Journey Into the Past

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

Biographical Notes

Title Page

INTRODUCTION

JOURNEY INTO THE PAST

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

Copyright and More Information

T
he 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.

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
: