Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (16 page)

The project was clearly looking for high sales figures, and in order to raise public awareness of the new venture as quickly as possible Zweig had suggested that Insel should distribute a free launch copy to every bookshop in Germany. This proposal was a little too generous for Kippenberg’s liking and it was not taken up. And in fact it would have been quite unnecessary, as advance orders from the book trade and the great popular success of the series were soon to demonstrate.

Following the preparation of some specimen copies, it was agreed to produce the books bound between boards that were covered with a variety
of coloured and patterned papers, with a separate title label stuck on. In the first year no fewer than twenty-seven titles appeared, featuring many authors from the publisher’s existing list and familiar themes from the past and present. The first volume was Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke
. Zweig himself was not yet represented with an original work of his own, unlike Hofmannsthal with his idyll
Der Tod des Tizian
and Ricarda Huch with his book of poems
Liebesgedichte
; but the fifth volume in the series was Verhaeren’s
Hymnen an das Leben
, which of course had been translated from the French by Zweig.

When the first volumes of the Insel-Bücherei went on sale, Zweig was already much exercised by the impending premiere that autumn of his play
Das Haus am Meer
. He was somewhat annoyed that his normal daily routine had been disrupted and he was wasting far too much time in pointless activity. He spent nearly every evening sitting in the café (“this unnecessary finish to the day, a habit I’d like to get out of”),
¹⁹
poring over newspapers or doing the crossword, then going home and reading into the small hours. Generally he was up early the next morning, since he found the mornings the best time for writing and editing work. Visitors were not particularly welcome at this hour. Victor Fleischer had noticed this a few years earlier, when Zweig was living in his student bedsitter in the Tulpengasse. He

found him—even though it must have been around eleven in the morning—unshaven and only half-dressed, [ … ] his bed still unmade and in disarray [ … ], as if he had only just got up. While Zweig’s own appearance at that hour could lead you to think he had only just got out of bed, I was soon to discover that he had already done several hours of serious work, and that the only reason he hadn’t shaved and dressed properly was to force himself, as it were, to stay at home and not be disturbed in his work by visitors.
²⁰

During these weeks, however, the concentration he needed for his work eluded him. The imminent prospect of having to contend with the theatre-going public—and in his own native Vienna to boot—filled him with alarm. After talking with good friends like Arthur Schnitzler he was suddenly convinced that his own conversation had become clumsy and awkward. Nothing seemed to go right for him. Excursions with friends, sometimes exploring the countryside outside the city in a touring car, were one way at least of finding some distraction.

One early evening in late July, at the end of a hot day, Zweig was sitting with an acquaintance in the garden of the Riedhof inn in Vienna. The place was still fairly empty, so he was able to observe the scene a few tables away, where a man and a woman had taken their seat. A second man, evidently a friend of the couple, came up to them and handed a present to the woman. It was a book. And even from that distance it was very easy to tell, from the turquoise-and-white patterned cover, what the book was—it was the fifth volume in the Insel-Bücherei, Émile Verhaeren’s
Hymnen an das Leben
, in the translation by Stefan Zweig. The chance circumstance caused him to smile. What he failed to notice was that the woman who had just been given his book as a present and who returned his smile was the same woman he had seen more than four years previously at the farewell concert for Alexander Girardi at the Stelzer Inn in Rodaun. But she recognised him, and she noticed straightaway that he had changed a good deal in the meantime: “Gone was the young bohemian, and in his place was a well-dressed, good-looking man—accustomed, so it seemed, to telling a woman things with a look that made words unnecessary.”
²¹
She had only come into town that evening to meet her husband briefly, and was returning next day to a place near Gars am Kamp, where she was staying for a few weeks with her two daughters and also looking after the children of a married couple she knew.

After this second personal meeting, albeit from a distance, she came to a decision.

NOTES

1
Zweig F 1964, p 33.

2
Zweig GW Welt von Gestern, p 194.

3
Stefan Zweig to Julius Bab, probably 21st April 1911. In: Briefe I, p 228.

4
Copy in the archive of S Fischer Verlag.

5
Stefan Zweig to Ida and Moriz Zweig, 22nd July 1909. In: Briefe I, p 190 f.

6
Stefan Zweig to Paul Zech, undated (early 1911). In: Briefwechsel Zech, p 20.

7
Sigmund Freud to Stefan Zweig, 4th July 1908. In: Briefwechsel Bahr/Freud/Rilke/Schnitzler, p 163.

8
Review of Erstes Erlebnis from the Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde, as quoted in: Zweig Brennendes Geheimnis, p 79.

9
Sigmund Freud to Stefan Zweig, 7th December 1911. In: Briefwechsel Bahr/Freud/Rilke/Schnitzler, p 164.

10
Stefan Zweig to Hermann Hesse, probably December 1903. In: Briefe I, p 72.

11
Zweig GW Welt von Gestern, p 101.

12
29th September 1912, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 17.

13
22nd September 1919, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 14.

14
Stefan Zweig to Ferruccio Busoni, undated (late 1911), SBB Berlin, Music Collection, Mus. Ep. St. Zweig 3 (Busoni literary estate).

