Journey Into the Past

by Stefan Zweig

  STEFAN ZWEIG (1881–1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. During the 1930s, he was one of the best-selling writers in Europe, and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Second World War. With the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to New York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. New York Review Books has published Zweig’s novels The Post-Office Girl and Beware of Pity as well as the novellas Chess Story and Confusion.

  ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the 2009 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Stefan Zweig’s Burning Secret. In 2002 she won the Independent foreign fiction Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

  ANDRÉ ACIMAN is the author of the novels Eight White Nights and Call Me by Your Name, the nonfiction works Out of Egypt and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project. he teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

  JOURNEY INTO THE PAST

  STEFAN ZWEIG

  Translated from the German and with an afterword by

  ANTHEA BELL

  Introduction by

  ANDRÉ ACIMAN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  JOURNEY INTO THE PAST

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  The word that keeps coming back is fluent. Stefan Zweig was born fluent. Fluent in everything. Everything seemed to come easily to him. Born in 1881 into a very wealthy, open-minded, Viennese Jewish family, he lived well and traveled widely; published at a very early age; finished his dissertation at an equally precocious age; acquired unparalleled inter national fame as a biographer, novelist, play wright, essayist, and librettist; and had a roster of friends and acquaintances so exhaustive that it is difficult to think of any European worthy of notice in the early decades of the past century whose biography would not at one point or another invoke the name of Stefan Zweig. He appears everywhere, knows everyone, and is translated into more languages than any of his contemporaries. Just about everything he put his mind to is stamped with the telltale ease, polish, and effortless grace of people whose success, literary and otherwise, seemed given from the day they were born or picked up a pen. He never quarreled with his tools; his tools were happy to oblige. He didn’t spend nights searching for the mot juste; the mot juste simply came. Agony was not his style. In his work there is not one trace of difficulty over come. Difficulty never came. There is—and one spots it from the very first sentence in almost everything he wrote—an unmistakable lightness of touch that makes him at once solemn and liant, humble and patrician, scholar and raconteur. The irony is seldom overblown, the drama never overstretched, and the psychology, for all its unsparing, disquieting probes into “spiritual upheavals ... unknown and unsuspected,” remains spot-on and mischievously subtle. You won’t hear the lumpish footfalls of over-the-top sorrow or pick up the false accents of fin de siècle melancholia. Zweig is firm and fluent. Everything in its time, everything just right, never a false move, not one sleight of hand. The story almost writes itself, from beginning to end. He’ll stop either when he has nothing more to say or when it’s no longer safe or necessary to go any further.

  Though similarities to Hoffmann and Maupassant—as well as to Maugham, Schnitzler, and Moravia—are tempting, in Zweig we are in the brooding, highly urbane Central European universe where sepulchral obsessions and the shady regions of the soul can only be glimpsed and not examined, much less explained, and where redemption is seldom given or earned. He is the master of hidden impulses, of passionate excesses, of l’amour fou, of desires that run amuck, and of “the confusion of sentiments,” which is the title of one of his novellas—or, as he writes in that same novella, of “the unimaginable depths of human emotion.” Dostoyevsky, Verlaine, Nietzsche, and, of course, that other free-thinking Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud—these are the voices to whom Zweig, as a scholar and biographer, had already devoted many pages and whose timbre both underscores the penumbral cast of his fictional universe and explains his near-libidinal urge to penetrate the darker chambers of the heart.

  Odd psychological states have a positively disquieting power over me; I find tracking down the reasons for them deeply intriguing, and the mere presence of unusual characters can kindle a passionate desire in me to know more about them, a desire not much less strong than a woman’s wish to acquire some possession.

  Stefan Zweig was a cosmopolite, a prototypically Pan-European emancipated Jew, who managed to shed all belief systems with the exception of pacifism. To this day he remains, paradoxically enough, Europe’s most gracefully defeated and disabused optimist. As of the early 1920s, he had picked up the menacing rumbles in Adolf Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. By 1933 he showed sufficient prescience to see that life was no longer viable for Jews in the German-speaking world and soon moved to England. And yet, for all his foresight, he too wished to trust Chamberlain’s assurances that Germany would not seek another war. Like all those who watched the gathering storm, he couldn’t bring himself to heed what was being shouted each time the Führer spoke. Distressed by the war in Europe, he moved to the United States, then settled in a villa in Brazil, where, in 1942—inexplicably—he and his second wife took their own lives. Their bodies were found lying fully clothed in bed; they were holding hands. His was not Walter Benjamin’s suicide, nor the suicide of so many who were hunted down and whose panic before arrest, deportation, and slaughter drove them to seek the quicker exit.

  And yet here, as ever with Zweig, things become quite misty. He gulped down a fatal dose of Veronal at the age of sixty for the startling reason, as he put it in his suicide note, that he simply didn’t have it in him to “make a new beginning.” There is something so resigned and understated, so speciously civil and genteel in his reasons for committing suicide that a recent critic likened his last words to an Oscar acceptance speech. In suicide, Zweig came home to a world he’d already crafted in fiction. Yet whereas suicide was a desperately affirming move in his characters, in him it represented the gradual etiolation of will, purpose, and desire. Zweig wasn’t interested.

