Messages from a Lost World

by Stefan Zweig

  In the essay ‘History as Poetess’ (1931), Zweig shows the central position of history in his world view and in his writings. He paints history not as the mere roll call of facts and dates, but as “the workshop of God”, where facts are only made meaningful by the poetic authority of those who transmit them. Once more, the notion of a European or world community saturates the text: “history only lives where it achieves a certain poetic grandeur, which is why the highest accomplishment of a people is to transform as much of its national history into world history as possible, its private people’s myth into a world myth”. He also says: “A nation gains more power in the spiritual space, the more poetically it can present its historical existence and development in the world.” Zweig lambasts the “ersatz” history of popular romantic biography favoured in the present, castigating those who muddle historical fact and adjust it to suit their story and in order to sell more copies. Zweig praises the genuine creative storytellers, those who take the raw material of historical fact and, without adulterating it, place it before us in such a way that it becomes meaningful, enhancing our knowledge rather than leaving us with a falsified theatrical approximation.

  ‘The Historiography of Tomorrow’ (1939) begins with the portrait of Europe being locked in a moral crisis and its peoples the victims of a persistent angst, all a by-product of world war. Like a doctor searching for a cure whilst his patient ebbs away on the operating table, Zweig determines that the artificially feverish atmosphere, like any drug or stimulant prescribed for too long, must be reduced. Zweig has noted how when the war, and thus “the obligatory hatred and murder”, abruptly ends, “like turning off a gas tap”, it cannot be expected that the populace will relinquish the impulses they have become accustomed to over four years. Thus the so-called peace is anything but. Zweig argues that the militaristic generation which inflicted this nightmare on mankind must be shed like a rotten branch, allowing new progressive branches to grow from the European trunk. For this there must be a wholly new conception of history, with a spiritual bent, focusing on intellectual and scientific achievements rather than military prowess and flag-waving heroism. He criticizes the way history was taught in his own youth, always reinforcing a nationalistic outlook, where each country feels that it alone must be the most powerful, the most righteous one. Zweig thunders, “With our blood seething in our veins, we can only tremble at the thought that, due to this kind of skewed education, the innocent and credulous new generation of young people might be heading for an even more appalling bloodbath than the last.” Only by introducing a new vision of history as the holding pen of the creative spirit will mankind recover from this “fever”, this bacillus, and extricate itself from the cycle of destruction. “It is only in this way that we can console ourselves and guard against the insanity of nationalism and dictators who are bent on launching peoples against one another, ever forcing us backwards politically when the natural momentum is to go forwards. Only when we access this new sense of being will we learn the history of tomorrow; only then will it be possible no longer to despair at our epoch and to retain, even if we failed as citizens, the pride to be men of our time. Only then will we be able to face without horror the bloody vortex of history, when we see it as a necessary creative stage for a new and more meaningful future, as preparation for a complete reworking of humanity.”

  V

  One of Zweig’s preoccupations, which appears in a number of his essays, is the stark difference between the atmosphere preceding the conflict in 1914 and that in 1939 and its repercussions for Europe. In the fascinating comparison essay ‘1914 and Today’ (1936), Zweig sees his generation as being blind to events, craftily hoodwinked, deceived into war by a minority of determined warmongers who took advantage of the naivety and trustfulness of the people who, on the eve of conflict, still believed at the eleventh hour that it could never happen, and that all was being done to prevent it, that the great socialist leaders would never let it happen, when in fact, due to the machinations of a clutch of powerfully positioned, unscrupulous individuals and the irresistible tide of fate, it had already begun. But in 1939/40 we see the polar opposite. “Whilst in 1914 every intellectual, every politician dared not speak of war or seem to glorify it, today in Europe and in Japan whole peoples are educated and disciplined solely with a view to waging war and with blatant cynicism the whole economic structure of the country is galvanized with this single aim in mind.” Zweig repeats this theme in a later essay, ‘Gardens in Wartime’ (Stefan Zweig, Journeys, Hesperus Press, 2010), which he wrote in England in 1940, while he experienced the so-called phoney war. Comparing it with the febrile gung-ho atmosphere of 1914, he explains that “in 1939 war did not arise suddenly, it simply gave concrete forms to fears already present… they endured the war because it was necessary to do so, as something inevitable.” Here, in the 1936 essay, this idea has already formed. “They await war as if for a perfectly natural event, almost as if of necessity, and that is why the current generation has no excuse to be ‘surprised’ by war as in 1914. For it is laboriously announced, prepared quite openly and lucidly. It is not only at the door, it already has its foot in the house.”

