Messages From a Lost World: Europe on the Brink Read online

  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 Page

  Epigraph

  Foreword 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—1934

  1914 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 Publication

  About 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 GRAY

  October 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

&nbs
p; 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 Realpolitik 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.

  Zweig abhorred politics, seeing it as the Antichrist to spiritual freedom, and thus distanced himself from it all his life. He saw a corrupt politics as having brought about the inferno of 1914 and the unstable aftermath. He firmly believed that he would do more harm than good to be sucked into a partisan position, even on Hitler. His pathological fear of his words being used for another’s ends, of his well-intentioned statement inadvertently stoking the flames, caused an impulse to recoil from any intervention, however justified. In this calculation it can logically be argued that he was wrong, for Hitler was surely a special case of extreme evil, a civilization-destroyer who required a beyond-normal-behaviour reaction; but Zweig indentified perhaps too literally with the humanist peacemakers and tolerance-preachers of the past, such as Erasmus or Castellio, and living “counsellors” like the arch-pacifist Romain Rolland. This conviction to keep above the melee was further endorsed by his eleventh-hour reading of Montaigne, whom he found had pursued a similar solitary path, extricating himself from the feelers of the opposing factions and thereby, in Zweig’s eyes, retaining his inner authenticity in an earlier time of chaos and barbarism. Yet Zweig despised Hitler and the Nazis as much as anyone and harboured a special loathing for Goebbels’s insidious propaganda, which he rightly saw as the most dangerous element in Nazism’s machinery of diabolism. Even as his books were tossed on the pyres and he was obliged to break with his long-standing German publishers Insel Verlag, Zweig wore his pacifist cosmopolitanism, his right to stand apart from politics, like cerebral body armour. But this was the same man whose conscience had commanded him to express his revulsion for war, his condemnation of the madness of the time, the overreaching spirit of violence and conquest in his poetic and prophetic drama Jeremias (1917).

  Much has been said about Zweig’s tendency to hang on too long in perilous situations and then make ill-starred decisions. Friderike Zweig was only too aware of her husband’s difficulty in this respect, his tendency to waver until too late. When he did make a political calculation it was often deemed naive or a blunder of sorts. In his biography European of Yesterday (1972), Donald Prater states: “Zweig’s political ideas were generally immature and ill thought out, and where he appeared to possess political insight this was often more from instinct than from clear or logical perception.” This phobia of politics and resolute “apolitical” stance has its origins in the Nietzschean drive for aestheticism, which Zweig seized on, for he like Nietzsche saw the political class and materialism as the mainstays of nationalism and European spiritual decay. But it also comes from Zweig’s instinctual sense that the zone of art and literature is quite apart from anything political or social, that the inward self must stay pure. This is surely why we see him drift away from Romain Rolland’s influence only at the moment when the old man falls under the spell of Communism.

  This ideal may seem to us repugnant when faced with the threat of Nazism, but this is simplistic, for Zweig was looking I suspect beyond his rhetorical public statement to what uncontainable tentacles would inevitably sprout from it, and he sincerely believed for better or worse that he could do more to persuade through his works, for example Erasmus (1934). Having said all this there is also evidence which shows that Zweig at certain moments acted boldly and decisively, even ruthlessly, his sudden departure from Salzburg being the most obvious. And in all these departures and arrivals during his intercontinental exile he behaves rationally and methodically, not to mention thoughtfully, sorting out his affairs beforehand, ensuring his manuscripts and library will serve the public good, that friends and domestic staff are well taken care of. Whilst in London, a city he claimed he loved because he was largely left to himself, Zweig worked tirelessly from his Hallam Street flat for Jewish friends and the stream of exiles who appealed to him for help with visas, connections and so forth, their constant entreaties exhausting his resources of patience and time. As always with Zweig there are curious contrasts, the interplay of conscious proaction and inaction proving a labyrinthine challenge for critics and biographers.

  With the advent of Hitler, Zweig was initially drawn into the radicalizing potential of the National Socialists, before leaping out as it were from a burning building. Zweig thought this new movement, though evidently repulsive, might stir things up, liberate the middle classes and offset what he saw as the infection of bourgeois materialism menacing the treasured spirit of France in particular. Zweig adored France above all other nations and unsurprisingly viewed her as the natural cradle of the arts and civilized intellectual activity, the model of his civilized Europe of the spirit. He like others presumed Hitler was a transitory phenomenon, an aberration, a spark of extremism which might have beneficial side effects before being sum
marily extinguished. Although this delusion was short-lived, as was his episode of Germanic pride at the outset of the First World War (discussed later), it appears to reinforce what Prater claims regarding Zweig’s slowness to realize the course of events at the beginning of momentous political change. But conversely it may also explain why Zweig corrected himself by later abandoning his Salzburg home so suddenly and thoroughly. Zweig might have been slow to see the light, but once his eyes were opened he acted without deliberation.

  Zweig’s spiritual internationalist outlook was really based on a long-developed and honed network of culturally enriching relationships across central Europe, or as Prater has it, “Zweig was quietist, seeing in internationalism not a political programme, but the sum of personal connections forged through friendship.” His vision was to extend his own model, to upgrade the most valuable element of the lost “golden age” before the First World War when these friendships were formed, both to act as a foil to the pernicious and ever more unstable reality represented by totalitarianism, and to provide a design for a future European situation beyond that of the present, whose survival he severely doubted. Zweig’s inherent idealism, his overriding passion for establishing a creatively ennobling society of nations, was underwritten by periods of striking artistic achievement in the past, most notably the Renaissance. At first sight all this may appear to us today laudable, naturally desirable, yet surely grossly out of touch with the bestial realities taking place on the ground, amongst peoples cut off from Zweig’s privileged elite. His determination to imagine Europe as a kind of spiritual engine house for the next key stage in mankind’s ascension appears now, in our present age of commonplace violent extremism and materialist decadence, as out of time as it did then, at the moment when Hitler, engorged with imperial fantasies, swept his hand impatiently back and forth across the map table in Berchtesgaden. However, the sheer passion and belief, the intelligence, the evident richness of learning, the valuable sediment as it were of a lifetime’s thought and reflection Zweig conjures in support of his dream remains valid and curiously seductive. Whatever the retorts, this is no vague chimera.