Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (36 page)

He fared better in Hanover, when at a “Book Day” in March 1929 he had stepped onto the platform “with a sunny smile and a spring in his step like a breezy compère”, as the
Volkswille
reports.
¹⁹
The
Hannoverscher Anzeiger
reviewed the same event thus:

Then Stephan Zweig appeared, smiling and acknowledging the applause of the audience with a deprecating gesture, and delivered a very finely judged improvisation—“A thank you to books”—in that extraordinarily soft and yet so richly expressive voice of his. Could anything be more beautiful and poignant on “Book Day” than these hauntingly lyrical words that tell of books which fix their patient gaze upon us, and which, taken to hand at the right moment, set us free from the ties of time and space and transport us to the realms of the eternal, while the only thanks we can proffer in return is our love. Stephan Zweig, who with his soft voice, outward appearance and delicacy of feeling could be mistaken for a Frenchman, is an outstanding interpreter of his own poetry.
²⁰

The itinerary for the reading tours strongly favoured the cities of northern and western Germany, as well as Berlin. Zweig was rarely drawn to the east. His appearances there, such as a reading in Breslau, were very much the exception. He never set foot in East Prussia at all. Nor did he ever give a public reading in Leipzig, where his publisher was located. In Salzburg the only reading he did was in private, in his house
or garden, and he never undertook a reading tour in the rest of Austria, apart from a few lectures he gave in Vienna. We can only speculate on the reasons for this, but he was certainly in a position to pick and choose where he made his public appearances. He had taken a strong dislike to Bavaria, ever since the political unrest stirred up there by Erich Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler. When he left Salzburg to go on tour he generally stopped over in Munich only very briefly, just to meet friends and acquaintances, before journeying on to the north as quickly as possible. By way of exception he did give a reading in Munich on one tour in November 1927, and found himself booked into a cinema auditorium, the Phoebus-Palast, where he had to do battle with the unfavourable acoustics. Before an audience of over a thousand he presented his new text on Tolstoy: “The reading was brilliantly attended, Thomas and Heinrich Mann were there, as well as Ponten, etc, but I wasn’t on my best form unfortunately, as I had to improvise and make wild leaps and cuts in my text, and raise my voice to be heard in the huge hall. [ … ] Tomorrow I will look back on it as a useful lesson. Lunch with Bruno Frank, [ … ] then off to see Thomas Mann.”
²¹

From there he travelled on via Stuttgart and Frankfurt am Main to Bremen and finally to Hamburg, a city for which he had long since developed a special affection, referring to it more than once as his favourite city in the Reich. In general he liked Germany north of the Main more and more: “Here in the north I feel as if I am at home”, he wrote to Friderike. And the people on the ground did their best to ensure that the famous writer would enjoy his stay. In Bremen he had been put up in the smart Hillmann Hotel at the management’s expense, at the Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg he was greeted on arrival by a huge bouquet of flowers with the compliments of the hotel manager. As Stefan reported to his wife, he had been given a “magnificent room, although it was naughty of them to make it a double”—an allusion to the first time they travelled together in 1912, when they had stayed at this very hotel.
²²

In Hamburg everything went off very well: “A phalanx of limousines lined up outside, while inside was posted a notice rarely seen this winter—‘Sold out’. A mass of people, expectant and attentive”,
²³
as the
Hamburgischer Correspondent
reported. The audience in the main hall of the Überseeclub, where the reading took place, listened intently and applauded at length. Next day the
Altonaer Nachrichten
paid homage in tones of ringing pathos—“We thank you, Stefan Zweig, thou good and noble man and poet, for 
this edifying hour!”
²⁴
—to “this delicate Viennese sensibility, this humble man with the spiritualised countenance and those indescribably clear and kindly eyes”. But as he gazed out over the Alster from his hotel window, Zweig easily fell prey to melancholy again:

