In his farewell letter, Stefan Zweig asked his Brazilian publisher for a modest funeral. The Brazilian government was unaware of this wish and considered it its duty to give him a state funeral as a great writer and friend of Brazil. Thus, on 24 February 1942, in the main school of Petropolis, the people were able to say goodbye to two coffins decorated with flowers. Stefan Zweig lay in one, his wife Lotte in the other. The farewell speech was given by the President of the Academy of Letters, and President Vargas, ministers, generals, writers and other artists were present.
The funeral procession marched through the sun-drenched streets of the city. Eight writers carried coffins, followed by a rabbi who had come from Rio de Janeiro. Around 5,000 people stood in the city streets; whites, mulattoes, blacks and Indians. The shops were closed and all the church bells were ringing. The President of the Academy of Letters said at the open grave: “If only he had been a little less vain, he could have been saved and we would have been spared this pain.”
The Zweigs were buried in a grave of honour next to that of Emperor Pedro II of Brazil. The house where they once lived was bought by the State and turned into the Zweig Museum.
Stefan Zweig was the most widely read writer in the German-speaking world in the 1920s and 1930s. His books had a circulation of millions and were translated into 50 languages, some of them were even made into films. Booksellers sold 250 000 copies of the tiny book The Starry Hours of Mankind in a short space of time, and even the biographical work Fouché, about a French statesman and police minister under Bonaparte, which the writer thought would not be a conspicuous success because there was no love affair in it, did well and sold 50 000 copies immediately.
He had thousands of loyal readers in many countries who could hardly wait for his new books. His literary reputation reached to all corners of the world, which is unusual, since the preference has always been for writers who wrote in English and French. It is interesting to know from which social strata the readers who reached for his books came. Were his works aimed at the middle classes, who were interested in interestingly written biographies and wanted to have a bit of fun while reading? Or did his psychological and even racy novels appeal mainly to the intellectual bourgeois youth?
Today we know that he used them to appeal to the rising middle class, which was still wandering somewhere between the working class and the bourgeoisie. No wonder, since the petty bourgeoisie has always been keen to identify with historical figures. The actions of his characters were based on transparent psychological patterns. Zweig himself, however, always resisted the accusation that he was writing for a small stratum of the educated and connoisseurs.
Judah Zweig’s books were despised by the Nazis, publicly burned and removed from all libraries. These measures were detrimental to the spread of his characters in the German-speaking world. But even after the end of the war, his popularity began to decline in democratic countries. His works began to disappear from the lists of compulsory reading in schools, and even today literary scholarship has little interest in his works.
Stefan Zweig wrote novels, biographies, monographs, essays, plays and legends, and was one of the most prolific letter-writers in the German-speaking world, with almost 30,000 known letters.
He was a sharp and precise observer of his times, which stretched from the beginning of the 20th century to the middle of the Second World War. Nothing escaped his critical eye and pen. Whoever reads him will step into that turbulent time, into yesterday’s world, which brought so much change and so much misery.
“I have never attached such importance to my own person that I have been tempted to tell others the stories of my life,” Zweig wrote in the introduction to one of his books, before continuing: “Much more would have to happen, infinitely more than the events, catastrophes and trials assigned to a generation, before I would have had the courage to start a book in which I would be the main person – or rather the centre of the action.
In the time in which I lived, paintings were made to which I added only words, and so I am not telling my own fate, but the fate of my generation, which was constantly shaken by volcanic events. I had no advantage over anyone else in this, except that I was Austrian, Jewish, a writer, a humanist and a pacifist.”
The good old monarchy?
The Zweig family originates from Moravia, where Stefan’s grandfather was a mixed-goods merchant and later founded a textile company with a small capital. His father Moritz was also involved in textiles and amassed a fortune for those days. He belonged to the group of Jews who, after moving to Vienna, consciously turned away from the Orthodox Jewish faith and committed themselves to progress. Her mother was also Jewish, from a family of bankers, and she loved a lively social life, expensive fashionable clothes and even more expensive travel.
On 28 November 1881, Stefan, the couple’s second son, was born in Vienna. Both children were brought up in a manner befitting and typical of the Jewish rich bourgeoisie. The governesses and nursemaids took care of them and, above all, taught them good manners and disciplined behaviour. They were not allowed to speak at the table until they were addressed by their elders. On holidays, the children lived and ate with the governesses in a cheap inn, while their father and mother stayed in the best hotels. Stefan resented this for the rest of his life.
What Stefan remembers of primary school and grammar school was the coldness and impersonal attitude of the teachers towards their pupils. Vienna, with its libraries, theatres, museums and concerts, helped to ensure that his time at school was not just a time of fear, coercion, austerity and a feeling of captivity. It was here that the 15-year-old discovered his love of art, literature and literary criticism.
