by Stefan Zweig
ANDERSON: Yes, it’s a great book. It’s his biggest fiction work by far. It’s the only real novel, and it’s just a masterpiece. When I read it I thought, how is it that I don’t already know about this—how is it that I seem to be the only person I know who’s read this book? At that time I really had not heard anything about it from anybody.
PROCHNIK: When I was first reading Zweig, I had a similar experience where I would ask very educated friends of mine in the United States about him, and none of them knew who he was. Part of what really got me also to write a book about him was the sense that his erasure was so violent. I came to know slightly Zweig’s step niece, the niece of Lotte, his second wife, who is a wonderful woman living in London. I remember at one point she told me that he thought he would be completely forgotten. Zweig predicted so many aspects of his own undoing and even disappearance. He was aware of the contingency to his whole project.
ANDERSON: To be erased in his mother tongue…There’s the story of the libretto for the opera he wrote for Richard Strauss after the Nazis had come to power in Germany—The Silent Woman. And the premiere was in Dresden, and then what happened?
PROCHNIK: Strauss kept insisting on Zweig’s participation and the use of his name in the programme, even though Jews weren’t really allowed by this point to be part of cultural productions of any sort, let alone something on this scale. Strauss was the head of music in the Reich. He was an incredibly powerful person within the bureaucracy. And he argued that Zweig’s participation was crucial for the opera’s success. The opera did in fact open and it was enormously successful. Immediately there were bookings in multiple cities around the Reich—and at that point they just shut the whole thing down, they just pulled the cloth off the table.
But it’s not only erasure in the mother tongue. There’s an amazing moment in Zweig’s life in the spring of 1941 when he was in New York City. PEN in Exile was just in formation at time, and there was an enormous launch banquet given at the Biltmore Hotel. Something like a thousand writers were supposed to be there. Many people gave speeches, and Zweig’s proved to be the one that got the most attention. In a completely counterintuitive move, Zweig came out and said, I’m here to apologise before you all. I’m here in a state of shame because my language is the language in which the world is being destroyed. My mother tongue, the very words that I speak, are the ones being twisted and perverted by this machine that is undoing humanity.
ANDERSON: He thought his language itself had been permanently distorted.
PROCHNIK: And felt a personal responsibility for this as a German-writing, -speaking man of letters.
ANDERSON: One thing I thought of along the way—just in how his own psychology is revealed through is work—one thing you do see all along with Zweig is these suicides. People commit suicide, people talk about suicide regularly all through his body of work, and it’s a bit eerie for us now. Whatever you read first, the one thing you do know—even the shortest bio on a dust jacket of Zweig tells you how it ends. And it’s something that really jumps out at you when you come across it, which isn’t so infrequent.
PROCHNIK: It’s there in so many of his works, and the larger culture had a frighteningly high suicide rate as well. There seems to have been some kind of psychological, sociocultural implosion that people were sensitive to. In his last years, Zweig was strikingly given to repeatedly saying, Europe is committing suicide—actually using these words. The whole continent is committing suicide.
ANDERSON: At one point he also refers to the suicide of our independence: the choice people are making, without realising it, to destroy their own freedom.
PROCHNIK: There’s an amazing essay Zweig wrote in the 1920s called ‘The Monotonisation of the World’. It’s essentially a critique of the global exporting of American mass culture. He writes how Europe took the first step toward destroying itself in the First World War. And the second stage is Americanisation, whereby everyone everywhere takes up mass fashion, mass sport, mass dance crazes, mass cinema. This homogenisation he equated with the destruction of independence you mentioned—people fighting to destroy their own individuality, really, out of a desire to be part of these different collective crazes of which he saw America as the wellspring.
ANDERSON: Zweig saw this as a kind of American invention. Making popular movements so successful, sweeping up so many people in them—I mean, I guess America is just that way.
PROCHNIK: The whole essay feels weirdly prescient of the critiques we see today. I do want to ask you also about the choice of including the whole of that extraordinary novella Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, which has its own suicide. What was it that drew you to that work in particular?
ANDERSON: Well it was also one of the first ones I read. One of the first of his short stories I came upon. Zweig conjures up the experience of this French resort of the past so vividly there, and this woman. He uses the same storytelling technique again. He sets the stage with a whole circle of people who are responding to something happening among them, a sort of scandal happening among them, but eventually that’s not what this story is about. That’s just a sort of prelude. And I loved that form. And then I was also taken with how this person who you get to know on the surface as an older person is so clearly drawn. And when she finally tells her own story that image is completely broken, and you realise how thoroughly you did not know her and her history. Some of Zweig’s short stories have been done as whole films, and I think that this one—you could see Max Ophüls doing Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman and making a masterpiece.
