secreted between the hot-blooded lines numerous subtle insights and valuable discernments which have only managed to germinate and peep through the undergrowth of emotion by drawing an unlikely nutrition from the relentlessly pounding ram of exultation. This juxtaposition of ecstasy and insight forms a key element in the composition of Zweig’s typical essay style and is clearly evident in his work on Nietzsche. With Zweig at the controls, the reader must simply strap themselves in and enjoy the ride, taking in the opulent landscapes that appear on either side, the pictorial replenishments offered by Zweig’s urgent conviction and obedient imagination. Yes there is repetition; Zweig has a tendency to over-egg the point by reiterating it, but these waves which parade their dauntless energy through the text are all closing in on the one shoreline, in this case to delineate the reality of the fall of Nietzsche in the most plausible terms, and in the most humane manner. Zweig was above all else a humanitarian, who saw culture not as one of numerous tributaries converging on a life richly experienced, but as its main artery, and in Nietzsche he sees not only a complex historical situation involving one great individual of the spirit, but xthe less resounding tragedy of a solitary misunderstood man hampered by ailments and despair, desperately working for the self realization of a humanity which will always remain blind and fatally harnessed to ‘foreground conclusions’.

Does this not then in some sense correspond with Zweig’s own personal mission? The noble folly of his ingenuous ideal of European intellectual union and cultural profligacy, in some sense traces the ecstatic crescendo of the great philosopher and the unbearable uninhabited ice floe of its diminuendo. Of course, Nietzsche’s ambitions are far more complex, but there is enough symbolic kinship here for Zweig to place Nietzsche as the obvious presiding father of the serviceable current stock of ‘good Europeans’. For it was these single-minded, pure intentioned leaders, these noble men of sacrifice, these men of ‘example’, of whom Nietzsche was but one, which Zweig revered. But Zweig not only supported these dead ‘masters’ by applauding their exploits and delineating their natures in books; he physically supported one still living by actively promoting his work in Germany on a grand scale. This was the case with the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, who was barely known in Germany before Zweig, with customary zeal, determined to address the issue. Still then in his mid twenties, Zweig translated Verhaeren’s poetry and pushed his works and personality vigorously into the domain of German letters, organizing lecture tours, readings, and commanding successive editions of the older poet’s works. Verhaeren’s fame in Germany and his consequent influence on German expressionist poets such as Georg Heym and Jakob van Hoddis, then his export to Russia and hence to the attention of Blok and Mayakovsky, was largely down to Zweig’s almost fanatical appreciation of his work, that sense of ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’, which the raw, fiery, earth bound voice of Verhaeren symbolized for a young writer keen to leave behind the self-regarding literary cliques and contrivances of the Viennese society into which he had been born. xi

Zweig is today often acclaimed for his uncanny powers of psychological percipience, especially concerning women, a gift admired by Freud (at whose funeral, in London in 1939, Zweig delivered the oration). Freud recognised the way the threads of Zweig’s poised, elegant, yet feverishly backlit prose gradually enmesh and entrance the reader. His strange mixture of patience and raw urgency, of simplicity but erudition, are further contrasting elements which underline the style of his prose, yet this tendency to effuse and rack up superlatives can all too easily appear gauche and over-earnest, leaving a hint of overkill about the text. Is this sense of leaving the ring on too long what made Joseph Roth himself so overheated? Thomas Mann famously grumbled at Zweig’s suicide and once testily noted in his diary, ‘A deferential letter from Stefan Zweig…’ What Mann probably realized but could not bring himself to accept was that Zweig was actually genuine in his deference, and could not help himself, for he actually did believe himself to be a lesser writer than many of his contemporaries. In some sense his ‘popular’ fame was a thorn to him for he felt that he could never measure up to those ‘masters’ he was serially infected by. Like many prodigious writers before and since, he suffered anxiety over the value of his own work and its historic permanence. He did not altogether trust the whooping of the literary crowd. Although on the surface he enjoyed success and his popularity was confirmed when, at the height of his fame in around 1935, he was to outsell even a writer like Mann, this left him distinctly uneasy. Apparently controlled and secure, the natural master of pan-European literary ceremonies was also inwardly a hive of discontentment, restlessness, insecurity and sometimes-hazardous indecisiveness. Relentless travel and his repeated expeditions into the heartland of other writers offered some comfort and a renewed sense of commitment.

