Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (37 page)

The next few months were completely taken up with work on the final draft of the Fouché biography. He had made a rod for his own back, Zweig admitted, since he had promised Insel Verlag that he would deliver the finished manuscript by 1st July. But during the months of writing he did dream of spending the winter far away from any manuscripts on a holiday
trip to Madeira, or even the Far East. While he was still busy with the proof corrections for the Fouché book, Zweig turned to the task of completing
Das Lamm des Armen.
He dedicated the play to his brother Alfred to mark his fiftieth birthday in October 1929.

This year he broke with his usual habit and stayed at home during the weeks of the Salzburg Festival. Shortly before the start of the summer theatre season he had learnt that Hugo von Hofmannsthal had died suddenly on 15th July in Rodaun. “First Rilke, now him—this is more than a coincidence, this is a sign, and not a good one”,
³³
wrote Zweig to Kippenberg. And he even said to Rolland that the death of these two writers marked the end of the old Austria. In memory of Rilke Zweig had written the text
Abschied von Rilke
in 1927, giving public readings of it in Munich and other cities. Now he was asked to give the commemorative address at a memorial ceremony for Hofmannsthal that was due to take place in mid-October at Vienna’s Burgtheater. It was an honour that of course he did not refuse, but he did make some guardedly critical remarks about the deceased beforehand: “His life was a protracted tragedy—perfection at twenty, and then the gods withheld their voice from him. I didn’t like him very much personally, but I was his pupil, and his death has shaken me.”
³⁴

In the autumn the biography of Joseph Fouché was published by Insel Verlag, subtitled
Bildnis eines politischen Menschen
[
Portrait of a Political Man
] and with a printed dedication to Arthur Schnitzler. Ernst Weiss wrote an enthusiastic review: “Certainly this work of Zweig’s would seem to be the summit of what has hitherto been achieved in this field, and it is, barring some minor failings that can be remedied, the classic example of this kind of historiography and at the same time the classic example of this kind of art. For it is both at once: it is principally a work of history, an academic study, but it is also a romance, a work of art and the imagination.”
³⁵
Zweig had indeed set new standards for popular biography in his time. When the book came out, he was already well into the preparations for his next work. The two series
Die Baumeister der Welt
and
Die Kette
had both run their course at three volumes each, but now he once again took up the successful idea of publishing three related life stories in one book. Under the portmanteau title
Die Heilung durch den Geist
[
Healing through the Mind
] Zweig proposed to bring before his readers the life stories of the doctor Franz Anton Mesmer and the founder of the Christian Science movement, Mary Baker Eddy. The third essay, it was clear from the outset, would
present by far the most complex challenge—Zweig planned to attempt an account of the work of Sigmund Freud.

Before he got down to the writing in earnest, Zweig had a little time to spare. Following a short trip to Paris with Friderike and Alix in October, Stefan and his wife travelled to Italy for a few weeks at the beginning of 1930 and met up with Maxim Gorky in Sorrento. Zweig had got to know and like Gorky on his trip to the Soviet Union: “We get on famously, even though we don’t understand each other’s language.”
³⁶
But their stay was brought to a premature end by unwelcome news from the theatrical world. When Zweig learnt of possible problems with the planned premiere of
Das Lamm des Armen
that could not be resolved by letter or telephone, the couple returned to Salzburg at the beginning of February.

Back at home, Zweig was soon immersed in the daily routine again. He worked on the new book in several stages, leaving the most difficult part until last. By the spring the first essay was almost complete, and work was in progress on the second. He was soon able to send some finished text passages to his Italian translator Lavinia Mazzucchetti. In a covering letter to her in May he wrote: “I’m sending you more of the Mrs Eddy now, and I’m just finishing the Mesmer. The Freud is next—and then I’ll be jumping for joy!”
³⁷

NOTES

1
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 22nd September 1927. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 199.

2
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 3rd January 1927, ÖUB Basle.

3
Stefan Zweig to Romain Rolland, 27th December 1927. In: Briefwechsel Rolland, Vol 2, p 263.

4
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 28th June 1929, ÖUB Basle.

5
Die Welt der Autographen. In: Matuschek 2005b, p 103 f.

6
As quoted in Rieger 1928, p 35.

7
Die Welt der Autographen. In: Matuschek 2005b, p 103 f.

8
Review of Amok from the Neue Freie Presse, as quoted in: Zweig Brennendes Geheimnis, p 79.

9
Tucholsky 1967, p 550.

10
Stefan Zweig to Richard Specht, 21st January 1927, in private ownership, Switzerland.

11
Beschwerde gegen einen Verleger. In: Matuschek 2005b, p 103 f.

12
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 22nd September 1927. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 199.

13
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 12th September 1927, ÖUB Basle.

14
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 12th August 1926, SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

15
Zweig F 1964, p 111.

16
Wiesbadener Fremdenblatt 1926.

17
Zweig F 1947, p 81.

18
Zweig GW Welt von Gestern, p 53.

19
Volkswille 1929.

20
Hannoverscher Anzeiger 1929.

21
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 6th November 1927. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 204.

22
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 11th November 1927. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 205 f.

