If you haven’t read Stefan Zweig, you may be familiar with a semblance of his spirit as seen in Wes Anderson’s 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which features a concierge (Ralph Fiennes) who looks somewhat like Zweig himself. You can review the plot summary here, and in this interview you can read how Anderson remixed elements he’d read in Zweig’s writing into a feature film. Of course Wes Anderson doesn’t talk about how he wesandersonified everything and reduced the Nazis to defanged, bumbling “ZZs” (named for the lightning bolts on SS labels). And he certainly doesn’t mention (and probably doesn’t even know!) that I found everything in general perfectly enjoyable although a little too stylized, whimsical, and twee for my tastes. A friend had gone to see it on consecutive days and talked it up too much to me, so instead of encountering a masterpiece it seemed something like a WWII-era mitteleuropa cartoon, which again was a perfectly fine way to spend an afternoon four years ago but a bit of a let down due to high expectations.
Zweig’s writing has never really disappointed, plus this is about the handful of Zweig books I’ve read so far, not a movie I’ll probably never watch again (2024 note: streamed it semi-recently and liked it a good deal, way more than Asteroid City, if not as much as Isle of Dogs, which child demanded so often a few years ago we ultimately acquired on DVD). As you’ll see in the little “book reviews” below, my #1 response to reading Zweig always seems to be read more Zweig. His prose in translation always maintains a graceful, profluent, sophisticated, accessible intelligence. It’s easy to see how his books sold millions before they were banned by the Nazis.
Generally, Zweig is an ambassador for a by-gone belief in the supremity of humanity, best expressed not through political or religious activities but in works of art. I still haven’t read his stories (I own the big orange collection), many of his novels, biographies, and mini-histories, or Three Lives, a biography about him. But I look forward to getting to all of it soon-ish and maybe posting about it here when I do.
I imagine Stefan Zweig sitting down next to me while traveling long distance alone by train (first class). A dapper man in a gray three-piece suit, he excuses himself and, with a gentle, weary smile, relays a story told to him the last time he traveled this route in a charming (yet never preening), forward-flowing (yet patient), good-natured (yet never silly/goofy) manner that nevertheless conveys some serious shit that occurred long ago and far away, sure, but still retains its relevance and urgency when considered in terms of the rise of fascism in the United States today.
Also, I’m saddened to learn (via Twitter, just as I went to announce this post) that Stefan Zweig’s primary translator Anthea Bell died today (October 18, 2018). I very much hope the occasion of working on this and posting it had nothing to do with her health. In all seriousness, she’s a translator I’ve known of for years and always looked forward to reading.
Also, 2024 update: streamed/re-watched “The Grand Budapest Hotel” recently and liked it quite a lot. Good work, Wes.
Chess Story
Translated by Joel Rotenberg
A flowing, engaging, gripping, hefty, accessible, masterful novella. Effortless/seamless old-timey Austrian structure: a narrator tells a story that includes someone’s third-person account about one major character and a longish first-person account by another major character. The two chess players are well drawn and absolutely differentiated: one’s a stoic idiot-savant peasant, the other’s an anxious intellectual from a highly regarded Viennese family. Really worth spending the hour or so it takes to read.
Directly addresses Nazi interrogation tactics and oppression but I’d say it’s maybe more about the ability of the mind to free one’s ass but also potentially become a sort of prison in itself. The imagination can imbue a wooden grid and wooden statues with so much serious rational significance that people devote their lives to chess and can ideally provide a refuge against oppression, whether as obvious as Nazi occupation or as subtle as daily boredom and/or a sense of the nothingness of existence etc. But then it can also operate in overdrive, go too far, feed on itself, become a sickness, an arrogance, a feverish instability that fails to recognize what’s going on in reality. I suppose this could be extrapolated to critique National Socialism, too — something about rational reclamation of a country’s spirit taken to sickly irrational extreme? Or maybe it has to do with the war-damaged artistic imagination? Regardless, looks like I need to read a lot more Zweig.
The World of Yesterday
Translated by Anthea Bell
I’d been having trouble settling into a string of novels, too impatient and restless and dissatisfied even with Tolstoy’s Resurrection, zoning out, not looking forward to reading at all. Finally I said screw it and grabbed Zweig’s memoir. By the time I’d made it through his preface it was like he’d administered a heaping dose of just what I need into my unsettled reading organ. I really did feel immediately healed, wanting nothing other than to settle down with Zweig’s flowing sentences, his self-effacing charm, his belief in the primacy of art as protection for humanity.
For a memoir covering his days of early education to 1939, a few years before his suicide in Brazil, he so rarely talks about himself or his family — there’s a mention of trying to apply for a license to marry his second wife in England right as England declares war on Germany, but no mention of a first wife. No mention of kids. Hardly a mention of his parents, other than a bit at the beginning and a bit at the end about his mother. This isn’t a personal memoir at all, really, but a cultural/artistic one. Zero gossip, even if he namedrops Rilke, Rodin, Gide, Joyce, Freud, Richard Strauss, Romain Rolland (who he considers the best of the best and who now seems wildly underread).