PROCHNIK: With all of the despair in Zweig’s stories and life, he shows us again and again that there were just a hell of a lot of splendid spots around Europe to go to and to spend time in. Even in the little sketches he gives, there’s something so visually charismatic in just the suggestion of what these places were. We somehow feel an aura of that luminous life—
ANDERSON: That luxury.
PROCHNIK: You really show that compellingly. You did an amazing job of revealing how parts of the fairy tale were real in the landscapes—and the hotels of course.
ANDERSON: One thing we came across as we were trying to figure where to do this movie was a collection of images on the US Library of Congress website. There’s this thing, the Photochrom Collection. Two different companies—one Swiss and one American—had a sort of joint venture, where they took black-and-white photographs all over the world, and then they colourised them and mass-produced them. And there are thousands of them. They’re from maybe 1895 to 1910, something like that, all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Prussia, and all over the world. I compare it to the Google Earth of the turn of the century. These are almost all landscapes and cityscapes. There are places that are just known as views. There are many, many of these spots where you can see a little terrace that’s been created, just because people would walk to this place and look out. It’s wonderful, and it really influenced our movie. There’s a wonderful photochrom of the hotel that I always thought of as sort of the model for our hotel, which is the Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, which was Carlsbad. The thing we learned when we visited all sorts of places that we found on this collection of pictures was that none of them were enough like what they once were to work for us. But the photochrom images seemed to tap into a truth about Zweig’s vision of the world that I was able to draw on in developing a visual aura for the film.
In The Post Office Girl, Zweig’s description of the grand hotel in Switzerland is so evocative. The protagonist is a girl who works in the post office. She’s invited to stay in this hotel as a gift from her rich aunt, and when she arrives in this place, the management thinks she’s there to make a delivery. Her suitcase is a basket. Finally they realise she’s actually going to be a guest in the hotel, which is unlike anywhere she’s ever been. Her point of view about this treatment she receives, and her experience of walking in and realising, “This is where I’m going to sleep”, is so powerful. But also that by the time her hol
iday abruptly ends, she is already addicted to this other way of life, and her existence is so dramatically changed, and a sort of desperation comes over her—and then a connection she makes with someone who is in his own desperate state. The idea of that work being something that had been out of print for that long is sort of surreal.
PROCHNIK: I agree. This idea—that a brief exposure to how good life can be was a fatal infection, in terms of the social order of that time—is rendered so powerfully. The notion that really, when life was good in pre-War Europe, it could be awfully sweet. But it’s interesting—when you described going around looking for a place in the real world to film, and not finding one, I thought also of the sentiment expressed near the end of your film, when the possibility is raised that the world M. Gustave inhabits may really have ceased to exist even before he entered it. There is the suggestion that the whole thing is a feat of imagination. I think this resonates with the embrace of illusion in The World of Yesterday. It gets away from the idea that Zweig was just unable to see reality, and moves more towards the notion that he just had a huge desire to live in the imagination so fully that it would diminish the impact of the real.
ANDERSON: That’s a good one! That might be a good ending.
FEBRUARY 2014
From
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY
Selections from the memoirs
of Stefan Zweig
THE WORLD OF SECURITY
Reared as we are, in quiet and in peace,
Now all at once we’re thrown upon the world.
Thousands of waves wash round us without cease,
Often delighted, sometimes pleased, we’re whirled
From joy to grief, and so from hour to hour
Our restless feelings waver, change and sway.
Our senses know a strange, tumultuous power,
And in the turmoil find no place to stay.
GOETHE
IF I TRY TO FIND some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our Austrian Monarchy, then almost a thousand years old, seemed built to last, and the state itself was the ultimate guarantor of durability. The rights it gave its citizens were affirmed by our parliament, a freely elected assembly representing the people, and every duty was precisely defined. Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in the form of shiny gold coins, thus vouching for its own immutability. Everyone knew how much he owned and what his income was, what was allowed and what was not. Everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight. If you had wealth, you could work out precisely how much interest it would earn you every year, while civil servants and officers were reliably able to consult the calendar and see the year when they would be promoted and the year when they would retire. Every family had its own budget and knew how much could be spent on food and lodging, summer holidays and social functions, and of course you had to put a small sum aside for unforeseen contingencies such as illness and the doctor. If you owned a house you regarded it as a secure home for your children and grandchildren; property in town or country was passed on from generation to generation. While a baby was still in the cradle, you contributed the first small sums to its way through life, depositing them in a money box or savings account, a little reserve for the future. Everything in this wide domain was firmly established, immovably in its place, with the old Emperor at the top of the pyramid, and if he were to die the Austrians all knew (or thought they knew) that another emperor would take his place, and nothing in the well-calculated order of things would change. Anything radical or violent seemed impossible in such an age of reason.