  Zweig’s attempt to go behind the scenes of the artistic process, ‘The Secret of Artistic Creation’ (1938), consists of his long-gestated musings on the mysterious processes leading to a finished work. This was a subject which Zweig, experienced collector of manuscripts, musical scores and autographs, not to mention psychological profiler of great artistic and historical figures, would have been particularly drawn to. Rather cleverly Zweig compares investigating this phenomenon to elements of criminology. Although he admits we can never truly know the interior process and should not wish to, we can up to a point “retroactively reconstruct it”. This essay is a tour de force of reflection on the laborious trials or relative ease of the creative process, how each masterpiece is formed at greatly differing speeds and through starkly contrasting processes, according to the habits, vagaries and natural creative velocity of the artist. Zweig, with his immense archive of sources, draws on a range of examples, notably in music, comparing Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn and Wagner, and so on. Zweig concludes: “To create is a constant struggle between the unconscious and the conscious. Without these two elements the creative act cannot happen. They constitute the indispensable foundation; it is within the law of contrast, the final compromise between conscious and unconscious that the artist is imprisoned. Within the limits of this law he remains free.”

  The collection closes with ‘In This Dark Hour’, one of Zweig’s final addresses, a touching speech made to the Pen Club in New York, 1941, heavy with portent and yet displaying characteristic eloquent resistance. Here, Zweig broaches the subject of being a writer in German at a time of acute German shame, stating how he welcomes the fact that he and others have been rejected by “those who have plunged this world into the greatest catastrophe in all history”, but how the burden of being an accessory to their crimes by dint of origin weighs heavy: “we must bear these violations as a secret and odious shame.” Zweig confesses that he cannot abandon the German language, despite the poison with which it is now infected, for, true to form, he argues that it was the language in which “we fought against the self-glorification of nationalism”. Zweig, though, does not, as Thomas Mann did, conveniently distinguish between a Germany of Nazis and a free Germany; Zweig sees Germany as guilty one and all. He has rejected Germany, the country he was closest to, where he was published and admired, yet this rejection was a long time coming and painfully borne. In divers letters to Joseph Roth we see this struggle, as Roth constantly beseeches Zweig to loose the mooring.

  Zweig’s last hope is that the supreme evil of Hitler and his cohorts has inadvertently given rise to a reactive surge for a renewed sense of liberty and inner strength. “It was necessary for this dark hour to fall, perhaps the darkest in history, to make us realize that freedom is as vital to our soul as breathing to our body. I know—never has the dignity of man be
en so abased as now, nor peoples so enslaved and maltreated; never has the divine image of the Creator in all His forms been so vilely defiled and martyred—but never, my friends, never ever has humanity been more aware than now that freedom is indispensable to the soul.” These essays in a sense announce the spiritual will and testament of Stefan Zweig, serving as lucid and expressive declarations of his inner conviction. Though, due to the perennial human aptitude for stupidity and folly, we might not yet be in a position to execute them, even entertain their plausibility, and perhaps never will, we can at least respect the intellectual knowingness and openness with which they are imbued, the insatiable curiosity and sagacity they display, the personal courage they exhibit—a powerful statement of one man’s belief in the potential of humanity to regenerate and compensate for its most heinous crimes.

  WILL STONE

  October 2015

  THE SLEEPLESS WORLD

  THERE IS LESS SLEEP in the world today; longer are the nights and longer the days. In each land of this limitless Europe, in every city, every street, every house, every apartment, the reposeful breath of sleep is now clipped and feverish; like an oppressive and stifling summer night, this inferno of an epoch glows over us, throwing the senses into confusion. Numberless are those who, on whichever side, would otherwise drift through the nocturnal hours in the dark skiff of sleep—gilded with colourful and gently fluttering dreams—but nightly now hear the clocks march, march, march along the hellish path from daylight to daylight, enduring the burrowing beetle of anxieties and dark thoughts relentlessly gnawing and devouring, until the heart is left raw and ailing. From now on all humanity is in thrall to this fever both night and day, a state of terrible and all-consuming watchfulness, sending its shower of sparks across the heightened senses of millions, fate entering, invisibly, by thousands of windows and doors, chasing out sleep, chasing forgetfulness from every couch. There is less sleep in the world today; longer are the nights and longer the days.