Zweig’s disciple-like passion and single-minded effort to further his ideals was entirely genuine, for it provided a life which xiilacked any concrete belief system, at least in terms of a religious bulwark, with the authenticity he craved. His relatively privileged position enabled him to take a presiding, constructive role in a European network of like-minded writers and his Salzburg residence through the twenties, when the Master Builder studies were written, was awash with international literary guests, the leading artistic lights of the era. Zweig’s fundamental concern was to keep track of and personally enthuse a universal brotherhood of those writers and thinkers, both living and dead, he deemed necessary to the continued health of humanity. For example, it is little known that in the summer of 1914, as conflict loomed, Zweig met trusted members of this fraternity to discuss a sumptuous edition of Verhaeren’s Collected Poems in German. Even Rilke, another Verhaeren acolyte was present. Each was entrusted with a section of the work and was responsible either for performing the translation (as in Zweig’s case) or finding a suitable translator. This worthy and ambitious communal project conceived on the eve of the then most destructive war in history symbolises the effort of its leader, Zweig, to advance the cause. But like the premise, the plan was doomed. The edition was never realised, within weeks national borders ossified and Zweig only just made it back to Vienna on the last from Belgium before they were sealed for good.

Zweig’s famous autograph and manuscript collection was in some sense a shadowing of his real purpose, which was to imprint the spiritual autographs of the greatest writers on his readership, by unveiling their as yet unexposed fraternal relationships, the threads which bound them together, the movements of the tides within their writings which governed the works reception and appreciation. This profound sense of relating to his subject peaked with the biography of Erasmus of Rotterdam, published in 1935, in whom Zweig saw both spiritual ally and pacifist counterpart, a lone guardian of humanity xiiitrapped in his own dark age, facing the cruelty, intolerance, nihilism and lunacy of puritanical religion. For Zweig, the mounting totalitarian threat to his own epoch could all too easily be superimposed on the idea of those massing dark forces defied by the lone flame of Erasmus.

Zweig then was an artist addicted to embracing other artists and securing evidence of their genius, to offer them a place in his growing network of manuscripts, autographs, prints and scores. To this end he could be unusually persistent. Rilke, for one, noted Zweig’s countless rather strained attempts to secure an unpublished poem for his collection. Zweig was both instinctively preserving greatness in his collection and irresistibly illuminating it in his biographical profiles. Again and again, as he secured a deep kinship with a writer, he was gladly seduced into the role of servant and spokesman of inwardness for the always more eminent nib. Yet this was not an obsequious lackey-like service to greatness, existing only on the surface, for Zweig was extremely dedicated in terms of penetrating deep into his subject’s psyche and yet genuinely regarded himself as a learner before the likes of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Stendhal and Balzac. This ‘loyalty’ is no more evident than in the account of Nietzsche, which seems somehow to crown the preceding essays, where the demon has almost met its human match in the figure of the stubborn philosopher seasoned with so many circumvented suicides, who goes further into thought than any other being before or since, and due to the fortune of a hearty constitution endures long enough to create something of unprecedented value to humanity.

