Ostend

by Volker Weidermann

  It’s back to London with Lotte, and then from there to Southampton, where on August 8 he will set sail for Brazil, alone, without Lotte, without Friderike, without Roth, without Fuchs.

  —

  From his homeland, from the old house on the Kapuzinerberg, comes one last piece of news. It’s Festival time, as it is every year. Toscanini is there, along with Bruno Walter. They are putting on an anti-Bayreuth, a not-Nazi German festival of theater and music. A demonstration. But Zweig is glad not to be there. He has always hated the hurly-burly at the Festival and tried to avoid his city during this period. Despite his love for Toscanini and his world. On the last day at the shore in Belgium, he writes to a friend in Salzburg: “You know how the atmosphere there has weighed on me so dreadfully for years now. I was completely undone by it and couldn’t work. To add to that were the conflicts you know about with my close family who were forever condemning my so-called pessimism and wanting to bind themselves closer to me out of nostalgia to the very degree that I was struggling to get out. I am almost forgetting those glorious years that I wasted there because of the bitterness I suffered. In the last years it was a secret and ever-increasing source of pleasure for me to feel that the world of Toscanini was living its last. It was, and indeed is again this year, as beautiful as a sunset.”

  And now mail has arrived out of this sunset, from the house still occupied by the very members of the family who had condemned his pessimism, Friderike and her daughters. They loved to act as its representatives, and during every Festival it was always filled with a crowd of guests—which this year included Klaus Mann and his sister Erika. Klaus sent a postcard to the master of the house, innocent, carefree, brief: “Greetings! You should envy us! Your house is enchanting. Why aren’t you here? How can it be more beautiful in Rio or Ostend?” The previous day this same Klaus Mann had written in his diary: “In between all the toing-and-froing: constant severe attacks of sadness. Before I go to sleep I always imagine my death. Who will sit there at my bedside? No one?—I think of a string of words: ‘But an angel will have mercy on me.’ ” And two days later: “Rain. Everyone still asleep. I can’t sleep that long. Vomit in the bathroom….I think of all the parties I’ve been to…the lost faces.”

  Tears in the diary, merriment on the postcards, and laborious efforts to arouse envy. Back straight. Never show weakness. Not to enemies and not to friends. “Your house is enchanting.” While thinking about death. The writer Annette Kolb is also in Salzburg this year. She too senses that she’s probably seeing it all for the last time. “The knowledge of events in the world, the hopelessness, weighed on our mood. The hellish emanations from the war in Spain reached the lakes, the forests, and even the concert halls.” A gentle wave of farewell: “Who told her she would return to Salzburg? Is life not becoming more and more uncertain from year to year?” And she ends her Salzburg book with the words “Beautiful, endangered Austria, farewell once more! Heart of Europe, commended to God.”

  This pessimism has been rooted deep and unbudgingly in Zweig’s soul for years. Now, as the shadows are falling, he draws strength from what he wrote in his final letter from Ostend to his friend in Salzburg: “The very fact that I’m inclined à la longue to pessimism gives me a certain heightened capacity for enjoyment; we should take every good thing with us, for as long as we can enjoy it.”

  It’s a happy man who boards the ship at Southampton, although the decor is less appealing: “Crude ostentation, no sense of style,” he remarks in his diary. “The weather wonderfully calm and with a September coolness.” The goal of his journey is Argentina, where he is to speak as the Austrian representative at the PEN Writers’ Congress. But what Zweig really wants from this trip is to try out a new life, to test whether a life would be possible for him there, for him and also for Lotte. The two of them had been learning Spanish together in the last weeks; now here on board he will keep on studying on his own. Stefan Zweig is alone among hundreds of passengers. He savors his aloneness, he’s traveling incognito, none of the passengers in first class recognize him; he sees some of them reading his books. But when he once goes to the lower decks where the Jews are traveling third class, he’s immediately recognized as “the great writer,” as he notes proudly in his diary. “They’re happy to have me come visit.”

  Zweig has begun a new book here on board, a book about the sympathy that contains good only when it is true sympathy, true fellow-feeling, when the sympathetic person is willing to share the feeling and the suffering to the very end. It’s the story of a young officer in the old Austrian army who, out of weakness and soft sympathy, which really is no more than a desire to free himself from the sight of misery, becomes guilty of the death of the sick young woman whom he’d hoped to save by dint of his general benevolence. The story of an officer who eventually will throw himself, almost in relief, into the battles of the First World War, in order to lose himself, and lose his life, while losing his guilt. The book will be called Beware of Pity, and it will be Stefan Zweig’s only novel. The theme has always preoccupied him; now, in these years of exile, more than ever. Is a life without guilt possible?

  Stefan Zweig is a man who can read people like books and therefore doesn’t judge them but understands them. Which means that he never wishes to choose between possibilities. A dream: Stefan Zweig is young, perhaps twenty-five years old, soft face, mustache, tiny glasses. He’s on board a ship that’s supposed to be taking him from Genoa to Naples. He makes friends with one of the humblest waiters, by the name of Giovanni. Before they dock, Giovanni comes to him with a letter. Please, would he read it out loud to him? Zweig doesn’t understand. Asks why he doesn’t read it himself. He can’t—he doesn’t know how to read. The traveler can’t get his mind around this. His world is a world of books; love, knowledge, thoughts—he has learned all of it from books. He had never thought about it before, but in this moment it dawns on him. A wall separates him from this Giovanni. He doesn’t know what he’d be without reading, without books. He can’t imagine it. Zweig writes it all down later, in a text with the title The Book as Entrance to the World: “And I understood that the gift of the blessing of being able to think in a wide-ranging fashion and amid a multiplicity of connections, that this magnificent ability, the only true way to contemplate the world from a multiplicity of vantage points at once, is only granted to the man who transcends his own experience to absorb from books what they can tell of many lands and peoples and times. I was shattered to realize how narrow a person must find the world if he denies himself books. But moreover, my very thinking about these things, the fact that I could feel as vehemently as I did about what poor Giovanni lacked in heightened pleasure in the world, that gift of being able to be shattered by the chance fate of a stranger, was this not something I owed to my preoccupation with the literary? For when we read, what are we doing if not sharing the inner life of strangers, seeing with their eyes, thinking with their minds? And now, drawing more and more vividly and more and more gratefully on this one moment of happy illumination, I remembered the countless blessings I had received from books. I remembered important decisions I drew from books, encounters with long-dead writers that were more important to me than some with friends and women, nights of love spent with books when you blissfully lost sleep in your enjoyment of them the way you would were you sharing them with another person; and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that our spiritual world is made up of millions of atoms of single impressions, whose minimum number stems solely from what we see and what we experience—while everything else, the existentialist interwoven world, we owe to books, to what is read, transmitted, learned.”

  Zweig dreamed aboard his ship as it left Genoa. Without books the world remains closed. His world. The way he sees it, the way he’s written it in all his books. Sympathy, admiration, living a life without harming others. He even wrote a little story about it, although it passed almost unnoticed. It’s called “Anton,” and it tells of a man who lives very simply in a small t
own. A craftsman, someone who can do everything one needs to know how to do in life, who helps people when they need it, who never takes more money than he needs to live at that moment. Who is always disappearing, surfacing when someone needs him. His story ends this way: “For many years I heard no more of Anton. But I can barely imagine anyone about whom there should be less cause for concern: he will never be forsaken by God, and what is even rarer, never by his fellow men.”

  Stefan Zweig has always openly acknowledged and defended his attempts to stay on the sidelines. Even to those who, he must know, despised him for this stance.

  He was still in Ostend when he wrote to his old friend Romain Rolland, whom he loved for his books on music and his pacifism, and who meanwhile has become an ideological Communist, and a Stalinist: “To me the enemy that is dogmatism, of whatever kind, is the one and only ideology that wants to destroy all thought. We need to create a fanatical anti-fanaticism.” This he says to Rolland the fanatic and ends, “My dear friend, I think of you so often, for we grow ever more lonely. The word has become weak in the face of brutality, and what we call freedom is incomprehensible to the youth of today: but a new youth will come. And it will understand us!” He has put all his hopes into this letter to his old friend. The reply is short, belligerent, and unambiguous: “No, I am in no way alone or lonely, as you say in your letter. On the contrary, I feel surrounded by the friendship of millions of people from every country and I extend it back to them.” The Party writer mocks his lonely friend who doesn’t want to take part in the fights of the day. “The words from Faust are becoming reality; freedom is being conquered daily on the battlefields of the earth. If I feel lonely anywhere, it’s among my fellow writers.”

  It is much easier to sign on to a movement, an ideology, a party. With what assuredness one can stand on the cliffs of conviction, looking down and mocking the disheartened and the scattered. It is very easy, and no one makes it easier for the ideologues than Stefan Zweig, who so openly articulates his incomprehension of the entire epoch: “Perhaps this is my last great journey, who knows?” he writes in the same letter to Rolland. The Last Journey.

  It’s a little like the way it was back then, in 1914, when he left Ostend on the last train. Stefan Zweig is journeying again into war. Only briefly, yes, only by way of a visit, a port of call. But there’s war in Europe again, and out of all the engaged, battle-ready, political colleagues who sat together in Ostend, it’s Stefan Zweig, of all people, who is the first to make a stop in Spain. It’s August 10, the ship is approaching the Spanish port of Vigo, and there’s an American cruiser at the mouth of the bay, which signifies that you go ashore at your own risk. And Zweig goes ashore. He sees “the town full of militia in splendid uniforms, as disciplined as Germans, blue sailor suits, khaki, and helmets. There are thirteen-year-old boys among them, armed with revolvers, hanging around the walls waiting for their pictures to be taken—but I also notice that many of the locals are not wearing the red badge of the Fascists. I watch and photograph heavy trucks packed with helmeted soldiers leaving for the front—they look as vestigially savage as our Home Guard, and it seems, from what I’m told, that even during the fighting the siesta is strictly observed.” A flaneur from old Europe on the edge of war. “One could walk around for hours here without realizing that the Front is merely an hour away.” And Zweig walks around for hours, watches the cobblers at work, sees his Maria Stuart laid out in the windows of the bookshop next to Hitler’s Writings, Ford’s book against the Jews, and “similar nonsense.” He sees bewitchingly beautiful people, donkeys, spans of oxen, fast cars, and “old women splendidly reminiscent of Goya with their disheveled, sweaty, dusty hair, dirty feet, and yet a magnificent dignity in their walk.” Zweig looks, is astonished, admires, strolls along the edge of the field of slaughter that will be an experimental laboratory for the great war to come, and finds all of it wonderful and picturesque. Two hours of Spain, he writes in his diary with delight, are more intense than a whole year in England. And then the phrase: “like Vienna at that time.” Zweig intuits that he’s seeing the harbinger of a new world and the eventual collapse of the old one, which is his, or he wouldn’t have written that allusion to the Vienna of the old days, but one last time he doesn’t want it to be true. One last time he wants to see only beauty, the beautiful people, the good in the world. Spain on the edge of the abyss, happy people, “a piece of magic.”

  Then back to the open sea, work on the novel, loneliness, and finally—Brazil.