Zweig’s a little like a Zelig character, except Zweig at the time is as famous as those he’s with. The portraits of Rodin (great artists are always the kindest, he says — he also shows Rodin go into such an OCD trance while working on a sculpture that he forgets young Zweig is even in the room) and the stiff, bitter polylinguist James Joyce during WWI in Zurich as he’s working on Ulysses are worth the price of admission.
But more so it’s the gravitas, the horrorshow, the heft, the drastic real-life poignancy of the loss of old European security. Forever everyone has remarked — most recently, the poet known by the nickname Biggie — that things done changed, but the change experienced by Zweig, Vienna, and Europe in general from the 1890s to 1939 is drastic. Zweig’s storytelling skills make it all seem like a consistent forward flow into the abyss — the days of security and complacency and the primacy of art, lit, music, and theater, give way to enthusiasm for the first World War (a completely unnecessary consequence of international saber-rattling/posturing) to post-war horrors, poverty, runaway inflation, to a period of experimentation and youthful reflowering coinciding with a rage for order that leads to protofascist glimmerings, brownshirts, the rise of the secretly well-funded National Socialists, political deceit, and crimes against humanity.
The Nazis are the antithesis of Zweig’s apolitical pan-European humanism. He’s able to write a letter to his number one fan in Italy (Mussolini) to get someone’s sentence lightened, but he can’t change history once it’s goosestepping toward Hades. He retreats, goes into exile, and writes biographies subtly critiquing the contemporary political situation. He works with Strauss who works with the Nazis — and Hitler himself even lets an opera with a libretto written by the Jew Zweig be performed. (It rarely comes up, but Zweig is a totally assimilated Viennese Jew.) He didn’t collaborate with the Nazis so much as try to preserve the primacy of art when faced with deathheads.
It’s the sort of book that makes you aware of the sweep of history we’ve lived through — the comparatively quiet yet totally disruptive technological revolution of the past 17 years or so, the artistic and cultural plate tectonics that slowly but surely rearrange the continents over time. I read this purposefully before reading The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig and I’m glad I did. I look forward to seeing echoes of everything covered in this memoir in his fiction, and I’ll also probably get to a biography about him to learn a bit about his personal life.
Zweig doesn’t have the reputation of Mann and Musil or Proust or those early 20th century uberdogs, and that’s most likely because he’s a centrist who’s so very balanced aesthetically and intellectually. Also, unlike Mann and Musil, his books were suppressed and/or burned and therefore unread in Germany for a while there. His writing and thinking are so accessible and he sold millions of copies as a result but he never dumbs things down. The few pages where he talks about his writing process were illuminating: he apparently wrote 800 pages and whittled them to the 200 necessary pages, always interested in pace, since he identified himself as a restless reader.
Anyway, can’t recommend this one more highly.
The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche
Translated by Cedar and Eden Paul
The take-home message is read everything Zweig ever wrote. Jeez. Such flowing, insightful, lucid prose, like a faucet streaming graceful intelligence across and down the pages. A good book for melancholic seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness.
Hölderlin the ethereal poet, Kleist the restless exaggerator, Nietzsche the inspired light. Totally compelling across the board biographical essays on creative genius and madness. Goethe comes up all the time as a sort of rational gubernatorial foil to these inspired/possessed folks. Like all psych portraiture, the fun part is self-IDing shared traits. In each case, Zweig writes about them because they’re off-the-chart extremes — and again (I’m thinking of Bernhard’s “art of exaggeration” in Extinction) it’s exaggeration that always seems so essential for powerful creation, as long as it’s hyper-truthful. More true than truth.
Zweig’s portraits are exaggerated most likely too — these guys come off as legends, mystics, saints, proto tragic rock stars. But never did I think he was overdoing it, or maybe every once in a while when talking about Nietzsche. But again the thing I’ll most remember about this one is that it will lead me to read all of Zweig (particularly his biographies) and Kleist and most of Nietzsche. Hölderlin doesn’t interest me too much, although I may have enjoyed his section the most.
Anyway, a great literary biography — recommended to anyone frazzled by trying to write etc. Interesting that for so many writers I know it’s not a spiritual struggle so much as a struggle for a shred of success, struggles regarding whether or not to self-promote, self-publish, sell-out and write something that (as Bill Hicks says) sucks Satan’s cock — it’s refreshing therefore to read about these writers’ old-fashioned struggles with art and inspiration.
