Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (25 page)

He began the new year by giving a joint reading with Wilhelm Schmidtbonn on 8th January 1918 in Davos. From there Zweig travelled on a few days later to nearby Buchs, so that he could meet Friderike at the frontier station after the successful completion of her mission. This time she brought her ailing daughter Suse with her; she did not yet have exit papers for her elder daughter Alix, whom she had therefore had to leave behind in Vienna. The three of them went to St Moritz for a short stay, which proved not entirely relaxing: “All the people I dislike are here”, noted Zweig in his diary, “Frau Lothar, Schickele, and today, to cap it all, Karl Kraus.”
¹¹
All the same, the brief stay supplied him with enough material for an article in the
Neue Freie Presse
, which he entitled
Bei den Sorglosen
[
Among the Carefree
]. The contrast between the people in the surrounding countries who were increasingly caught up in the events of the war, and these “happy few” who carried on as usual, untroubled by any cares, enjoying a life of aristocratic leisure on the dance floor, around the tea table and on the ski slopes: it was a story that practically wrote itself.

A major event was now coming up on 27th February 1918—the first performance of
Jeremias
. For the two days preceding the first night—as we gather from the
Mitteilungen des Zürcher Stadttheaters
, the theatre’s own newsletter—the theatre remained closed while the stage sets were erected. Theatregoers also learnt some facts about the work and its genesis—in
Jeremias
, the newsletter informs us, “the author unfolds before us the fate of Jerusalem in its downfall. We also find many of our contemporary woes echoed in this period of Jerusalem’s decline; the devastating war now raging, which no sense or reason is able to check, is mirrored in that time.” Quoted alongside Romain Rolland’s words of praise for the published text of the play is his comment that the piece probably needs some cutting for the stage, and the newsletter duly goes on: “This dramaturgical labour has been undertaken for our performance here in Zurich by head stage director Danegger, who has used this edited text as a basis for rehearsals, which are being conducted with the author present.”
¹²

The story of the prophet Jeremiah, who warns of impending war and is mocked, despised and rejected for his pains, until his people are finally forced to confront the harsh facts, really did touch a nerve in the theatre-going public. The newspapers were full of praise. Felix Beran reported in
Pester Lloyd
: “A full house gave the work rapturous applause such as is seldom heard here. [ … ] Repeated curtain calls brought the author to the front of the stage.”
¹³
The unsigned review in the
Neue Freie Presse
had
very probably been penned by Zweig himself—he was the paper’s Swiss correspondent, after all. And he was in very good company—it is a known fact that Friedrich Schiller similarly wrote an anonymous review of the first performance of
Die Räuber.

In the wake of this success Stefan and Friderike returned to Bern in April to attend a conference of the Committee for Lasting Peace. Stefan gave an opening address on the Austrian winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Bertha von Suttner, who had died a few weeks before the outbreak of war. After the conference the two of them did not travel straight back to Zurich. The city was in a constant state of unrest, and the company of some people there really had become excessively wearing. Moreover the distinct impression had arisen in the hotel that certain persons present were listening a little too closely to other people’s conversations. So Friderike and Stefan took up residence in the Hotel Belvoir in Rüschlikon on Lake Zurich, not far from the city, renting a suite of rooms where they could feel reasonably safe from the unwanted attentions of prying contemporaries. Here, hoped Zweig, he would at last be able to get down to regular work again. But in quiet moments he was troubled not only by the news reports of a war that kept dragging on, but also by the feeling of being permanently on the run. Without fixed abode, he was moving from one hotel to another, while his house in Salzburg was to all intents and purposes uninhabitable, a distant, and for the moment unattainable, prospect. His situation was made worse by financial worries, since both Friderike and he were also paying rent on separate homes in Austria—his apartment in the Kochgasse, hers in the Lange Gasse—which neither of them had any immediate plans to give up.