  Today no one can be alone with himself and his destiny, each peers out furtively into the far distance. At night, at the hour when he lies awake in his safely locked, guarded house, thoughts turn to friends and those far away: perhaps, at the same hour, a measure of his destiny is fulfilled, a cavalry charge in a Galician village, a naval attack, everything that has happened at every second across thousands and thousands of miles, all that relates to his one single life. And the soul knows, she extends and feels the intimation of a yearning to grasp it all, the burning air of all those desires and prayers, which wing back and forth from one side of the world to the other. A thousand thoughts restlessly on the move, from the silent towns to the military campfires, from the lone sentry on his watch and back again, from the nearest to the most distant, those invisible gliding threads of love and tribulation, a weft of feelings, a limitless network now covering the world, for all days and all nights. How many words they whisper now, how many prayers they send up into the indifferent ether, how much lucid love pulses through each hour of the night! Unremittingly the air quivers with secret waves for which science has no name and whose amplitude no seismograph can measure: but who can judge if they are futile, these desires, if this colossal will, burning from the depths of the soul, can overshoot distances like the vibrations of sound or the convulsions of electricity? Where there was once sleep, unsubstantial rest, there is now a desire for images: always the soul struggles to perceive through the dark night those beings far away, those held close to the heart, and via the imagination each now lives with a range of destinies. A thousand thoughts burrow into sleep, ever and again its swaying edifice topples and the image-rich darkness inclines vacantly over the solitary. Watchers of the nights, men are now also watchers of the days: at this hour, in the most ordinary people one encounters, lies living proof of the power of the orator, the poet, the prophet, for what is most secret in man is, through the diabolical pressure of daily events, forced to the exterior, so that each individual experiences a sudden burgeoning of his vitality. In the same way as elsewhere, in the exterior world, on the field of battle, plain peasants who have spent a lifetime calmly tilling their land in silence and peace are suddenly seized at the emotive hour by the heroic, and some visionary force rises like a lithe flame in people ordinarily taciturn and prone to grumbling; each and every one steps outside the communal circle of existence; those normally only concerned with the working day now sense in every message inspired reality and a compelling image. Today the people endlessly haul their plough of anxieties and visions across the barren soil of night, and, when they finally sink into sleep, surrender themselves to outlandish dreams. Then the blood runs hotter in their veins, and in this sultriness bloom tropical plants of horrors and nervousness, the dreams come, and one’s only salvation is to wake and shrug them off as nothing but useless nightmares, the appalling realities of mankind’s most terrible truth: the war of everyone against everyone.

  Even the most peace-loving today dream of battles, columns rising for the assault and rushing across sleep, the dark blood roaring in the reverberation of the cannon. And if you suddenly awake terror-stricken you hear, with eyes wide open, the thunder of the wagons, the clatter of boots. You listen, lean from the window: and yes it’s true, they’re coming now in long procession, carts and horses along the deserted streets. Some soldiers lead a troop of horses by the reins, steeds that trot obediently with their heavy, deafening tread on the echoing cobbles. And they too, who normally would be resting through the night from their labours in their warm stables, these placid teams are forced apart, their benign brotherhood broken. In the stations you hear cows bellow from the cattle trucks; these patient beasts, wrenched from the warm, soft summer pastures and led into the unknown, even for them in their stupor, sleep is troubled. And the trains force a path through slumbering Nature: she too is startled by the clamour of humanity; flocks of riders gallop at night over fields which for eternity had rested peacefully in the darkness, and above the black expanse of the sea the light pools of the searchlights gleam in a thousand places, brighter than moonlight and more dazzling than the sun, while even below the darkness of the waters is disturbed by submariners seeking their prey. Shots ring out across the mountains, echoing, chasing the birds from their nests, no sleep can be assured, and even the ether, that eternally pristine space, is streaked with the murderous velocity of the aeroplane, those ill-omened comets of our time. Nothing, nothing can bring calm or rest in these days; humanity has dragged animals and nature into its murderous struggle. There is less sleep in the world today; longer are the nights and longer the days.

