by Stefan Zweig
Interestingly and rather touchingly, in Did He Do It? Zweig is partly emulating the classic English country-house murder mystery, setting a puzzle that involves a probably deliberate killing and the identity of the murderer, even challenging the reader with a title that is a question (in German, War er es?—Was it he?). It is also one of several Zweig novellas in which events are narrated through the voice of a woman, in this case Betsy, the wife of a retired colonial official.
The Miracles of Life dates from a much earlier period, and was first published in 1904. Zweig took a great interest in historical subjects, and wrote a number of historical biographies of figures such as Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette, Magellan and Fouché. Here he imagines the city of Antwerp in 1566, when the Low Countries were still under Spanish rule but beginning to rebel under the Prince of Orange of that time. No date is actually mentioned in the story, but 1566 was the year in which the rioting and iconoclasm in Antwerp that form the background to the novella took place. Zweig, although Jewish, was not an observant Jew. His family had long ago assimilated entirely to the European society of the time, and much later than this story, as Nazi anti-Semitism became rife, Zweig pointed out correctly how much Jews had contributed to the intellectual and cultural lives of many European nations, not least Germany and Austria. But here he presents a sixteenth-century Jewish character who greatly values her lost family background—the girl Esther, rescued from a pogrom by a rough-mannered but good-hearted soldier going home to Antwerp to open an inn. The old painter who is the central character of the story sees her as the perfect model for a painting of the Virgin Mary that he is commissioned to provide as an altarpiece. Devout Christian of his time as he is, he also sees it as his duty to convert her, an idea that horrifies Esther. None the less, genuine friendship develops between the old man and the girl, who tragically dies in a riot when she goes to the cathedral to look at the painting of the baby who modelled with her, and whom she came to love passionately. From a man who was not fervently religious in any way, it is an interesting study of the conflict of two deeply held faiths, and the reconciliation in human terms of the two who represent them. Zweig also had an eye for a detailed historical background, for instance in his account of the cathedral and quayside of Antwerp before the story proper begins.
Another study of Jewish background lies at the core of Downfall of the Heart, where the old Jewish businessman who rose from humble origins and worked hard to make a fortune, finds that his wife and daughter do not appreciate his generosity as he thinks they should. In his memoir, Zweig describes, with astonished indignation, the way in which girls when he was growing up in Vienna were deliberately kept in ignorance about both intellectual life (not a proper pursuit for a woman) and sexuality. The old man’s daughter Erna, however, is of a later generation; she is a Bright Young Thing of the Twenties, cheerfully flirts with many admirers and, as her father discovers to his horror, is sleeping with one of them. Neither Erna nor her mother behaves well, but the old man’s growing rancour and resentment are a grim theme; he withdraws from his family into private brooding and ultimately into the comforts of his traditional religious faith. The strong note of observant Judaism struck at the end is something rarely found in Zweig’s work.
The short story The Governess, first published in 1911, takes us, however, right back to the prim propriety of Vienna in the early twentieth century as described in The World of Yesterday. Zweig mentions an aunt of his own who, on her wedding night, “suddenly appeared back in her parents’ apartment at one in the morning,” complaining that her new husband “was a madman and a monster. In all seriousness, he had tried to take her clothes off.” The aunt must have been seventeen or so at the time, I suppose. What, we may wonder, was her mother thinking of, to keep her in the dark and leave her there? In view of that story, it is not surprising that the two sisters in The Governess, aged twelve and thirteen, are entirely ignorant of the facts of life, and are puzzled to hear their governess, of whom they are very fond, telling their student cousin Otto that he and she will have a baby—a baby is “on the way”, is the implication of the German expression: literally, “I have a child by you”, but the use of the present tense in German makes the girls assume that the baby has already been born. So where is the baby? They would love to ask Miss about it. Is it a boy or a girl? But only married people have babies, and their governess is not married! A century later, it is impossible to imagine girls of that age in such a state of ignorance; these sisters, who come to feel that the adult world is set against them, reflect from a feminine point of view the experience of the boy Edgar in Burning Secret of 1913, two years later, as he tries to puzzle out the nature of the secret that grown-ups so enviably seem to know.
These four stories are wide-ranging in the diversity of their subjects and the author’s approach to them. The least autobiographical of writers in his fiction, Stefan Zweig none the less integrates into it many themes that intrigued his imagination. To read his memoir casts light on many of his stories.
ANTHEA BELL
Other Stefan Zweig titles published by
Amok and Other Stories
Translated by Anthea Bell
Beware of Pity
Translated by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt
Burning Secret
Translated by Anthea Bell
Casanova
A Study in Self-Portraiture
Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul
Confusion
Translated by Anthea Bell
Fantastic Night and Other Stories
Translated by Anthea Bell
The Royal Game
Translated by Anthea Bell
Twilight
Moonbeam Alley
Translated by Anthea Bell
Wondrak and Other Stories
Translated by Anthea Bell
The World of Yesterday
Translated by Anthea Bell
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Copyright
Original texts © Williams Verlag
English translations © Anthea Bell 2011
Did He Do It? first published in German as
War er es? (between 1935 and 1940)
The Miracles of Life first published in German as
Die Wunder des Lebens (1903)
Downfall of the Heart first published in German as
Untergang eines Herzens (1927)
The Governess first published in German as
Die Gouvernante (1907)
This edition first published in 2011 by
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ISBN 978 1 906548 79 9
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Cover Illustration: On the Hillside 1914 Heinrich Kuhn
© Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Vienna
Frontispiece: Stefan Zweig
© Roger-Viollet Rex Features
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