The Society of the Crossed Keys (2 page)

ANDERSON
: As we discussed, the book takes a form that we sort of overtly lifted for our movie, and I particularly loved the opening scene. There’s a wonderful brief introduction from the author, and then it goes back some years, and we see the author who’s visiting a restaurant that he thought would have fallen out of fashion a long time ago, outside Vienna. But then he’s sort of surprised that he’s still seeing people he knows there and this figure—this guy comes over to him, a guy he knows vaguely. (This author
character
is well-known, he’s famous like Zweig.) And the guy who comes over to him he describes as the sort of person who knows everybody, at least a bit, and bounces around among people and table hops and name drops. It’s a very familiar sort of person today. You know immediately you can connect him to a few people who you might know and even like, but who do this.

PROCHNIK
: I love the phrase that Zweig has for this type—which translates literally from the German as “Also-present” (“hanger-on” in translation).

ANDERSON
: And the author character has this moment with him. He’s a little unhappy to see him—he wanted to be alone—but at the same time it’s not so bad, and now he has somebody to talk to. And then that “Also-present” figure sees a man across the room our author does not recognise, but then he tell him the man’s name, and the author knows exactly who he’s talking about: he’s a war hero. And then
the author and the war hero reconnect by chance at a party the next day, and this time they actually meet. They talk about that guy who was bouncing around the restaurant, and they click. That whole set up to me is the best. First, it’s happening in a setting that is very interesting to me—this Vienna that is unfamiliar and exotic, and at the same time there’s so much that I do feel connected to: that it could be happening in some place like Manhattan today. There are the same kinds of people and dynamics we know from our world. But also details of a universe most of us have no experience of, and that’s great to discover. I remember being gripped by Zweig’s description of the cavalry unit that the lead character is a part of. There’s great detail about that whole way of life. But then we’re pulled into this story very, very quickly. We plunge into an account of what happens to him with a family that he makes a kind of social success with, and who he then gets drawn into a strange, complicated, disastrous relationship with.

PROCHNIK
: A relationship centred around a sort of warped pity—this whole fascinating double definition of pity that Zweig gives at the outset, that’s really at the core of what the book is trying to explore. There’s pity that’s meant just to exonerate the person expressing it from actually having to deal with the object of their pity—and then there’s another kind of pity, that consumes the whole being of the
compassionate
person as he or she tries to merge in solidarity with the object of pity right to the end, and beyond.

ANDERSON
: Yes, and at each step the novel’s protagonist tries to do the right thing, and at the same time his motivations
are a little bit complicated; but everything he does, even while it may rescue the situation for a moment, actually ends by digging him in deeper and deeper and deeper. And the other thing that happens is that this book leads up to the war. It was shortly after finishing
Beware of Pity
that I started reading
The World of Yesterday
. You see how this moment is reflected over and over again in his work.

PROCHNIK
: Yes, and it’s so surprising that the scenes in the introduction you pointed to—in a restaurant and at a party where things feel very civilised and very social—the reader then discovers are happening in 1938. So it’s five years after Hitler has been appointed Chancellor, the same year as the annexation of Austria, and one year before everything goes completely to hell. With this whole book, Zweig manages to take the very personal story of a minor officer’s increasingly engrossing and twisted relationship as a metaphor for our greater human inability to stop digging ourselves deeper into the grave as cultural entities beyond our individual fates.

ANDERSON
: Yes, it’s a great book. It’s his biggest fiction work by far. It’s the only real novel, and it’s just a masterpiece. When I read it I thought, how is it that I don’t already know about this—how is it that I seem to be the only person I know who’s read this book? At that time I really had not heard anything about it from anybody.

PROCHNIK
: When I was first reading Zweig, I had a similar experience where I would ask very educated friends of mine in the United States about him, and none of them knew who he was. Part of what really got me also to write
a book about him was the sense that his erasure was so violent. I came to know slightly Zweig’s step niece, the niece of Lotte, his second wife, who is a wonderful woman living in London. I remember at one point she told me that he thought he would be completely forgotten. Zweig predicted so many aspects of his own undoing and even disappearance. He was aware of the contingency to his whole project.

ANDERSON
: To be erased in his mother tongue…There’s the story of the libretto for the opera he wrote for Richard Strauss after the Nazis had come to power in Germany—
The Silent Woman
. And the premiere was in Dresden, and then what happened?

PROCHNIK
: Strauss kept insisting on Zweig’s participation and the use of his name in the programme, even though Jews weren’t really allowed by this point to be part of cultural productions of any sort, let alone something on this scale. Strauss was the head of music in the Reich. He was an incredibly powerful person within the bureaucracy. And he argued that Zweig’s participation was crucial for the opera’s success. The opera did in fact open and it was enormously successful. Immediately there were bookings in multiple cities around the Reich—and at that point they just shut the whole thing down, they just pulled the cloth off the table.
    But it’s not only erasure in the mother tongue. There’s an amazing moment in Zweig’s life in the spring of 1941 when he was in New York City. PEN in Exile was just in formation at time, and there was an enormous launch
banquet given at the Biltmore Hotel. Something like a thousand writers were supposed to be there. Many people gave speeches, and Zweig’s proved to be the one that got the most attention. In a completely counterintuitive move, Zweig came out and said, I’m here to apologise before you all. I’m here in a state of shame because my language is the language in which the world is being destroyed. My mother tongue, the very words that I speak, are the ones being twisted and perverted by this machine that is
undoing
humanity.

ANDERSON
: He thought his language itself had been
permanently
distorted.