  But let us reflect, over and again, on the vastness of time and the fact that what is occurring now has no equal in history, reflect on what it means to be only awake, unceasingly awake. Never since it came into being has the whole world been so communally seized by nervous energy. Until now a war was only an isolated flare-up in the immense organism that is humanity, a suppurating limb which could be cauterized and thus healed, whilst all the remaining limbs were free to perform their normal functions without the least hindrance. There were always places that remained untouched, villages which no message from the restless activity ever reached, villages which calmly continued to divide their life between day and night, between labour and rest. Somewhere there was still sleep and silence, people who awoke at daybreak amidst gentle laughter and whose sleep was untrammelled by disturbing dreams. But due to its steady conquest of the globe, humanity forged ever-closer links, so today a fever quivers within its whole organism; horrors easily traverse the entire cosmos. There is not a workshop, not an isolated farm, not a hamlet deep in a forest from which they have not torn a man so that he might launch himself into the fray, and each of these beings is intimately connected to others by myriad threads of feeling; even the most insignificant among them has breathed so much of the feverish heat, his sudden disappearance makes those that remain that much colder, more alone and empty. Each fate leads inexorably to another fate, little circles which grow and
expand in the vast sea of feeling; in this profound connection, in this mutual reinforcement of experience, no one goes into his death as into a vacuum, each takes something from others along with him. Each is pierced through by the gaze of those behind him, and this constant looking and seeing, magnified millionfold and woven into the destiny of whole nations, has created the world’s current state of nervous agitation. All humanity listens keenly, and through the miracle of technology even responds at the same moment. Ships transmit messages across boundless waves, whilst the radio transmitters of Nauen and Paris fire off a message in minutes to the West African colonies and the shores of Lake Chad, as at the same moment the Indians receive it on their scrolls of hemp and lace, then the Chinese on their silk, and so on to the farthest reaches of humanity, the same feverish anxiety arrives and stifles the peaceable course of life. Each keeps watch, each remains at the open window of his senses to receive the slightest message, swallowing reassuringly the word of the heroes and dreading the doubts of the despairing. Prophets, both the genuine and the false, have assumed power over the masses, who now obey and obey again, advancing resolutely into the fever, day and night, the interminably long days and nights of this epoch which demands that each remain in perpetual wakefulness.

  These days had scant respect for those who stood apart, and even those remotest from the battlefield could not disengage from it. Without exception our lives were shaken to the core, and no one, whoever he was, had the right to unmolested sleep in this monstrous excess of agitation. We were all dragged through this enforced migration of nations and peoples, which we either affirmed or denied according to our will. Each became gradually enmeshed in the great event; no one could remain cool in the fiery delirium of the world. Constancy is helpless when realities are utterly transformed; none could stand aloof, secure on his rock above the waves, looking down and smiling knowingly at a world wracked with fever. Whether aware of what was happening or not, all were borne on the current, with no idea where it was leading. No one could cut himself adrift, for our blood and spirit made us part of the river of the nation and each quickening of the current merely drew us farther on, each change in the pulse disrupted further the rhythm of our own life. What new values will exist when this fever has finally dissipated and all that appeared to remain the same will be so entirely different? The German cities, what feelings will they experience when they reflect on themselves after the war? And how different and strange will Paris seem to our new sensitivity! I know myself that from now on, in Liège say, in the same old guest house, I shall hardly be in a position to sit alongside my European friends indulging in the usual sentiments now that a load of German bombs has rained down on the citadel; for between so many friends, from whichever side of the conflict, the shadows of the fallen will be stood and their icy breath will kill any warmth of the spoken word. We will all need to relearn how to proceed from yesterday to tomorrow by way of this indecipherable today, whose violence we only perceive through still more horror, learn how to heal ourselves by finding a new structure of life beyond this ferment which turns our days white-hot and makes our nights so stiflingly oppressive. Another generation are rising undaunted behind us whose feelings have been emboldened by this inferno; they will be quite different, those who saw victories in these years where we only saw retreats, hesitation and lassitude. The pandemonium of these times will give rise to a new order, and our primary concern must be to assist in vigorously shaping it for the better.