A Remarkable Man: The Vanished World of Stefan Zweig

A Remarkable Man: The Vanished World of Stefan Zweig by Peter Beyfus

This article, first published in the ‘Westminster Quarterly’, reminds us of why
we should be eternally vigilant, ever watchful of evil trends in society.

A man and his wife decided to commit suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates on
the 22 February 1942. They were living in a country far removed from what was culturally
part of their universe, and were despairing of what was happening to Europe. The names
of these two people who soon after arriving in Petrópolis, Brazil, decided to end their lives
were Stefan and Elizabeth (“Lotte”) Zweig. Their ghosts are resurrected every year for me,
and, no doubt, others when listening to the New Year’s Day Concert from the Musikverein,
Vienna; for it was that city that encapsulated what Zweig held so dear; its architecture,
music, high culture and sense of enduring stability. As is the case for anyone having to
leave their homeland to preserve their life, fleeing Austria must have been a terrible
wrench for Zweig. We know a great deal about his thoughts, experiences and meetings
with the literati of his day from his memoir ‘The World of Yesterday’. The narrative captures
the fin de siècle of the end of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and concluded with the
outbreak of World War Two in September 1939.

Zweig was born on 28 November 1881, in Vienna, the son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy
textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer, whose family were bankers. Like many rich and
assimilated Jews Stefan and his brother Alfred grew up in a cultured environment. He was
a very able student and wrote poetry while still a schoolboy, and by the time he was 19
had published his first novella, ‘Forgotten Dreams’, about a chance encounter between a
woman who married for money and her former lover. It confronts the idealistic choices and
youthful passions that are part of our early lives. His 1904 novella ‘The Love of Erika
Ewald’ explores themes of budding desire and the hesitation of youth; but most critics
regard ‘Amok’, meaning “a frenzied attack”, published in the same year, as his first
significant literary effort. He returns to the theme of obsession and the destructive power of
unchecked emotions. Zweig views the characters through the lens of psychoanalysis,
clearly influenced by his contemporary Sigmund Freud. It was in 1904 Zweig received his
PHD from the University of Vienna. His philosophical thesis was on the French historian,
philosopher and critic, Hippolyte Taine, and his choice of subject reveals his enduring love
of all things French.

Zweig was a prolific writer. His biographies of Queen Marie Antoinette, Erasmus,
Ferdinand Magellan, Mary Queen of Scots, and Balzac are still respected today principally
for their literary merits and psychological insights. He also wrote plays, short stories,
poetry and essays on various subjects. He shared his great love of literature with a galaxy
of the great minds if his era, and the people he knew, many of whom he befriended, read
like a copy of Who’s Who! I will mention a select group to give an impression of the world
which Zweig inhabited: Freud, Schnitzler, Richard Strauss, Gorky, Rodin, H G Wells,
Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Theodore Herzl. He had a long and deeply personal
relationship with the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, who he stayed with on many
occasions. Zweig brings to life these eminent figures in his memoir ‘The World of
Yesterday’.

One of the saddest moments in Zweig’s later life was the loss of many memorabilia that he
had collected during his lifetime and was forced to abandoned when the Nazis invaded

Austria in 1938. Like the people he knew, the list of first editions and musical manuscripts
is truly breathtaking. He collected sixty-nine historical and literary manuscripts, including
handwritten items by Balzac, Goethe, Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Oscar Wilds and
Martin Luther. His miscellany of musical autographs, numbering some 131 manuscripts,
would be the envy of any autograph hunter. There are items by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
Schubert, Brahms, Mahler and Stravinsky, and many others. During his travels he met
Cosima Wagner, the daughter of Frank Liszt and widow of Richard Wagner. Zweig recalls
that Cosima was “hard and stern, yet magnificent in her emotional gestures”. Fortunately,
for posterity, Zweig’s vast collections that had previously been dispersed during his exile,
and although some items were lost, many were denoted by his relatives to various
institutions including the British Library, the National Library of Israel and the State
University of New York at Fredonia.

Zweig presents Austria, or particularly Vienna, in the era before the First World War, as
cosmopolitan, highly cultured and apparently free from the taint of antisemitism. As a Jew,
coming from an affluent, well-established family, Zweig, an accomplished author, who was
respected by the intelligentsia, may have not encountered prejudice, or chose not to draw
attention to what clearly existed in Austrian society, especially among the aristocracy.
Gustav Mahler experienced intense antisemitism throughout his life. Even his conversion
to Roman Catholicism in 1897 did not satisfy the Jew-haters who continued to plot against
him and attack him in the press. Although Theodore Herzl was to opine the only remedy to
Jews being regarded as second class citizens was to establish a Jewish State, Zweig, a
good friend of Herzl’s, mentions a telling comment that is not common knowledge; namely
Herzl in the 1890s considered the mass conversion of Austrian Jews to Catholicism. This
echoes his and many other Jewish liberal intellectuals that assimilation was essential if
Jews were to have a productive future in Austrian society. The Dreyfus Affair convinced
Herzl his idea was a forlorn hope and then directed his attention to the advocacy of
Zionism.

From his earliest days Zweig soaked up the democratic and European intellectual
currents that he was exposed to when visiting the Viennese coffee houses. Although his
roots were embedded in Vienna he profoundly disliked nationalism, declaring himself a
citizen of the world and ardent internationalist. During the First World War his literary
talents were enlisted in writing patriotic propaganda but he soon realised at heart he was a
pacifist. He witnessed the tragic aftermath of war, where his home was a wreck, hyper-
inflation destroyed businesses and people’s livelihoods; and with the rise of Nazism and
how it quickly infected Austria, he left Austrian in1934, first coming to England, then to the
USA, and finally to Brazil in 1942. His memoir ‘The World of Yesterday’ brings down the
curtain on what Zweig believed was the end of civilised society, that had been displaced by
barbarism and the cult of hatred
.
Peter Beyfus