Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (41 page)

In the early summer he travelled to the health resort of Bad Gastein, filled with the usual and soon-to-be-forgotten resolutions to give up his excessive consumption of coffee and tobacco. His stay there, punctuated by judicious amounts of work, did Zweig a lot of good, and he made plans to undertake a study trip to Basle for his latest book project. Here he planned 
to study archive material on the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, who was to be the subject of his next biographical profile. He already had a provisional subtitle:
Portrait of a Defeated Man
.

During the summer Festival season of 1933—which for once he spent at home in Salzburg—he was visited by Bruno Walter and Richard Strauss, who played him the first two acts of
Die schweigsame Frau
on the piano. Zweig was more enthusiastic about the project than ever: “Musically it is quite superb, and could become a real popular hit.”
³¹

His plans for the autumn once again included an extensive programme of travel. He began with a good month of work and relaxation in Montreux, from where he planned to travel on to France, accompanied by Friderike:

On 16th or 18th October I am in Paris to give a lecture, then I shall probably go on via Holland to London, where I shall settle down quietly and get on with my work (London is the only city with a large library where I have few acquaintances and complete peace and quiet). I will definitely not be coming back before the New Year; I find the constant political tensions in Austria very distracting, and unfortunately I am living in the most dangerous place of all. It’s high time I found some inner peace, the powers that be in Germany have reduced me to a nervous wreck.
³²

So nearly thirty years after his last visit, London was to be his next destination. He travelled north from Switzerland with Friderike and crossed the Channel. Initially they stayed at Brown’s Hotel, but immediately began looking for somewhere more spacious, since Stefan was planning to stay for some time. At the end of October he wrote to Geigy-Hagenbach to give him his new address: 11 Portland Place.

I can tell you that I am feeling very much at home here. We moved out of the hotel after a couple of days and into an excellent service flat, where I have everything I need to work in comfort. I spend all my mornings in the British Museum. I’ve also got a permit to use the Manuscript Room, but so far I haven’t looked at very much or requested things. [ … ]

The most important thing for me now is to get down to some concentrated work, and for the moment it is going better than I expected. The city suits me very well because nobody bothers about you here and everyone respects other people’s time.
³³

While Zweig had travelled abroad of his own free will and could go back to Salzburg whenever he wanted, many German colleagues had already emigrated. Soon after leaving his native land, Klaus Mann was planning to start a journal for writers in exile, to be called
Die Sammlung
[
The Collection
]. The first issue appeared in September, and Stefan Zweig was named in it as a future contributor. He had accepted the editorial team’s invitation to write for the journal on the express understanding that the new venture was a purely literary publication. But even though not a single line of his was ever printed in its pages, the mere fact that he had agreed to contribute was soon to cause him all kinds of difficulties; and even before Zweig received his copy of the first issue he had written to Klaus Mann withdrawing his offer of collaboration. The explanation he offered sounds somewhat threadbare—he claimed that various foreign journals had criticised him for refusing to contribute to their pages, while promising a piece for
Die Sammlung.
He preferred to wait, he said, until everyone was speaking with one voice—and until that happened he would not be working for
any
of the journals. But in point of fact Zweig was having to contend with very different objections to his collaboration—something that he did not mention to Klaus Mann. Anton Kippenberg had strongly urged him to withdraw his offer of collaboration—the situation for Zweig and his books in Germany was complicated enough already, and every piece he wrote for this journal would only have made matters worse. Richard Strauss, too, had a feeling that this would be bad news for his librettist and for the opera they were working on. Zweig was not alone in his decision; Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann and René Schickele had also gone back on their original agreement to write for
Die Sammlung.
When Zweig received his copy of the first issue, he informed Klaus Mann immediately that, given the manifestly political tenor of the journal—contrary to all the assurances he had received—he would not now be contributing any material in the future either. Meanwhile Kippenberg took the precaution of drafting an extended statement in similar vein in Zweig’s name, aimed at countering any attacks prompted by the announcement in the first issue of Zweig’s future involvement. Zweig approved the text of the statement, making just a few minor changes. He was travelling in Switzerland when he wrote to signal his consent, and Anton Kippenberg was also away from home, taking the waters in Garmisch. From here he instructed his deputy in Leipzig to send Zweig’s letter by way of further precaution to the appropriate government agency, which was the Reich Ministry for
Public Education and Propaganda. This proved to be a serious mistake. At the Ministry they were delighted by this high-profile bail-out—what could possibly be better, from their point of view, than discord and mutual recriminations between suspect foreign writers and German émigrés? So without informing Zweig or Kippenberg, Zweig’s statement was now promptly forwarded to the German book trade journal
Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel,
which could be relied upon to toe the party line. The edition of 14th October 1933 printed the disclaimers issued by Döblin, Thomas Mann and Schickele, while Zweig’s statement was enclosed as a separate insert printed on red paper—but edited so that it no longer appeared to be a personal letter addressed to Kippenberg, but a formal statement specially drafted for the
Börsenblatt
. It was accompanied by an editorial note stressing the point that Zweig had been deceived as to the true intentions of
Die Sammlung,
and therefore refused to have anything more to do with it. A perfect storm of scandal now broke. Zweig received outraged letters from every quarter, sent by writers in exile and opponents of the German government, asking how he could possibly have betrayed the opposition in this shameful manner. Zweig’s next letter to Klaus Mann is filled with bitter resentment at what had happened:

