Authors: Clive James
He would have been horrified to find that Thomas Mann thought of him as a mediocrity. It would have been one horror too
much; but, unlike the other horrors, it had not been invented by Hitler out of thin
air. That Mann had uttered such an opinion was the simple truth. But we should not put too
sinister a construction on a snide remark. Mann was never at ease with the idea that some other German writer might sell more books than he did in the world market. The natural state of affairs
between exponents of the humanities is one of tension, suspicion, rivalry and, all too often, enmity. Only a catastrophe can bring about, among its survivors, any degree of the automatic mutual
regard that Zweig dreamed of so fondly. A great deal of creativity arises from conflict between the creators, and it tends to be annulled when they are driven to make peace by supervening
circumstances. Colin Thubron, who can read Mandarin, noted the blandness that prevailed in the literary aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s: when dissent had been alive,
the dissenters had dissented among themselves. It is a misconception to think that the emigration from Germany produced nothing—the memoirs alone constitute a whole library of substantial
German literature—but equally it would be a misconception to think that the émigrés achieved even a tiny fraction of what they would have achieved had they been left free to
quarrel. (They quarrelled anyway, but on a drastically reduced scale: unable to disagree about Hitler, they could disagree only about Stalin.)
In my time, in both London and New York, there have certainly been gatherings on the terrace; and in Melbourne and Sydney
they become more frequent and impressive by the year; but the
herzliche Stunden
can never for long be counted on as a sustaining context. Thomas Mann, a
tougher nut in every way than Zweig, noted how in the Vienna of Brahms it was remarkable how the musicians, united only in their mutual suspicion, jealously protected their individuality. (The
omniscient Fitelberg, one of Mann’s best shots at the figure of the cultural ominivore, says it in
Doktor Faustus
: “Wolf, Brahms and Bruckner
lived for years on end in the same city, namely Vienna, avoided one another the whole time, and none of them, as far as I know, ever met one of the others.”) The same applies to the Paris
of the great painters. Today their masterpieces hang together in the same galleries. We can find our ideal Paris in New York, Chicago, Moscow and Petersburg. While they were painting, in the real
Paris, they would cross the boulevard to avoid each other. For understandable reasons, Zweig wished the world otherwise; but in that respect his World of Yesterday was a
never-never land. He was always looking for concrete, tangible realizations of a coherence that can exist nowhere except in the spirit. His celebrated collection of autograph
manuscripts, which was in display in the Salzburg house, brought the great artists of the past together: another gathering on the terrace. Typically, upon arrival in his last new country, Zweig
wrote a book about it:
Brasilien, Land der Zukunft
(Brazil, Land of the Future). Quoting freely from the Portuguese, the book is a stunning tribute to his
powers of almost instantaneous assimilation. But it also testifies to his corrosive grief. He tries to persuade himself that a land without a past might be a new start for civilization. The real
theme, however, has all to do with what he has lost. In Rio de Janeiro the terrace was almost empty, and in Petrópolis, where he took his own life, there was no terrace at all. I have been
there, and seen it; and it can be a beautiful place, when the purple
quaresmas
bloom against the green forest; but it isn’t long before you starve for
company.
And I realized that for any man, much of the best of his personal
freedom would be limited and distorted by photographic publicity.—STEFAN ZWEIG,
Die Welt von Gestern
, P. 371
This was an early perception of how the destructive effects of fame in the twentieth century were
spreading even to the world of art. Zweig knew more about success than any other serious writer of his time. No stranger to press scrapbooks and photo albums, he documented himself with care. He
was always a mighty archivist. But he saw the danger, and might well, had he chosen to live, have chosen the next stage to fame: reclusion. (He could never have done without illustrious company,
but might have been quite good at scaring them all to silence.) If he could have seen forward in time, he would have well understood the course taken by Thomas Pynchon and J. D. Salinger. He
would have been an appreciative student of the minimax approach to the requirements of publicity, by which the star says just enough to keep the mill turning. Nowadays, everyone knows that fame
must be managed, or it will do the managing. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, in
Der doppelte Boden
, says that Heine was condemned to world fame. The
“condemned” is the
modern word, but Zweig would have seen its force. Even earlier, Proust had foreseen that there would be a desirable status beyond being
well-known, in which one was known only by those that fame did not impress. In
Sodome et Gomorrhe
he noted that the true stars of
le monde
—by which he meant high society—are tired of appearing in it. Zweig never got tired of it, while it was still a society. He enjoyed his stellar
status, but his good heart made him slow to grasp that his very celebrity was one of the reasons the Nazis wanted him dead. The idea that the German-speaking culture was being so prominently
represented by a Jew made them angry: a sign that Nazi ideology had only a tangential relationship with nationalism.