More and more I long to withdraw from the world, to have done with all this public exposure, despite all the agreeable aspects that go with it. Likewise all the letter-writing and fiddling-about: I think to myself [ … ] how wonderful it would be to live a completely private life again, to live one’s own life, and to travel without commitments and other people. Hopefully we can get to that stage; this itinerant artistic life is so artificial, it destroys much that is precious within all of us. Werfel is travelling ahead of me: wherever I do a reading, he was there the day before, and so we never actually meet. It’s just the same porters carrying his luggage out who turn around and take mine in—the whole business in one image! I’m not at all suited to this life of doing the rounds and cutting a figure; I don’t have the ambition for it, and I have too many doubts about the value both of my own work and of that public exposure.
²⁵

At home they were well aware that contact with the public, and the flurry of attention that he attracted on these occasions, much as he sometimes courted it, was not always good for him. The previous year he had begun a letter written during a busy lecture tour with the words: “Hounded like a wild boar, I can only dash off a few quick lines”.
²⁶
And now, as he once again travelled across Germany, “singing for his supper” day after day, he received a letter from Friderike—who was staying in Vienna at the time—to which his mother had added a few affectionate but concerned lines by way of a postscript: “Do take a bit more care of yourself, and don’t be giving lectures every night, it makes you very tense. Affectionately, Your dear old Mama.”
²⁷

But Ida Zweig’s “Stefferl” took little notice of his mother’s advice and was already planning to travel extensively in the coming year. In May 1928 he surprised everybody with thoughts of quite different destinations: “I’ve been quietly here at home for a while, and will remain here, apart from some shorter trips, until the end of July, when I want to go to Belgium. Hopefully I will succeed in my plan to rent two or three rooms there in a private home, thus avoiding the guest house. I’d like to arrange things so that I can move around freely, perhaps leaving my family behind, and going to London or Holland for a time.”
²⁸
That summer he actually was
in Ostende at the time of the Salzburg Festival, and unusually he was accompanied by Friderike and Suse; but he did not travel on to London, which he had not seen for more than twenty years.

When he got back home he found a letter from the Soviet Union in his mail, inviting him to represent Austria at the celebrations for Leo Tolstoy’s centenary. He would need to leave on 7th September, and Zweig accepted the invitation on the spot. The two weeks that separated his departure and his return to Salzburg brought him barely a moment’s respite. On 11th September he wrote to Friderike from the Grand Hôtel in Moscow, recounting the events of the past few days and describing the packed schedule that lay ahead of him:

Arrived Monday three pm, welcomed, photographed, filmed, washed, chatted, had meal, to the magnificent opera house at six, which holds four thousand people, listened to the speeches from the platform for three hours, then made an improvised one myself, while my eyes were dazzled by six searchlights and the cinematographer was cranking his camera alongside me, and I had the radio technicians and four thousand people in front of me, then a drive through the city at one am. Tuesday morning Dostoevsky Museum, the magnificent Historical Museum, then helped to open the Tolstoy House, met endless people, then to the Tolstoy Museum (my Tolstoy book is on sale on every street corner twenty-five kopeks [ … ]). In the afternoon to see Boris Pilniak, all kinds of Russians there, then to some antiquarian booksellers and all over the city in a cab, to the opera in the evening to see Eugene Onegin, now I’m leaving for Tula at twelve o’clock, arriving tomorrow, Wednesday, at six, then by car to Yasnaya Polyana, back through the night on the overnight sleeper (what’s a bed?), on Thursday four museums and ten visits scheduled, including Gorky, theatre in the evening, a walk around town in the night, Friday is another full day, Saturday likewise. On Saturday evening, invited by my publisher, I have an ‘excursion’ to Leningrad, twelve hours in the sleeper, on Sunday see the Rembrandts and Leningrad, returning Sunday evening on the overnight sleeper (another twelve hours), Monday (assuming the train is running) on the sleeper to Warsaw, Tuesday on the sleeper to Vienna, arriving in the afternoon, Thursday or Friday at the latest back in Salzburg. [ … ] It’s all incredibly interesting. I am so pleased to have seen it all, it’s something I shall remember for a lifetime. [ … ] Please acknowledge all letters with the message that I am going to be away for another month. I am well, and feeling fresh and better than ever under the effect of all these impressions. With love, Stefan.
²⁹