Friderike’s daughter Suse had initially been placed in a children’s home in Zurich, while Alix was still being looked after by her grandfather back in Vienna. After some efforts they were able to secure permission for her to travel to Switzerland too, and Friderike now moved with the two girls to Amden near Weesen on the shores of the Walensee. Their governess had failed to obtain the necessary travel permit, so Friderike set about finding a new nanny locally. She managed to find someone, but even with this support she felt unable to cope with her present situation. She had no heart for her work on the Rousseau translation. To begin with Stefan did his best to encourage her, offering to take on a portion of the revision himself—only to discover, shortly before the delivery deadline, that the material she had revised was completely unsatisfactory. Already snowed
under with paperwork for his various projects, he gritted his teeth and took on the bulk of the job of revising
Émile
as well.

In fact he had wanted to spend these weeks working on a new novella that he had provisionally entitled
Der Refractär
. This story about a conscientious objector, for which Masereel supplied some illustrations, appeared later under the title
Der Zwang
. Meanwhile the long-planned major essay on Dostoevsky was nowhere near finished, and the chamber piece
Die Legende
eines Lebens
was also still at the manuscript stage on his desk.

While Zweig had already published various anti-war texts while still in Vienna—most notably
Jeremias
—he now felt more confident, and was emboldened to go further. Instead of putting his views into the mouths of characters in his short stories or plays, he now put out an open “Bekenntnis zum Defaitismus” [“Profession of a Defeatist”], a call to condemn the mass murder of war once and for all, which was printed in the pacifist journal
Die Friedens-Warte
. The Austrian authorities had not lost sight of Zweig, despite his exemption from military service, and following publication of the article a letter was sent from the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Embassy in Bern to the Foreign Ministry in Vienna: “Our very own Stefan Zweig in the
Friedens-Warte
!” wrote the official responsible, “that’s all we need! It wouldn’t much matter in itself, but this is not the kind of propaganda we had in mind.”
¹⁴
Zweig subsequently had to answer some awkward questions, but unofficially he was very pleased that his piece had evidently hit home in the right quarters.

That summer the local Swiss authorities had also started to take an interest in him. On 26th July, a good three months after the move to the Hotel Belvoir, the Swiss Attorney General’s Office in Bern had contacted police headquarters in Zurich to request a detailed and accurate dossier on him, which was of course to be compiled without his knowledge. A plain-clothes policeman duly travelled to Rüschlikon from nearby Kilchberg, and by 1st August he was in a position to submit his report to his superiors. The investigation had been triggered by the fact that Zweig’s passport expired around this time, as the police officer notes at the beginning of his report. The last renewal, processed by the Austrian Consulate-General in Zurich, was valid only until 29th July of the current year. So now the authorities decided it was time to take a closer look at this man. But in the end no further police action was taken, because exhaustive inquiries failed to uncover anything suspicious about the subject, Dr Stefan Zweig, resident at Kochgasse 8 in Vienna, Lower Austria: “He is pursuing his career as
a writer here and working for the theatre and newspapers”, the report informs us. It goes on:

Discreet enquiries have revealed that Zweig has a great deal of correspondence, both from abroad and from within Switzerland. I was unable to discover any more about the purpose of this correspondence, other than the fact that most of it has to do with his work as a writer. He is also said to have contacts with the leading Swiss newspapers. I understand that he is a regular contributor to the
Freie
Presse
in Vienna. At present he is said to be working day and night on his major work.

Zweig subscribes to several newspapers here such as the
Freie Presse
(Vienna),
La Feuille
, etc. He apparently receives large numbers of visitors, many of them writers. Viennese citizens staying in Zurich are also said to visit him frequently, since he is apparently regarded as a fairly well-known Austrian writer. [ … ]

Dr Zweig is said to be here on leave, and holds the rank of a titular sergeant. He is apparently very interested in peace, presumably because he has the prospect of great wealth. [ … ]

He travels frequently to Bern, Geneva, etc, as does his collaborator, Frau Winternitz,
Friderike
[ … ]. It is not known here what the purpose of these visits is.

