Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (7 page)

If more work was needed to persuade people of his talent, Zweig was the man to do it. The pieces he wrote for various newspapers had gradually led him to the
Neue Freie Presse
in Vienna. His first meeting with the editor, Theodor Herzl, made a profound impression on him. As soon as he saw him he understood that this fierce advocate for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine had not been nicknamed the ‘King of Zion’ just to make fun of him: there really was a kind of majesty about the man, with his chiselled features and flowing beard. Highly regarded as an editor and author, Herzl agreed at once to print Zweig’s pieces. Zweig’s own parents read and respected the
Neue Freie Presse
at home, even if they could not go along with Herzl’s vision of Zionism. Not in their wildest dreams would it have occurred to Moriz Zweig and most of his fellow factory owners, who had built up their position in the city over many decades, to abandon their former lives and emigrate to a state that did not yet exist in the desert of Palestine. But none of this detracted in any way from Herzl’s standing as a publicist, and when Stefan Zweig’s novella
Die Wanderung
was printed in the
Neue Freie Presse
at the beginning of 1902, his father took every opportunity to tell his colleagues, friends and acquaintances about his son’s notable achievement.

Zweig and Herzl were on good, not to say sometimes warm, terms during their brief collaboration—Herzl died in 1904—as we can sense from the following lines, sent by Herzl in November 1903: “My dear Zweig,
how young you are! I am returning your letter to you so that you can enjoy reading it again in twenty years’ time. In particular, the antechamber of the beautiful woman will give you much pleasure then.”
⁸
Unfortunately the letter from Zweig referred to here, which would presumably have thrown some light on the “antechamber of the beautiful woman”, has been lost.

Zweig might have been more than satisfied with these successes, yet his own texts, and in particular the poems, soon ceased to meet the standards he expected of himself. Within a short time of the book’s publication he was already finding it difficult to understand how he could have inflicted these artificial-sounding verses on the public at all. This critique of his own work—it almost amounted to an aversion—was not fully formulated until many years later, when he pointed out on a number of occasions that he had always refused, with good reason, to authorise reprints of his early publications. And so, despite its favourable critical reception,
Silberne Saiten
never made it past the first edition—which is why the book is a valuable collector’s item today.

During this period Zweig’s closest friend and colleague was Camill Hoffmann. The two met up whenever time permitted. They visited the city’s Museum of Art History quite often and studied painting and sculpture. But on Sundays, at Hoffmann’s suggestion, they would read aloud to each other from works of French literature—in the original French, of course. Together they translated some of Charles Baudelaire’s works, which were published in 1902 by Hermann Seemann Nachfolger in Leipzig under the title
Gedichte in Vers und Prosa
, with an introduction by Zweig.

Such adaptations and translations were like a kind of therapy that Zweig had prescribed for himself after his disappointment at his own poetic writings. Richard Dehmel had advised him to engage in this way with the works of foreign authors, to study structure, vocabulary and style, and at the same time to train his own feeling for language. A planned volume of his own novellas and a second book of poems would therefore have to wait, even though, given the rate at which he had been working, Zweig had already accumulated a fair amount of material. In March of that year he had completed the novella
Die Liebe der Erika Ewald
, but the manuscript lay untouched for another two years until it became the title story of a collection published in 1904.

A semester in Berlin, which he had arranged right at the start of his university course, promised further distraction and a change of direction. Zweig hoped that a few months spent living life to the full far away from
Vienna would help him to see a little more clearly where his future lay. As from 1st April 1902 his new address would be Berlin SW 46, Bernburger Strasse 20, not far from Potsdamer Platz.

Once installed here he set about compiling a volume of Paul Verlaine’s poems in German translation, which Schuster & Loeffler had again agreed to publish. This time Zweig saw himself more in the role of editor than contributor. In selecting the translations he sought to give an insight both into the work of Verlaine and into that of the translators, whom he had chosen in consultation with the publishers. Among the contributors were Richard Dehmel, Franz Evers, Richard Schaukal, Johannes Schlaf and Cäsar Flaischlen. But certain compromises had to be made. Schaukal, for instance, was a “literary con artist”,
⁹
as Zweig wrote to Adelt. But as a very active figure on the literary scene at the time it would have been difficult to exclude him from the project. The dislike was mutual, and Schaukal had already announced that Zweig could depend on receiving a comprehensive slating for his Baudelaire translations in an upcoming issue of the periodical
Die Gesellschaft
. It is not difficult to guess who the author of this review would be. And this was just the opening round in what was to become an increasingly vicious feud.