To Zweig, Nietzsche, what he stood for and achieved, has more about him to worship than any conventional religious deity. But the fact that Nietzsche was a man with all the weaknesses, fears and failures inherent to a human being makes him even more worth revering, because only through a colossal xivpower of the will did he force himself beyond the limits generally imposed by reality. Like many writers and thinkers with one foot in the nineteenth century and one in the twentieth, Zweig revered Nietzsche as the prophet who somehow, despite his blatantly clear message scrawled again and again across the materialist, militarized and science-infatuated last decades of the nineteenth century, could not be prised out in time by his legion future rescuers (such as Zweig) from the colossal ‘no reply’ and ensuing darkness of his own epoch, the haunted ailing figure who ended his days craven under nursing home blankets staring into the dry well of insanity and death, he who had gambled on a new higher caste of humanity emerging somewhere beyond a rationalist expansionist Germany he could no longer endure. So Nietzsche the prophet was dead, ‘hunted down’ and killed off by the very people he had sought to guide; Zweig felt a responsibility to serve Nietzsche by truthfully exhibiting him as a tragic figure in the human dimension, as an exceptionally solitary artist with an indomitable will enduring against all the odds, not as the theatrical superhero of modern German mythology, which at the time of writing was the public image to which Nietzsche was increasingly prone. Right from the opening chapter, Zweig attacks the German appropriation of Nietzsche and the ensuing Teutonic embellishments to his figure. It is clear that Zweig is attempting to free Nietzsche from the nationalist creepers that are, with his sister Elisabeth’s insidious feeding, ever more powerfully entwining his legacy after the First World War, and to relocate him as the key modern universally relevant ‘master builder of the spirit’. Zweig wants the reader to feel what price Nietzsche paid as a man in his time gifted with visionary perception and the strength of will, how, despite possessing the utmost clarity of thought and unclouded integrity, he was ignored and obliged to accept the wooden spoon of only posthumous appreciation. But above all he wishes to show that this was inevitable, xvgiven the inability of the German people to be readied for Nietzsche’s thought. Beyond this he can say little more. Zweig demonstrates the crime of Nietzsche’s neglect by focusing on the failure of a modern industrialized country increasingly harbouring imperialist fantasies, to recognize his warnings, but also the establishment’s scholarly establishment is also criticised for its incessant outpourings of volumes, its ever feverish activity, yet its abject failure to notice the one great mind sending up flare after flare in its midst.

Zweig goes on to articulate Nietzsche’s coruscating solitude and his infamously nomadic existence, now tinged with a certain melancholy exoticism, the life of a ‘fugitive’ whose nerves are a delicate barometer registering the surrounding elements and sending the ‘outlaw prince’ to all corners of the continent in search of the perfect climate in which he might exist more productively. Zweig lists the locations like so many chance oases on the long desert journey of a heavy wool coated vagrant. But it is the high plateau of the Engadine in Switzerland, and the little lakeside village of Sils-Maria, where Nietzsche settled over consecutive summers in the 1880s and wrote certain of his most famous works, that draws Zweig’s main attention. Only here could Nietzsche properly breathe, he claimed, due to its ‘invigorating and ozone rich air’, and he even latterly expressed the wish to build a permanent home on the peninsula. The little nondescript room still preserved today in the Sils house becomes for Zweig the prime martyrdom cell in which the tormented man pursues his path to posthumous greatness. Like many German-language writers and poets drawn since by the shadow of Nietzsche, and of the singular majesty of a landscape that equated with his thought, Zweig had visited the ‘Nietzsche house’ at Sils-Maria, stayed at the hamlet of Baselgia and made the pilgrimage walk down the Chastè peninsula into the lake at the heart of Silvaplana, taking the same xvipaths Nietzsche would have taken. Yet Zweig, interestingly, suggests a certain malignancy in the casual sightseeing, which the philosopher’s name has brought to Sils-Maria. This recalls a preoccupation with the proliferation of tourism on the back of human suffering made explicit in his essay on Ypres (see Stefan Zweig – Journeys, Hesperus Press, 2010).

Nietzsche’s fixation on climate is bound, Zweig argues, to the mental suffering and intellectual tension experienced during his travels, so that ‘Little by little, he distills from his pathological experiences a kind of sanitary cartography for his own personal use.’ It is interesting how Zweig marvels at Nietzsche’s diverse itineraries and restless criss-crossings of Europe, for of course he too was an insatiable and perennial traveller and was never satisfied in one place for very long. For Zweig, the carriage of a train proved often the least demanding and most creatively fruitful environ in which to locate himself. But as ever the gulf between the relatively secure existence of a writer like Zweig, at least until Hitler came to power, and the precarious voyages to further insight and alienation served by Nietzsche’s dauntless thought locomotive, could not be wider. Two of the most influential architects for a European ideal are seen sharing the same tracks and heading for similar Central and Southern European destinations, but in contrasting circumstances and bearing very different loads.

Zweig relishes transmitting not only Nietzsche’s mania for climate but also for dietary issues and ailments. He rummages in Nietzsche’s travelling trunk for the tragic evidence, which is all too abundant, depicting his creative period as a perennially solitary endurance course, a physical and mental road to perdition amidst the empty bottles of chloral and veronal, where the interchangeable narrow bed in a shabby alpine lodging house is the rack on which he must prostrate himself between bouts of vertiginous writing. Although there is a lush romanticism xvii