Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (40 page)

Warmest regards,

                                 Stefan
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As one can infer from this letter, the situation regarding Friderike and her daughters had not improved in recent years. Quite the reverse—the older and more independent Suse and Alix became, the more volatile the atmosphere between them and “Stefzi” was apt to turn. As far as can be seen from the few documents available, neither of the children appeared to have much interest in training for a career. Still suffering frequently from poor health, Suse had had to struggle with learning difficulties at school, and then went on to do some training in baby care and childcare. In later years she attended courses in photography, and a small darkroom was even set up for her in the Salzburg family home. But despite attempts to further her career, her commercial success as a photographer remained somewhat limited. About Alix we know that she took various casual jobs working in advertising and travel agencies, but she appears never to have had any permanent employment. Both girls were alike in having inherited their mother’s temperament. The antiquarian book dealer Heinrich Hinterberger recalls a visit to Salzburg and tells us that at the beginning of the 1920s Zweig “was toying with the idea of training at least one of the two girls at some point to become his assistant and collaborator”, but doubtless this idea was quickly abandoned.
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Zweig once told Richard Friedenthal that he could not understand how, during all the years they lived together in the same house, the two girls never once asked to see his manuscript collection. Zweig’s observation may seem naive, but Suse and Alix not only failed to show any interest in intellectual matters, they were also unimpressed by the many illustrious visitors who came and went on his account at the house on the Kapuzinerberg. To Zweig, who as a schoolboy had stood at the stage doors of theatres and opera houses in the hope of catching a glimpse of the actors and singers, and getting an autograph if he was lucky, this complete lack of interest was utterly incomprehensible. He introduced the young ladies to nearly all the great men of his time in the garden (and to those of past times in the manuscript pages of his collection), and received not the smallest mark of admiration in return. So curiously enough it was Stefan who felt himself neglected and ignored by the girls, rather than the other way round.

They had discovered one way of avoiding conflict, though—they simply avoided each other as much as possible, which, given the general fondness for travel in the Zweig household, was not difficult. And if it became necessary Stefan would retreat to Thumersbach to work, across the lake from Zell am See. But this was hardly a solution to their problems.

Zweig repeatedly toyed with the notion of leaving the house, the city, and maybe even the country for a lengthy period. He contemplated an extended tour of South America, and even thought about settling in Palestine for a few years. But for the moment he was still spending a good deal of time in Salzburg, and every reunion with his family was liable to lead very quickly to fresh disappointments and mutual recriminations. For New Year’s Eve 1930 Alix and Suse had organised a party for their friends on the Kapuzinerberg. The arrangements were evidently made with Friderike’s consent, or at least with her knowledge, but at all events against Stefan’s will. He himself had planned only a small gathering to mark the day, consisting of the actor Emil Jannings and his family and Erich Ebermayer, who has left us an account of the evening in his memoirs. After midnight had struck, Zweig conducted his guests on a tour of the house, as usual showing them the library and the saloon with Beethoven’s desk. As they continued the tour they heard the sound of voices and gramophone music coming from behind a closed door. When Zweig threw open the door, the party mood among all those present suddenly evaporated. He managed to contain his fury in front of his guests, but Ebermayer recalls a strange sight: “He went deathly pale and flushed bright red by turns.”
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The constant family tensions, Stefan’s relentless drive to undertake more work (which was ultimately another form of escape) and the prospect of a dark future for Germany and Austria were not without consequences for his relationship with Friderike. During a stay in Switzerland she wrote to him on 16th January 1932:

There are bad times ahead, and in my nightmares I have seen Hitler’s bombs raining down on our house. Who would have thought that we would be praying for the re-election of Hindenburg! And there is no time to be lost in making decisions. [ … ] Certainly no one can say it is my fault if you haven’t done enough work. It is hard to see how you could have published more books than you have, or more successful ones. You have grown into your books more and more with the passing years. The routines of work have perhaps stunted the human being in you, but he will revive again, once you have cast aside petty concerns again. You have given the worker in you his full due. Since you have been with me, my dear, your work has grown in an unbroken chain, and although no stenotypist myself, I really have done everything I could to create the kind of environment that an artist needs in order to work undisturbed. And that has not happened by itself. Don’t undervalue the importance of that by wishing that you could make a stenotypist of me yet, even now when my hair is turning white. But I don’t mind helping out a bit with the correspondence. [ … ] Hugs and kisses and love from Suse too.

Friderike signed the letter “Your ex-Mumu”
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—a clear sign of her unwillingness to tolerate the present state of affairs any longer. A few days later she met up with her husband in Paris, and shortly after that she travelled to Kitzbühel for a few weeks of skiing on her own. Here she received a letter from Stefan filled with trivial items of news from Salzburg, which ended with the words “Nothing else to report, don’t go off-piste—except perhaps in the marital sense, if you get lucky. Love from St.”
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Was he just being ironic—or was there more to it than that?

In 1932 the
Völkischer Beobachter
had written about Zweig’s work and his well-known pacificism in predictably disparaging tones:

Stefan Zweig is constantly at war with the basic rules of the German language, which has not so far affected sales of his published mass-market works. He was, however, not at war between 1914 and 1918. It seems that this Austrian citizen, who was thirty-three years old at the outbreak of war, “endured grievous sufferings with a coterie of European comrades as a result of the war”. In Switzerland, that is. For those of us who endured grievous sufferings in the field as a result of the war, this fact alone is enough to ensure that we will not be taking any lessons in humanity from the Jew Zweig. Because for us the great humanity of the world war consisted in standing shoulder to shoulder with our German brothers in the hail of steel.
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Such accusations now appeared in print with growing frequency, as his enemies felt increasingly free to express their anti-Semitic views—quite openly in some cases—in newspapers and magazines. After years of silence and mutual distance, Zweig’s old acquaintance Richard Schaukal now surfaced again, causing quite a stir by attacking him verbally in the most vulgar terms. He had already published an article in 1930 entitled ‘The Coronation of Stefan the Great—German Prose at its Contemporary Best’ in the journal
Deutsches Volkstum,
in which he first sounded off about Zweig’s alleged inability to express himself correctly in the German language. It is true that Karl Kraus had already made the same point in
Die Fackel,
but Schaukal’s line of attack was different: this was not satire, but a personal settling of scores with a writer notably more successful than himself. In these times it was not difficult to get diatribes of this kind into print, as long as they were peppered with suitably nationalistic sentiments and submitted in the right quarter.

Admittedly Zweig’s frequently stilted and convoluted turn of phrase provided plenty of ammunition for any critic disposed to search his works for linguistic errors and inaccuracies. In his 1914 newspaper article ‘To My Friends in Foreign Lands’ he has the sentence: “the meanest Low German peasant, who barely understands a word of my language and certainly not a word of my heart, is closer to me in these hours than you …”,
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which, notwithstanding the seriousness of the situation at the time, is apt to have provoked unintended mirth in some readers who spoke Low German (whether they were North German peasants or not).

It was also in 1914, when he was preparing the German edition of Verlaine’s works, that Zweig had confided in Schaukal of all people about his working methods: “I find, unfortunately, that once something is in print it is repugnant to me, like any dish that has gone cold, and an inner aversion prevents me from touching it again, even though I know in my mind that it is unsatisfactory as it stands”
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—an admission that the recipient of these lines now gratefully seized on and exploited, nearly twenty years later.
In his first article, the aforementioned ‘Coronation of Stefan the Great’, Schaukal not only tore into Zweig’s biography of Joseph Fouché, which had only just been published, but also gleefully picked apart a piece by Erich Ebermayer describing a visit to Zweig’s house. Schaukal’s next tirade was even more blatantly entitled ‘The Case of Stefan Zweig—A Contribution to the History of Stupidity’. This time the grateful beneficiary of the article was the journal
Deutschlands Erneuerung,
and the young writer Hanns Arens, who like Ebermayer had penned a rather effusive newspaper article about a day he had spent on the Kapuzinerberg, now found himself in the firing line too. Anyone who consorted with Zweig and was also a published writer was immediately deemed by Schaukal to be guilty by association of alleged crimes against the German language. The fact that he landed a double blow on Zweig by attacking his friends and “disciples” was a source of additional satisfaction to Schaukal. The campaign reached its climax with his remarks in the January 1933 issue of
Die neue Literatur.
Here he was able to inform his readers that he had discovered by chance that Insel Verlag had given Zweig’s
Marie Antoinette
—now in print—to a literary scholar and asked him to check it for stylistic errors. Bad as the article was, worse was to come when it transpired that Schaukal’s account was essentially correct. Anton Kippenberg had indeed—and without Zweig’s knowledge—commissioned the literary historian Walther Linden to suggest textual changes for future editions of
Marie Antoinette
in the interests of avoiding the use of “foreign words” and maintaining the integrity of the German language in line with “modern” thinking. In the event these changes were not incorporated into the next reprint of the book, but for Zweig this must have been an early warning sign, only confirming what he had already seen coming in his darker hours. At all events, these revelations had put a serious damper on the pleasure he took in the fact that
Marie Antoinette
was the best-selling Christmas title of 1932, notching up sales of 50,000 copies by the start of the New Year.

On 30th January 1933 Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of the German Reich. What Zweig had long feared had now become a reality. Already tense and wary, he now went on high alert. The fear of war and persecution became widespread, and it was clear that much of what could previously pass for attacks by isolated opponents would now very quickly be legitimised, encouraged and even ordained by the state.

In March Zweig embarked on a reading and lecture tour of Switzerland. Once again he was able to bask in his success. He wrote to Friderike from Montreux:

Have done Bern and Zurich, both very successful. Zurich is pressing me for a repeat performance because—like Bern—they had sold too many tickets for the hall, and the people who couldn’t get in kicked up a huge fuss—I had to sign nearly eight hundred copies of my books in the two bookshops. Sales are still booming here. [ … ] I’m keeping very well so far, although I didn’t get any sleep at all; I’m writing this letter on the train, in pencil, because my fountain pens (all three) have run out from signing all the books.
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In Bern he spoke on the radio on the evening of 12th March, at the peak listening hour. The
Schweizer Radio-Illustrierte
announced a reading of his most popular texts. This occasion produced the only known recording of Stefan Zweig’s voice. During the recording, which lasts a good five minutes, he can be heard reading his poems
Hymnus an die Reise
and
Der Bildner
into the microphone, speaking with dramatic emphasis and an unmistakable Viennese inflection.

During the course of the trip Zweig had decided to play it safe and withdraw from a planned reading tour of Scandinavia, which would have taken him for the first time to Norway, Sweden and Finland, leaving his old friend Franz Karl Ginzkey to take his place. As he explained in a letter to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach in Basle: “At the present time I don’t want to travel through Germany, which is not as harmless as it looks, or to have all these vile discussions in the nationalist press about whether or not I am entitled to appear there as a German writer (perhaps you have no idea here in Switzerland just how far the madness in Germany has gone).”
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That madness led on 10th May to state-organised public demonstrations in many German cities, when books written by anti-Nazi and Jewish authors were thrown onto bonfires. Zweig sent Sigmund Freud a copy of the Brazilian edition of his Freud essay from
Die Heilung durch den
Geist that had appeared that same year, adding the sardonic handwritten dedication: “To the revered master, in the year of the book burning, from his devoted Stefan Zweig”.
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