Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (22 page)

Meanwhile Zweig succeeded in placing one of his own essays, entitled
Die Bücher und der Krieg
, in a different and perhaps much more unlikely quarter, namely the
Bibliophilen-Kalender
for 1916. The same volume contained an article by Julius Zeitler on the curious concept of “war bibliophilia”. Here too Zweig had been pushing hard, showering the editor, Hans Feigl, with unsolicited suggestions, and indeed with material from his own manuscript collection: “Perhaps it would be better, if you want to reproduce something from my collection, to choose Kleist’s
Kriegslied der Deutschen
”, he wrote, “without being militant as such, your almanac ought to reflect contemporary events—perhaps including an essay on war literature.”
²⁰

These occasional topical pieces should not make us lose sight of Zweig’s previous published work. Heading the sales list of his titles in 1915 was the novella collection
Erstes Erlebnis
, followed by his one-act play
Der verwandelte Komödiant
. At the other end of the scale, very few copies of
Das Haus am Meer
were sold in the bookshops. Astonishingly, despite Verhaeren’s well-known anti-German stance, the editions of his poems and dramas in Zweig’s translation remained popular with the book-buying public.

Since Zweig’s duties in the War Archive were purely of a clerical nature, he did not have to spend his nights in a barracks, but was able to carry on
living at his home address in the Kochgasse. From time to time he would invite friends round in the evening for reading parties. These were sometimes attended by Arthur Schnitzler, who had become a valued discussion partner again. As always the assembled friends went out for supper, which suited Zweig very well, since he was briefly attempting to give up eating meat—without success, as it turned out.

With the onset of colder weather Friderike had returned to the city from Baden and rented an apartment for herself and both daughters in the Lange Gasse, not far from where he lived. Stefan still indulged in the occasional “episode”, as he used to call it at one time, and he now found himself increasingly at risk of running into Friderike in the street at the wrong time. He shied away from the obvious embarrassment of such a chance meeting—but told her about these liaisons anyway. She tried her level best to come to terms with it, claiming that as long as he could make it up to her—which he had always managed to do so far, so she told him in a letter—he should not try to hide his amours from her. But this time she also admitted in her letter that she was hurt by them.

The new year brought a further change in their living arrangements. Stefan retained his rooms in the Kochgasse, but in the spring he and Friderike, her two daughters and their nanny Elise Exner (whom they called “Lisi” to her face, “the Beanpole” when she was not present) moved out to Kalksburg near Rodaun. Here they lived separately—and yet together. On the edge of an old estate they had found a pair of rococo pavilions that seemed absolutely made for them. The ladies lived in the larger one, while Stefan moved into the smaller one. The two buildings were separated by a garden with an old weather-beaten well. Out here Zweig was able to work on into the warm evenings when he came home from the office and at weekends. And he took full advantage of this, pacing up and down, writing and revising his
Jeremias
, and scattering cigarette butts liberally over the lawn.

His work at the Ministry put an increasingly severe strain on him. Apart from having to deal with the feeling that he was playing only a subordinate role, there was the growing fear that he would eventually be called up to serve at the front after all. More and more employees at the War Archive, provisionally exempted from military service, disappeared from their desks after fresh medical examinations, and within a short time found themselves posted to the battlefield. Zweig had been spared so far, because in addition to the earlier reservations about his health the doctors had also diagnosed
a nervous complaint; but the decision as to his fitness could change from one day to the next. In the light of this it is easy to understand why the remaining toilers in the “hero factory” took every opportunity to make themselves indispensable in their present employment. This was also the thinking behind the proposal to publish a monthly journal on military science and history, for which Zweig produced a draft outline indicating the general editorial direction and content. The project eventually resulted in the magazine
Donauland
, published by von Veltzé outside the Archive, which first appeared in 1917.

In the autumn Zweig was granted a long-awaited period of leave. He and Friderike travelled to Salzburg for three weeks. Away from Vienna, away from his increasingly stressful office job and the city and its people, whose vacuous gossip-mongering ways pursued him, as he said, into his sleepless nights and bad dreams. He was now living alone with Friderike in the Park Hotel Nelböck, the girls having stayed behind at home. Their days were taken up with long walks together through the local countryside, and attempts to get down to serious work on his own writing, which had become something of a rarity. “It is really quiet here, and I can hear his footsteps”, wrote Friderike in her diary, “his movements as he walks around while working, tapping his fist against his palm in the way he does. If only he could blossom again here! All the torments of life in uniform have fallen away from him like a bad dream. All he needs is rest, he takes so much pleasure in things and feels that his life is pure enjoyment.”
²¹
But the prospect of their imminent return to Vienna did provoke the occasional mood swing in him. Friderike herself was also working on the manuscript of her new novel, and Stefan actively encouraged her in this, more or less telling her to focus on this one important thing and not be distracted by the minor details of everyday life.

During their explorations of the city they came upon a villa with a large garden on the Kapuzinerberg, just across from the monastery. Tucked into the hillside, the yellow-painted house was full of corners and angles, with sections of roof that projected or were set back, and it even had a turret. In short, it looked like a castle out of a fairy tale. To live somewhere like this suddenly seemed like a realistic alternative to all their previous plans. Friderike and Stefan had talked a lot recently about moving away from Vienna one day—one distant day—when the war was over. They had considered Merano and other places in the South Tyrol where they both liked to spend time. So was Salzburg now another option? It was
certainly worth thinking about. Here they would be far enough away from Vienna, yet could easily get to the city in a few hours if they had to go there on family matters or business. In other respects, too, Salzburg was very conveniently located. They could get to Germany quickly, and Munich, their nearest major city, was not far away. Here they would be living in the heart of Europe, with Switzerland, Italy and other destinations all within relatively easy reach. And there was another important consideration—here they could hope to find the peace and quiet they needed. Apart from Hermann Bahr, who had lived here for some time and could be counted as a friend, there were no other colleagues living remotely within striking distance.

It was now almost exactly four years since they had taken their first trip together to Hamburg and Lübeck. During their stay in Salzburg Friderike was accorded a notable honour, as she noted in her diary: “Today Stefan named me as his permanent ‘top bunny’. I don’t wish for anything more, and if he occasionally enjoys a subordinate bunny, that’s fine by me. I don’t begrudge him others, nor others him. Just as long as I am always his top bunny.”
²²

Soon after their return to Vienna came the announcement on 21st November that the Emperor Franz Joseph had died at Schönbrunn after a reign of sixty-eight years. He was succeeded on the throne by Karl I. A few days later Friderike watched the funeral cortège from the window of a house on the Ringstrasse, in the company of her daughters and the father of her ex-husband, with whom she still remained on good terms. She loved this kind of elaborate ceremonial. When she was in Paris she had marvelled at the fine coaches in which the visiting English King and Queen were taken on a tour of the city. But the really terrible news that reached them in those days had nothing to do with the death of the eighty-six-year-old Emperor.

On the day after his birthday Zweig learnt that Émile Verhaeren had suffered a fatal accident in Rouen on 27th November. On the way back from one of his readings he had tried to board a moving train, but had slipped and fallen beneath the wheels. This was the exact same place where the two men had embraced for the last time in July 1914: “We made little of our leave-taking, as we were expecting to meet again soon in the seclusion of his house [ … ]. I was due to come to him on the second of August, and he called out after me to remind me: the second of August!”
²³

Stefan had telephoned Friderike from the office during the day to tell her the news. He spent the evening alone, leafing through his old correspondence and diaries, which recalled their times together in Belgium, France, and on the reading tour in Germany and Vienna. Once before, following the publication of the poems about Belgium’s enemies, Zweig had parted company with Verhaeren—now he was deeply upset that a true reconciliation would no longer be possible, that his friend and mentor had died hating the Germans. As a sign of mourning he abandoned his customary purple ink for a while and wrote his letters in black ink instead.