Confusion
Translated by Anthea Bell
Said something like oh man that’s awesome when I finished (owing more to the final half-page chapter than the entire novella) but it also sometimes felt melodramatic, sensationalist, hysterical — a review I read calls Zweig a watered-down Proust or Stendhal but that doesn’t hold water for me since the passionate tilt-a-whirl overwrought feints and parries in the French biggies are pronounced and dramatized to the extreme whereas here they’re glossed over by Zweig’s essayistic instinct, his graceful, flowing summary.
I can’t think of another novella from 1927 in which the narrator admits that he’s essentially in love with the mind of a male teacher — and that toward the end so explicitly treats of early 1900s gay life in Berlin, particularly derision, oppression, blackmail, unsavory clandestine spasms in alleys etc. The love triangle among wife of professor, charismatic professor, and hot young passionate student narrator isn’t fleshed out enough? Swimming scenes seemed muted, even when a slip of tit made its PG-13 appearance. But the prose soars when it’s totally platonic and the professor dictates his long repressed work on Shakespeare to the narrator.
Zweig, becoming a great favorite, excels when describing ecstatic intellectual paroxysms. But he’s becoming a favorite more so for perfectly phrased insight. Although in many ways unlike Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, which predates this by ~21 years, I think it’s safe to associate them thanks to the shared academic setting, “Confusion” in the title, pre-Nazi era, and man-on-man action/passion.
Journey Into the Past
Translated by Anthea Bell
Another flowing, perfectly phrased, psychologically and historically charged, emotionally moving novella by Zweig, this time about life before, during, and after WWI as Nazi shadows gather. About thwarted desire, great physical distance followed by insurmountable temporal distance, lives interrupted by war, the pleasures of memory over the anxieties of the present, especially when the present involves goose-stepping rows of uniformed men parading through a quiet college town, Heidelberg, which I’ve visited and could imagine as clearly as Zweig’s prose portrayed the path to the castle and the view of the river valley.
Looks like I’ll have to read everything available in English by him. Words to describe his prose are watery, liquidy, silken, flowing, light-handed, almost always sliding ahead as a result of expectations in a sentence loaded toward its start. But also the language disappears and conveys real insight and atmosphere and psychological and emotional urgency and moral sense.
Great stuff, Stefan — too bad you snuffed yourself at 60! This edition sandwiches the long story with two excellent little biographical essays. Might read the story again since it’s formally exemplary, I’d say. Seems so simple and smooth and subtle without ever being elusive or arch or clever. Honest, respectful, deeply imagined urgency.
Montaigne
Translated by Will Stone
Zweig is the best. Secular humanism uber alles! Great to return to him and think the same general thought: I need to read everything he’s written, particularly these short biographies. This is a step in that direction. It’s really a pretty slight but insightful/enjoyable rundown of Montaigne’s life, paralleled by Zweig’s own. Zweig wrote this in Brazil shortly before he killed himself with his second wife, exiled from the irretrievably ruined European culture he thrived in and treated like his true religion.
I haven’t read Montaigne, though I’ve tried and will surely try again soon. Interesting bits: he flees the plague that kills half of Bordeaux’s 34K population, he essentially self-publishes his essays, he travels for nearly two years at age 48 to get away from all the demands of family and land ownership and while away is named mayor without running for office, he essentially locks himself in a tower with a view of his inherited estate and writes, trying to get as close as possible to the core of his life (I’ve used that phrase before writing about Knausgaard) yet he doesn’t consider himself a writer. His mother comes from a Spanish Jewish family, yet he doesn’t talk about her at all. As a child his father immersed him in Latin to such a degree (all caregivers and teachers only spoke it) that it was his true first language.
But the real power of this, what sustains it through its 115 pages (first 35 pages is an introduction) is the parallel Zweig draws right away between his time (the unimaginable brutalities of the Nazi rise and WWII) and Montaigne’s time, which offered sufficient horrific slaughter, with a sort of civil war descending into what Zweig calls (deploying a typically perfect Zweig-type phrase) “a vortex of pandemonium,” totally lawless criminality run rampant etc. During such a time, how do you protect yourself from contracting some terrible infection of the soul? Montaigne and Zweig inculcate themselves, fighting the battle the only way they really can: internally, waging a sort of soul battle against the incursions of immorality run amok.
But the really interesting thing was to read the opening as Zweig parallels his own time with Montaigne’s time, thinking all the time of course about our own time, its particular nastiness — really bad, so bad, bad! Thankfully little books like this, beautifully published by Pushkin Press (French flaps, textured covers, thick bright pages), disperse readers across centuries of struggles, most of which seem far worse than anything we face now, which is good to keep in mind since, despite the general gist of protecting oneself from the forces of idiocy and evil all around, these guys aren’t exactly role models — it’s probably not a good idea for everyone to hide away in a tower writing essays about what they know or to light out for South America and ultimately end themselves before seeing the resolution of an era’s nasty issues. But still totally worth the few hours reading and a reminder that things have always been simultaneously good and bad, undulating for the most part between either extreme for all time.
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