The educated discussed the productions at the Burgtheater and the premieres at the Opera, people adored the famous actors, and Richard Strauss’s operas and Gerhart Hauptmann’s plays gave the Viennese something to talk about. Zweig and his companions were already queuing at the box office early in the morning to secure a ticket to stand in the theatre.
But, and this is what Zweig wrote in his book Yesterday’s World, Vienna and the whole monarchy at that time represented a golden age of security. Everything in the thousand-year-old monarchy was built to last forever, all rights were guaranteed by Parliament and all duties were clearly defined. Everyone knew how much they had, what was allowed and what was forbidden. Those who had wealth could calculate exactly how much interest they would receive per year, every officer knew in which year he would be promoted and when he would retire. Everything in the empire had a firm place, and it was known that when Emperor Franz Joseph died, he would be replaced by another who would make no difference to the established order. Nobody believed in wars, revolutions and upheavals. People looked with incomprehension on former periods of wars, famines and revolts.
In this period of reason, everything radical and everything violent seemed simply impossible. In the end, even the workers organised themselves and secured some basic rights. People insured their houses and apartments against fire, their bodies against accident and disease, bought life annuities for old age and put a policy in the cradle of a little girl to guarantee her a suitable dowry. Only those who looked to the future with a carefree attitude enjoyed the present with a good sense of well-being. It was not a world of passion, and even new discoveries such as the telephone, the radio, the car and finally the aeroplane had little impact on the life into which the young Zweig was born and grew up.
If the value of shares on the stock market fell by just 5%, people were already talking about a stock market crash. Age rates had a different meaning then than they do today. An eighteen-year-old grammar school student was treated almost like a child, punished if he was caught with a cigarette in his hand, and had to raise his hand in the school pews to ask permission to go to the toilet. Even in their thirties, the older people considered them not yet fully mature people.
Advertisements appeared in newspapers recommending remedies for faster beard growth, as even young men wanted to be thought of as older, and young doctors grew mighty beards and wore spectacles to give their patients the appearance of experience and age.
But something has changed in the monarchy, at least among the young. Every now and again, students and intellectuals grabbed the few copies of foreign newspapers, such as the Mercure de France, the Neue Rundschau or the Burlington Magazine, that were available for purchase. Social values slowly began to change. Young people were no longer only interested in Keller’s prose, Ibsen’s plays and Brahms’ music. New names such as Baudelaire, Whitman, Valery, Strindberg, Dostoyevsky and Rilke attracted their attention.
In Vienna, a group of intellectuals called the “Young Viennese”, which included Arthur Schnitzler and Hermann Bahr, attracted attention. When the young people discussed the then almost persecuted Nietzsche and somebody said, with an air of haughty superiority, that Kierkegaard was better in the idea of egoism, everybody began to wonder who Kierkegaard was, because they knew nothing about him. And they immediately rushed to the library to get the works of this Danish philosopher, because not to know something that others know was humiliation.
On the political scene, however, many in Austria have advocated harmonious cooperation. The young Zweig noted with concern and unease that cracks were already appearing in the dual monarchy. The bourgeoisie was increasingly failing to meet the needs of all classes and, under the leadership of Viktor Adler, a strong socialist party emerged, demanding universal suffrage.
On 1 May 1890, for the first time in Austrian history, workers marched in protest through the Prater, the bourgeoisie was already talking of “Jacobin riots” and predicting the collapse of the country. As soon as a red carnation appeared in the buttonholes of the dresses of the Socialist Party members, the Christian Social Party members pinned a white one on their clothes. More dangerous was the party of the petty bourgeoisie, which, under the leadership of the later mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, was strongly anti-Semitic.
The development of industry and mass production were disastrous for the middle classes and many craftsmen, and meant their social collapse and their slide into the poor proletariat. Dr Karl Lueger, with his slogan “the little man must be helped”, cleverly exploited this discontent. This was the very scared social stratum that Hitler later gathered around him en masse and used Lueger’s anti-Semitic slogans to show who was to blame for their downfall.
There was also the small German National Party, which tried to annex Austria to Germany with brutality and violence. Many later criticised Zweig’s thinking about pre-war Austria as too one-sided, pointing out that anti-Semitism was not just the programme of one party, but had an impact on public opinion as a whole. Even the well-known law professor Eugen Dühring publicly demanded: “Put the Jews back in the ghetto. There is no emancipation for them.”
This prompted Prime Minister Eduard Taaffe to warn, “I will not allow any incitement against Jews in my country. We must nip anti-Semitism in the bud. The Jews are a patriotic people and gladly sacrifice their lives for the Emperor.”
