Ostend

by Volker Weidermann

  What a misfortune that the other side retaliated with its own poems. It was the ninth of November when Zweig made a diary entry about “a small catastrophe in my existence.” For his teacher, his father, his model, his great Belgian friend Verhaeren had also been writing poetry. German and Austrian newspapers printed his verses as a demonstration of sheer monstrosity. They were the first poems by the Belgian that had not been translated by Stefan Zweig. Zweig had learned early on about Verhaeren’s intention to write about the war, and he had burdened their common friend Romain Rolland with the task of urging him “to commit only those things to verse, and hence to posterity, that he knew for certain were true.” But Verhaeren turned every horror story about German atrocities into lyrical truths. Virgins raped, women’s breasts hacked off, children’s feet severed and carried in the pockets of German soldiers. All of it in the poetic voice of the bard of life, drunk on images, that Zweig so worshiped.

  O tragic sun made witness in Flanders

  Of women in flames and cities in ashes

  Of long-drawn-out horror and sudden crime

  For which German sadism hungered and thirsted.

  Stefan Zweig was bewildered: to whom had he given all his love and worshipful admiration? These lines were written by the same man who had symbolized the best of Europe to him, and who had taught him “that only a perfect man can be a good poet.” In despair, Zweig asked himself if maybe everything had been false—the very fundament of his life, translating and writing poetry.

  The worst aspect of this poem about Belgium was the accusation of barbarity, the assertion that this German war was being prosecuted by means that were not all honorable or civilized. The war as Stefan Zweig imagined it was heroism and willingness to sacrifice for an end both worthy and necessary. And the enemy too should demonstrate good behavior. “My greatest good fortune as an officer would be to ride out against a civilized foe,” he wrote, he, the son of a textile manufacturer from Vienna, to his publisher Kippenberg in Germany. Zweig had very romantic notions about war. An amateur gentleman rider with exquisite manners and a saber, in the saddle against civilized opponents, for example the French.

  In these months he envied the Germans not just their victories but, most of all, their enemies. Zweig didn’t want to fight against Russia, he didn’t want to fight barbarians, Slavs, and the enemies of civilization. In the letter to his German publisher, he spelled out the details of those for whom he had little desire to fight either: Those outposts of the Danube monarchy that were the most threatened in the first months of the war. The regions close to the Russian border where people spoke Polish, Russian, or Yiddish. The unknown, distant, rather sinister territories of the East. Zweig wrote to Kippenberg, “This may explain to you why not one of Austria’s intellectuals has willingly volunteered for the front, and why those who were obliged by their status to do so even arranged for themselves to be transferred out again—we lack any connection, as you must well understand. Brody does not signify to me what Insterburg does; the first left me cool, the second caused me to tremble when I learned it had been laid waste! Finally there is only one supreme connection; language is our only home.”

  * * *

  *  The poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

  YES, BRODY LEFT Stefan Zweig unmoved. He had never so much as been to the place. There was hardly a person in the Vienna of those years who knew Brody, the little town in Galicia at the far edge of the Danube monarchy. And if anyone did know it, then it was as the synonym for poverty, the home of poor Orthodox eastern Jews, the embarrassing distant kin of the assimilated western Jews in Vienna. Brody was far away. In Vienna no one wanted to fight for Brody, certainly not any intellectuals, and most certainly not Stefan Zweig.

  Not even twenty thousand people lived at that time in the little border town that from the very outbreak of war found itself at the center of the first slaughter. Three-quarters of the population were Jews. For many years Brody had been a well-to-do market town, the meeting point of traders from Russia, Poland, and Austria, but since the railroad between Odessa and Lemberg had been opened in 1879 and no longer stopped in Brody, the town had been cut off and forgotten. A young writer would later recall the town as follows: “Everything was peaceful at home. The only enmities were between closest neighbors. People got drunk but then made their peace. Business rivals did one another no harm. They took it out on customers and buyers instead. Everyone lent everyone else money. Everyone owed everyone else money. Nobody had anything to reproach anyone else with.

