Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (48 page)

Having sorted out this and other administrative matters, it was time to leave. In
Die Welt von Gestern
Zweig describes the end of his stay:

In those last two days in Vienna I gazed upon every one of the familiar streets, every church, every garden, every old corner of the city in which I was born, with a silent, despairing “Never again”. I embraced my mother with that unspoken feeling, “This is the last time”. I had that sense of “Never again!” about everything in this city and this country, conscious that this was a farewell, a farewell for all time. The train took me past Salzburg, the city in which stood the house where I had worked for twenty years, but I didn’t even get out at the station. I could have seen my house on the hill from the window of the carriage, with all the memories of bygone years. But I chose not to look. What would have been the point?
¹²

The selection of manuscripts that he “donated” at this time is worth looking at briefly. They consisted largely of manuscripts by contemporary authors, most of which Zweig had acquired as gifts himself, including a page from Franz Kafka’s novel
Amerika
, given to him by Max Brod, and the sketch
Die Hungernden,
which Thomas Mann had sent him. An official sale of these items would hardly have been possible, but there was no real need to select these particular manuscripts for disposal. Having offloaded his collection of older German literature onto Hinterberger, Zweig now picked out manuscripts by Hesse, Hauptmann, Roth and Rolland: as in real life his circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances was already breaking up and falling apart, so they were now lost to him a second time in symbolic form.

In particular his decades-old friendship with Rolland had taken a battering of late. Increasingly the two one-time close companions found themselves at odds in their assessment of current events and in the conclusions they drew from them. Zweig took Rolland to task for his pro-Stalin phase, while for Rolland Zweig had been far too timid and not radical enough on many issues. Rolland’s support for Friderike during the quarrels over the house and marriage were a source of further friction in his relations with Stefan. And even when they were on seemingly safe ground, such as their shared interest in old manuscripts, resentment could quickly flare up. When Rolland learnt indirectly that Zweig had started to dispose of
his collection, he accused him of failing to inform him. Furthermore, so Rolland claimed in his letter, Zweig had never sent him details of his many Beethoven items, even though he had known perfectly well how much he, Rolland, was interested in the composer’s life and work: “I cannot understand how you could have let them go to strangers, who cannot possibly appreciate them as much as I do, rather than showing them to me.”
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Admittedly Rolland had been misinformed, and his memory had also deceived him. Firstly, contrary to what he had evidently been told, Zweig was not selling off the entire collection; and secondly, Zweig had most certainly told his friend earlier, and with great pride, about his successful forays into Beethoven memorabilia.

Zweig’s relationship with Joseph Roth, whom he greatly admired for his writing abilities, was of much more recent standing. When Roth’s wife Friederike, diagnosed with a serious nervous illness, was placed permanently in a sanatorium, her husband had descended into alcoholism. When Roth found himself in a desperate state at the start of the 1930s, Zweig had done all he could to help him. Roth’s addiction soon threatened to turn ugly, and he was not the easiest person to live with. His relationship with Zweig was also put under strain by the fact that Roth, like Rolland, remained close friends with Friderike Zweig, which led to unpleasant scenes around the time when the Salzburg household was being broken up. In May 1937, when Zweig was in Salzburg and Roth was there at the same time to lend support to Friderike, Stefan avoided a meeting with him, and Roth flew into a rage: “You spend a lot more time with assorted shits than you do with me! (I have found this out by chance.)”
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Before long the situation had calmed down somewhat, and Stefan was able to tell Friderike that Roth had sent him a copy of his latest book: “It’s a miracle, really, that his brain has survived relatively undamaged. He is exactly the same great artist that he was before, and perhaps it is just the subject matter that now seems not quite so fresh and new to us as it did back then. But it does look as if there is hope for him yet. What he needs, though, is a dragon of a wife—instead of all those people who just encourage his alcoholism.”
¹⁵