Little is known about the time he spent at the University during these months in Berlin. Zweig was more interested in meeting new people outside the academic world. As he himself wrote, what he was looking for was not to mix with “good” society, to which he had belonged from birth in Vienna, and would seemingly always belong, but with “bad” society, or at least what commonly passed for such. In a café on Nollendorfplatz he met up with members of a group of artists known as Die Kommenden [The Coming Men], one of whose leading lights was the then unknown Rudolf Steiner. A motley collection of bohemians of all artistic persuasions and from all points of the compass gathered around the ageing writer Peter Hille to recite their works to each other, engage in debate or give themselves up to other pleasures. This seething mass was quite unlike anything that Zweig had experienced in Vienna. And the social world inhabited by this group, into which he willingly allowed himself to be inducted, offered no shortage of astonishing sights: “I sat at the same table with alcoholics and homosexuals and morphine addicts, I shook the hand—with great pride—of a fairly well-known and convicted fraudster (who later published his memoirs, which is how he ended up consorting with us writers). The kind of characters that I had found hard to believe in the novels of the
realists were all crowded in together in the little pubs and cafés to which I was taken, and the worse a person’s reputation was, the more keen I was to meet its owner in person.”
¹⁰
It was not for nothing that contemporary literary journals carried advertisements not just for things like ink and writing instruments, but also for sparkling wines of widely varying quality and withdrawal treatments for all manner of addictive substances.

Despite this social whirl it is open to question how far Zweig really made use of his freedom, and whether he would even have known how to enjoy it for what it was. Mixing with such society far from home certainly did not mean that he immersed himself fully in it or truly belonged to it. Even fleeting temptations of an unfamiliar kind were counteracted by that need for security which had been a family trait for so long, and on which the family’s fortunes had been built. It was not that easy to shake off his ancestry, especially as he did not feel intolerably burdened by it. Or so we gather from a letter that he wrote to Hermann Hesse nine months after he returned from Berlin:

I think that basically we—“we” meaning those of us who feel an affinity with each other—all live in much the same way. I too have wasted my substance in high living, but the ultimate excess has eluded me: inebriation. There’s a part of me that always stays sober—something that Georg Busse-Palma, the greatest pub crawler of our day, could never forgive me.
¹¹

It was a good deal easier, on the other hand, to pursue pleasures of a more sedate kind—including the selection of a signet for his own writing paper. Zweig had asked the artist and graphic designer Hugo Höppener—professional name ‘Fidus’—to design something for him. Höppener worked for periodicals such as
Pan, Jugend
and the Social-Democratic organ
Vorwärts
. He was also a devotee of the contemporary cult of naturism, and the signet he produced was entirely typical of the artist’s style: a line drawing of a naked boy with long hair and a stick in his hand, energetically bowling a hoop along before him. Underneath, in the space between the letter-writer’s first name and surname in capital letters, a stylised branch (the German word for branch being
Zweig
) bearing laurel leaves sprouts and divides to left and right.

The most important new friend Zweig made during his brief sojourn in Berlin was Höppener’s colleague Ephraim Moses Lilien, who was one of the leading exponents of German Art Nouveau or
Jugendstil
. All
his work was profoundly influenced by this contemporary artistic movement. Many of his themes and motifs were derived from religion. In him Zweig encountered a second champion of Zionism after Herzl, and one whose origins were again very different from his own. Lilien came from Drohobycz in Galicia, and was the son of a master woodturner. Zweig saw in him a typical representative of East European Jewry, and the first of his kind that he had known personally. In 1902 Lilien had joined forces with Martin Buber, Chaim Weizmann, Berthold Feiwel and Davis Trietsch to found the Jüdischer Verlag, dedicated to the promotion of Jewish culture in the German language. A survey of his own work appeared a year later under the title
E M Lilien, sein Werk
, albeit published by Schuster & Loeffler. Zweig contributed an extensive foreword to this volume, in which he sought to show how the distinctive features of his friend’s graphic art could be linked to his origins. How well he really understood Lilien and his religious views is not very clear from his rather broad-brush account, which earned him “the not very welcome title of Zionist, and otherwise a paltry fifty marks”.
¹²
Nor do we get a more nuanced picture from the corresponding chapter in
Die Welt von Gestern.