15
Stefan Zweig to Heinrich Glücksmann, 19th June 1911. In: Salzburg 1961, Cat No 34.

16
Insel Verlag to Stefan Zweig, 17th April 1912, GSA Weimar, 50/3886, 1.

17
Stefan Zweig to Insel Verlag, 19th April 1912, GSA Weimar, 50/3886, 1.

18
Stefan Zweig to Insel Verlag, January 1913, GSA Weimar, 50/3886, 2.

19
22nd September 1912, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 16.

20
Fleischer 1959, p 37.

21
Zweig F 1947, p 69.

Friderike Maria von Winternitz, with daughters Alexia Elisabeth (left) and Susanna Benediktine (right), 1912

Emotional Turmoil

I have an utter aversion to all literature. There are a few good people in my life, just a tiny handful, a woman who means a great deal to me, and therefore plenty of passionate experiences at the same time (the physical body is hungry for experience, after all), restlessness and a desire to travel, which I satisfy as best I can.
¹

To Benno Geiger 21st March 1914 

O
N 26TH JULY
1912 Stefan Zweig found a letter in his post that had been written the day before by a lady who was unknown to him:

Dear Herr Stefan Zweig,

Perhaps it is unnecessary to explain why I find it easy to do what other people term “inappropriate”. And this is not the place to explain the other reasons why it does not strike me as scandalous.

Yesterday I was in Vienna for the afternoon and stayed overnight, having travelled in from my rural retreat, my mill, where I am surrounded by woods and water far from the madding crowd. And what a happy coincidence then befell me. I saw you a few years ago one summer evening at the Stelzer Inn, where Girardi was giving his farewell concert. [ … ] It was a lovely evening. You were sitting with friends, I believe, and they were, or seemed, in very high spirits. My life then had reached a kind of turning point. [ … ] And yesterday there you were again, sitting near me in the Riedhof, when an acquaintance brought me a copy of
Hymnen an das Leben
. I read it today to the sound of the carriage wheels, as I returned in the early morning to my summer home. Outside the fields were bathed in glorious sunshine. And so it seemed to me the natural thing to write you a note. The
Hymnen
are really wonderful! I already knew a few of them.
Das Wort
is a particular favourite of mine. I read it aloud to myself several times when it appeared in the
Insel Almanac
. And when I was sitting near you yesterday, I was struck by the thought that it
does
make a difference whether one spends one’s life translating Péladan and Strindberg or Shaw—or Verhaeren. Tell me who you translate—and I will tell you who you are. And also
how
you translate! “Adaptations”, that’s what’s so splendid about them!

I write a little myself. Perhaps you have read something of mine recently, or cast an eye over it. [ … ]

I have your address from someone who once told me a bit about your veranda, when he saw my Christmas book list which included
Tersites
. I don’t think you’ll need to say anything to anyone about this foolish letter. And I am not writing in the expectation of a reply, though it would give me great pleasure. And if you should feel like replying, then please write to Maria von W, c/o the post office, Rosenburg am Kamp.

Best wishes!
²

He replied, but his letter is not thought to have survived. From her next letter, however, which she wrote on 30th July in Mannigfallmühle near Gars, it is possible to draw some inferences about its content. For example, he must have made some remark about “ghastly would-be poets” in response to her admission that she occasionally wrote poems herself. At any rate, she quotes this phrase in her next letter, and is at pains to point out that she fully understands his sceptical reaction, but had not meant to give the impression that it was merely a sideline in her case (having written some poems and feature articles, she had also tried her hand at writing a novel). Zweig had evidently also asked her to abandon her semi-anonymity. So this time she signed the letter with her full name—Friderike Maria von Winternitz. She also revealed one more secret, one that he had not—or not directly—enquired about: “I’m sure you want to know if there is a ‘Mrs’ in front of my name—the answer is ‘yes’.”
³

Friderike Maria von Winternitz had been born on 4th December 1882 as the daughter of the Burger family in Vienna, where her father was a civil servant. After an elder sister had contracted diphtheria at a celebration parade in the school playground, and later died as a result of the after-effects of the disease, her parents Emanuel and Theresia Elisabeth Burger stopped sending their children to the public school. Instead Friderike attended a private school, the Luithlen Institute, subsequently passing through the normal state system of training to become a French teacher. She showed a keen interest in the literature and history of France, even though she had never visited the country at the time. For her subsidiary subjects she chose psychology and pedagogy.

When she met Felix von Winternitz he was a somewhat unassuming law student, whose parents wanted him to become a diplomat. His father, Jakob von Winternitz, who was known within the family as “the old man”, had worked his way up from humble beginnings via a career in journalism to the upper echelons of the Foreign Office. At the same time he was
chairman of various authors’ associations and founder of a fund for the widows and orphans of writers, a service for which he received the Order of Franz Joseph and was in due course elevated to the nobility. His wife had died very young, leaving her husband with two sons, whom he had looked after by himself ever since. The name Stefan Zweig will have been familiar to him, not so much because he lived in the same street—the Kochgasse—but because he followed what was happening in the literary world very closely, and was also a member of the selection committee for the Bauernfeld Prize, which, as we know, had given Zweig an award some years previously.

Felix von Winternitz and Friderike Burger were married in April 1906 in a quiet ceremony in the chapel of the Minoritenkirche. They rented an apartment in the Döbling district of Vienna, near the private school where Friderike had found a job as a teacher. The following year a daughter was born; christened Alexia Elisabeth, she was generally called Lix or Alix.