Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (17 page)

In later years Friderike left a good deal unexplained about her own origins and about her relationship with Felix von Winternitz, so that even today any account of these matters must necessarily be incomplete. The couple had married in a Catholic ceremony, but they came originally from Jewish families. On 25th September 1905, the year before her wedding, Friderike had left the Jewish religious community in Vienna and been baptised. It was possibly only then that she took her second name Maria, which she nearly always used in addition to Friderike thereafter, even if sometimes only in the form of the initial “M”. Alfred Zweig tells us that he seems to recall Fritz von Winternitz was also baptised as a Catholic long after his birth.

The marriage was probably an unhappy one from the start. Friderike’s veiled reference, in her first letter to Stefan Zweig, to a “turning point” in her life that she saw coming in 1908 related to her increasingly strong feeling that she and her husband, who was now working as a commissioner of finance, were drifting further and further apart in their intellectual interests. Added to this were some very disagreeable things she was learning about him. On the afternoon of that day in Rodaun, when Girardi sang his melancholy songs of farewell in the evening, she had visited Felix in hospital. It had not escaped her notice that despite the stomach complaint that the doctors had diagnosed, he was feeling well enough to devote a great deal of attention to a female fellow patient. In search of a little welcome distraction that evening, she had left her infant daughter with a nurse and gone off to the recital with a friend of the family. This man,
whom Friderike identifies only by his Christian name Clemens, pointed out Stefan Zweig to her; and he it was also who had now given her the Insel volume as a present.

In spite of everything the relationship between Friderike and Felix survived, and at times it even seemed to have improved. In 1910 a second daughter was born, Susanna Benediktine, who became known as Suse. When she fell ill before the age of two, suffering from a life-threatening chronic metabolic disorder, her father proved to be of little help, so that Friderike and the two children were largely left to fend for themselves. Despite constant worries about the health of her younger daughter, she made efforts to establish a certain independence from her husband, and continued to work at her own writing. She was supported in this by her father-in-law, with whom she seems to have developed a far closer relationship over the years than the one she had with his son, her husband.

When she saw Zweig again in the summer of 1912, her marriage had reached another low point. She even ventured to request a personal meeting with the unmarried Zweig, but this was thwarted initially by his annual summer trip to France, which he naturally wanted to take again this year. He travelled to France at the beginning of August, and on his return at the end of the month he found her next letter waiting for him. In the meantime she had continued to study his books, had read
Tersites
, and enclosed a few of her own newspaper articles with the letter. The long-awaited meeting still failed to materialise, however—invited to visit him in his apartment, she had to cry off at the last minute because her daughter had fallen ill, and shortly after that she departed on her own travels, to Krumau in Bohemia.

And what did the writer do in this situation? He reached for his pen. But what he now began to write was not a poem or a short story, but a diary. Zweig had made diary notes much earlier in his life, but no pages, jottings or notebooks from this time have survived. How extensive these older writings were, what periods they covered, and whether they were destroyed by Zweig himself or simply lost, is only partly known. We do know that he kept a diary of his visit to Verhaeren in 1902. And during his first stays in Paris and London, the two years that he later called the most intensive of his whole life, the diary was his constant companion; but these volumes were later stolen. Doubtless he frequently went back to keeping a diary thereafter, although we have no firm evidence of this.

But now at all events, on 10th September 1912, a few weeks after the first letter from Friderike and a few months before his thirty-first birthday,
he takes up the pen again to record his daily doings. Some time must have elapsed since his last diary notes, because the first entry in the new notebook reads like the preface to some new and momentous undertaking:

