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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
A collection of the great writer's observations, made during his travels across the Europe he loved so muchWhen I am on a journey, all ties suddenly fall away. I feel myself quite unburdened, disconnected, free – there is something in it marvellously uplifting and invigorating. Whole past epochs suddenly return: nothing is lost, everything still full of inception, enticement.For the insatiably curious, ardent Europhile Stefan Zweig, travel was both a necessary cultural education and a personal balm for the depression he experienced when rooted in one place for too long. He spent much of his life weaving between the countries of Europe, visiting authors and friends, exploring the continent in the heyday of international rail travel.Comprising a lifetime's observations on Zweig's travels in Europe, this collection can be dipped into or savoured at length, and paints a rich and sensitive picture of Europe before the Second World War.Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York – a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
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Contents
Introduction
A day of travel just like so many others over these last years. Is it because the world shakes on its foundations that one is so used to living in perpetual movement? Is it the premonition that a time is approaching when countries will erect barriers between them, so you yearn to breathe quickly, while you still can, a little of the world’s air? Whatever it might be, to travel is for me no longer something foreign, but almost natural. One breaks free with more force from one’s ties and habits, of one’s home and possessions – both become insecure, they no longer miss you. Two suitcases, one containing my clothes, the material necessities, the other my manuscripts, the reserve for work and spirit, and so one is everywhere at home. And if the meaning of life consists in relentlessly discovering in the temporal and intellectual new forms of freedom, it is better perhaps to live with the least possible constraints, the art of leaving behind oneself, without sentimentality, a good portion of one’s past.
Journal entry, 27th September 1935, journey from Paris to London
To merely ascribe to the celebrated Austrian writer Stefan Zweig the title ‘inveterate traveller’ – as one of those who may find literary inspiration, temporary existential relief and inner fulfilment of a kind in the act and the art of travel – to lump him in with other prolific writer-travellers, would be to fail properly to understand the absolutely primary importance of travel or the ‘journey’ to his particular existence. For Zweig, travel, and European travel especially, was unquestionably the fulcrum of his entire adult life. When Zweig talks of travel he means travel by train, taking advantage of a complex rail network that found its golden age in the first half of the twentieth century, allowing the refined, erudite traveller to indulge in the comforting illusion of domestic privacy in the small furnished compartment, woodlined carriages studded with pictures, the handsome dining car, the attentive steward… giving the impression one was somehow still at home but also on the move.
In the journal entry above, Zweig himself articulates the extent to which, by 1935, travel had become not a departure from home, but a home in itself. By this time, Zweig was no longer travelling with a light heart for cultural enrichment alone, to escape a sterile patch in his domestic life or to enhance literary relationships, to perform readings or attend lectures, to write a commission on a certain place for a leading German newspaper, to tease out of a fellow writer another manuscript or letter for his voluminous collection, or any other reason that made up the objectives for the countless journeys that span his working lifetime. In 1934, Zweig – a Jew and committed pacifist, whose celebrated novellas, novels and popular biographies were to burn on pyres in university courtyards across Germany – had abruptly terminated a period of fifteen years living in Salzburg and was if not yet running at full tilt, then jogging purposefully from snowballing Nazi tyranny. Seeking sanctuary in England, Zweig settled first in London then later in Bath, a town enclosed by a rural landscape that reminded the exile of his beloved Salzburg. Then, as Britain was in turn drawn into the war, came the affront of the Austrian-born author being labelled an ‘enemy alien’: he a Jew and victim of the Nazi state! Somewhat unhelpfully indecisive in his personal life, yet prone to dramatic decisiveness when events constituted a direct attack on his person, Zweig embarked for the USA along with his new wife, formerly his secretary, Lotte Altmann. Soon afterwards he moved on to Brazil, a country that had previously seduced him, where he was to remain until the combination of an insidious depression about the internecine events in Europe and the unexpected loneliness of his exile’s vigil culminated in his suicide, alongside his wife, in their small house in Petropolis in February 1942. In the above journal entry, made en route from Paris to London, we have an insight into Zweig’s thoughts as he sensed a perhaps permanent life on the road courtesy of Hitler, an imminent jettisoning of an old life, now outlawed, for a new unknown one, in which a man with two suitcases and a passport would attempt to breathe what was left of ‘the world’s air’ before the hatch of war came down again. These first feelers of anxiety signal the lighting of the fuse that burned on ever more powerfully to reach, seven years later, the explosive ending none had foreseen.
Zweig’s first precocious literary achievements when barely out of his teens were confined to the self-regarding circles of turn-of-the-century literary Vienna. Destined by way of birth and social position to prosper within a privileged artistic milieu where, at least for him, success came too easily, the youthful Zweig sensed that if he was to understand properly what it meant to be human he would have to extricate himself from that rarefied nepotistic circus and get his fingernails dirty in the soil of a wider Europe and beyond. First stop was Berlin, where he attempted rather unconvincingly to live for a time the life of a bohemian. This otherwise undistinguished period of ‘slumming it’ in the more exotic and edgy dens of artistic Berlin was however crucial in terms of contacts, namely his meeting with the influential political figure Walter Rathenau, who impressed on Zweig in no uncertain terms the need for him radically to expand his horizons by travel. Next stop was Belgium, symbolically the crossroads of Europe, where Zweig wrote a postcard in shaky French from Bruges requesting a meeting in Brussels with the famous poet Emile Verhaeren. Thus began a deep friendship of mutual respect that fostered important literary accomplishments on both sides, interrupted only by the outbreak of war in 1914 and Verhaeren’s tragic death two years later, when he was crushed by a train in Rouen station. Verhaeren’s presence in both poetic and personal terms overwhelmed the cosseted Zweig. The fervent Whitmanesque visions of Verhaeren’s poetry and his ever passionate, ever curious, always fair and humane nature, the sheer human impact of this resolutely European-minded man was no less than a revelation to Zweig, heralding a new way of thinking and living that shaped the remainder of his life. Ever faithful to Verhaeren, whom he saw, before the FirstWorldWar tore into such lofty ideals, as one of the key European thinkers, those who together could usher in a vanguard of like-minded spirits to secure a united Europe, Zweig not only wrote an important biography of the Belgian poet, translated into several languages (including English), but secured his reputation in Germany by translating his poetry. Hence we find in the body of Zweig’s work a slightly disproportionate number of essays relating to Belgian locations. At Verhaeren’s urging, which no doubt also influenced a young Rilke to make the same journey shortly after, Zweig sought out the Flemish towns of Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, while during this same period he also travelled south to Provence, to discover Arles, Avignon, Tarascon, St Rémy and Les Baux. Here Zweig encountered the Provençal landscape of a century ago, still enjoying a late flowering of its unique customs, following the renewed exposure and safeguarding of its traditions by its indefatigable native son, the poet Frédéric Mistral.
Thus we have a crop of essays from the period 1902 to 1906, starting with ‘The Season in Ostend’, in which we are given a glimpse of the almost unimaginable luxuries and largely uppercrust decadence of northern Europe’s leading coastal resort, as the town transformed into a glittering playground for the smart set’s summer season and reverted to a lowly fishing port during the dead period of autumn and winter. It is pertinent to read this account and observe the rather drably materialist though in another sense eerily nostalgic Ostend of today, utterly unrecognisable from the grandiose portrait Zweig painted a century before. Ostend never recovered its former grandeur after being levelled by bombs during the Second World War, and ever since has been condemned to pick resignedly at its own architectural scab, the town’s authorities convulsively rebuilding, levelling what remains of its more meaningful past, gentrifying its old venerable art museum into a sterile complex of fashion boutiques, for example, and leaving behind the famously immense curve of the old sea front a monstrous showpiece for bleak functionality at the expense of aesthetic enrichment.
Also included in this period is the curious essay on Hyde Park, where Zweig attempts to articulate the unique character of the largest of London’s parks, to sift from the misty English heath a psychology of place. Here one sees to the fore, perhaps for the first time, the gently probing but determined method of Zweig, where a repetitive handling of the impressionistic material finally distils the nuances he is looking for. Zweig portrays Edwardian-era Hyde Park as a miraculously situated giant garden for the robust English to reveal their leisure and sporting proclivities, whilst at the same time retaining an air of peace and otherness from the metropolis that heaves in on all sides. The result is unexpectedly intriguing.
