Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (47 page)

There was a not insignificant difficulty associated with Zweig’s public appearances in England, and that was the language. He had never mastered English to the same extent as French, and the prospect of talking without a script had always filled him with dread, as numerous remarks of his attest. In October of that year he gave the introductory address to a series of lectures on the life and works of Rilke at the London School of Economics. Relying on the written text to get him through, Zweig had diligently practiced the correct pronunciation of the words in advance and littered his manuscript with marks to indicate pauses and stresses
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Just as Zweig had said at the start of his television interview, his official place of residence at the time of the broadcast—June 1937—was London. The change of address had been preceded by fierce and protracted arguments with Friderike. She and her daughters had steadfastly refused to leave Salzburg or Austria. Friends and acquaintances, and even Stefan’s mother, were mobilised to dissuade him from ‘fleeing the fatherland’ for good. But when his Austrian passport was renewed in the autumn of 1935
he had officially given ‘London’ as his place of residence. Meanwhile his application for an indefinite residence permit for the United Kingdom was being processed, and in May of that year he had already instructed a Salzburg estate agent, naming his terms for the sale of the villa on the Kapuzinerberg.

Friderike refused to accept that their life together was over and that her second marriage, too, was headed for the divorce courts. Stefan surmised—correctly—that one of the main reasons for Friderike’s resistance was her fears about her financial security. Those fears were increased by the fact that Friderike felt a special responsibility for her two daughters. So in his letters Stefan now urged her repeatedly to make serious efforts to get Alix and Suse, or one of them at least, married off, so that at long last they would cease to be dependent on her.

At least the sale of the Salzburg property was a done deal as far as Zweig was concerned. When he moved into the new apartment in Hallam Street the first pieces of furniture from the villa were shipped off to London. A desk, cupboards, carpets, his favourite armchair (a gift from Friderike), several bookcases and their contents, a few pictures and smaller items were packed up and sent to England, where Friderike was getting the rooms ready for him in his absence.

When visiting the continent he had recently taken to making the journey between England and Switzerland by air on occasion. When in Salzburg he stayed overnight in a hotel rather than in his own house, and was only up on the Kapuzinerberg during the day in order to make the arrangements for clearing and selling the house. Amongst other things this involved the destruction in several stages of a major portion of his correspondence and other papers. In a secret move initiated in 1934 Zweig had already begun to send the most important letters from prominent correspondents such as Verhaeren, Rolland, Freud, Gorki, Hofmannsthal, Rilke and Rathenau, as well as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, to the Jewish National and University Library (now the National Library of Israel) in Jerusalem. He donated the correspondence to the Library on condition that the matter was kept secret, and that the material was to be kept under lock and key until ten years after his death. Zweig’s decision did not come out of nowhere—for years he had received periodic requests from the Library during its early development phase, inviting him to make a gift of papers or support the work of the institution in some other way. In May 1937 the sealed bundles of letters delivered by couriers would be followed by a further gift
of thirty-eight manuscripts from his collection. This was Zweig’s rather half-hearted response to the Library’s request for manuscripts by Jewish authors. The manuscripts that he now sent hardly fell into this category, consisting rather of miscellaneous left-over pages from his collection that he had only now rediscovered while sorting out the contents of the house in Salzburg.

At the beginning of 1937 Zweig had pushed hard to finalise the sale of the house, and he felt no scruples about putting Friderike under considerable pressure to achieve his aim. The “gentleman’s manservant” Johann Thalhuber, who had temporarily accompanied Friderike and her two daughters to Vienna, had fallen out with them there, had then disappeared, and was finally dismissed, which only created more friction between husband and wife. From London Zweig wrote to his secretary, Anna Meingast: “You can imagine how painful the news was to me. I cannot form a very accurate picture from this distance, of course, but I know only too well the tone that the young ladies are wont to adopt when something is not to their liking. I too have cleared off before now when confronted by this tone and this behaviour—just like Johann.”
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Anna Meingast, whose services were no longer needed when the Salzburg household was broken up, fared rather better. After she was officially discharged Zweig continued to pay her an allowance.

In the course of the dispute with Friderike it had emerged that while Stefan had signed off with the Salzburg tax office when he moved to London, this did not mean, contrary to what he assumed, that he was no longer liable for tax. While Friderike remained officially resident in Austria, he, as her husband, was required to carry on making payments, even though he was also paying tax in England. The whole business became increasingly complicated—Friderike, who planned to move to a new location in Austria, had her own financial claims on Stefan as his wife, but at the same time she wanted to avoid a formal, binding agreement that would finalise their personal separation.

In April 1937 they received an offer to buy the villa on the Kapuzinerberg. A local Salzburg family of merchants, the Gollhofers, wanted to buy the property for the price of 63,000
schilling
. The sum of 40,000 was due on signature of the sale contract, the balance, plus interest, was payable within two years. The first instalment of the purchase price, plus another 7,000
schilling
, went straight out of Zweig’s bank account again, because the first thing he had to do was pay off his accumulated tax bill of 47,000
schilling
,
which had been registered as a charge on the property. In a letter to Friderike he gave vent to his irritation—he would have lost a lot less money if he had given the house away to a stranger as soon as he left the country, instead of continuing to have a shared domicile with her in Austria since 1934. But more important to him than this was finally to be rid of the burden that the house and all the associated unpleasantness had come to represent.

From now on he was intent on avoiding anything that might give the tax authorities the idea that he still had any property, or indeed a place of residence, in Austria. When he learnt that Friderike had rented a house in the Nonntal district of Salzburg with the intention of running it as a boarding house, he took immediate steps to ensure that this enterprise could not in any way be connected with him. He had very mixed feelings about it in general, not least because Friderike wanted to carry on living in the very place where he had suffered police harassment in the shape of the house search. Nevertheless he transferred a substantial sum of money to her for the rental payments, and as a moving-in present he gave her Goethe’s
Mailied
, which he had withdrawn from the ongoing sale of his manuscript collection.