  Stefan Zweig has perhaps never been so overwhelmed in his life, so happy, so proud and confident. How far old Europe lies behind him, and how fast he allows himself to be infected by the enthusiasm of the Brazilians, by the sun, the light, the beaches, and the warmth of the people. A country is lying at his feet. Everyone he meets seems to have read his books. Again and again he writes “wonderful, wonderful” in his diary. In Rio he recognizes the happiest admixture of “Madrid and Lisbon, New York and Paris”; wherever he goes, he’s overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the people, he reads from his books to crowds numbering in the thousands, writes his name hundreds of times each day, is received by the foreign minister and again by the president, receives gifts everywhere, a giant coffee-making machine, the most exquisite coffees, cigars. Having seen his work almost disappear into the darkness of irrelevance, he suddenly draws new courage from this universal goodwill. A whirl of happiness. “Everyone feels that a great future is shaping itself here.” And for a few days Stefan Zweig feels it along with them.

  And then he decides to take a trip high into the mountains. The old emperor Dom Pedro spent his summers up here when it became unbearably hot down by the sea, at the Copacabana. Zweig wants to see this other city and the emperor’s palace, which has become a museum in the meantime, the glass palace on the heights. And he wants to see Brazil, the land, the sea, one time from way up here. A view over the landscape and also a view back toward old Europe. And each day a question hangs unspoken over every step that he takes: is a new life possible here as a continuation of the old one?

  Zweig knows already that he can’t stay at the seashore, down there in the big city. He cannot cope with the masses of people, the obligations, the claims on him, not at any price. It’s a dream of the moment, an enormous source of happiness, to feel that he is loved here in this land of the future the way he is loved nowhere else. But live here, in this dancing metropolis? Out of the question. And an emperor is not the only one for whom the summers are far too hot.

  The journey up is also a test. The road keeps climbing, higher and higher. There is a light rain. When you look down: mist. Nature is all-conquering; it is almost impossible to imagine that people can force back the rain forest here. Up at the top, the city runs along the cleft of a valley, green mountains to right and to left, down the middle a narrow brown river, tight paths bordering the road, people bustling around under large umbrellas. The air is glorious, there’s no wind, it’s fresh and green and damp and pleasantly cool. Stefan Zweig resolved early to love this country. He came here determined to be overwhelmed. He doesn’t want to see the dark sides of this new world: the dictatorial regime of President Getúlio Vargas, the expulsion of the Communist Jew Olga Benário Prestes, the anti-Semitic literature of the powerful Fascist movement Brazilian Integralist Action, the restrictive immigration laws. Zweig wants to see none of it. He wants to love.

  Back in December 1932 he had already discussed travel plans with his Argentinian translator and agent, Alfredo Kahn. Two weeks in Argentina and then by zeppelin on to Brazil were what was on his mind, and he wrote euphorically, “South America looms ahead of us like a living hope, and we all have a much closer cultural connection to these countries than to North America: the spiritual bond seems to me to be deeper, and besides, it is the New World for us, another sphere.”

  Political developments in Europe at that time put a stop to his travel plans, but the love for Brazil and South America was already born in him before he ever set foot in that par
t of the continent.

  And now he’s standing here in the drizzle in the mountains of Brazil. No, in truth, not much here recalls the Semmering Pass in his old homeland. But there’s the will to remember, the will to rediscover his old world in the new. Does he see the little whitewashed house up here, clinging to the mountainside? And the little garden in front, and the terrace under the overhanging roof? “We would live simply.” The Ostend utopia. Is this the place where it will become enduring reality? It’s possible.

  JOSEPH ROTH’S AUTUMN THIS YEAR is very different. Stefan Zweig has barely left when misfortune hits him again with full force. First comes a letter from the American publisher Ben Huebsch, informing Roth that he no longer wishes to publish his books. A heavy blow, for the American market is almost the only remaining hope, financially speaking, for German-speaking authors who have emigrated, losing their home audience. Lion Feuchtwanger, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig achieve high earnings in the United States, and even Roth’s exile publishers in Holland had always been able to calculate licenses in the United States and England as part of their high advances for Roth. After the letter from Huebsch, Roth realizes that for the duration of his exile, he will no longer be able to count on adequate income from his books, no matter how much he writes and no matter how many ideas for novels he sells in parallel to the publishing houses of Allert de Lange, Querido, and De Gemeenschap.