We are a lost generation, who will never see a united Europe
again.—STEFAN ZWEIG, QUOTED BY
ERWIN RIEGER IN
Stefan Zweig
, P. 112
The term “lost generation” had already been launched by Gertrude Stein. Zweig merely put
it to a more appropriate use. Nobody was trying to kill Hemingway and Fitzgerald except the manufacturers of what W. C. Fields called spirituous fermenti. Zweig’s generation was up against
a more formidable enemy. Nevertheless his suicide in January 1942 will always be a bit of a mystery. It seems not quite to fit the circumstances: with America in the war, the Nazis no longer
looked like winning, and there was no reason to think that he would not have resumed his glittering international position when the war was over. But we could be dealing with a disposition of
mind. Despite his success and his huge range of prominent friends, he had been on the verge of despair for most of his life. As the date of this quotation shows, he already felt that way while
the Weimar Republic was still in one piece. He had felt that way at the end of World War I. He had wanted a depoliticized world, and it was obvious that the war had had the opposite effect: it
had shattered the foundations of society, but it had also reinforced politics to the point where nobody was exempt. By 1928, when Germany was enjoying an economic recovery which might have
perpetuated the Weimar Republic if the Depression had not sealed democracy’s
fate, Zweig had reasons to modify his pessimism. But it deepened, because the political
divisions in Europe were deepening too. From the start of his waking life, Zweig had staked everything on the concept of a coherent European humanist heritage. After the Nazis got in, there was
nowhere for his pessimism to go except further into despair.
Franz Werfel said truly that Zweig was equipped to live in the countries of exile before there
was
an exile. He was multilingual, he was famous all over the world, his manners were perfect and there was nowhere that his stream of royalties did not
reach. But his personal success meant little to him outside the ambit of its original context. His final breakdown can be seen well under way in the
Tagebücher
that he kept early in World War II. On page 410, we see that he was already carrying a phial of poison at the time of Dunkirk. On page 464,
“
die Epoche der Sicherheit vorbei ist
” (the epoch of security is over). The word
vorbei
keeps cropping
up. “It is over. Europe finished, our world destroyed. Now we are truly homeless.” By “we” Zweig didn’t mean just the Jews, a category in which he was reluctant to
believe until he found out the hard way that Hitler did. Zweig meant everyone who had lived for the arts, for scholarship and for humanism. He was wrong, of course: Thomas Mann was angry at the
selfishness of Zweig’s suicide—too personal. But that was the way Zweig felt, even as it became clear that the forces of destruction would not win the war. He thought that they had
already won the war that mattered. We who grew up in the aftermath have a right to say that his resignation was premature, but we would be very foolish to slight its sincerity. Our united Europe
of today will be doing very well if it can restore the qualities of which he was the living representative, and which led him to destroy himself because he thought they were irretrievably
vorbei
. The price of studying the heritage that produced him is to be steadily invaded by the suspicion that he might have been right. Reader beware.