This is a private letter addressed to you, you can show it to anyone, but I do not want it reprinted or made a matter for further public debate. My dear Klaus Mann, this business has made me ill. You cannot imagine—I have been away from home for some weeks, and heard here in London that people were attacking me because of some statement I was said to have issued in the book trade journal. What statement? I knew nothing about it, until another week had gone by and I discovered that a letter I had been asked to write to Insel Verlag for its personal information had been published, without asking my permission or even informing me after the event. Need I say that I have never in all my life entertained the least desire or thought of publishing such an inflammatory document, which would be a kind of moral suicide for me?
³⁴

With some effort he was able to placate his angry fellow writers, but the termination of his association with Insel Verlag now appeared inevitable. The question was, what would now happen to the titles that Zweig had already published under its imprint? At the end of November 1933 Kippenberg received a letter from the Association of German Booksellers, enclosing a highly confidential listing of titles from his publishing house
which were no longer approved for distribution to the retail book trade, and which therefore had to be withdrawn from sale immediately. In future these books could only be sold to academics who needed them for study purposes. The list of proscribed books included four titles by Johannes R Becher, two by Leonhard Frank, one by Heinrich Mann and no fewer than fifteen by Stefan Zweig.
³⁵

Kippenberg now wrote to the Reich Ministry for Public Education and Propaganda, pointing out that if Zweig’s books were to disappear from the bookshops overnight the reading public would immediately notice, especially as the popular titles from the
Baumeister der Welt
series and the Insel-Bücherei, including the best-selling
Sternstunden der Menschheit,
were on the blacklist. Kippenberg emphasised that all the titles in question were “completely unpolitical, and for the most part purely fictional works”. He went on to say that if the ban on sales were upheld, Zweig would certainly have all his books printed abroad by a foreign publisher. But if some amicable agreement could be reached, “I would be able to persuade Dr Zweig to choose a publisher who does not put out any titles by émigré writers and who is not in any way anti-German”. Finally he asked the Ministry to let him know how he should respond to future enquiries from the book trade, and in particular how he should handle the author himself.
³⁶

By the time the Booksellers’ Association had lifted the restriction on sales of Zweig’s titles in the Insel-Bücherei series in March 1934, the next catastrophe in Zweig’s life had already happened. At the start of the year he had travelled from England back to Austria via Zurich, intending to return to London in the foreseeable future. He gives us an account of those days in February in
Die Welt von Gestern
:

I had got back from Vienna to my house in Salzburg in the afternoon to find a whole pile of proofs and correspondence waiting for me, and I worked late into the night to clear the backlog. The next morning I was still in bed when I heard a knock at the door. Our good old manservant, who normally never woke me unless I had specifically asked to be woken at a certain time, entered the room looking upset. He asked me if I would come down, as there were some gentlemen from the police there who wanted to talk to me. I was somewhat surprised, put on my dressing gown and went downstairs. There I found four plainclothes policemen, who told me they had orders to search the house; I was instructed to surrender immediately all the weapons that I was hiding in the house for the Republikanischer Schutzbund. I must confess that I was too taken aback initially to say anything. Hiding weapons for the Republikanischer Schutzbund in my house? The whole thing was too ludicrous for words. I had never belonged to a political party, and never concerned myself with politics. I had been away from Salzburg for several months, and apart from that it would have been the most ridiculous thing imaginable to establish a cache of weapons in this house of all places, which stood on its own on a hill in the middle of the city, where anybody approaching the house with a rifle or any other weapon could have been clearly seen. So I simply responded with a cool “Be my guest.” The four detectives went through the house, opened a few boxes, tapped on a few walls; but it was obvious from the casual way they went about it that the search was just a formality, and that none of them seriously believed there were any weapons hidden in the house. After half an hour they said that they had completed their investigation and left.
³⁷

In the wake of this provocation Zweig immediately packed his cases and travelled back to London via Zurich and Paris. A few days later he instructed his brother Alfred to contact the Salzburg registration office and deregister him. So if one had to put a date on the end of Stefan Zweig’s ‘second life’, the day of the house search, 18th February 1934, would surely serve as well as any other.

NOTES

1
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 27th November 1933, ÖUB Basle.

2
Stefan to Friderike Zweig, 12th March 1930. In: Briefwechsel Friderike Zweig 2006, p 221.

3
Zweig 1931.

4
Stefan Zweig to Karl Geigy-Hagenbach, 12th August 1930, ÖUB Basle.

5
Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, 21st August 1930. In: Briefwechsel Freud/Zweig, p 18.

6
Arnold Zweig to Sigmund Freud, 8th September 1930. In: Briefwechsel Freud/Zweig, p 21.

7
Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, 10th September 1930. In: Briefwechsel Freud/Zweig, p 25 f.

8
Sigmund Freud to Stefan Zweig, 17th February 1931. In: Briefwechsel Bahr/Freud/Rilke/Schnitzler, p 191 f.

9
Schwerin, Begegnung mit Stefan Zweig. Copy in the archive of S Fischer Verlag.

10
Relgis 1981, p 57 f.

11
Carl Zuckmayer to Stefan Zweig, 3rd March 1930, SUNY Fredonia/NY.

12
Carl Zuckmayer to Stefan Zweig, 16th June 1932, signed with the names of the dogs Flick, Flock and Bonzo, SUNY Fredonia/NY.

13
Zweig F 1964, p 123.

14
25th October 1931, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 344.

15
Richard Strauss to Stefan Zweig, 31st October 1931. In: Briefwechsel Strauss, p 7.

16
23rd November 1931, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 356.

17
27th November 1931, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 357.

18
Carl Zuckmayer to Stefan Zweig, 26th November 1931, SUNY Fredonia/NY.