Enquiries at the hotel itself have revealed nothing notable or unfavourable about Dr Zweig.
¹⁵

That summer Switzerland was in the grip of the Spanish flu epidemic, making it advisable to avoid large gatherings of people and the consequent risk of infection. For Zweig this was a welcome opportunity to withdraw from society and concentrate on his work, and to encourage Friderike in her view that she and the children would be better off in Amden than with him in Rüschlikon or in Zurich. He now imposed a working retreat on himself, from which he would only emerge if he was meeting good friends such as Robert Faesi, and if such meetings held out the promise of some relaxation. He wrote to Friderike from his retreat: “The heat is just incredible now. I am not moving from R[üschlikon]—in part because of the flu, which is still rampant in Zurich. I haven’t been there once since you left. My only outing was with Faesi yesterday evening, we rowed across the lake at midnight, and it was marvellous.”
¹⁶

Zweig was no mountaineer, and he suffered from vertigo, which could even cause him problems in the upper circle of a theatre. Nevertheless during these weeks he undertook a number of extended hikes with his writer
colleague Carl Seelig—and indeed on his own. He wrote a postcard from the Wengernalp, after walking for three hours on the Eiger Glacier. And not long afterwards he wrote about an impending solo excursion into the mountains: “I’m taking no equipment with me apart from my hobnailed boots and my rucksack.”
¹⁷

Meanwhile Friderike was becoming acquainted with the publishing business. Her novel
Vögelchen
was finally going into print, and she had sent the manuscript—subsequently dedicated to Romain Rolland—to the publishers, S Fischer Verlag in Berlin. Initially they sent her only a portion of the agreed fee, whereupon Stefan was able to give her some useful tips on how to secure payment of the balance. Zweig himself is clearly recognisable to the reader of Friderike’s novel in the figure of the sensitive neurologist Dr Clemens Urbacher, who attempts, with very modest means but a formidable knowledge of the subject, to assemble an important collection of miniature paintings—an echo of the almost forgotten manuscript collection that Zweig had left behind in Vienna. Urbacher’s rival in the field of collecting is the wealthy industrialist Mannsthal, prompting the suspicion that it was no accident that Friderike had chosen the shortened form of a famous writer’s name for a fictional character who is plainly an insufferable human being.

While she knew better than anyone how much of Stefan’s character was reflected in the figure of Dr Urbacher, his growing passion for Dostoevsky was causing her some misgivings. When she was living in Baden she and Stefan had had some lively discussions about Balzac and Stendhal and also about Dostoevsky. Friderike felt very much at home with French literature, but these characters from the “dark, simmering Russian world”
¹⁸
were an unfathomable mystery to her. And it was just as much a mystery to her how Stefan could be so fascinated by these characters—had he perhaps recognised traits of his own personality in them? For the moment Friderike tried to answer her questions by telling herself that one must not confuse the writer with the work.

Despite their lengthy separations, she was aware of Stefan’s fluctuating moods and the constant roller coaster of his emotions. While one might have supposed that his health would improve when the war ended in November 1918, it seemed rather as if the opposite were the case. Zweig followed events in Austria and Germany very closely, and he could see where things were leading, long ahead of time. In mid-December 1918 he wrote a letter to Rolland in which he set out the results of his reflections
and his frightening forecasts for the future (doubly frightening when seen from today’s perspective):

There are moments when I ask myself if it is worth living through the next twenty years. I am crushed by the twofold burden of a hatred for which I feel I bear no responsibility: the hatred against Germany, which started the war, and the hatred against the Jews in Austria for profiteering from the war. I was neither a warmonger nor a profiteer, God knows, and yet I cannot abandon either group in their hour of need. But life will become intolerable there for all who are not driven by ambition or a love of violence. People like me will be destroyed, we will not even be allowed the air we need to live. But where are we to go? The world will close its doors to us, and I cannot live as the prisoner of a state that despises even someone like me as an outsider and an enemy. Down the centuries there has not been a life situation that’s as critical as that of an Austrian Jew and author writing in German today.
¹⁹