Not surprisingly, the country with all its contrasts gave him plenty of material to write about, and as in earlier years he published an extended report of his travels. Readers of the
Neue Freie Presse
could study his account at their leisure in the features section of the paper, serialised over several editions in late October and early November. Right at the beginning of his article he emphasised the completely different scale of things, in every possible way, that visitors to Russia had to get used to. Distances and times were measured by completely different standards, as he discovered after a very short time in the country: “Arriving an hour late for an appointment is not considered discourteous, a four-hour conversation is a little chat, a public address lasting an hour and a half is a short speech.” Zweig was careful to avoiding commenting on the country’s politics, confining himself to a few observations about the public projection of Communist power through red flags floodlit at night and Lenin’s glass coffin. He was more at home pondering the question of whether he might have stood on the walls of the Kremlin at the very spot where Napoleon had once stood to gaze out over the burning city at his feet.
³⁰

The Napoleon connection was an obvious one for Zweig to make, not least because he had recently been reading a good deal about Napoleon’s life and times for his biography of the Police Minister, Joseph Fouché, which was now gradually taking shape. Zweig quietly let it be known to his friends and colleagues that he couldn’t abide the protagonist of his new book, and that he would never again make the mistake of writing about such a monster. Meanwhile he was working in parallel on two new plays, which were also set in the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon: the tragicomedy
Das Lamm des Armen
and the drama
Adam Lux
, about a fervent admirer of the Republic who was born in Mainz and ended his days under the guillotine in the chaos and confusion of the Revolution. He had discovered the historical figure of Lux for himself before the First World War, and had worked at intervals on a dramatisation of his life story. But he just could not find a way to complete the project—only the prologue appeared in print during Zweig’s lifetime, and a further nine sketches for the unfinished play were found in his literary papers. Even if Zweig sometimes claimed the contrary, the theatre remained of great interest to him. In 1927 he had collaborated with Alexander Lernet-Holenia (writing under the joint pseudonym “Clemens Neydisser”, which the critics soon deciphered) on the comedy
Quiproquo—Gelegenheit macht Liebe
, in which the actress Paula Wessely achieved her first stage
success in November 1928; and only a few months previously his play
Die Flucht zu Gott
had been premiered in Kiel.

Two more trips were planned for the end of 1928. The first was a brief excursion to Paris, where a few days before Zweig’s birthday at the end of November the French version of his
Volpone
received its first performance to thunderous applause. On his return he stayed only a few weeks in Salzburg. As Christmas approached he set off alone for Switzerland, where he remained over the holiday period and into the new year. In Montreux he enjoyed some peace and quiet, and even found time for some athletic exertions. While he was there he met up with Rolland on several occasions, and found his friend in uncommonly good form, so that for once Zweig did not need to worry about his state of health. Passing through Zurich on the way there he had met his brother Alfred, who was taking a winter vacation with his wife, and on the way back he stopped off in Basle to see Karl Geigy-Hagenbach.

1929 in its turn was to be another year that Zweig later looked back on as “one mad round”, which saw him chasing in the usual fashion from one manuscript to the next and back and forth across Central Europe. Slowly but surely, the picture that Rolland had painted in the preface to the French edition of
Amok
came to haunt Zweig: “He is constantly on his travels, ranging across every part of the cultural landscape, always observing and making notes; his most personal works are written during brief periods of respite in some hotel room.”
³¹
By March he was touring Belgium and the Netherlands. In Brussels he gave a lecture entitled
Der europäische Gedanke in der Literatur
[
The European Ideal in Literature
]—though it wasn’t entirely his own idea, as he made clear to Geigy-Hagenbach: “This time I was under pressure from all sides to do it. The thing is, this was an international event and they wanted to hear a German perspective at last; and given the nationalistic temper in Germany I was the one who had to step up to the mark, because I am still well thought of there from Verhaeren’s time and because I translated his works.”
³²
Afterwards he travelled on to Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague, where he gave readings from his works and did many book signings.