It would probably be true to say that as Zweig gains experience as both a traveller and a writer, especially after the trauma of world war, his essays exhibit more depth and his concerns take on more urgency. ‘Antwerp’ (1914), ‘Requiem for a hotel’ (1918) and ‘Ypres’ (1928) reflect this trend. In the first we learn of the obsession of Napoleon with that vital port town. Zweig’s evident satisfaction, his determination to acknowledge the schism between the French tyrant’s rapier-like intellectual faculty and his ultimately doomed romantic compulsion, points to the more substantial later monographs on Erasmus and Calvin, and the popular biographies of Marie Stuart, Magellan or the unfinished Balzac. In the essay on Ypres, one of the most assured here, Zweig lays out his pacifist credentials in no uncertain terms. The section ‘Jamboree upon the Dead’ echoes the more acerbic attack by fellow Austrian Karl Kraus, in his ‘Promotional Trips to Hell’ (1921), which one feels Zweig must have read. Kraus’ eruption of contempt for the tourism and media hyenas who profit from the leftover carcass of the war, offering their ‘battlefield tours’ with every luxury and comfort afforded the visitor, is commendable. Today such a scenario would be an obscenity so overt it would not be tolerated; and yet, if one travels to the immaculately restored, ‘dummy’ Ypres of today, one still finds curios in shop windows made of spent shells similar to those that Zweig remarks on, one still finds tour groups and coaches spilling their contents onto the now perfectly restored cloth hall square. If the promotional fanfare is less audible, the behaviour of visitors more solemn, the secret thirst for ticking off significant sites and purchasing mementoes of the genocide of Europe’s youth seems unquenched.
Zweig’s clear hatred of authoritarianism, of dogma, of orthodoxies, of senseless inequalities, of basic unfairness, come through in all his essays, but in none more strongly than ‘Ypres’. His impression of the Menin Gate is genuinely moving, even though it may seem to us now over polite, rather too earnest. Likewise the account of the venerable old Zurich hotel lost to developers, a tale reminiscent of his despairing friend Joseph Roth’s brief but terribly poignant piece on the closing of his beloved Hotel Foyot in Paris in 1938. But perhaps most telling of Zweig’s growing preoccupation with humanity’s behaviour faced with nationalist barbarism are the final essays written during the period of Zweig’s exile in London. ‘House of a Thousand Fates’ (1937) is concerned with a shelter for Jewish vagrants that Zweig encounters in London. Of course, post-Holocaust, the pathos of this piece is almost intolerable. We read with the knowledge of what was to come and this honourable shelter becomes a helpless structure fixed at the point of being swept away in a nuclear blast of exterminatory zeal. And yet we read Zweig’s careful inventory of humanity’s potential for unselfishness, the tireless Sisyphus-like labour of this little volunteer-run shelter that relieves those who are fortunate to pass through it, at least for a time, of the anxieties wrought on them by their insecure situation. But in his essay on the London shelter, Zweig is not concerned with Jewishness, he is concerned with ordinary people who through no fault of their own have been victimised, he is concerned with their fate, with fundamental fairness and the small, sometimes all-but-lost hope that can perhaps evolve into the greater one, that can properly anchor when people come together and do what is right in human terms. That is what this shelter epitomises for him: an endangered decency, a dogged labouring back towards a state of mutual trust, in the face of insane persecution. In ‘Gardens in Wartime’ it is the composure of the English people Zweig wonders at, in their most challenging hour, as they calmly tend their allotments and patches of garden. This he compares to the frenzied atmosphere of the previous world war, when people charged forward in paroxysms of blind enthusiasm for the great adventure. With his customary generosity of spirit, Zweig hails the mysteriously calm, resigned-to-be war-yoked English as the victors, not necessarily of the war but of the way to live inside the machine of war and still remain connected to the natural world, to be human.