Today, on a day chosen at random, I begin my diary again—as I have so many times before! The reason: I realised when rereading an earlier diary how dull, how dangerously and desperately dull my memory has become. Things written there that were clearly felt very intensely at the time are now just words on the page, alien and forgotten, and however deep I dig into my memories I can no longer put faces to any of these people. Perhaps this whole hunger of mine to experience things over again is rooted in the fact that I have no hold on the past, that everything with me is in constant flow, so to speak, so that my life would dry up the moment that nothing new flowed into it. [ … ] And so I begin again—though for how long … This time it will be a test of willpower, and every day that passes tells me that I badly need to steel my will. The mood in which I am living is flat and dull. It’s strange, but this sense of vibrancy in the city, the excitement over my
Haus am Meer
, I just don’t feel it within myself; any one of those sexual adventures means more to me, and yet it’s only the risk that appeals. Now I want to see if I have enough self-discipline to wind up a steel spring inside me each night, just as I wind up my watch, and give an account of myself, take stock—even on those days of dreamy indolence. In the weeks ahead there are a lot of decisions to be made in my outer life, and my inner self—if it is still capable of reacting—needs to get a grip and think more about what I am doing. [ … ] Let us put it to the test.
⁴

The choice of this particular time to start keeping a diary again was not, of course, quite as random as Zweig would have us believe in his opening sentence. Rehearsals for his new play
Das Haus am Meer
were about to start, and the prospect of a personal meeting with Frau von Winternitz, whose letters had affected him more deeply than those of other admirers, was sufficient cause for nervous agitation.

The meeting was finally arranged for the end of the month, doubtless over the telephone. Zweig turned up at her apartment on the afternoon of 23rd September. As a gift for his hostess he had brought along a copy of his collection of short stories,
Erstes Erlebnis
. They talked about literature, but the conversation soon turned to more personal matters. She said how tragic it was that a woman could only have children by one man, a remark that impressed Zweig enormously by its boldness and honesty. He was
very touched by her affection for her two daughters—when else had he witnessed such family scenes up close like this? When he got home he noted that it had been a “good conversation with a truly sensitive woman”, and tried to analyse his own part in the encounter:

It is a joy to know that my supreme gift in life is to get people to open up, to awaken in them, through a frankness that transcends all shame (and in this I am completely uninhibited), a need on their part to confess their innermost thoughts. What a splendid thing it is, such a thought, which feels as if it is daring to express itself to me in words for the very first time, and is blissfully happy, like a bird that launches itself into the air for the first time, and cries with joy to find that its wings are bearing it aloft. I know that I can often release something in women, and in men too. But I am careful not to exploit this gift for erotic ends; on the contrary, it is through an unspoken erotic denial that I am able to engender this freedom in the first place.

The one disagreeable part of the visit was the arrival of Felix von Winternitz. Friderike was deeply embarrassed, according to Zweig, which he tried “to gloss over as best [he] could”, but when her husband entered the room “it was like a blast of cold air”.
⁵

The days that followed were much like the days that had gone before: Zweig was still unable to concentrate sufficiently to devote himself to important work, and the date of the first performance of his play was drawing inexorably closer. Meanwhile the correspondence with Frau von Winternitz continued apace. In October he engaged a manservant, which he hoped would introduce greater order into every area of his life—a life that continued to be divided, not very productively, between the café, visits to the theatre and evening walks punctuated by occasional “episodes”.

The rehearsals for the new play proved to be an emotional roller coaster for him. One day he would admire the director Albert Heine for his handling of the actors, the next day it was a competition to see who was the more irritable, as they practically came to blows over something or other. Then came the big night of 26th October. Ten days earlier Zweig had sent copies of
Tersites
and
Das Haus am Meer
to Gerhart Hauptmann, whose reply now reached him by telegram in the interval between the two acts of the first-night performance. The timing could hardly have been better. In his next letter Zweig thanked his colleague for his words of encouragement:
“I read your telegram and all my fears were banished: all of a sudden I felt sure of myself.”
⁶
After that, he writes, he had stepped out in front of the curtain without a care, taking no fewer than eight curtain calls at the end of the performance. Afterwards, sitting with a few friends and his brother while congratulations poured in on all sides, he felt his brain stop working, as he wrote in his diary.