  One could allege many reasons for his suicide. There was no escaping a world at war—even in the safety of the relatively ritzy resort town of Petrópolis on the southern coast of Brazil. Plus—and despite his praises of the country in Brazil: A Land of the Future—Zweig must have found the solitude around his villa supremely stultifying. As far removed from the dangers of war as Petrópolis was, it could offer nothing resembling the social and intellectual climate he was used to, even in crepuscular prewar Europe. Plus he must have sensed that there was, in 1942, no way of defeating the anti-Semitic hydra, which kept sprouting more heads each time the Allies tried to crush it. Above all, and perhaps here lies a good part of the reason for taking his life, his world was crumbling, had crumbled. “Everything, or almost everything that represents my work in the world during forty years has been destroyed”—this from his memoir The World of Yesterday, begun during his brief stay in New York. The indefatigable globe-trotter (as he referred to himself once) of l’entre-deux-guerres, who had sought out the world with so much zeal but who always knew that a lavish, sheltering home awaited him in Vienna, and later in Salzburg, had lost his bearings. From Austria, to France, to England, to the United States, and now far-flung Brazil, he must have felt like an untethered punt drifting up against a riverbank. “I ceased to feel as if I quite belonged to myself. A
part of the natural identity with my original and essential ego was destroyed forever.” He might well have been glad to build a new existence in Brazil, since, as he wrote, “the world of my own language [had] disappeared for me and my spiritual home, Europe, [had] destroyed itself.” But not at the age of sixty. Suddenly, thrust into the wings of history, this urbane man about Europe had become yesterday’s man.

  But the damage was done not in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, or on Kristallnacht in 1938, or on September 1, 1939, when Germany unleashed World War II. The real damage was done in 1914 when the “world of security,” as Zweig referred to it, came to a sudden end. Unfit for military service, he had been assigned to the archives of the Ministry of War, but by 1917, while on leave in Switzerland, was finally dismissed from service. It was in neutral Switzerland, under the aegis of the 1915 Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, that he became a confirmed pacifist. It was also in Switzerland that he became aware of a certain cast of people who, in his words, lived “amphibiously”—that is, between countries, between languages, between loyalties and identities: in short, in exile. Little did he know then that he would eventually become the ultimate amphibian himself. One day in Zurich, Zweig offered to help James Joyce translate a difficult passage from A Portrait of the Artist into German. As they were about to do so, both decided to try the words in French first and then in Italian before working their way back to German. To the Austrian’s astonishment, not only did this staunch Irishman, who was his junior by three months, turn out to know English better than Britons but he possessed an “incredible knowledge of languages”—of German, French, and Italian. But signs of such linguistic fluency and open intellectual traffic during the worst conflict known to mankind, instead of reassuring Zweig that the world could easily rise above war, should have reminded him that the fragile world of prewar empires, which had made cultural ductility the most desirable currency known to humans, was expiring before his very eyes and that he himself was fast becoming a vestige, a shadow of that era. The amphibian world of the composer Ferruccio Busoni (part German, part Italian) or of the novelist René Schickele (part German, part French) would never last, nor would there be room one day for Semites whose hearts were in the Aryan world. As Zweig must have felt in 1935 when the Nazis forbade the production of Richard Strauss’s opera, for which he himself had written the libretto, mankind would become more blinkered and more barbarous yet. World War II simply administered the finishing blow.

  Signs of the collapse were still very hazy. Below the Old World charm and velvety composure of Zweig’s narratives or, for that matter, of his farewell note, lurked many demons. Zweig was no stranger to demons. In his book The Struggle with the Demon, about Kleist, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche, he was fascinated by how great artists, including Beethoven and Michelangelo, were stirred by demonic, “volcanic,” mono-maniacal urges. But what lurked beneath these compulsive demons was something more intangible, more sinister, and ultimately more damning, because it found its seat in Zweig’s far tamer, more conciliatory, and depressive personality: the specter of regret, the specter of what might have been if only ... If only one could turn back the clock, if only remembrance didn’t stifle all hope or renunciation foil desire. If only one could do something to stem the course of what seems unavoidable, if only one didn’t give up before even trying, if only one had acted sooner or not acted at all. If only life did not have to end. If only is the unspoken, the unspeakable, the thing that even the most talented writers cannot name, for one can neither rise above it nor put it behind one—only gape and play with tenses. If only is the last stop before we enter the shadow-lands. And into shadowlands Zweig had stepped long before the Veronal. As he writes in the closing lines of The World of Yesterday:

  Homeward bound I suddenly noticed before me my own shadow as I had seen the shadow of the other war behind the actual one. During all this time it has never budged from me, that irremovable shadow, it hovers over every thought of mine by day and by night; perhaps its dark outline lies on some pages of this book, too. But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.