One deficiency in their friendship was that Lilien turned out to be a very lazy correspondent, who could not remotely keep up with Zweig’s massive output of letters. All Zweig’s gentle reminders, to the effect that he might want to reply to the letters he received, were of no avail. But when the two of them met up in Berlin or Vienna they always had so much to tell each other that this was quickly forgotten. And with Lilien Zweig could explore subjects that few other people in his circle had any interest in. In August 1903 he penned a letter to “Dear Efra” in which he wished he had not been led to his friend’s studio merely by “the paths of idleness”. He explained that he had sketched out an ideal picture of their artistic friendship,

a little picture [ … ] that shows us both. You drawing with that fierce concentration of yours, gently clasping your sketch pad. Me in the other corner, writing something that for certain is not as good as your drawing. And this is how I imagine it: that every half-hour or so, as we let our fingers rest for a moment, weary of our labours, we get up and take a look at each other’s work, so that not only can we see the work as all the others do who are unwise enough to buy it, but we get to know a little more about our creative endeavours, about the passion and the effort, the joy and the dedication, which make these hours so precious and special.
¹³

As we can see, Zweig’s fascination with the genesis of works of art, which had driven his interest in studying the draft manuscripts of other writers, had in no way diminished. Alongside all his own literary efforts, the attempt to decode this mystery remained for him one of the most exciting of challenges. It was only natural that he should broaden the scope of his observations from literature to other art forms. Apart from which he could hope to gain a more immediate impression from a graphic artist, since a drawing was right there in front of one, whereas writing and music remained much more abstract when first committed to paper.

In the light of such reflections Zweig could be sure that his friend Lilien would appreciate a special gift, and so he gave him the manuscript of his novella
Die Wanderung
in exchange for an original drawing. Lilien owned another memento of Zweig in the shape of a silver cigarette case, which the latter had presented to him with the following dedication engraved on it in his own handwriting: “Given to E M Lilien, reluctantly but with warm wishes—Stefan”. Conversely every sheet of notepaper that left Zweig’s desk from 1908 onwards carried a drawing by his friend, for it was at this time that the rarely used signet commissioned from Fidus was replaced by a round monogram designed by Lilien, with the two intertwined letters “SZ”. Printed in the top left-hand corner of notepaper and postcards and on the back of envelopes, it became a kind of brand logo, instantly recognisable on the literary scene for the next thirty years. A seal bearing the same motif was made up at the same time, but the fashion for such things had passed and it was hardly ever used.

After the months spent in Berlin Zweig returned home only briefly, for the annual summer holidays in Marienbad with his parents had now come round again. But afterwards he travelled on alone to Brussels and Paris, where his friend Camill Hoffmann was already staying and a few other acquaintances were expecting him. On his travels he wrote a few poems and feature articles for the press back home. In choosing France as his destination Zweig was following up a long-standing special interest, which over the years had almost become an obsession—and France would not disappoint. Apart from the fact that he spoke the language very well, it was clear that he had made an intensive study of recent and contemporary French and Belgian literature. Even during his schooldays the literary periodicals, both Austrian and foreign, that were put out for patrons in the cafés of Vienna had been an endless source of new discoveries for him. The boys at school had tried to outdo each other with tales
of unknown writers and texts. Each boy wanted to be the one to discover some hitherto overlooked major talent. This was how Zweig had come across the Belgian writer Émile Verhaeren years before, his work still virtually unknown in the German-speaking world at the turn of the century. Verhaeren had written several cycles of love poems dedicated to his wife, the painter Marthe Massin, but his poetry for the most part inhabited a very different world from that of Zweig. In the last decade of the nineteenth century he had turned increasingly to social themes, abandoning his career as a lawyer. The inexorable march of technological progress and the contrasts between urban society and rural life now became the main preoccupations of his writing, in which poetry and drama were the predominant forms. The volume of poems he published in 1883,
Les Flamandes
, was regarded in his rural homeland as scandalous, despite—or rather because of—glowing reviews from avant-garde artists. Together with their local priest, Verhaeren’s parents spared no efforts to buy up every copy of the book they could find—for the sole purpose of burning the lot. But the effect of their actions was more or less the opposite of what they intended, serving only to raise Verhaeren’s profile in his native land. He lived in the middle of the countryside he often wrote about, in a house in Caillou-qui-bique, spent occasional periods of time in Brussels or Paris, and moved to the coast for a few months each year, where the climate in early summer brought him some relief from his hay fever.