Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (51 page)

NOTES

1
1st September 1939, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 433 f.

2
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 22nd June 1934 [?], SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

3
Picture Page, 23rd June 1937 (interview transcript), BBC Reading.

4
Programme note for the broadcast Picture Page of 23rd June 1937, BBC Reading.

5
Einführung zu den Rilke-Vorträgen. 27th October 1937, typescript annotated by hand to indicate correct stresses, SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

6
Stefan Zweig to Anna Meingast, 26th February 1937, SLA Salzburg.

7
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, undated, probably 17th April 1937. In: Briefe IV, p 183 f.

8
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, undated, probably 20th April 1937. In: Briefe IV, p 188 f.

9
Stefan Zweig to Heinrich Hinterberger, 21st May 1936, BL London, Loan 95.14.

10
Stefan Zweig to Romain Rolland, 3rd March 1938. In: Briefe IV, p 611 f.

11
Joseph Gregor to Stefan Zweig, 8th November 1937. In: Briefwechsel Gregor, p 309 f.

12
Zweig GW Welt von Gestern, p 459.

13
Romain Rolland to Stefan Zweig, 1st March 1938. In: Briefwechsel Rolland, Vol 2, p 673 f.

14
Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig, undated, May 1937. In: Roth Briefe, p 492.

15
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 5th July 1937, SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

16
Keun 1968, p 160.

17
Hinterberger 1939.

18
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 14th October 1936. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 311 f.

19
Josef Geiringer to Stefan Zweig, 28th November 1938, SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

20
Moabit-West Tax Office (Berlin) to Stefan Zweig, 20th February 1939, SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

21
Alfred Zweig to Richard Friedenthal, 4th August 1958, Zweig Estate, London.

22
Stefan to Ida Zweig, undated, probably August 1938. In: Briefe IV, p 227 f.

23
E N Cooper to R E Gommee at the Ministry of Labour, 19th February 1936, PRO Kew, HO 382/4, 104623.

24
Stefan Zweig to Siegfried Trebitsch, 10th January 1939, ZB Zurich, Ms. Z II 579.261.

25
Stefan Zweig to Carl Seelig, 20th January 1939, ZB Zurich, Ms. Z II 580.183a.

26
Radio talk for schoolchildren in America, March 1939, typescript with handwritten additions, SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

27
Richard Friedenthal to Stefan Zweig, 24th January 1939, SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

28
Stefan Zweig to Siegfried Trebitsch, 2nd December 1938, ZB Zurich, Ms. Z II 579.261 [“
der dortige Freund
” would be the more usual “High” German term—translator’s note].

29
B von Szilly to Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 26th June 1939, Zweig Estate London.

30
Stefan Zweig to Siegfried Trebitsch, undated, mid-1939, ZB Zurich, Ms. Z II 579.261.

31
1st September 1939, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 433 f.

32
6th September 1939, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 440.

33
19th September 1939, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 427; quoted here in Zweig’s own original English.

34
Ministry of Information to Arthur Baker, Foreign News Editor at the BBC, 26th September 1939, BBC Reading.

35
Felix Braun to Stefan Zweig, 12th August 1939, SUNY, Fredonia/NY.

36
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 27th July 1939, ÖUB Basle.

37
Lebensreliquien Beethovens, undated (1939/1940), typescript with handwritten additions, BL London, Loan 95.8.

38
Stefan Zweig to Victor Fleischer, undated, postmarked 31st January 1940. In: Briefe IV, p 269 f.

39
21st May 1940, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 454.

40
28th May 1940, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 460.

Stefan Zweig browsing through second-hand books on New York’s Third Avenue in May 1941.

A World of Tomorrow?

Sois ton bourreau toi même!

N’abandonne l’amour de te martyriser

A personne, jamais.

Sei selbst dein Henker! Gib

An niemanden die Lust, dich zu misshandeln

An keinen, nie und nimmer!

Be your own executioner! Give

To no one the pleasure of tormenting you

To none, not ever!
¹

Émile Verhaeren,
translated into German by Stefan Zweig in 1904

O
NE SUMMER MORNING IN
1941, it must have been in July or August, Klaus Mann, then in his third year of American exile, was walking the streets of Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue he saw Stefan Zweig coming towards him; he had met him only a few weeks earlier at a cocktail party in Zweig’s hotel. On that occasion Zweig had invited a few friends from Austria and Germany to join him for drinks, and had chatted away relatively freely in this company. But now he wore a distracted look. Stony-faced and unshaven, he wandered through the urban canyons and failed to recognise his young colleague, who expressed surprise at this unaccustomed sight: “I looked at him, the stubbly chin, the dark, staring eyes, and thought to myself: ‘What’s up with him?’ I went up to him: ‘So where are you off to? And why the great hurry?’ He started like a sleepwalker hearing his name called. A second later he had composed himself and was able to smile, chat and joke again, engaging, animated as ever: the urbane and elegant, slightly too smooth, slightly too ingratiating ‘
homme de lettres
’, speaking with the nasal twang of the Viennese and unquestionably a man of ‘impeccably pacifist sentiments.’”
²

At the time of this encounter Lotte and Stefan Zweig had left England more than a year previously. At the end of June 1940 they had booked passage on a steamer from Liverpool to New York. Their last few weeks in Bath had been anything but restful and relaxing. Since the beginning of May, when the German
Wehrmacht
had attacked the Benelux countries
and France and was now continuing its relentless advance, Zweig’s worst fears seemed about to come true, sooner than even he expected. At the time he contemplated the possibility of embarking on another lecture tour of South America—was this one way of escaping the madness? Where would intellectuals like him be needed in future? In Europe? In the USA? In the countries of South America, where boatloads of European refugees were now arriving? Or had existence itself become pointless?

It was not an easy decision, but in the end they chose to travel across the ocean to America. They planned to spend time in the USA first, and then journey on to Brazil. Lotte had received her British passport shortly before their departure, and a few days later Stefan and she were granted a tourist visa for Brazil, valid for six months from the date of issue. Now came a period of anxious waiting and to-ing and fro-ing, since neither of them as yet had tickets for the passage, which could not be obtained without a visa. They were finally able to reserve two tickets in third-class accommodation through the intervention of Zweig’s confidant, the antiquarian book dealer Heinrich Eisemann. The tickets were upgraded to first class by the ship’s captain, who, upon learning that he had such a celebrity and his wife on board, promptly relinquished his own cabin to them.

When they left the house in Bath, Stefan and Lotte left most of their belongings behind. All they took with them were a few steamer trunks packed with clothes and other essential items, including of course Lotte’s typewriter. Stefan had not packed the finished chapters of the Balzac biography, nor the related source material. Although he feared the worst for the coming months, or perhaps even years, of the war, the plan was to return to Bath sooner or later, when he would resume his work there. But he did take a few valuable manuscripts from his collection with him, along with two drawings by Rembrandt that he had only recently acquired. These were all precious works that meant a great deal to Zweig; but now they had an additional value for him as financial assets. Whereas shares and property had turned out to be poor investments, and liquid assets were constantly threatened by inflation, there was always the hope that each of these manuscripts or drawings could be sold off in an emergency at a profit, or at least for not much less than he had paid for it. And it was useful, to say the least, to be able to carry this unusual form of currency around with him in a handy package wherever he went. “Two suitcases, one of them containing clothes, the earthly necessities, and the other manuscripts, the intellectual wherewithal, and one is at home everywhere”,
³
as Zweig had
written in his diary in September 1935, en route from Paris to London. And now he was hoping to travel halfway round the world on that same principle.

The ocean crossing was overshadowed by the news that Friderike was now in danger following the German invasion of France. Together with thousands of other refugees she had fled Paris at the last moment and headed south. Suse and Alix were both with her when she finally reached the safety of Marseilles. In the meantime both daughters had got married in France—Suse’s husband was the Austrian photographer Karl Hoeller, while in 1939 Alix had married Herbert Karl Stoerk, a doctor, whom Friderike had known since he was a child (his parents, both doctors themselves, were the friends of hers who had been killed in an avalanche in 1916). The two husbands had also managed to escape to the South of France, and now the five of them attempted to make their escape across the Atlantic. Their first plan was to travel to Mexico, but then they decided to sail across to the USA. There Stefan had already applied to the Emergency Rescue Committee for an entry visa, though not without letting Friderike know how pointless it was for him to apply for such a document for five people at once. His old resentment towards Suse and Alix played a not insignificant role in this: now that they were married, reasoned Stefan, it was the job of their husbands to secure all the necessary paperwork—an entirely superfluous dig on his part, because of course on the other side of the ocean they had not been as idle as he chose to think. In the end Friderike and her daughters and sons-in-law were able to make their way via a circuitous route to Spain, and thence to Portugal; and from here they travelled on visitor visas to the USA, where they were due to arrive in mid-October.

Before leaving on the next leg of their journey to Rio in August, Stefan and Lotte stayed for a few weeks at the Wyndham Hotel in New York, where they had stopped off on their last visit. This was not one of those vast American hotels with two or three thousand rooms, but a comparatively small establishment with apartments. Here the Zweigs had rented a two-room apartment with bathroom. The Wyndham was situated on 58th Street, not far from Fifth Avenue, and just one block from the southern end of Central Park.

They encountered familiar faces at every turn, for sooner or later nearly all European writers ended up in the USA. Klaus Mann was already living here, as was his father, Thomas. Heinrich Mann would arrive in the autumn, on the same ship as Friderike, and Carl Zuckmayer had also moved to America—to name but a few. While he could manage it Zweig did his
best to help out less fortunate émigrés with his money and his connections, but as in London the whole business threatened to get out of hand. For good reasons he gave out his hotel address only to a select few, and he had his mail sent c/o his publisher, Ben Huebsch.

Prior to his departure from New York Zweig met frequently with his fellow Austrian Berthold Viertel, with whom he now shared his old and unfinished ‘story of a postwoman’. Together they took the subject matter of the unfinished novel and developed it into a screenplay for the film
Das gestohlene Jahr.
Would it have been possible to go to Hollywood at some point and have a career there as a screenwriter? Zweig had already received several such offers, and a number of his books had been very successfully filmed.

On 9th August 1940 Stefan and Lotte left New York for his second, and Lotte’s first, voyage to South America. Their ship entered the harbour of Rio de Janeiro on 21st August. This time Stefan had insisted that the whole circus that had accompanied his last visit should not be repeated this time; he wanted this to be more of a study trip, with few lecture appointments and extended periods of rest. They had set aside a sufficient amount of time for such a leisurely tour—at the moment there was little to draw them back to North America, let alone Europe.