I’m going to be a writer
Zweig started writing poems and short stories when he was still in grammar school, and managed to get some of them published. But he had bigger ambitions. He wanted confirmation from someone who was a big deal in the literary and journalistic world, confirmation that he had talent and should therefore persist in writing. So he decided to introduce himself to the well-known journalist Theodor Herzl, who edited the fiction section of the important Viennese newspaper Neuen Freie Presse.
As a journalist, Herzl witnessed the public humiliation and unjust judgment that degraded and condemned Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish descent, as a traitor, and decided to stand up for the Jewish cause. In his work The Jewish State, he demanded a national state for the Jews of Palestine, thus becoming a symbolic figure of the Jewish demand for a state of their own.
When the 20-year-old Zweig stood in front of the tall man with the long black beard and Herzl promised to publish his article in the newspaper, he couldn’t believe his ears. This was the beginning of his decision to become a writer. His family did not object, as they saw that his articles were being published more and more frequently in the newspapers. So they decided to leave the running of the family textile business to Stefan’s brother Alfred, who was expected to study whatever he wanted.
For most bourgeois Jewish families, a concern for science and the arts was just another important step closer to complete assimilation into their environment. Stefan chose to study philosophy and literature. However, he felt cramped in Vienna because of his family ties and decided to continue his studies in Berlin.
He met interesting people there. Russian students, Silesian Jews, failed existences, writers, architects, revolutionaries, impoverished Prussian aristocrats, poets, drunks and drug addicts, homosexuals, all gathered in a café on Nollendorfplatz, fascinating Zweig, who came from a world of security and solidity, and providing him with models for his later novels.
He also met representatives of Eastern Jewry, and a young Russian read to him extracts from Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, which was unknown in Germany at the time. Zweig soon realised that he had yet to learn to write and to find his own style of writing. In 1902, he returned to Vienna to complete his studies, and when he had finished, he went to Paris. Paris, England, Italy, Belgium, Holland, these were his favourite stops. It was all the easier because he was the son of a millionaire and his writing earned him a good living later on.
But he could not settle anywhere, he was internally tense and restless. In many of his stories, he describes life in large and famous hotels, and he could spend hours wandering the avenues, watching the passers-by, the bohemians, the elegant ladies, but also the prostitutes and thieves. In Berlin, he met Walther Rathenau, an industrialist and later Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, who suggested that he visit India. He saw Celjeon, Madras, Calcutta and Rangoon, and in Benares watched the burning of the dead on the banks of the sacred river. He could hardly bear the sight of an old man dying, lying on the pavement among the roadside vendors and pilgrims. “They left the man to limp and croak,” he wrote later.
He enjoyed travelling but never managed to understand Indian culture and had no understanding of the symbols of an incredible religion. The misery of the masses, the caste distinction and the destructive effect of English imperialism on the self-confidence of the Indian peoples made his journey a blight. He was able to write only one narrative on it, and the clear message from it is that he who kills someone kills his own brother.
He also travelled to America, which did not attract him, returned home in 1912 and one day met an unusual woman. Friderike Maria von Winternitz was married to a man who had no sympathy for her literary ambitions. She was from a Jewish family, but had converted to Catholicism. They met, began to visit each other and a strong bond was formed. Friderike, who already had two daughters, soon divorced, but under Austrian law she could not remarry.
As he had done so many times over the years, Zweig travelled to Belgium in July 1914 to spend a holiday with the Flemish poet Emile Verhaeren. One day he was startled by the strange sounds of trumpets and marching soldiers. Now there was no longer any doubt – Belgium had declared mobilisation and passers-by informed him that rumours were spreading that Germany was about to invade Belgium. Zweig thought this absurd and utter nonsense, but as the rumours persisted and the newspapers warned, he only caught the last train still running from Ostend to Germany.
When they stopped at a station, a freight train came by and you could see the gun barrels under the tarpaulins. The Germans had invaded Belgium. In Austrian territory, mobilisation notices were already hanging in every station, brass bands were playing and people were shouting.
In Vienna, he was cheered by the crowds at the declaration of war. People came out of their apartments, gathered in long columns and waved flags in patriotic enthusiasm, and long columns of young men stood outside the recruiting stations to volunteer as soldiers.
When Zweig later reflected on those days, he wondered why Europe went to war in 1914 in the first place, and no matter how he thought about it, he could find no sensible reason. It was not a matter of any political idea and it was not a matter of any petty border disputes, so that he could not explain this action except by an excess of power, the result of a tragic dynamism that had accumulated during forty years of peace and was now being violently unleashed. Each country felt that it was strong, forgetting that other countries felt the same way, and all were filled with optimism that the worst would not happen.
Most intellectuals behaved indifferently and passively. Even the sick Franz Kafka in Prague was struggling with the idea of volunteering for the army, and had already bought his army boots for this purpose, and looked with envy at the soldiers going off to war.
The generation that lived through the outbreak of the Second World War might later wonder why they did not experience such enthusiasm. Why did people in 1939 not shout with enthusiasm, but were serious, silent and resigned to their fate when mobilised? Zweig had the answer in the palm of his hand. Because in 1939, people no longer had the childish naivety of trust in the authorities that they had in 1914. At that time, people had an unwavering faith in their authorities and no one among the German-speaking Austrians imagined that the 84-year-old Kaiser Franz Joseph would call them to battle except as a last resort.
By 1939, almost no one believed in the honesty and competence of their leaders. Even the poor workers on the French roads mocked Daladier, and in England no one trusted Chamberlain’s foresight any more. In Italy and Germany, people wondered where all this was leading, because they had not yet forgotten the horrors of the First World War. They listened, but they did not celebrate. They went to the front, but they no longer dreamed of becoming heroes.
Zweig found a way to avoid going into the firing trenches. In fact, he would have preferred to work in a hospital, and when that didn’t work out, he managed to sneak into the Vienna War Archives with the help of an acquaintance with a high-ranking officer. There he met a bunch of acquaintances. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was working in another department. This inwardly divided lyricist, in his ill-fitting uniform and with a grim face, went about his work, publishing the dubious patriotic newspaper Austria-Hungary in Arms and the Danube. It was to glorify the heroic actions of the Austrian troops.
The German poets and writers, who were less European-educated and lived exclusively in German literary circles, felt that they had to do their best to strengthen the enthusiasm of the masses for the war. For them, French and English culture no longer existed. Everything was of much less value than German art. Thus, in the first months of the war, it was impossible to talk to people in a rational way at all, and conversations often ended with the stupid phrase: “He who is incapable of hating cannot really live.”
In July 1915, Zweig was promoted to orderly and sent to Galicia as a well-known writer, with the special task of reporting from there on the situation in the Crown Land. Galicia had previously been occupied by the Russians, but Austrian and other Allied troops drove them back with a massive counter-offensive. Zweig travelled through it by train and was shocked to see the devastation that the war had brought; bombs everywhere, gunfire, mass graves strewn with crosses, terrified people hiding in cellars, while their villages were just ruins and their houses nothing but ashes.
During the return journey, eight wounded Hungarian soldiers were also lying in a compartment of the train taking the wounded back to Hungary, and they told of the bloody fighting in the Carpathian Mountains. They were lying side by side on primitive stretchers, their limbs blown off. Zweig looked at their wounds in horror. One of them had been wounded in the abdomen and was moaning in the pre-death struggle.
An apathetic assistant doctor, who was in fact a dentist from a small Hungarian town, took him along for a visit. The bandages and morphine had long since run out and the old priest could not administer the last sacrament to the dying because he was out of oil. He turned to Zweig and said, “I am 67 years old and have seen many things. But I never thought that such a crime against humanity was possible.”
On his return to Budapest, Zweig went to a hotel and slept for 15 hours. When he woke up, he could not believe his eyes. The spring day, which was turning into summer towards midday, was beautiful and carefree. Women in white dresses strolled happily with officers who looked as if they came from a different army from the one he had met the day before. They were buying bouquets of flowers for the ladies and gallantly presenting them to them.
The monarchy collapses
Those days in the ruined Galicia marked Zweig forever and confirmed him in his conviction of the futility of war. It is therefore quite hard to believe that, after his return from Galicia, he wrote an article that reinforced the official war propaganda and even described the train with the wounded as a place of healing. But by the end of 1915 at the latest, Zweig already knew that he had to follow his inner conviction and fight the war with his words. At the suggestion of the French writer Romain Rolland, he began to collaborate with the pacifist newspaper Le Carmel.
Until the autumn of 1916, he lived with Frederika in Kalksburg and went from there to work at the War Archive. After returning from work, he sat at his desk and wrote the play Jeremiah. In it, the Old Testament prophet warns the King of the Jews not to go to war with Nebuchadnezzar, as this will mean the fall of Jerusalem. The King of Judah does not listen to the advice, Jerusalem falls, but hope still remains for the defeated, overcoming all suffering and defeat, because the victors are corrupted by power.