When the contents of the house on the Kapuzinerberg were cleared out in May 1937, Heinrich Hinterberger had taken on the most valuable portions of Zweig’s extensive library, and soon afterwards was offering them for sale in his stock catalogue under the listing number XIX. He also packed up the unique collection of over four thousand manuscript catalogues and shipped them off to Vienna. The plan was not to put the collection up for sale, however, but to use it as a reference library for his antiquarian bookshop; and indeed it did not come onto the market until after the end of the Second World War. As well as wanting to take as few books with him to London as possible, Zweig had little interest in the rest of his household belongings, as his comments in a letter to Friderike reveal. The piano from the saloon? “Sell it, it’s no good”; his grandfather’s iron trunk, where he stored his manuscripts? “It can be sold”; the large table in the library? “I’m for selling it”. He wanted a clean break, and quickly: “I don’t care about any of it, I just want to clear my head.”
⁷

Shortly before travelling to Salzburg for the final round of house-clearing, he had asked Friderike to make a few preparations:

I’d like to have a line of book crates and packing cases ready and waiting—at my expense—into which I can pack books (the valuable ones with dedications—I’ll just tear out the inscriptions from the rest). [ … ] Then I want to pack up selected correspondences (Insel, friends from my youth, reviews). I’ll just pick out a couple of pictures and etchings from the other things. I don’t want anything else. [ … ]

The things in the passageway (old bank statements, etc) that are not needed any more I would ask you to burn, so that there is less for me to sort out when I am there. Suse should be there at least, and Alix should take time off too if she can, so that you can get through it more quickly. The more you can sell off beforehand, the better. Get a book dealer to come round and sell all the minor stuff for one apiece. Just make sure you tear out the inscriptions.
⁸

As a result the house was emptied in a very short time. Friderike kept her own books, some of the furniture, the crockery and assorted memorabilia. Important office papers, including blank cheques and the ledger containing details of foreign-language publishing contracts and license agreements, were entrusted by Zweig to the care of Anna Meingast, who took them home with her.

Zweig now became increasingly paranoid about antagonising the Austrian authorities in any way. Even in the early stages of the sale of his manuscript collection he had talked about having an “almost pathological concern to obey the letter of the law in everything that I do.”
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In the autumn of 1937, after the sale of the house had been completed, he purchased an important set of Richard Wagner manuscripts from Hinterberger, and the elaborate precautions he took bordered on the grotesque. Instead of stepping forward openly as the buyer, he pretended to Hinterberger that he was only an intermediary, acting on behalf of an anonymous “friend” who allegedly wished to purchase these items. But it is perfectly clear, both from the surviving documents relating to the manuscript collection and from the fact that all the Wagner manuscripts were subsequently found in Zweig’s literary estate, that the “friend” in question never existed, and had simply been invented by Zweig in order to protect himself.

Beethoven’s desk, probably the most valuable item in the house, had been shipped initially from Salzburg to Vienna, where it may have been kept at the home of Alfred Zweig. Some at least of the smaller memorabilia, such as Beethoven’s violin, compass, travel desk and cash box, were deposited with a solicitor for safekeeping. Because of the ban on exports and his worries about falling foul of the authorities, Zweig had not initially intended to take the items out of the country. Exactly when and how he then managed to get the desk shipped to England we do not know. At all
events, the desk later resurfaces in London. As late as 3rd March 1938 Zweig was telling Rolland in a letter that he had left everything behind in Vienna “because they would not have allowed me to take these relics out of the country (or it would have caused an uproar if I had). I had left them to the city of Vienna in my will; now I shall change that particular provision.”
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No doubt Alfred Zweig, as an experienced factory owner, will have assisted his brother with the transport arrangements and any action that may have been required to secure the release of the precious desk from customs; it could have been declared as a family heirloom, after all, and in case of doubt the Beethoven connection need not have been mentioned at all. Of the remaining items from Beethoven’s estate the violin and a silver cream skimmer, which had been engraved with the composer’s name at a later date, were left behind in Vienna, and are now thought to be lost.

At the end of November 1937 Zweig returned one more time to Vienna, making the journey from London by air. It had been clear for a long time that Austria’s days as an independent state alongside Germany were now numbered. Zweig knew that this could be his last visit to his native city, and so the time had come to make final arrangements for any property he still owned there. Since Friderike was still registered as an Austrian citizen, and Stefan, following his earlier encounters with the tax authorities, feared that things could still go wrong for him, he continued to search feverishly for some way to draw a definitive line under the business, which had caused him many a sleepless night. He hit upon an unusual solution—Joseph Gregor, the head of the theatre collection at the National Library in Vienna, worked behind the scenes to set up a generous “endowment”. The institute would acquire 101 manuscripts from Zweig’s collection (which was feted as a sensation in numerous newspaper articles), while in return Zweig would be given official immunity against future tax demands from Austria (which of course had not been disclosed to the press). The Austrian Minister of Finance Rudolf Neumayer and his head of department Heinrich Weigl would need a private sweetener for their generous concession, as Gregor wrote to Zweig: “Two or three books will suffice for Dr Weigl, but I imagine Dr Neumayer will expect a somewhat grander gesture—I was thinking in terms of the complete works.”
¹¹
These “gifts” too Zweig was happy to supply, if it meant an end at last to the menacing prospect of being presented with yet another demand for payment by the tax authorities. In his agitation he wrote the wrong date on the handwritten list that he had drawn up in the Hotel Regina on his fifty-sixth birthday:
instead of that day’s date—28th November 1937—he put his actual date of birth, 28th November 1881.