Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (44 page)

In other ways he was an odd bird—and it’s an apt image, because he really did have small, dark, flashing eyes like little buttons; there was a warmth in them, and a certain melancholy, but you had to have known him well for quite a while before you saw that. He loved women, adored women, loved to talk about women, but “in the flesh”—and there is no equivalent expression in German—he tended to avoid them. When he came out to tea in Henndorf and my wife or a female friend decided to join us, he became rather jittery, and wouldn’t really enter into conversation; if they offered him something or tried to help him to something, he politely declined, until in the end the ladies left us alone out of consideration. Immediately he would relax and become his usual eloquent self, man to man, his talk intense and stimulating as always. He liked to drop sly hints about erotic encounters, for which he never had time; but most of all he liked to talk about the subject matter that he was currently working on. It was a delight to listen to him [ … ].

After one such intimate conversation my wife asked me when he had gone: “What was Stefan telling you today that made him so animated?” “The latest gossip from the French Revolution”, I said, and left it at that; for he was then working on his
Marie Antoinette
, and he knew exactly which type of venereal disease each character had had, as if he had been a dermatologist practising in St Germain at the time. He even spoke about such matters with the same discreet smile, and whispering behind his hand in the same way, as that doctor would doubtless have done among friends.
¹²

In Benno Geiger’s memoirs the same Stefan Zweig comes across as a good deal less reticent. Geiger has the following story to tell from the years before the First World War:

Zweig too had his little perversion, and in order not to break the law he had persuaded Freud, who was aware of the matter, to certify that he was one of his patients and was undergoing treatment with him. He himself told me about all this. He suffered from an addiction to exhibitionism, or the compulsion to expose himself to solitary young girls. He had invented his own pet name to describe this little weakness: “
Schauprangertum
” [roughly “self-pillorification”]. Favoured locations included the paths in the grounds of Schönbrunn, and in particular the old Monkey House, which has not been used as a cage for a long time, and now lies at the heart of a kind of labyrinth. From there it was easy to look out over the trimmed box hedges and see in good time if the police were coming, even if they were trying to creep up on him. Zweig knew every inch of Schönbrunn, including all the escape routes.”
¹³

It is virtually impossible to say how much truth there is in this account. Published in 1958 in a very limited edition and in Italian only, Geiger’s memoirs abound, like many of his poems, in grotesque and sometimes
extremely tasteless details. Had he really been there when the events described—or something like them—took place in the grounds of Schönbrunn? It is hardly likely. Had Zweig told him about his exploits, and perhaps embellished the truth—whatever the truth may have been? We know of many instances where his account of his own experiences was informed by a lively imagination. Could Geiger seriously have believed that such a controversial figure as Sigmund Freud would have risked giving a patient of his with exhibitionist tendencies a kind of ‘hunting licence’, designed to ensure that in the event of his arrest the authorities would make allowances and accept a plea of mitigating circumstances? It is safe to assume that such a dubious strategy would more likely have ended badly for doctor and patient alike. So Geiger’s account needs to be treated with a good deal of scepticism.

However, he goes even further, giving an account of Zweig’s “great poetic confession”, which had appeared in August 1923 in the
Neue Rundschau
under the title
Ballade von einem Traum
[
Ballad of a Dream
]. Like his novella
Verwirrung der Gefühle,
in which Zweig had tackled the subject of male homosexuality with a frankness that was remarkable for the times, the poem in question was inevitably destined to foster all manner of rumours about its author. But in contrast to Zweig’s novellas, whose autobiographical content it was almost impossible to determine, even his friends, interestingly enough, viewed the stanzas of the
Ballad
as a far more personal form of self-portrayal, and therefore closer to the truth. In more than a dozen stanzas the poet records a dream he had in the night, in which suppressed memories and events come back to haunt him. The opening lines read:

What waking I never could confess

Was mirrored clear within its frame,

And this dream, that I knew not,

Knew me more deeply than the day

Reeling under the pursuing gaze of strangers, the dreamer hurries on through dark rooms until a hand appears, and amidst thunder and lightning writes dire words of warning on a wall: “You are found out! You are found out!” Now the fleeing protagonist realises the hopelessness of his position:

In vain that I for forty years

The keeper was of my own heart—

My secret vice and darkest deeds,

The very walls did know them now!

What I had buried deep within,

Dressed with darkness, casket-like,

What I had masked with craven words,

Covered up and draped with lies,

My inmost self, my secret core

Was now the talk of every tongue,

And this dread hand upon the wall,

Made it known for all to see:

You are found out! You are found out!

Pursued by his demons he stumbles blindly on, until finally deliverance is at hand: the moment of wakening. The poet opens his eyes and quickly realises that the tormenting words “You are found out!” had been invisible to everyone but him:

The writing on the wall was gone

And none did know me, no not one! [ … ]

At that I laughed in inward glee

Donned my robe of outward show,

Wrapped silence round me, like a cloak,

And set about, quite unfound-out,

My daily toil that now awaited.
¹⁴

But Geiger was not about to let Zweig return so easily to his daily toil—at least, not in the retrospective account he penned so many years after Zweig’s death. In the lines “And every gaze that fell upon me / Did light upon my shame” he saw a clear acknowledgement by Zweig of his alleged exhibitionist tendencies. To strengthen his argument Geiger quotes passages from a letter written to him by Felix Braun some time after Zweig’s death:

All that you say about Stefan I already know. All the same, I think that now, given the squalid circumstances of his death, we must forget all about it. And not least because we don’t have the right to judge him. [ … ] In his great poetic confession, which even Hofmannsthal could not but praise, Stefan revealed things about his way of life that neither he nor we could approve. And if you are right, that at the end he could not bear to look at himself in the mirror, then he must have been in a pitiable state. Stefan’s greatest affliction was that he could not cope with affliction. Even during the First World War he was close to suicide, and only Friderike was able to stop him. In the course of my life I have found that those who are closest to us know least about us.
¹⁵

We know of no other statements or evidence that would throw further light on the matter. But the publication of the poem was sufficient to cause quite a stir behind the scenes for quite some time. After Zweig had taken his life in 1942, Thomas Mann observed rather coolly in a letter to his patron, Agnes E Meyer: “I suspect that sex had reared its ugly head again, and that he feared some kind of scandal. He was vulnerable in that regard.”
¹⁶
Whatever other rumours might have been circulating at the time, it is reasonable to suppose that Mann’s thoughts were significantly influenced by Zweig’s
Ballad of a Dream.
To what extent the various surmises and claims surrounding Zweig’s sexual escapades reflect the truth is almost entirely a matter for speculation. But when it came to his work, he could be very open about his preoccupations. In a letter to the writer and critic Oskar Maurus Fontana at the end of 1926 he wrote: “I have no feeling for boundaries in sexual matters.”
¹⁷

Throughout the 1930s Zweig maintained his ceaseless output of new books. Friderike later observed that it was when Stefan was feeling depressed that he tended to throw himself most furiously into his work, as a way of banishing the dark moods. And of course, by the time the
Maria Stuart
biography came out he was already well into the next big project. Following his study of Erasmus of Rotterdam, a work entitled
Castellio gegen Calvin oder Ein Gewissen gegen die Gewalt
[
Castellio contra Calvin, or a Conscience Opposes Violence
] was to be his second engagement with the challenges of the times. As always, in order to portray the conflict over religion and philosophy between Sebastian Castellio and his one-time friend Johannes Calvin, Zweig needed access to original documents. So when travelling between London and Vienna in the course of 1935 he made several extended stopovers in Switzerland, and spent time at the library in Basle and elsewhere studying the source material. In May he had been in Zurich to attend a reception for Thomas Mann’s sixtieth birthday. His birthday present was well received by Mann, who noted in his diary: “Goethe manuscript, a gift from Zweig, gives me great pleasure”,
¹⁸
and proceeded to hang a small, framed Goethe poem in the author’s own hand on the wall of his study.

The first performance of
Die schweigsame Frau
was due to take place in Dresden in June, but there had been significant complications in the run-up
to the premiere. The key questions were whether it would still be possible, in the Germany of 1935, to perform a new opera with a libretto by a Jewish writer and to mention the writer’s name on the posters and in the programme notes. Richard Strauss, who had been president of the Reich Chamber of Music since 1933, certainly did his best to have Zweig’s name included, in the face of strong opposition. Zweig himself, who would happily have forgone any mention of his name, followed the wrangling—which went to the highest levels of party and state—from afar, and felt only dismay: “Dear Richard Strauss has not done me any favours. I can’t understand why artists of this sort always feel the need to make political points, when it turns out that their private intelligence is considerably less than their artistic intelligence.”
¹⁹

A few weeks before the premiere was due to take place, a large parcel containing the complete piano score of the opera in the composer’s own hand was delivered to Zweig. When drawing up his contract with Strauss he had secured a specific undertaking that he could have these very special manuscript pages for his collection. The first performance took place on 24th June 1935 in the presence of the composer. And just as Strauss had promised, Stefan Zweig’s name appeared on all the posters and programmes printed for the Dresden Staatsoper. The evening turned into a great social occasion, with many celebrities in attendance. Anton Kippenberg had been unable to come because of the Bach Festival that was taking place at the same time in Leipzig, but his wife Katharina was able to attend the gala performance. Afterwards she wrote a letter to Stefan Zweig, the librettist and former star author of her husband’s publishing house:

The house was completely sold out—it was a very glamorous gathering, the ladies had made a real effort to look their prettiest and most elegant, enthroned in the central box was the Reichsstatthalter Herr Mutschmann with his wife, and in one of the front-row stage boxes was Blomberg with a group of officers. The atmosphere was very festive. It put me in mind of
Der Rosenkavalier
—how many years, or rather decades, ago was that?—[ … ] and of Hofmannsthal, who was so worked up that he only had aspirin for lunch. [ … ]

Die schweigsame Frau
was a complete triumph all round, and that is certainly due not least to the libretto, which is delightful, and of which Richard Strauss has said that nothing so good has been written since
Figaro
, calling it the most workable text he has ever been given.
²⁰

The euphoria—from which Zweig remained largely aloof—was short-lived: after just three performances the opera was banned throughout the German Reich. And Strauss, who after the premiere had written to Zweig assuring him that nobody was going to stop him setting further texts of his to music, finally resigned from his post at the head of the Reich Chamber of Music. The official explanation was that he was leaving for health reasons, but in fact he was forced to resign on orders from the highest authority—the letter in question, with its declaration of support for Zweig, had never reached the intended recipient, doubtless having been intercepted by the Gestapo en route. Furthermore a rumour had been started alleging that Zweig, prior to the dress rehearsal, had officially assigned his royalties to some Jewish organisation abroad. Any further collaboration between Zweig and Strauss, who was not prepared to leave Germany, was now out of the question. So the outline of another opera that Zweig had already drafted, which would later be called
Friedenstag
[
Day of Peace
], was in the end completed by his friend Joseph Gregor, who went on to write other texts for Strauss, thus becoming the permanent successor to Hofmannsthal—following Zweig’s intermezzo—as the composer’s librettist.