When this 1917 Easter play was published in book form, Zweig was sure that it would meet with fierce resistance. But the opposite happened. 20,000 copies were sold immediately, a great success for a play published as a book. What happened? The war had been going on for two and a half years and the blood toll on the battlefield had dampened people’s enthusiasm. Now they saw the war with different eyes. The country had been divided by a rift. On the one side were the soldiers bleeding in the trenches, on the other those who stayed at home, went to the theatres and still earned from the misery of others.
The Front and the Home Front were increasingly at odds with each other. People knew that some had made their fortunes through war contracts, while farmers and workers were being forced into the firing trenches. Daily necessities were becoming more and more expensive and food more scarce, thanks to the multitude of middlemen. One million Austrian soldiers were already dead. People were increasingly suspicious of money that was losing its value, of generals who were losing battles, of newspapers that lied.
Zweig knew that he would not be able to stage the play, so he was pleased to be asked by the director of the State Theatre in Zurich, who was willing to stage it and invited him to the premiere performance. He was given permission to leave Austria and in mid-November 1917 he and Friderike crossed the Swiss border at Buchs. The new Austrian Emperor Charles, who saw that the monarchy was collapsing, was trying to make a separatist peace and it was therefore in line with his political concept to allow the pacifist Zweig to present Austrian culture in neutral Switzerland.
It is hard to imagine what it meant then to move from a closed, exhausted and famine-ridden Austria to a neutral Switzerland. It was only a few minutes’ drive from the Austrian border post at Feldkirchen to Buchs in Switzerland. Zweig stepped off the train, stood in front of a well-stocked buffet full of things he had almost forgotten existed, and marvelled that oranges, bananas, chocolate, ham, bread and meat could be bought without food stamps. There were French and British newspapers in the newsagent’s, as well as German ones, and you could buy them without being fined.
First, he took the train to Geneva and met the French writer Romain Rolland, whom he had met in Paris and with whom he shared common European values. The inter-European wars seemed absurd to both of them, and they both resisted the urge to start hating other nations on command. Zweig knew that neither side of the government looked kindly on the meeting of two nations at war with each other, and he also knew that spies were following him.
So he decided to make an unusual move. He made no secret of the fact that he was visiting Rolland, staying in a hotel under his own name, and they walked the streets and sat in cafés in public. In Switzerland, Zweig and Friderika met many intellectuals and artists from France, Germany, Belgium and England who were considered pioneers of the new Europe; Henri Guilbeaux, Wilhelm Friedmann, Annette Kolb, Herman Hesse, Leonhard Frank. They gathered around the small but independent newspapers La Feuille and Demain.
In February 1918, the play Jeremiah was given its first performance and the newspapers wrote: “Few authors have been so praised after their premiere.” After the Armistice, Zweig decided to return to Austria with Frederika in March 1919, even though he was aware of all he would have to give up. The return to Austria was itself an adventure. It was necessary to dress warmly, as there was no coal in Austria, and to take enough food, as food vouchers had not yet been distributed. In addition, the railway connections were uncertain and the borders of the new Austrian Republic had not yet been drawn.
Zweig stood on the platform of Buchs station in Switzerland, watching the people waiting. He thought that these were not ordinary passengers who were going somewhere. They were well dressed, almost aristocratic. Then a train came from the Austrian side. It was not an ordinary train, dirty, filthy and unsightly. It was a saloon train and stopped slowly at the station. The crowd at the station cheered and Zweig did not know why. Then, behind the window pane of the parlour car, he saw the last Emperor of Austria, Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, coming into exile after seven hundred years of the Habsburg dynasty. Then the train with the former Emperor moved on.
Stefan had to change trains to an Austrian train, unshowered, with no curtains on the windows, with seats cut up and a conductor in a torn uniform. Inflation in Austria was skyrocketing and only the black market was really working. The only thing that made Zweig happy in this sad situation was that the new laws now allowed him and Frederica to marry.
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Fascism becomes reality
Zweig managed to buy a house on Capuchin Hill in Salzburg during the war, and it was his home for the next 15 years. It was actually a hunting lodge with nine rooms, built in the 17th century, beautiful and respectable, but impractical as it did not even have a driveway. The roof could not be rebuilt because the carpenters had no wood in the post-war period, they had no coal for heating and used only wet branches from the garden, and the roofers had no sheet metal. So he wrote in bed with his fingers too cold, covered with a thick blanket.
There was very little food, and it was of poor quality. The bread that could be bought in town was black and crumbly, and tasted like glue. Coffee was made from barley and yellow water, potatoes were always frozen, there was no meat, so the townspeople started keeping rabbits. Cats and dogs rarely returned alive from their walks. Of the money, only foreign currencies were worth anything, and everyone wanted to get rid of the Austrian kroner. Foreigners quickly sniffed this out, flocked to impoverished Austria and started buying cheaply or almost for free. The hotels were thus always fully booked.
For four years, not a single new building was built in Austria, and the plaster was falling off many houses. The new youth, who grew up in wartime, lost all respect for their elders, parents, politicians and teachers. The post-war generation has been quick to break free from the old traditions and to take their destiny into their own hands. A new world was to emerge in all spheres of life.
Soviet-style school councils were set up in schools to supervise teachers and tell them what to teach. But in Salzburg, Zweig was able to work unhindered, and so by 1928 he was able to complete a series of works called The Builders of the World. In the first part, The Three Masters, he tried to present the three great epics of the 19th century; Balzac, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, that is to say, the three writers whose nations fought against Austria. His biographical essays were intended as a contribution to overcoming yesterday’s hostilities and as building blocks for a future cultural community of nations.
Five years later, the next book, entitled Fighting the Demon, was published, with essays on Hölderin, Kleist and Nietzsche, and the last one, The Lives of Three Poets, with stories on Casanova, Stendhal and Tolstoy. Zweig did not shy away from writing critical thoughts on Sigmund Freud, whose theories did not convince him. The novels were received with enthusiasm by readers. Even more resonant than the novellas and essays, however, was the tiny booklet entitled ‘The Starry Moments of Mankind’, in which he presented the dramatic decisions in human history that determined the fate of the following centuries.
Zweig has visited many countries on his travels. First, of course, Italy, which was the closest. When he arrived at his hotel in Verona, he put ‘austriaco’ in the nationality section. Portir looked at him and was silent for a while, then exclaimed, “Ah, you are Austrian! At last!” He had never met an Austrian in his life. Zweig sighed with relief. The war was over. But it was not over and no one knew it at the time. The struggle had moved from the national to the social sphere.
Stefan witnessed an event that he only understood later. For a long time, he did not know why almost every house in the city had the slogan “Viva Lenin” written in a clumsy hand. He had heard that a socialist leader called Mussolini and his group of followers had split from the party during the war. No one attached much significance to this. What does one group more or less mean? There were many such groups marching across Europe.
From the Baltic and the Rhine to Bavaria, people have set up separatist groups and tried to come to power, but nowhere have they succeeded. No one thought that the fascists who had exchanged the red shirts of the Garibaldini for black would one day determine the destiny of Italy. Zweig only became alert when he visited Venice. After arriving at his hotel, he went to St Mark’s Square, which was deserted because of the general strike, with only a few hundred people gathered under the arcades, who, judging by their appearance, were workers waiting for something.
Suddenly, a group of young people came running, or rather running in an orderly fashion, from a side street, singing a song in harmony – later Zweig learned that it was their anthem, Giovinezzo. They approached those standing under the arcades and started beating them with sticks. And as quickly as they had come, they left just as quickly, still singing their song.
The bold and courageous march past the ten times larger crowd under the arcades was so successful that the workers did not even realise what was happening, and the fascists were already gone. When they realised what had just happened, they started waving their fists in anger. But it was too late. For the first time, Zweig realised that this dynamic group of fascists was real, and he did not agree at all with his friends from Rome and Milan, who simply shrugged their shoulders at this story.
Out of curiosity, he bought a few issues of Popolo d’Italia and recognised in the plastic style of Mussolini’s speech the same determination he had seen in the group of fascists in St Mark’s Square. This was the first warning that something was brewing beneath the apparently calm surface of Europe. The second warning did not have to wait long.
He decided to go to Westerland on the German North Sea in the summer. It seemed to him that Germany was recovering quickly from the war. The Deutschmark was steadily appreciating against the Austrian crown, the trains were running punctually and clean, the hotels were clean, new houses and factories were being built, order reigned everywhere, although there was some unrest in Genoa and Rapallo because of the peace negotiations.
For the first time, Germany participated in these negotiations as a more or less equal partner, hoping that the Great Powers would reduce their reparation obligations. The German side of the negotiations was led by Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. He was a Jew and knew the difficulty of the task he was undertaking. He and Stefan Zweig had been friends for many years.
In those days during the negotiations, Zweig was on the beach in Westerland. Hundreds of people were swimming in the sea, a brass band was playing as in the days before the First World War. Suddenly, a newspaper seller shouted: “Walther Rathenau has been murdered!”
Panic set in, people started leaving the beach, the Deutschmark plummeted and there was no stopping the fall until one mark reached the billions. A whirlwind of inflation had begun, against which Austria was an innocent breeze. Zweig experienced times when he had to pay 50,000 marks for a daily newspaper in the morning and 100,000 in the evening. At that time, he tried to protect himself against inflation by demanding immediate payment from the German publisher for the first 10,000 copies of the book for a text he had been writing for almost a year. However, when he received the cheque two days later, it was worth just enough to pay for the postage on the parcel.