As if this was not enough, Friderike received the news at Christmas that a couple she knew very well, the Stoerks, whose children she had often looked after, had been caught in an avalanche in the Tyrol and had been killed. In a state of shock she withdrew to Rodaun for a few days, where Stefan and a few friends did their best to comfort her.

Meanwhile, despite everything, work on
Jeremias
was moving forward. Zweig knew how much energy he had invested in the manuscript, but more than that, he now knew how much of himself he was revealing in his anti-war drama. Stressful as his day job at the War Archive was, it also helped to fuel his cautious but by now deeply felt opposition to the war. To Gerhart Hauptmann he confided that this was his first true literary work.
²⁴

In mid-January 1917 he travelled to Prague to read extracts from the play. The proceeds from this event would go to help refugee children. He was accompanied by Friderike and their friend Felix Braun. While away she planned to develop her contacts with the International Committee for Lasting Peace, which was holding a meeting in Prague. For some time now she had openly espoused the cause of pacifism.

They travelled in a third-class carriage—still a novel experience for Stefan—and stayed at the hotel in three adjacent single rooms, observing the proprieties. Despite a busy schedule that also included a visit to Max Brod, they had sufficient free time to explore the city under its blanket of winter snow. And just like the weeks they spent on holiday in Salzburg, Stefan’s mood changed the moment they left Vienna. Friderike recalls a walk through the narrow streets on an “evening full of matchless and magical beauty and full of thankful gaiety, the three of us arm in arm, Stefan, Felix and me, holding on to each other so as not to slip on the icy pavements. Stefan full of notions and jokes, like a man suddenly set free.”
²⁵

Back in Vienna again, the private tragedies of recent months and the bad news from the various theatres of war were compounded by worries
about the things of everyday life. Coal was in short supply, some schools and universities were shut down because they could no longer be heated. Food shortages were also a problem, so this year, when they moved out to the pavilions in Kalksburg, they planned to keep a goat on the lawn to provide them with a dependable supply of milk.

But despite all the stress there were times now when Friderike appeared to find that sense of contentment and security that she had so ardently hoped for from their partnership, as her poem
Abendstunden an Stefans Kamin
[
Evening Hours by Stefan’s Fireside
] indicates:

When the day is slipping towards its dark end,

And hands are folded, with nothing more to do,

Drowsiness envelops me like a cloak.

To rest in dreams close by my love,

Transported to worlds that are closed to us by day,

And yet so near, that through the wall of sleep

Quiet footsteps bring assurance still—

And so I take wing and am no longer in the room

Not lost and cast adrift in solitary depths.

I am here and there, with you, with God,

I am not alone, but as if in a dream.
²⁶

For Zweig it was now time to start thinking about the possibility of getting his
Jeremias
performed on the stage. Even though there seemed little hope of getting it premiered in Germany or Austria, given its anti-war message, he wrote to various theatres asking for their opinions. In one of these letters he noted: “The tragedy demands an actor of outstanding calibre (I know of no one suitable in Vienna, for example).”
²⁷

That
Jeremias
meant more to him than any other work in a long time can be gauged too from the insistence with which he urged his publishers to hurry up with the preparation of the book edition. A great deal depended on it, not least in financial terms. As yet he was not able to live off his previous earnings as a writer, but he wanted to change that. It was true that he would one day own a share of his parents’ factory, but the future of this enterprise was far from certain at this moment in time. He delivered the manuscript in April and suggested that the design of the book should follow the format used for
Das Haus am Meer
. His proposal for the front cover was a drawing of a seven-branched candelabrum, but contrary to his usual
practice he refrained from further interference in the matter, as the post from Vienna to Leipzig now took more than ten days in each direction, which would have delayed the project too much.