Although it might be tempting for mischievous detractors to accuse Zweig of imbuing his subject with a sometimes aesthetically rhetorical romanticism, I think such a knee-jerk reaction belies the genuine satisfaction to be had from these surprisingly dense yet delicately nuanced pieces, which show themselves furtively, like gentle landscapes that can often harbour more poetic colouring than dramatic ones. Zweig secures an image of a vanished period in a certain moment of its activity, a moment frozen during a fete or a fair, a station in the early morning coming to life, a moment of flowering or decline, the precise flavour of which we can never reclaim. Zweig has his aesthetic roots in the nineteenth century, among that stable of exemplary mood-discerners distilled from the symbolist movement. Not for nothing does he quote lines from the poet of Bruges, Georges Rodenbach, and not for nothing did he feel such a natural bond with Rilke, a poet habitually obsessed by the aesthetic, who in his turn revered Verhaeren and was significantly influenced by Rodenbach’s melancholy verses. These travel essays are valuable bone fragments contributing to the overall skeletal remains of a European writer’s journey through a period whose dizzying descent from security to chaos we simply cannot fully comprehend today. They show a man who was above all wilfully curious and unable to rest, a man who must write in order to exist, but travel to fully live. And one should be careful not to sigh complacently when noting another outburst of superlatives, of joy, or rapture, which pepper Zweig’s earnest reactions, since the underlying current throughout, as in all his writings, is an innate awareness of loss. But Zweig is an instinctive activist against loss, a fighter for memory if preservation fails, his writings stained with the sense that time is running out both for him and for his generation. And this is clear decades before the appearance of that final celebrated compendium of remembrance, The World of Yesterday. In the end one is left with the sense that Zweig is the quarry, the man out of his time; that the ground between him and his hunters, whether they be overt or obscure, is continuously diminishing as he criss-crosses Europe’s railways, as if endeavouring somehow to stitch the uncooperative continent together. This sense of the imminent loss of individual freedom, the looming nimbus of totalitarianism and the herd’s coming of age, is never more clear than in the essay ‘To Travel or be Travelled’, where Zweig witnesses the birth of mass tourism with such natural disdain. This essay represents a kind of proto-manifesto of inwardness, on what it means to be a solitary traveller and not a tourist. It still holds perfectly true today. Though we know Zweig’s fears for the future of mass travel have been realised in the most decisively hopeless and depressing manner, we can still, as we embark on a journey alone, find against all the odds a certain enabling stoicism of the spirit in his words. Even if only for the celebration of that indecipherable inner fortification afforded by independent travel, one should read these invaluable essays, handed down to us by a man who ultimately was unable to contemplate living on in a world where such freedoms were consciously obliterated.
Travel must be an extravagance, a sacrifice to the rules of chance, from daily life to the extraordinary, it must represent the most intimate and original form of our taste. That’s why we must defend it against this new fashion for the bureaucratic, automated, displacement en masse, the industry of travel.
Let us preserve this modest gap for adventure in a universe of acute regulation. Let us not hand ourselves over to these overly pragmatic agencies who shepherd us around like goods, let us continue to travel in the way our ancestors did, as we wish, towards the goal we ourselves have chosen. Only that way can we discover not only the exterior world but also that which lies within us.
A note on the texts
This selection of travel essays is taken from the collection Auf Reisen. From a considerable body of works I have chosen what I felt to be a representative selection of Zweig’s writings on Europe. I have endeavoured to give some diversity in terms of period and place, and to present essays that I felt would engender most interest. I wished to avoid a glut of notes, so as not to encumber the reader travelling through these texts, therefore those notes that do exist were deemed worthy of inclusion for their particular instructive value, and when I felt the reader’s understanding of the text may have been diminished by their absence. Zweig tended to pepper his essays with phrases from foreign languages; taking his lead, where such phrases appear in the text I have left them untranslated, though translations are provided in the notes. These phrases, a number of them English, are differentiated by being presented in bold, italic type. My aim was to render these texts in such a way that the distinctive tone of Zweig’s language would be safeguarded as much as is reasonably possible, while at the same time making them accessible to the contemporary English reader. The photographs at the end of the volume present a number of Zweig’s destinations in their current condition, as captured by me on my own journeys.
–Will Stone, 2010