Everything cost billions of marks and trucks were constantly moving freshly printed banknotes from bank to bank. A hundred dollars could buy a six-storey house in the very centre of Berlin. Some underage boys found a crate of soap that had fallen off a truck in the harbour and lived like princes for months, because they sold one bar of soap every day. Meanwhile, their parents, once rich people, gathered around garbage bins and foraged for food.
Those were crazy times. All values were turned upside down. In Berlin, bars and liquor stores sprouted up like mushrooms after the rain. Hundreds of young men dressed in women’s clothes and hundreds of women dressed in men’s clothes strolled down Berlin’s famous Kurfürstendamm street offering their services. And they were not professionals at all. Everyone wanted to earn something and survive.
Zweig knew that something had to happen, because this was no longer the way forward. He did not notice that behind all these events, those who would plunge Germany into chaos in a few years were gathering. “The worse the country does, the better for us”, was their motto. They knew their time was coming.
Around Ludendorff and the then even less important Hitler gathered officers who had been stripped of their epaulettes, petty bourgeois who had lost all their savings in the chaos, the unemployed who had lost their jobs in times of crisis. They joined various semi-legal movements.
The day German hyperinflation ended in 1923 was a turning point in history. In a single moment, one billion marks could be exchanged for one new mark. The situation calmed down, bars and liquor stores closed their doors and everyone could calculate with absolute clarity what they had gained and what they had lost. And the vast majority lost. From today’s point of view, the period between 1923 and 1933, when Hitler came to power, was a period of pause between successive catastrophes.
Success and internal disunity
In Stefan Zweig’s personal life, it was a period of success. His books, especially his biographies, sold well. Novellas such as The Mad Gunman and Letter from a Stranger were popular, as were his novels, dramatised and filmed on film, and the tiny booklet The Starry Hours of Humanity was almost compulsory reading in schools.
Every one of his works sold tens of thousands of copies on the first day it appeared in bookstores without advertising. He also travelled extensively during this period, and of all his travels, the one that sticks in his mind the most is his trip to the Soviet Union – the land of the new social experiment. In 1927, his collected works in ten books were published there, and he knew that he had a readership there too. Shaw, Barbusse, Istrati, Gide and other intellectuals had already visited this country. Some had returned enthusiastic, others disappointed and horrified.
The following year, Stefan Zweig was invited to attend the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s birth in Moscow. He travelled there by train via Galicia and arrived in Warsaw. He saw no sign of the Warsaw that had been conquered by various armies in the past. The cafés were full of elegant ladies and officers walked proudly through the streets. Peace and confidence reigned everywhere and one could feel how proud people were of the new Polish Republic.
As the train continued its journey towards the Soviet border, the countryside became poorer and poorer. In Moscow, he immediately noticed the overcrowding, the desperate shortage of housing and the domination of an unbearable bureaucratic apparatus. He met Maxim Gorky, who spoke no foreign language but managed to explain everything to him with hand gestures.
This was followed by the obligatory pilgrimage to Jasna Poliana to the grave of Tolstoy. The warmth, the friendliness and hospitality, the pride in what had been achieved, the enthusiasm for art and literature, could lead an inattentive visitor to a false positive assessment of the new social developments.
One evening, Zweig found a letter in his jacket that someone had slipped to him. And that letter made him cautious. “Don’t believe everything they tell you and show you, because they haven’t shown you many things. Remember that the people you talk to do not tell you what they want to tell you, but only what they are allowed to tell you. We are all being controlled, and you are no exception. Your translator keeps those responsible informed. Your phone is tapped and your every move is monitored,” it said. Zweig returned to Salzburg full of doubts.
In his absence, the provincial city became the cultural Mecca of Europe, with stars, dukes, journalists, millionaires, snobs, artists and writers crowding the streets and filling the hotels. Thomas Mann and Romain Rolland stayed at the Zweig, Wells, Joyce, Werfel, Valery, Zuckmayer, Schnitzler, musicians Ravel, Strauss, Bartok and Toscanini visited.
But the political horizon has already begun to darken. The Nazis came to power in Germany and soon the works of “non-German” authors began to burn on the pyres. Zweig was attacked and ridiculed on German radio as a typical Semite. Anti-Jewish hysteria spread throughout Germany, even to his long-time German friend and publisher Kippenberg.
Zweig was bitterly disappointed. As early as March 1933, the Nazis called for a boycott of Jewish shops, doctors and lawyers, and two years later, Nuremberg’s racial laws banned marriage between Aryans and Jews.