That was why he read history and that was why he studied
philosophy: not to educate himself or convince himself, but to see how other men had acted, and thus to measure himself beside others.—STEFAN ZWEIG,
Europäisches Erbe
, P. 53
Zweig always wrote wonderfully about Montaigne, with whom he shared the gift of
summarizing and assessing the actions of historical figures, although Zweig probably did it to a different end. Montaigne could have been a man of action: there were many official attempts to
lure him out of his library, and one of them secured his services for a diplomatic initiative that probably saved France from ruin. Shakespeare, our supreme student of Montaigne, actually
was
a man of action for most of his life: the theatre was no cloister, and nobody could have invented Timon of Athens who had not dealt with practical
matters, kept the hirelings in line, and acknowledged the power of an account book. Zweig, however, was a man of letters in the most usually accepted sense: i.e., he was not a man of anything
else. His gallery of portraits of the mighty, stretching through his writings like the Uffizi collection through its long corridor, does not lead to a paradigm of action, except to the extent
that to achieve understanding is an action in itself. There is something passive about Zweig, and, human nature being what it is, the passive invites a kicking. Critics capable of being sensitive
about anyone else still find it permissible to be insensitive about him. While he was alive, they found it mandatory. Is he really, they used to ask, any better than Emil Ludwig, who lives high
in rented villas and plush hotels while cranking out glib historical success stories to convince Philistine businessmen that they are really Napoleon? Doesn’t Zweig, by lavishing the same
sympathy on both, reduce Erasmus to the level of Marie-Antoinette? Where is the man, behind that universal curiosity and suspiciously mellifluous style?
Well, the answer is that he is not behind them: he is in them. Zweig was the sum total of his appreciations, to which his
style gave the spiritual unity that they never had in life. For those of us reading German as a language not our first, there is always a tendency to be too grateful for the writer who makes it
easy. But Zweig makes it better than easy: he makes it effortless. There are whole pages that the beginner can sail through and leave the dictionary until later, because the impetus makes the
syntax unmistakeable. Much of his prose rhythm is poetic in the raw sense of being laid out with the specific, point-to-point vividness of verse. Often you will find Zweig writing a clause that
you could match to a line by Rilke. They were soulmates, although you can bet, as so often with Zweig, that the admiration was more selfless
from his direction than from the
other. Rilke and Zweig visited André Chénier’s tomb together. Zweig was the one better equipped to appreciate the generosity of Chénier’s last night on Earth,
which he spent comforting an aristocratic young lady against the chill prospect of the morning, when they would both be taken from the Conciergerie to be guillotined. Rilke would have been more
interested in her coat of arms.
The difference between Rilke and Zweig was crucial. Rilke was a mighty lover of the arts, but even that love redounded to
his own glory. All that he adored was absorbed into his personal style. He glossed the world over with his own preciosity. Zweig was more humble. He could imagine a world without himself, and
when the time came he made what he imagined real. (It is hard to conceive of Rilke committing suicide: how could the world have stood the deprivation?) Yet both of them are glories of
twentieth-century literature in the German language. Their books are lined up in the most fruitful kind of competition, in which neither contestant can really replace the other. Collecting
Zweig’s books is made the more delicious by the variety of formats and publishers. Rilke, even after his death, went on and on in the standard format lovingly chosen for him by Insel
Verlag. But the gulf between the physical uniformity of Rilke’s books and the physical variety of Zweig’s invites us to look for a deeper clue. We can find it in the dates on the
title page. Insel Verlag was permitted to go on publishing Rilke in Germany right through the Nazi era. Zweig’s books had no single home, and least of all were they at home in Germany and
Austria while the Nazis were in power. While Goebbels ruled German culture, the state had no fundamental quarrel with Rilke’s humanism. It proscribed Zweig’s humanism because Zweig
was a Jew. There is a reminder, there, that we should not get carried away by the idea that totalitarianism can’t put up with the humanist love of the arts and learning. Josef Brodsky said
that Osip Mandelstam was proscribed because his lyricism was intolerable to the state. No doubt it was, but it is even more likely that he was proscribed because he wrote something rude about
Stalin. Even the Soviet Union, which was much more thoroughly censorious than Nazi Germany, put up with quite a lot of overt love for the arts. The pre-revolutionary repertoire of classical
ballet, for example, was never taken away from the people. (In Communist China it was: one of the several measures by which the Maoists,
and especially Madame Mao, were even
more insane than the Stalinists). To avoid sentimentality, we should be ready to accept the possibility that an all-knowing state will know enough to co-opt the arts by letting people love them,
as long as that love does not interfere with the state’s ideological precepts. A smart bad state could afford to let the arts survive, because it would know that they are better at
encouraging contentment than arousing rebellion. We should beware, then, of their seduction. Liberals and humanists are always saying that art is the soul of truth. But they are quite often
ignoring the truth while they say so.