When his books were banned in Germany, Roth moved first to Austria and then to Paris. He met Zweig a few more times in exile—the latter cutting a very different figure from the impoverished and down-at-heel appearance of the other émigrés. Roth’s lover, the writer Irmgard Keun, tells of a visit in Ostende: “Stefan Zweig looked very decorative—exactly like a cinema-goer’s notion of a famous writer. Cosmopolitan, elegant,
dapper, with a gentle melancholy in his dark gaze. [ … ] He spoke of Vienna with a passionate intensity, and painted charming pastel scenes of a life that had already begun, quietly and inexorably, to rot and decay.”
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On 12th March 1938 Adolf Hitler ordered his troops into Austria. Just three days later a jubilant crowd at a rally in Vienna listened as he announced the
Anschluss
—the “annexation” of his homeland to the German Reich. The sinister laws and regulations that had been passed since he came to power in Germany now applied with immediate affect to Austrian Jews and dissidents. A new wave of emigration began. At the last minute the seriously ill Sigmund Freud, whom Zweig had visited again during his stay in Vienna in November 1937, was able to get out with his family, travelling via Paris to London. He too took only a portion of his extensive library with him into exile. The books left behind in Vienna were sold by a canny antiquarian bookseller—none other than Heinrich Hinterberger, who now listed his place of business in his latest catalogues for foreign customers as “Vienna (Germany)”.
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His fears for relatives and friends, prompted by the threatening National Socialist presence in Austria, were now compounded by business disasters of his own. Stefan Zweig’s publishing house in Vienna had ceased to exist with the
Anschluss
. Herbert Reichner had promptly fled to Zurich with his family, and moved to the USA in 1939, where he later opened up an antiquarian bookshop. His collaboration with Zweig, over the relatively short period when his books were published by Reichner, had been marked by growing tensions. To begin with Zweig was able to repeat his success at Insel by getting some of his ideas and suggestions adopted by his publisher. Thus he successfully persuaded Reichner to take on the young writer Elias Canetti and his book
Die Blendung
. In 1936 Zweig’s book
Castellio gegen Calvin oder Ein Gewissen gegen die Gewalt
had appeared, in which, as a result of misinformation, he had made an embarrassing error, which the printer had only been able to correct in some copies of the first edition. In the autumn of the same year Reichner had published the two volumes
Die Kette
and
Kaleidoskop
, which contained Zweig’s collected novellas and short stories. But certain editorial decisions had been taken without consulting the author, who fumed with rage at his publisher: “He’s done everything wrong. Instead of the title
Collected Short Stories Volume I and Volume II
, and then the subtitles, he has simply left out the series title, [ … ]. And the binding is cheap and nasty, just plain burlap—I’m in despair, because from now on I’ll have to check up on everything myself (in all
languages). How different it was with Insel! But this pig-headed idiot just messes everything up.”
¹⁸

As well as a few minor publications and limited editions for bibliophiles, Reichner had originally planned to bring out a major edition of Stefan Zweig’s collected works, which had been made possible by his departure from Insel in February 1936. But only a month later the distribution and sale of all Zweig’s books had been officially banned in Germany. Reichner’s remaining book stocks in Leipzig had then been confiscated, and it was only after protracted negotiations that their release was secured and they could be taken out of the country.

To cap it all the widow of the publisher E P Tal, who had published Zweig’s collection of essays
Fahrten
shortly after the war, had objected to any of this material being reprinted in the proposed new edition of his works. In legal terms she had little prospect of success, as the earlier fee payment had been tied to the one-time publication; but the correspondence between Zweig, his Viennese lawyer Josef Geiringer, the publisher’s widow and her legal representative filled an entire file and caused a great deal of trouble.

The last book of Zweig’s that Reichner published was his study of Magellan, which came out in mid-November 1937 (and was already dated 1938 on the title page). When conditions in Vienna descended into chaos, Zweig formally terminated his contract with Reichner in April 1938. Consequently the agreement he had already signed for the publication of his first novel
Ungeduld des Herzens
now lapsed. But in the event Zweig was without a publisher for only a few weeks. Gottfried Bermann Fischer, the son-in-law of the publisher Samuel Fischer who had died in 1934, had set up his own publishing house in Vienna, Bermann-Fischer Verlag, which he later ran from his Swedish exile in Stockholm. Zweig now joined his list of authors. Initially his books were also published in collaboration with the Dutch publishing house Allert de Lange in Amsterdam.