  “Political parties were not tolerated. No one made distinctions between people of different nationalities, because everyone spoke everyone else’s languages. Jews were identifiable only by their traditional clothes and their hauteur. Sometimes there were little pogroms, but in the general whirl of events, they were soon forgotten. The dead Jews were buried, and those who had been robbed lied about having suffered damages.”

  This writer was an ambitious, talented Jew with short, dark hair, slightly prominent ears, very blue eyes, and a look of permanent skepticism. And he did everything in his power to leave Brody as soon as he could.

  He was very good at school. He liked to reinforce his statements with an emphatic “That’s a fact”; as he called himself Muniu, this soon earned him the friendly nickname of Muniufact. He had grown up with his mother in the household of his grandfather Jechiel Gruebel, who lodged with the rich uniform tailor Kalman Ballon in the Goldgasse. He had never met his father, who had left on a business trip, or so he was told, before his son was born, and had not come back. Supposedly he had gone mad. Or alcohol had addled his mind and killed him.

  Muniu’s real name was Joseph Roth. In 1913 he made it to the university in Lemberg, the capital of Galicia, and in another six months he succeeded in pushing on to Vienna. He was enraptured and intimidated by the scale and the brilliance of the imperial capital. One of his first walks took him to the apartment house of an admired writer whom he wanted to thank for his books, to whom he wanted to express his adulation, whom he wanted to catch even a glimpse of, or at least see where he lived. So there, in 1913, stood Joseph Roth in front of Stefan Zweig’s apartment. He waited for a while outside the closed front door, and then, having not seen his idol, he went home.

  In the summer of 1914 Joseph Roth was home in Galicia for the vacation, in Brody and in Lemberg. When the news of the assassination of the Austrian crown prince reached him, he was sitting with his friend Soma Morgenstern, talking about their studies and talking about Vienna. They sensed that war was on the way, and to them, war meant war against Russia. And in turn: victory over Russia. They longed for Russia’s defeat. They had still been children when Russia lost the war against Japan in 1905. Even back then they were thrilled. It would happen again, they knew it for sure. But none of it had much to do with them personally.

  They made jokes about the imminent war, and they went to a Jewish inn, the best in Lemberg according to Roth, called Zehngut. The fatherless Roth wanted to know everything about Soma Morgenstern’s father. How much he loved him, how much he wanted his son to study law, and so on. A very old man, a regular guest, with a pointed beard, came into the inn. Roth looked at him, fascinated. How would Morgenstern himself look when he was old? he asked his friend. Morgenstern had never thought about it. And anyway, the men in his family didn’t live to such an age. But Roth had thought about it long and hard. He would live to be very old, he was certain. He explained this to his startled friend: “And this is how I always see myself: I’m a skinny old man. I wear a long black robe with long sleeves that almost cover my hands. It’s fall, and I take walks in a garden and think up devious plots against my enemies. Against my enemies and my friends too.” It was the first time he’d told Soma any of this, but it’s a story he’d tell in future again and again. Himself as an old man, with his long sleeves and his devious plots.

  After the war broke out, Morgenstern and Roth met again, this time in Vienna. The headline in the Neue Freie Presse wa
s LEMBERG STILL IN OUR POSSESSION! It became their standard greeting, even long after Austria lost Lemberg, just like Brody and the entire great empire. The world of yesterday.

  At the same time Stefan Zweig was sitting surrounded by his friends at the seaside, laughing at the world until suddenly he was at the edge of the abyss and in desperate urgency got on the last train home. A wild departure, back into the flatlands, both abrupt and unexpected for someone who, like Hans Castorp, had failed to read the newspapers or, when he finally did read them, had failed to take them seriously.

  Many years later Zweig thinks back with longing to this summer in his life. “When every man was called up, to hurl his petty self into the furnace of the masses, in order to purge himself of all self-regard. All differences of status, of language, of class, of religion were inundated in this one moment by the floodtide of brotherly love. Strangers spoke to one another on the street, people who had avoided one another for years shook one another’s hands, one saw lively faces everywhere. Each individual experienced a heightening of earlier times, he was now absorbed into the general mass, he was ‘the people,’ and his person, his otherwise ignored person, had acquired a meaning.”

  IT IS JULY AGAIN. A new summer in Ostend.

  The streetlamps from which Stefan Zweig said he would hang himself are still there. And the sea is the same too, the expansive long beach, the big, overly broad promenade, the elaborately curved casino with its large terrace, the bistros with their little marble tables outside, the wooden bathing huts in the sand. The newspapers lie on the bistro tables, but there are no newsboys calling out alarming headlines for the Austrian tourists to make fun of. The mood along the shore is boisterous, the season has just begun, it’s hot, the entire youth of Belgium seems to have gathered this summer in what the advertising brochures like to call “Queen of Beach Resorts,” on the white spun-sugar promenade by the North Sea. July 1936, in Ostend.

  —

  Stefan Zweig thinks back to that last innocence, remembering a world he believed to be eternal, a world without end, and a man in a flat cap in a kingdom of the dead in mass revolt, a boneyard of masks.

  But Ostend also conjures up memories of bursts of energy, and intensity and strength, of a new beginning with the force of a catapult, ripping him out of contented inertia to encounter the utterly unexpected possibility of a new world and its equally unanticipated sense of spiritual brotherhood. So even after the cataclysmic destruction began, with its aftershocks still to be felt now, in this new summer, the place itself would forever be associated with the hope of a sudden change in the course of the universe. What a youthful, yearning young man, so susceptible to wild enthusiasm, Stefan Zweig had been in 1914!

  Twenty-two years have passed since that summer, years in which he has become a world star of literature. His name is as internationally famous as that of Thomas Mann, his books outsell those of any other German author around the world. His novellas, his historical biographies, and Shooting Stars are global best sellers. He’s a child of Fortune, owns a little yellow castle in the woods up on the Kapuzinerberg overlooking Salzburg, corresponds with every great mind on the Continent, and has long been married to his love of those years back then, Friderike von Winternitz. And now, in this new summer, he is a man struggling to find a foothold.

  Zweig has barely ever bothered with present-day politics or religion in the world in which he lives. In history—yes! If it was the world of Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette, or Joseph Fouché, he knew every historical and political detail, the mechanisms of power, the world-historical context, all of which he encompassed in his books as part of the human story, the story of mighty, individual people. Or, occasionally, as the story of powerless people who were singled out by a world-historical lightning bolt to change the course of destiny. None of it had anything to do with the world he actually lived in.

  It is only in recent years that he has begun to sketch himself in his historical personages and his present world in historical events.

  Two years ago he published a book about the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, and most recently a monograph titled Castellio Against Calvin, which carried as its subtitle A Conscience Against Power. Erasmus and Castellio are the heroes in whom he also describes himself, the ideals for which he strives: conscience against power, humanism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and reason. In the life and teachings of Erasmus, Zweig discerns the art of ameliorating conflicts by “well-intentioned understanding” and “the absolute will to comprehend” per se. In Calvin’s opponent Castellio he sees the great anti-ideologue who despised terror and intolerance and fought against them with his pen until, exhausted by the long struggle, he died without achieving victory. That Zweig, with his pleas for tolerance and understanding, has recently been reaping a harvest of intolerance and incomprehension, in émigré circles first and foremost, is something he finds utterly bewildering.

  But these are the years when decisions must be made, the years of resolution. Zweig is still writing out of a world, and about a world, that no longer exists. His ideal is pointless, unrealistic, risible, and dangerous. His analogies no longer have a place in a present in which the enemy holds all the power. What use is tolerance in a world in which any man and everything he lives for and everything he writes are in danger of being ground to a pulp?

  “Fight or shut up,” Joseph Roth wrote to him. But Zweig doesn’t want to fight. He wants to keep quiet in the first years after the Nazis seize power in Germany. Even after his books are burned on the Opernplatz in Berlin. Quiet—the better to keep working and living in peace. And perhaps the better to ensure that his books continue to be sold in Germany and he can continue to influence his readers there. For a time this even seems to work. In the first years of Nazi rule in Germany, Zweig’s books are still available to German readers.