23
Hamburgischer Correspondent 1927.

24
Altonaer Nachrichten 1927.

25
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 11th November 1927. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 205 f.

26
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 10th December 1926. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 189 f.

27
Ida Zweig’s postscript to a letter from Friderike to Stefan Zweig, 9th November 1927. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 204 f.

28
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 23rd May 1928, ÖUB Basle.

29
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 11th September 1928. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 213.

30
Reise nach Russland. In: Zweig GW Reisen, p 277 ff.

31
As quoted in Rieger 1928, p 35.

32
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 6th March 1929, ÖUB Basle.

33
Stefan Zweig to Anton Kippenberg, 18th July 1929. In: Briefe III, p 242.

34
Stefan Zweig to Romain Rolland, 20th July 1929. In: Briefe III, p 591.

35
Weiss 1929.

36
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 19th January 1930, DLA Marbach, 68.345/29.

37
Stefan Zweig to Lavinia Mazzucchetti, 23rd May 1930, NLI Jerusalem.

Stefan Zweig at the premiere of his play
Das Lamm des Armen
in Hanover on the 15th of March 1930. From left to right: Raul Lange (Fouché), Carola Wagner (Pauline Fourès), Stefan Zweig, the director Georg Altmann, Theodor Becker (François Fourès) and Hugo Rudolph (Napoleon Bonaparte).

Lapses

Everything is on hold with me at the moment, and I can’t make any plans.
¹

To Karl Geigy-Hagenbach 27th November 1933

T
HE PREMIERE OF
Das Lamm des Armen
took place on the evening of 15th March 1930 with simultaneous performances in a number of cities, namely Lübeck, Breslau, Hanover and Prague. Zweig travelled first to Breslau, where he was somewhat shocked by the production—“Here I watched the rehearsals for a curious comedy that reminded me a little of
Der Lamm des Armen
”
²
—and then attended the performance in Hanover. He was cheered by the first-night audience, and the play received very favourable reviews. Unfortunately none of the theatres kept it on for as long as he had hoped, prompting Zweig to remark on occasion that their repertoires were not sufficiently “meaty”—because his “Lamb” was not on the stage. He also wrote an article about Hanover entitled
Hannover—Stadt der Mitte
[
Hanover—City of the Centre
] (intended as a compliment), which the city fathers were happy to reprint the following year as the foreword to their promotional booklet
Hannover zu allen Jahreszeiten
[
Hanover—A City for all Seasons
].
³
But much as he liked northern Germany, Zweig was keen to move on. He had an appointment with Albert Einstein in Berlin—to Zweig’s own astonishment Einstein had turned out to be a devoted reader of his books, and was dying to meet him. However, this too was only a very brief stopover, and he set off for home the very next day, determined to finish the new book at last.

After studying the source material at length and completing the first two essays for
Die Heilung durch den Geist,
Zweig could see that writing the essay on Sigmund Freud was going to be harder than he thought. In the end, in order to bring the work to a happy conclusion, Zweig made use of the Salzburg Festival weeks in the summer of 1930 and decided to go to Hamburg—“the most improbable of all summer resorts”, as he put it—to carry on working on the manuscript.
⁴
The biggest attraction of this city for him was that he had virtually no friends or acquaintances here, and could devote himself to work and evenings of leisure without any major
social commitments. The young author Joachim Maass, who had been in contact with Zweig for some time past, had arranged an apartment for him at Alsterglacis 10 for his working stay of around three weeks, and also supplied a few other addresses where he might like to spend some of his leisure hours. The establishments in question were already well known to Zweig from earlier visits to Hamburg, and back in 1926 he had urged his colleague Erich Ebermayer on no account to miss the delights of an evening at the “Rote Mühle”.

For months Zweig had been sifting through books and documents on the history of psychoanalysis and the significance of Freud, as well as on the resistance to his teachings. While he was still trying to work all this information into an essay, his next project was already on the stocks elsewhere. With Zweig’s financial support, his friend Erwin Rieger had been installed since March in the Hôtel Manchester in Paris, not far from the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he was going through the translations of Zweig’s essay on Casanova and his biography of Fouché with the French translator Alzir Hella. But Rieger’s main task at the library was to carry out extensive research into a lady whose life story Zweig planned to make his next subject of study. The life of the Austrian-born French queen Marie Antoinette promised more than enough of the kind of material from which his books were created.

But his immediate priority was to focus on the recent past and the present and write about the life and work of his contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Neither side took readily to the idea. Not Zweig, who admired Freud enormously, but had not hitherto concerned himself with the finer points of psychoanalysis, and not Freud, who naturally knew about the project, but did not seem altogether comfortable at the prospect of seeing himself and his scientific work portrayed in an essay by Zweig. This emerges clearly from the correspondence between Freud and the writer Arnold Zweig, who was not related to Stefan Zweig by blood or marriage. At the time when Stefan Zweig was getting down to work in Hamburg, Freud was recuperating by Lake Grundlsee, following the exhausting preliminary investigations for an impending operation on his jaw. From here he wrote to Arnold Zweig on 21st August 1930, a few days after the latter had written to congratulate him on the award of the Goethe Prize: