The Society of the Crossed Keys

GEORGE PROCHNIK
: I thought your film did a beautiful job of transposing Stefan Zweig’s actual life into the dream life of his stories, and the stories into the fabric of his actual life. You showed how deeply implicated they were in one another—not in the sense that Zweig was necessarily writing directly about his own experiences, but in the way his own experiences had a fairy-tale dimension, confectionary and black by turns. This dream-like aspect of his work and existence seem central to understanding him. I wondered if you could say anything about these qualities and how Zweig became an inspiration for you.

WES ANDERSON
: One thing that struck me, after I had read a few of Zweig’s books, is that what I began to learn about him personally was quite different from what I
felt
I understood about him from his voice as a writer. So much of his work is written from the point of view of someone who’s quite innocent and is entering into kind of darker territories, and I always felt that Zweig himself was a more reserved person who was exploring things in his work that he was drawn to but that weren’t his own experiences. In fact, the truth seems to be completely the opposite. He seems to be somebody who more or less tried everything along the way.

PROCHNIK
: I agree, and I’m curious whether this quality of Zweig’s character resonates with the intriguing title you gave this collection,
The Society of the Crossed Keys.

ANDERSON
: Well, that just refers to a little made-up secret guild of European hotel concierges in our movie. Many of the ideas expressed and/or explored in
Grand Budapest
we stole directly from Zweig’s own life and work; and then, also, maybe the membership of the Society itself might hint at hidden, secret corners of Zweig’s world which we are only now starting to pull back the curtains on.
    I had never heard of Zweig—or, if I had, only in the vaguest ways—until maybe six or seven years ago, something like that, when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of
Beware of Pity
. I loved this first book, and immediately there were dozens more in front of me that hadn’t been there before. They were all suddenly back in print. I also read the
The Post Office Girl
, which
had been only published for the first time recently.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself—our “Author” character, played by Tom Wilkinson, and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law. But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes, is modelled significantly on Zweig as well.

PROCHNIK
: Zweig’s stories are always nesting stories within stories and confessional revelations of deep secrets within secrets. The action of observing other people’s secrets becomes the occasion for personal disclosures by the observer. The way that your film seems to work on that grid of multiple overlapping and proliferating story lines was very striking.

ANDERSON
: We see this over and over again in Zweig’s short stories. It’s a device that maybe is a bit old-fashioned—I feel it’s the kind of thing we might expect to find in
something
by Conrad or Melville—where somebody meets an interesting, mysterious person and there’s a bit of scene that unfolds with them before they eventually settle down to tell their whole tale, which then becomes the larger book or story we’re reading. I love that in Zweig—you describe it as confessional, and they
do
have that feeling, and they’re usually secret. One of his novellas is even called
Burning Secret.
Anyway, that sort of technique is such an effective way to set the stage, to set a mood. It draws you in before you say, “Now I will tell you my story.” It creates this kind of a “gather around” feeling.

PROCHNIK
: When you were speaking about the device as a convention, I was thinking also about Freud. You
probably
know that Zweig was a good friend of Freud’s—and a huge admirer of his theories. There’s one letter Freud wrote Zweig in which he praises Zweig’s work and remarks that there’s an astonishing quality to his novellas whereby they seem to grope closer and closer to the most intimate inner core of their subject matter, the way that symbols accumulate in a dream. This idea calls to mind as well what you did with Zweig and his work. Reading his fictions I often feel that while on the one hand they’re formalised and traditional, there’s also something so peculiar and subverted.

ANDERSON
: I agree. There’s a word I use to describe it, which is “psychological”. When I’ve occasionally said that to describe Zweig I always want to say, Now, what do you mean by that? Because I don’t really know what I mean by this. But the stories feel psychological. It feels like there are contradictions within the characters that are being explored and there’s something unconscious that’s always brewing, and the behaviour that people don’t really want anyone to know about is kind of forcing its way into view.

PROCHNIK
: I think that’s exactly right. There’s a strange,
compulsive
quality to that process of revelation. And whatever the psychological quality to his fiction is, it definitely has something to do with the unconscious. He was so concerned with states of complete immersion and concentration, like the powerful moment in his memoir when he describes watching Rodin begin to touch up a sculpture he’s working
on and forgetting that Zweig is even there in the studio with him. Zweig was fascinated by fascination—losing yourself in that way. I think when his fictions work you can feel him going after some kindred process.

ANDERSON
: Like the state in which he worked. He liked absolute quiet and seclusion in his work—this was a
particular
issue for him—and I could see that need for silence tying into this. Think about the novella
Confusion
. Zweig is both of the main characters there. Because I can see the student who kind of goes off the rails in Berlin and enters into this wild life as one aspect of Zweig’s experience; and then there’s the academic, who’s sort of distant, and whose relationship with his wife is full of secrets. I feel he’s represented in both these characters. I mean I guess that’s probably normal. Writers are inside all kinds of characters.

PROCHNIK
: But I think the split is particularly true to his nature. Many of Zweig’s friends characterised his social persona as that of the voyeur who would never quite take part in the dance-hall action—he would sit there and watch. But then at the same time there are odd stories about him—for example of his possibly having been a flasher when he was a young man. There were rumours that Zweig used to go to a park in Vienna and expose himself. And Freud of course saw these kinds of desires on the same axis—that need to expose oneself and to be hidden he saw as very linked.