This sense of security was an asset owned by millions, something desirable, an ideal of life held in common by all. Life was worth living only with such security, and wider and wider circles were eager to have their part in that valuable asset. At first only those who already owned property enjoyed advantages, but gradually the population at large came to aspire to them. The era of security was also the golden age of the insurance industry. You insured your house against fire and theft, your land against damage by storms and hail, your body against accidents and sickness; you bought annuities for your old age; you put insurance policies in your girl children’s cradles to provide their future dowries. Finally even the working classes organised themselves to demand a certain level of wages as the norm, as well as health insurance schemes. Servants saved for their old age, and paid ahead of time into policies for their own funerals. Only those who could look forward with confidence to the future enjoyed the present with an easy mind.
But for all the solidity and sobriety of people’s concept of life at the time, there was a dangerous and overweening pride in this touching belief that they could fence in their existence, leaving no gaps at all. In its liberal idealism, the nineteenth century was honestly convinced that it was on the direct and infallible road to the best of all possible worlds. The people of the time scornfully looked down on earlier epochs with their wars, famines and revolutions as periods when mankind had not yet come of age and was insufficiently enlightened. Now, however, it was a mere matter of decades before they finally saw an end to evil and violence, and in those days this faith in uninterrupted, inexorable ‘progress’ truly had the force of a religion. People believed in ‘progress’ more than in the Bible, and its gospel message seemed incontestably proven by the new miracles of science and technology that were revealed daily. In fact a general upward development became more and more evident, and at the end of that peaceful century it was swift and multifarious. Electric lights brightly lit the streets by night, replacing the dim lamps of the past; shops displayed their seductive new brilliance from the main streets of cities all the way to the suburbs; thanks to the telephone, people who were far apart could speak to each other; they were already racing along at new speeds in horseless carriages, and fulfilling the dream of Icarus by rising in the air. The comfort of upper-class dwellings now reached the homes of the middle classes; water no longer had to be drawn from wells or waterways; fires no longer had to be laboriously kindled in the hearth; hygiene was widespread, dirt was disappearing. People were becoming more attractive, stronger, healthier, and now that there were sporting activities to help them keep physically fit, cripples, goitres and mutilations were seen in the streets less and less frequently. Science, the archangel of progress, had worked all these miracles. Social welfare was also proceeding apace; from year to year more rights were granted to the individual, the judiciary laid down the law in a milder and more humane manner, even that ultimate problem, the poverty of the masses, no longer seemed insuperable. The right to vote was granted to circles flung wider and wider, and with it the opportunity for voters to defend their own interests legally. Sociologists and professors competed to make the lives of the proletariat healthier and even happier—no wonder that century basked in its own sense of achievement and regarded every decade, as it drew to a close, as the prelude to an even better one. People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches; our fathers were doggedly convinced of the infallibly binding power of tolerance and conciliation. They honestly thought that divergences between nations and religious faiths would gradually flow into a sense of common humanity, so that peace and security, the greatest of goods, would come to all mankind.
Today, now that the word ‘security’ has long been struck out of our vocabulary as a phantom, it is easy for us to smile at the optimistic delusion of that idealistically dazzled generation, which thought that the technical progress of mankind must inevitably result in an equally rapid moral rise. We who, in the new century, have learnt not to be surprised by any new outbreak of collective bestiality, and expect every new day to prove even worse than the day just past, are considerably more sceptical about prospects for the moral education of humanity. We have found that we have to agree with Freud, who saw ou
r culture and civilisation as a thin veneer through which the destructive forces of the underworld could break at any moment. We have had to accustom ourselves slowly to living without firm ground beneath our feet, without laws, freedom or security. We long ago ceased believing in the religion of our fathers, their faith in the swift and enduring ascent of humanity. Having learnt our cruel lesson, we see their overhasty optimism as banal in the face of a catastrophe that, with a single blow, cancelled out a thousand years of human effort. But if it was only a delusion, it was a noble and wonderful delusion that our fathers served, more humane and fruitful than today’s slogans. And something in me, mysteriously and in spite of all I know and all my disappointments, cannot quite shake it off. What a man has taken into his bloodstream in childhood from the air of that time stays with him. And despite all that is dinned into my ears daily, all the humiliation and trials that I myself and countless of my companions in misfortune have experienced, I cannot quite deny the belief of my youth that in spite of everything, events will take a turn for the better. Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.
Now that a great storm has long since destroyed it, we know at last that our world of security was a castle in the air. Yet my parents lived in it as if it were a solid stone house. Not once did a storm or a cold draught invade their warm, comfortable existence. Of course they had special protection from cold winds; they were prosperous people who grew rich, then even very rich, and wealth comfortably draught-proofed your windows and walls in those times. Their way of life seems to me typical of the Jewish middle classes that had made significant contributions to Viennese culture, only to be exterminated root and branch by way of thanks, and I can say impersonally of their comfortable and quiet existence that, in that era of security, ten or twenty thousand Viennese families lived just as my parents did.