Zweig’s brother Alfred left Vienna at the end of March 1938 together with his wife Stefanie, travelling unhindered to Switzerland, where, as a Czech national, he had no difficulty getting a residence permit. His mother Ida, on the other hand, faced with the decision to abandon her home, was neither able nor willing to act with the urgency that the dramatic pace of events demanded. As the holder of an Austrian passport she would not have been allowed to enter Switzerland anyway at that time. By the beginning of June, after a great deal of effort, Alfred had finally found a way,
with the assistance of the lawyer at the Czech Embassy in Paris, to secure an exit visa for his mother and her nurse to travel to France. But despite all his efforts, the old lady felt too weak to make the arduous journey, and the return of a serious stomach complaint put an end to the plan for good.

Before leaving Austria Alfred had been able to make arrangements for his mother’s constant care. The task was shared between her nephew, Egon Frankl, Alfred’s long-serving secretary Fräulein Schönkopf, two home helps from the Garnisongasse and Alfred’s own housekeeper, Frau Kruder. Responsibility for his mother’s medical care rested with internist Dr Gang and a nurse, although the latter was not permitted, as an Aryan, to stay overnight with her Jewish patient. Alfred telephoned twice a day from Zurich to get an update on his mother’s health from the staff and the doctor in the Garnisongasse. In the evening he would then telephone his brother with a situation report. By the end of July Ida Zweig’s condition had deteriorated further, and it very quickly became hopeless. She succumbed to her illness on 23rd August 1938, having slipped into unconsciousness more than a week earlier. Alfred was informed immediately of his mother’s death, and he telephoned Stefan with the sad news, which in a way came as a relief.

Ida Zweig’s burial in the family grave in the Jewish section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery took place a few days later. Except for the nurse, everyone who had supported her in her last days was there, and the family lawyer had also attended. As was the family custom, no formal notice of the bereavement appeared until after the funeral.

In the coming weeks numerous valuables and memorabilia from Ida Zweig’s apartment went missing. Alfred had already taken steps earlier to ensure that a portion of her correspondence was destroyed for security reasons. But his mother’s jewellery, which was kept in a safe, disappeared along with her collection of newspaper cuttings and other papers that included poems, essays, critical writings and book reviews by her son Stefan.

Under the terms of the will, Alfred and Stefan inherited equal shares in the parental home at Garnisongasse 10. For both brothers the prospect of ever seeing the house again, let alone being able to live there themselves, was remote indeed. Alfred had however acted in good time to protect his own house at Sieveringerstrasse 75 in the Döbling district of Vienna. Before leaving Austria he had made over the property to his father-in-law Franz Duschak for a monthly payment of one hundred
schilling
. Since his wife’s family had no Jewish roots, Alfred could at least feel that he had done
everything in his power to protect the land and the house from seizure as Jewish assets, in the hope of holding on to them until better times returned. In the case of the weaving mill in Ober-Rosenthal he had made several unsuccessful attempts to sell the business prior to 1938. In 1941, after Czechia had also been occupied by German troops, Alfred Zweig—now living in New York—received a letter from E Just, a lawyer in Reichenberg, who had been appointed trustee by the chief district official. Without prior notice the shares in the mill owned by the Zweig brothers had been sold to Vereinigte Färbereien AG in Reichenberg. Alfred wrote several letters of protest, but received no reply—the business was lost.

Stefan had other losses of his own to contend with. He never received the second instalment of the purchase price for his house, and on his fifty-seventh birthday in November 1938 his lawyer Josef Geiringer in Vienna drafted a letter to him in which he catalogued the assets now remaining to him in Austria—or Germany, as it now was—for the purposes of declaring them to the authorities under the provisions of the so-called “Jewish asset tax”, and making an application for their release. The final total of 255,703
Reichsmark
, of which twenty per cent, or more than 51,000
Reichsmark
, were to be seized by the government, was principally made up of Stefan’s share of the house in the Garnisongasse, his paper securities, the money held in various publishing house accounts, the liquid assets deposited with Geiringer and his as yet unsold manuscripts.
¹⁹
After a few adjustments Zweig was required to pay the sum of 48,600
Reichsmark
in four instalments by 15th August 1939 into the account of the Moabit-West Tax Office in Berlin. As the statement of account expressly stipulated, no extension of the payment period would be granted “under any circumstances”.
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