Zweig also travelled extensively during this time. He rented a flat in London and kept it until the end of 1935. After all the tensions on the Continent, he liked the pleasant atmosphere there. He appreciated the coolness and detachment of the English towards events on the Continent and their strict respect for private life.
Frederika visited him several times in London, but as he needed a secretary for his writing, he hired young Lotte Altmann, the granddaughter of a rabbi from Katowice. She was educated, intelligent and completely devoted. Naturally, Friderika kept a close eye on her later rival. Although Zweig had promised to break off his sentimental relationship with Lotte, he was unable or unwilling to do so. The couple began exchanging harsh, unkind letters.
In such moments of internal division, Zweig accepted an invitation from the Brazilian government to visit Brazil and attend the International PEN Club meeting in Buenos Aires. On 7 August 1936, he boarded a ship in Southampton bound for Rio de Janeiro.
The ship made a stopover in the Spanish port of Vigo, which was then occupied by the Phalangists during the Spanish Civil War. Zweig took advantage of the stopover to go ashore and see their war preparations. What he saw reminded him of the events in Venice. The streets were crowded with troops of the Phalangist militia, and their discipline was exemplary German. That is why he had a bad feeling. Otherwise, life in the city went on as normal.
In a new world
As the ship approached Brazil, the air changed, becoming humid and sweet. Zweig was welcomed at the port as an honoured guest and accommodated in the best hotel. He was enchanted by Brazil, especially the fact that several races were united in one nation. For a writer who was tired of Europe, life there seemed almost paradisiacal, and at first he did not even notice the reality.
Dictator Vargas crushed the communist uprising in blood and, following the example of Mussolini, declared the Estado Novo in 1937, sending all dissenters to prison or exile. But the writer from Europe received a standing ovation after his lecture from the 2000 participants. Zweig also visited the Great Prison, 1500 prisoners, thieves, murderers and swindlers gathered in the courtyard, and the Austrian anthem was played in his honour for the first and last time in his life.
After his return to Salzburg in October 1936, reality of course awaited him. Frederica’s independence and critical judgement began to bother him. He spent more and more time with Lotte in London. His pathological fear of old age also contributed to his deteriorating mood. At the age of fifty-five, he saw one last chance to start a new life with a younger woman who was willing to submit to all his wishes. The Zweigs decided to divorce and sell their house in Salzburg.
He still watched in unconcealed horror what was happening under the Nazis in Germany. Now he was denied access from a German reader. For whom else, then, should he write? It was not much better in Austria either. The authoritarian Dollfus government suppressed by force the attempted resistance of the socialists, and the gendarmes also ransacked and searched Zweig’s villa, for he was known as a pacifist. He was completely out of his depth and spontaneously decided to leave Austria.
He settled temporarily in London. Shortly afterwards, World War II broke out. Lotte, as a former German citizen in England, was threatened with internment, so he married her in September 1939 and a year later, with the help of friends, they were granted English citizenship.
But Hitler’s victories on the Continent and the imminent invasion of England still left Stefan feeling threatened. He took advantage of an invitation to lecture in South America and left Europe in early 1940 with his new wife on board. They never returned.
The first stop on the way to Brazil was New York. There, he learned that Frederica and her two daughters had managed to evade the advancing German troops at the last moment and made their way to southern France, from where they travelled by boat to America. The writers Franz Werfel and Heinrich and Golo Mann came with her.
From New York, Stefan and Lotte travelled to Brazil, where their arrival did not attract much attention. Stefan was then able to start writing his last book in peace, an autobiography called Yesterday’s World. He was still travelling widely, lecturing in Chile and Uruguay, and was also in New York helping with refugee issues.
He and Lotte settled in Brazil and rented a villa in the Petropolis high-rise spa, which reminded Zweig of a more pleasant Austrian climate. In his sixties, he was plagued by depression and convinced that hard times were coming, times that others had no idea were coming.
On the twenty-third of February 1942, the door leading to their bedroom remained tightly closed until the early morning. The staff called the police. The couple was found fully clothed on the bed. Both were dead. They had poisoned themselves with veronal. On the table was a letter addressed to the Mayor of Petropolis. In it, Stefan Zweig thanked Brazil for its hospitality and said that after sixty years he no longer had the strength to start a new life and that he was tired of wandering around the world for so long.
Stefan Zweig initially believed in the success of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and shared with many European friends the conviction that eternal peace in the world was possible if only it followed Tolstoy’s teaching that violence could be overcome through non-violence. The idea of non-violence had a tragic dimension for him, because it always came at the wrong time. It was only with difficulty that he came to realise that pacifism is unnecessary in peace, mad in war, powerless in peace and helpless in times of war. And he did not want to live in such a world any more.