PROCHNIK
: And felt a personal responsibility for this as a German-writing, -speaking man of letters.

ANDERSON
: One thing I thought of along the way—just in how his own psychology is revealed through is work—one thing you do see all along with Zweig is these suicides. People commit suicide, people talk about suicide regularly all through his body of work, and it’s a bit eerie for us now. Whatever you read first, the one thing you do know—even the shortest bio on a dust jacket of Zweig tells you how it ends. And it’s something that really jumps out at you when you come across it, which isn’t so infrequent.

PROCHNIK
: It’s there in so many of his works, and the larger culture had a frighteningly high suicide rate as well. There seems to have been some kind of psychological,
sociocultural
implosion that people were sensitive to. In his last years, Zweig was strikingly given to repeatedly saying, Europe is committing suicide—actually using these words.
The whole continent is committing suicide.

ANDERSON
: At one point he also refers to the suicide of our independence: the choice people are making, without realising it, to destroy their own freedom.

PROCHNIK
: There’s an amazing essay Zweig wrote in the 1920s called ‘The Monotonisation of the World’. It’s essentially a critique of the global exporting of American mass culture. He writes how Europe took the first step toward
destroying
itself in the First World War. And the second stage is Americanisation, whereby everyone everywhere takes up mass fashion, mass sport, mass dance crazes, mass cinema. This homogenisation he equated with the destruction of independence you mentioned—people fighting to destroy their own individuality, really, out of a desire to be part of these different collective crazes of which he saw America as the wellspring.

ANDERSON
: Zweig saw this as a kind of American invention. Making popular movements so successful, sweeping up so many people in them—I mean, I guess America is just that way.

PROCHNIK
: The whole essay feels weirdly prescient of the critiques we see today. I do want to ask you also about the choice of including the whole of that extraordinary novella
Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman
, which has its own suicide. What was it that drew you to that work in particular?

ANDERSON
: Well it was also one of the first ones I read. One of the first of his short stories I came upon. Zweig conjures up the experience of this French resort of the past so
vividly there, and this woman. He uses the same
storytelling
technique again. He sets the stage with a whole circle of people who are responding to something happening among them, a sort of scandal happening among them, but eventually that’s not what this story is about. That’s just a sort of prelude. And I loved that form. And then I was also taken with how this person who you get to know on the surface as an older person is so clearly drawn. And when she finally tells her own story that image is completely broken, and you realise how thoroughly you did
not
know her and her history. Some of Zweig’s short stories have been done as whole films, and I think that this one—you could see Max Ophüls doing
Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman
and making a masterpiece.

PROCHNIK
: With all of the despair in Zweig’s stories and life, he shows us again and again that there were just a hell of a lot of splendid spots around Europe to go to and to spend time in. Even in the little sketches he gives, there’s something so visually charismatic in just the suggestion of what these places were. We somehow feel an aura of that luminous life—

ANDERSON
: That luxury.

PROCHNIK
: You really show that compellingly. You did an amazing job of revealing how parts of the fairy tale were real in the landscapes—and the hotels of course.

ANDERSON
: One thing we came across as we were trying to figure where to do this movie was a collection of images on the US Library of Congress website. There’s this thing, the Photochrom Collection. Two different companies—one
Swiss and one American—had a sort of joint venture, where they took black-and-white photographs all over the world, and then they colourised them and mass-produced them. And there are thousands of them. They’re from maybe 1895 to 1910, something like that, all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Prussia, and all over the world. I compare it to the Google Earth of the turn of the century. These are almost all landscapes and cityscapes. There are places that are just known as views. There are many, many of these spots where you can see a little terrace that’s been created, just because people would walk to this place and look out. It’s wonderful, and it really influenced our movie. There’s a wonderful photochrom of the hotel that I always thought of as sort of the model for our hotel, which is the Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, which was Carlsbad. The thing we learned when we visited all sorts of places that we found on this collection of pictures was that none of them were enough like what they once were to work for us. But the photochrom images seemed to tap into a truth about Zweig’s vision of the world that I was able to draw on in developing a visual aura for the film.
    In
The Post Office Girl,
Zweig’s description of the grand hotel in Switzerland is so evocative. The protagonist is a girl who works in the post office. She’s invited to stay in this hotel as a gift from her rich aunt, and when she arrives in this place, the management thinks she’s there to make a delivery. Her suitcase is a basket. Finally they realise she’s actually going to be a guest in the hotel, which is unlike anywhere she’s ever been. Her point of view about this
treatment she receives, and her experience of walking in and realising, “This is where I’m going to sleep”, is so powerful. But also that by the time her holiday abruptly ends, she is already addicted to this other way of life, and her existence is so dramatically changed, and a sort of desperation comes over her—and then a connection she makes with someone who is in his own desperate state. The idea of that work being something that had been out of print for that long is sort of surreal.

PROCHNIK
: I agree. This idea—that a brief exposure to how good life can be was a fatal infection, in terms of the social order of that time—is rendered so powerfully. The notion that really, when life was good in pre-War Europe, it could be awfully sweet. But it’s interesting—when you described going around looking for a place in the real world to film, and not finding one, I thought also of the sentiment expressed near the end of your film, when the possibility is raised that the world M. Gustave inhabits may really have ceased to exist even before he entered it. There is the suggestion that the whole thing is a feat of imagination. I think this resonates with the embrace of illusion in
The World of Yesterday
. It gets away from the idea that Zweig was just unable to see reality, and moves more towards the notion that he just had a huge desire to live in the imagination so fully that it would diminish the impact of the real.