  —

  This finally comes to an end in the summer of 1936. His German publisher Anton Kippenberg is no longer allowed to issue his books, yet Zweig still doesn’t switch to one of the German-language publishers in exile like Querido or Allert de Lange, which are based in Amsterdam. He goes to the little Austrian publishing house of Herbert Reichner, who, although he is a Jew, is still able to get his books shipped into Germany and thus is excoriated by many émigrés, including Roth, as Hitler’s house Jew who’s prepared to make any compromise just to keep doing business with Germany. To Zweig, Reichner is still a fragment of Austria, a connection to his old homeland. He himself is barely ever there anymore. Since his house on the Kapuzinerberg was searched by police in February 1934, who were on the hunt for the cache of weapons of the Workers’ Republican Defense Alliance, it’s been lost territory to him. This experience was not only an insult to his writings and his work, which for so many years has been dedicated to nonviolence—it was an intrusion by the state into his very world, and the protected realm of his creative output.

  The house is now nothing more than a burden, a memory, a museum of his earlier life. Even when he lived there, it had had something of the aura of a museum. Zweig was a collector of antiquities, particularly of written artifacts: manuscripts, leaves of notebooks. He owned manuscripts by Balzac and Maupassant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Gustav Mahler, Mozart, and almost every contemporary writer. He had begged each of them for a sheet of paper, one story; he owned the manuscript of Heinrich Mann’s The Road to Hell, Hermann Hesse’s novella Heumond, Arthur Schnitzler’s Call to Life, poems by Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, Richard Dehmel, Paul Claudel, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, plays by Wedekind and Hauptmann, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Lay of the Love and Death of Christoph Cornet Rilke, which begins:

  Riding, riding, riding, through the day, through the night, through the day.

  Riding, riding, riding.

  And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast. There are no longer any hills; hardly a tree. Nothing dares to rise up. Alien huts squat, thirsting, beside muddy wells. Nowhere a tower. And always the same scene. One has two eyes too ma
ny.

  These things that were important to Stefan Zweig in the worlds of the intellect, of literature, and of music, he possessed in the handwriting of those who had created them. They are relics of the world in which he feels at home, in which he lives and whose existence he renews in his writing. He is a great admirer, a selfless worshiper of the art of others. This art, European culture, is his religion.

  His altar is Ludwig van Beethoven’s desk, at which he loves to sit and which he took with him to London, where Friderike set up a new apartment for him at the beginning of the year. Yes, he kept the desk, a page from Goethe’s Faust, and the latter’s poem about the violet annotated by Mozart. It’s the terrible, masochism-saturated opposite piece to the romantic “Little Wild Rose,” and it ends:

  Alas! Alas! The girl went past:

  Unseen the violet in the grass was crushed, poor violet.

  It drooped and died, and yet it cried:

  “And though I die, yet still I die

  By her, by her,

  By her feet passing by.”

  He parted company with the rest of the collection, selling it to the autograph dealer Martin Bodmer in Zurich.

  In 1925 Stefan Zweig had written a novella about a blind old man who had once possessed one of the most astonishing collections of engravings and drawings in the world and now sits, sightless and impoverished, among his family in inflation-ravaged Germany, still proud of his works on paper, his entire estate. Each day he has them laid out in front of him, one by one. But his unfortunate family, in sheer desperation, has long since sold the collection. The old man has no idea. An art dealer comes to visit from Berlin; the family begs him not to betray them. So the blind collector shows the stranger his pride and joy. Every sheet of paper is blank, substituted by the family as each piece was sold. The blind man is oblivious; his pride and his certainty that all this is his have remained untouched all through the years. “And thus this triumphant cascade of words continued for two whole hours. I cannot tell you how eerie it was to be with him as we looked at these hundred or two hundred blank scraps of paper, that were so unbelievably real to this tragic, innocent man that he described and praised every one of them in their exact order, without a single error. The invisible collection, which must have been scattered to the four winds long since, was so unmistakably present for this blind, heartbreakingly deceived man, and his passionate vision was so overwhelming, that even I began to believe in its reality.”