The next morning the first reviews were already in the papers. On the whole he had reason to be satisfied, except that “that old duffer Kalbeck” had been “downright aggressive”
⁷
in the
Neues Wiener Tagblatt
(though Zweig quickly made it up with him again). In his review Kalbeck began by criticising the crudely drawn characters, particularly the ageing pilot Gotthold Krüger, who did not have much to say, preferring to clench his fist in his pocket instead, which did not make for a very animated part: “If this is supposed to be a character study drawn from life, this bovine heap of flesh has no place in the theatre, and the playwright had no need to turn him into a gibbering idiot in the course of the play.” It was not a promising start to a review, and sure enough it does not get any better:

Das Haus am Meer
is not short on romanticism. But it is the kind of romanticism that comes from long-forgotten adventure stories, while it also flirts with the popular low-life theatre and the cinematic sketch. Much more interesting than this misconceived play would be a psychological study of its author, enquiring how it is that such a highly cultivated mind, such a gifted and subtle linguist, such an important writer in verse and prose as Stephan Zweig, to whom we owe that perfectly formed book about the Belgian Émile Verhaeren and other things besides, could have got it so badly wrong. Did this decadent, schooled in the works of Verlaine and Baudelaire, suddenly crave to play the muscle man? Did the engraver long to wield the carpenter’s hatchet?
⁸

The review printed in the
Hamburger Fremdenblat
t a few days later made for more agreeable reading. The author of the piece was none other than Friderike von Winternitz, who, after an extended break, had gone back to writing occasionally for this paper again. Her review had been shortened for publication, and her father-in-law had added a few words of his own—which annoyed her considerably.

But in the meantime she had been making other plans of her own. By the middle of the month she had written to Zweig to say that she was planning to spend a week or two in Berlin and Hamburg in November.
She had been aware that
Das Haus am Meer
was about to begin a run at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus, and that Zweig had thought about attending the premiere on 23rd November, especially as he would be in transit anyway, since he planned to visit Berlin. She came to see him again in his apartment in the Kochgasse prior to his departure. This was the first time that the two of them had been alone together. Her demeanour was quiet and demure, which attracted him “no end”; but he added: “I dare not make any erotic advances: I cannot give her anything, and I would only wreck things.”
⁹

On 18th November he travelled first to Dresden, where he met his old friend Camill Hoffmann again after a long interval. From there he journeyed on to Berlin. This time he stayed at the Fürstenhof. Friderike von Winternitz had gone on ahead of him, and, claiming not to like her own hotel, the Excelsior, took a room in the same establishment as Zweig (which of course she found charming). This was not to be purely a pleasure trip for Friderike either, as she was trying to establish contacts with publishers in order to develop her writing interests. She eventually received a letter that Zweig had posted from Hamburg. He had decided to attend the premiere of his play after all, and had already reserved a room for her in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, where he himself was staying. When she arrived, she found a bouquet of flowers from him in her room, which looked out over the Inner Alster. In a letter he wrote that he wanted to save up their reunion until after the first performance of his play, as a reward; and he suggested that they could combine this with celebrating his birthday together in Lübeck (to which end he summarily moved his birthday forward by two days—which of course she could not know).

The premiere of his play went brilliantly, once again he had to take repeated curtain calls, and he looked a good deal more relaxed than he had a few weeks previously, at the very first performance before a local Viennese audience. Three days later he had arranged to meet Friderike von Winternitz in the evening in Lübeck. She had spent the day looking round the city and making an excursion to the nearby Baltic coast. When Zweig arrived at the station they went off to the Ratskeller for dinner, where he began by quizzing her in the manner of a professor—had she managed to see all the sights of the city? Cathedral? Holsten Gate? Town Hall? Marienkirche? Yes, she had seen them all. The mood soon became more relaxed, they drank champagne to celebrate the occasion (the ostensible occasion and the actual one), and later repaired to the Hotel Stadt
Hamburg, where doubtless one room sufficed for their needs this time. “In Travemünde I saw the sea for the first time”, wrote Friderike in her memoirs, “what would my normal life feel like after this trip? In Lübeck I forgot all about my normal life.”
¹⁰
And Zweig, for his part, did not forget to tear out the four pages in his diary that related to this trip.