ANDERSON
: There are other stories by Zweig I think of that might relate to this as well. There’s the story where a guy starts going to red light districts in a Kasbah-type place each night—
Moonbeam Alley
. And that’s very similar to
what he describes the student in
Confusion
doing when he arrives in Berlin. And I think these experiences in his
fiction
relate for me to that chapter of
The World of Yesterday
where Zweig describes how totally repressed they were as students in Vienna, and how as a result of that everything was secret. There was so much going on that was secretive. Everything sexual was illicit—and so there were loads of whorehouses and things, and it was all on that hidden level.

PROCHNIK
: Secret chambers in restaurants, and so on. You know, that chapter in
The World of Yesterday
, “Eros Matutinus,” which I was very happy to see you’ve made one of the selections for this book, is considered by some scholars to be the most historically original part of what he wrote. The kind of taxonomy of the sexual underworld of
fin de siècle
Vienna Zweig creates there is almost without parallel. There’s an amazing letter that Zweig wrote near the end of his life, just after he’d finished revising
The World
of Yesterday
in Brazil, where he describes the entire book to a friend as “a hard and realistic image of sexuality in our youth.” He ends up converging everything on that one chapter, which was only added when he was in Brazil. It was an afterthought. He had written a whole draft of the memoir while he was living in Ossining, up the river from New York City, and then he adds that one chapter, almost like his own secret, that he couldn’t divulge until the very end.

ANDERSON
: Very interesting. It makes sense that he would see it that way afterwards. My experience of reading the book was full of that sense of surprising realities being disclosed.
It was the thing that struck me the most. There were so many descriptions of parts of life, which—as much as we may have read or seen something of them in movies—we didn’t
really
know about from his time, before reading Zweig’s memoir. In particular I don’t think I ever thought about the moment when it became necessary to have a
passport
, which is hugely meaningful when you see it through his eyes. You suddenly see this control that comes in.

PROCHNIK
: I think it was absolutely devastating for him—that loss of geographical freedom, the ability to just cross
borders
without thinking about it. Zweig was addicted to that sense of access to novelty and heterogeneity in culture and individuals. He was so deeply invested in idiosyncrasy of every sort and there’s just a sense of everything gradually becoming more monotone and congealed. I thought you also did a lovely job of depicting this transformation in the film, near the end, where you have the extraordinary scene in which your protagonists are stopped a final time on the train for their papers and it’s clear just how vital these documents have become—a matter of life and death.

ANDERSON
: You can see why for Zweig this turn of events would be the beginning of everything that became too much to bear. Not only because he was someone who had friends all over Europe and collected people actively—made friendships and made these connections and so on. He also collected manuscripts and books and musical scores, and he was gathering things from all over—among artists he admired. And eventually all this, plus his own work, was taken away, destroyed, made impossible for him to continue
pursuing in that way. And when you read
The World of Yesterday
you just see how all the things he invested his life in, this world that he prefers to call the world of security, this life that had been growing more and more refined and free that’s so meaningful to him, is just obliterated.

PROCHNIK
: There were friends of Zweig who saw him as invested before the war in creating almost a cabinet of curiosities, a museum of Europe—one person described it as a garden—that would serve as a microcosm of the whole vast continent before it all got blown asunder.

ANDERSON
: Vienna—the environment he grew up in was so—I guess, art was the centre of his own activity, and it was also the popular thing. One detail that I remember from
The World of Yesterday
is that the daily newspapers they got each morning had poetry and philosophical writings. He and his friends went to meet in cafés regularly in groups. And there were new plays continuously being produced, and they were all following these playwrights. Vienna was a place where there was this great deep culture, but it was the equivalent of rock stars—it was the coolest thing of the moment. It was completely popular, and that was Vienna. Zweig was living in the dead centre, ground zero place for this. And he was living there up to the point that it came to an end.

PROCHNIK
: One passage that always strikes me in
The World of Yesterday
is when he begins to talk about what’s
happened
to the news, and how it’s suddenly just become—in a way this seems to foreshadow our own world—a kind of nonstop disaster feed. Zweig talks about that moment when suddenly the wireless is working, and you’re getting
reports of catastrophes in China, and wars in countries that you don’t know anything about. You’re enveloped in a present-ness that is all about the most sensational, most dispiriting acts of bloodthirstiness and natural catastrophe that really seem to suck away the reflective element that had been part of newspapers when he was young.

ANDERSON
: Ideas and thoughts. Not just accounts of terrible events. I think one thing that Zweig does very simply, that just seems so clear to him, is that he attributes everything that’s gone wrong to nationalism, and the two ideologies of socialism slash communism and fascism. These two movements might be conflicting, but to him they were just equally disastrous—

PROCHNIK
: To the individual.

ANDERSON
: Yes, these dogmas take hold so forcefully or forcibly that it’s just the beginning of the end, and he sees it happen right in front of him. Because of the monolithic nature of them. I think there were all kinds of aspects of socialism he would have embraced. But the problem for him was that people began to identify themselves with these dogmas, and then people began to oppose each other on the basis of these causes or dogmatic kind of movements.

PROCHNIK
: After the First World War Vienna had arguably the most progressive government in Europe—a socialist government, and people came from everywhere to study the model. Zweig was certainly sympathetic to that. It wasn’t something that he advertised about himself, but I’m sure he would have considered his politics from an economic perspective to be in accord with socialism.

I want to cycle back to his fictions. When you said that
Beware of Pity
was really your introduction to Zweig—why did you find this work to be so compelling?