  The language here may seem a touch too fluent, but it does suggest that the past has ways of reaching into the present and from there into the future to make us the playthings of time. Shadows know more about us than we know ourselves, are more like us than we care to know. They reach into areas where we fear to tread, bear their own secrets, tell their own tales, speak their own tongue. They even foretell what is likely to happen and, as Freud knew so well, reinvent what might have happened and perhaps did indeed happen—who’s to know. Shadows are how we grope and speak of time when we’ve run out of time.

  Not surprising, then, that Zweig’s Journey into the Past should, like The World of Yesterday, also end with shadows. It begins at twilight and it ends at twilight, blurred in perpetual soft focus. Even the history of the tale’s publication—it comes out in the United States for the first time this year, almost seventy years after Zweig’s death—bears all the marks of a shadow from the past that happens to be about shadows from the past.

  A fragment of the novella, identified as such, was first published in 1929 in an anthology of short fiction by Austrian writers. But a longer version, in typescript with handwritten corrections by Zweig, was discovered in London after his death and subsequently published to great acclaim in Germany, France, and Great Britain. The typescript bore two titles: Wider-stand der Wirklichkeit (Resistance to Reality) and Die Reise in die Vergangenheit ( Journey Into the Past), the latter of which, however, Zweig crossed out. It is difficult to date the final composition of this novella, but it would not be unwise to place it after 1933, once the hold of the Nazi Party seemed secure.

  The story itself is, at first, irresistibly formulaic, so readable and fluent that it smacks of a B-grade, black-and-white Hollywood romance from the 1930s or ’40s. A man and woman are on a train headed for Heidelberg. It soon becomes clear that this is a moment both have been looking forward to. They have chosen to remain silent, partly because the compartment is full but also because they are too hesitant to speak the truth that sits between them. Then, as in so many films, the screen starts to blur, and we move back in time and see the young man a decade earlier. He comes from extremely humble origins, studies chemistry, is hired by an industrial magnate, and “initially given menial tasks to perform in the laboratory.” From there the hasty rise of the ambitious young man about to become a most trusted assistant follows a script laid down by Balzac and Dickens—authors to whom Zweig had devoted many pages in Master Builders of the Spirit. The young man, Ludwig, is then asked to reside in the home of the industrialist. Reluctantly, he accepts. Within a short period of time, he falls silently in love with the boss’s wife, and she with him, but before anything desired and unavoidable occurs between them, the young man is asked to move to Mexico for two years to manage a mining concern for the German industrialist. It is on hearing of Ludwig’s impending departure that the wife suddenly lets down her guard and allows her feelings for the young man to erupt. He cannot hide his feelings, either. The physical proximity of the lovers, which might have led to one thing only in Stendhal, finds itself hampered as in any of Racine’s plays by crippling inhibitions and by the perpetual presence of the husband and hired help. “Not now! Not here! I beg you!” she stammers, almost on the point of surrender. That almost, which spells “silent consent” and intimacy before the act, becomes the lodestar of their unconsummated love. They, too, now enter a shadowland of their own invention.

  Ludwig leaves, and in Mexico counts down the days, the weeks, the months. They write incessantly and clearly feed off the feverish letters each sends the other. Then the worst happens. In Mexico the young man learns that war has broken out in Europe. It is 1914. He cannot go back and all correspondence between them comes to a sudden halt.

  The screen blurs again and it is nine years later. Lu
dwig lives in Mexico, is married, and has children. Now, for the first time since leaving before the war, he returns to Germany on business. This, by my calculation, must be 1923. It is also the year of Hitler’s attempted coup in Munich.

  The almost-lovers finally do meet; she is older, a widow, lives alone. But nothing else has changed. The house is the same, the help is the same, even her telephone number is the same; to his surprise, Ludwig is completely able to resurrect his age-old feelings of inadequacy as a young man when he had first stepped into that house. He thought he’d outgrown the feeling, what with being a married father and a wealthy businessman in his own right now; but if parts of us move on and grow older, others stay frozen still and don’t budge, won’t grow, won’t live, won’t die. We exist on several parallel time lines; sometimes those lines cross, sometimes they don’t touch, and sometimes each withdraws as though shoved by a “ghostly mist.” Nothing has changed—nothing—and yet things couldn’t be more strained between the lovers. “People may grow old,” she finally says in a moment of candor, “but they remain the same.” “Everything is as it used to be,” he will almost concur during an uncomfortable moment between them, only to add, “except for us, except for us!” But an instant afterward, as if to dispel his cruel quip, he will ask: “Do you still remember?” And she will right away reply: “I have not forgotten either.” For all their undiminished love, however, everything seems to have chilled between them. He asks to revisit his old room in the house. She shows him upstairs. This is where they had kissed and hugged and where she promised to offer herself. Now complete discomfort sits between them. With nothing more to add, they say goodbye. The next day, however, he asks to see her for one last time. “People come back,” says the author-Lothario in Letter from an Unknown Woman. “Yes, they do come back, but they’ve forgotten,” replies the woman who has loved him and only him.