Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (12 page)

NOTES

1
Zweig 1922, p 7 f.

2
Stefan Zweig to Hermann Hesse, 2nd March 1903. In: Briefe I, p 57.

3
Schnitzler 1990, entry for 28th May 1908.

4
To Emil Ludwig, undated, SBB Berlin, Ludwig literary estate 141, Box 1: Zweig, Stefan.

5
Wenn ich im Dämmern liege. In: Zweig GW Gedichte, p 101.

6
Stefan Zweig to Insel Verlag, 8th March 1910, GSA Weimar, 50/3886, 1.

7
Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Anton Kippenberg, 23rd November 1906. In: Briefwechsel Hofmannsthal/Insel Verlag, column 204 f.

8
Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Stefan Zweig, 15th February 1908. In: Briefwechsel Hofmannsthal, p 91.

9
Stefan Zweig to Franz Karl Ginzkey, probably late March 1905. In: Briefe I, p 97.

10
Stefan Zweig to Ellen Key, probably late May 1906. In: Briefe I, p 117.

11
24th January 1935, Zweig GW Tagebücher, p 373 f.

12
Hydepark. In: Zweig GW Reisen, p 81.

13
Alfred Zweig: Familiengeschichte.

14
Stefan Zweig to Victor Fleischer, probably 16th April 1907. In: Briefe I, p 146.

15
Stefan Zweig to Willy Wiegand, 12th November 1909. In: Briefe I, p 199.

16
Stefan Zweig to Insel Verlag, 5th May 1908, GSA Weimar, 50/3886, 1.

17
Zweig GW Gedichte, p 191 ff.

18
Zweig GW Welt von Gestern, p 175 ff.

19
Erinnerungen an Émile Verhaeren. In: Zweig GW Verhaeren, p 262.

20
Fontana 1968, p 73.

Stefan Zweig sitting in the back of a tour bus in India

“Why Don’t You Go to India?”

All the time I am homesick for cities where I am not at home, and in my own country I yearn for faraway places.
¹

To Leonhard Adelt 

“W
HY DON’T YOU GO
to India and America?”
²
—such was the challenging question put to Zweig by Walther Rathenau during a late-night conversation in Berlin. On that June evening in 1907 the two of them had talked at length about literature, politics and foreign countries before Rathenau posed the question. It was a very reasonable question to ask, because so far, much as he loved to travel, Zweig had confined himself almost entirely to the countries of Western and central Europe. He had of course told Rathenau about the time he spent in Great Britain, and confessed his difficulties in understanding the country and its inhabitants. Rathenau said that one could only understand Britain if one had viewed the colonial system from a different perspective. So visiting the far-flung corners of the empire and the USA would definitely broaden Zweig’s horizons. And anyway, he added, Zweig’s work as a writer was not bound by deadlines. The publication of an important piece of work was not tied to the calendar; this year, next year, it made no difference.

Zweig took Rathenau at his word. In the coming years he would twice leave Europe for several months at a time in order to visit the two countries suggested.

Then a member of the supervisory board of AEG and later Germany’s Foreign Minister, Rathenau was rightly seen by Zweig as a leading expert on world affairs. The two men had met in a roundabout way and quickly taken a liking to each other. In his weekly journal
Die Zukunft
, to which Zweig was a regular contributor, Maximilian Harden had published a number of outstanding pieces by an unknown author writing under a pseudonym. Intrigued, Zweig wrote to enquire after his identity. It turned out that the author of these articles was the son of the founder of AEG, who then replied in person to Zweig’s letter. Zweig responded by return with another letter, and so a lively correspondence quickly ensued. The
contact with Rathenau, who moved in very different circles from himself and his acquaintances, developed in an extremely interesting and promising direction. In the summer of 1907, during a visit to Berlin, Zweig finally saw an opportunity to meet up in person. When he telephoned to suggest a meeting at short notice, it turned out that Rathenau was leaving next morning to accompany his friend and state secretary Bernhard Dernburg on a tour of German East Africa lasting several weeks. Despite the unfortunate timing, Rathenau immediately suggested that they meet late that evening after the last of his official engagements. So Zweig ended up calling on him at a quarter past eleven at night, not returning to his hotel until gone two o’clock in the morning.

The meeting that both men had long been hoping to have seems to have gone very well. Rathenau impressed Zweig with his cool manner and his acute analytical mind. Above all he was fascinated by the combination of business acumen and philosophy—or in other words, theory and practice—that he saw in Rathenau. With him one could discuss important issues without getting lost in the everyday minutiae of party politics, which had never much interested Zweig. The circumstance of getting to know the son of an industrialist who was also deeply committed to writing is also likely to have appealed to him for autobiographical reasons. For although he had made his reputation as a businessman and a politician, Rathenau himself did not view his writing as a mere sideline. This is one reason why he was so interested in meeting other authors, and for some years already he had counted Maximilian Harden and Gerhart Hauptmann among his friends. After their meeting Zweig did his best to support him in his literary endeavours by publishing reviews that praised Rathenau’s writings in terms verging on the effusive. For Zweig they represented the first steps towards a synthesis of practical life experience and artistic creativity, and as such were the epitome of modernity. So suggestions for new travel destinations, coming from a man whom he esteemed so highly, were naturally going to be taken very seriously by Zweig. And in all probability Rathenau had only given expression to thoughts that Zweig had long been harbouring anyway.

But such an enterprise needed careful planning. It soon became clear that a world tour was not on the cards, that Asia and America would have to be covered in two separate trips. Much as Zweig liked being away from home for a time, he did not want to be absent for too long in case people forgot about him. Furthermore his travels would leave him little time to work on new writing projects; a few newspaper articles were the most he
could hope to produce while away. Yet his head and his desk were full of ideas and drafts. A more substantial work on Verhaeren would have to wait until he got back, but the book
Balzac: sein Weltbild aus den Werken,
a collection of texts assembled and edited by Zweig, appeared before the end of 1908 in the series
Aus der Gedankenwelt grosser Geister
. Zweig also turned the fruits of his labour into articles which appeared in two issues of Harden’s journal
Die Zukunft.

Not that pleasure was entirely sacrificed to work. One summer’s evening Zweig and a few friends journeyed out from Vienna to Rodaun, to attend the farewell concert of popular singer and actor Alexander Girardi, who was leaving Vienna to go and work on the stage in Berlin. On the day of Zweig’s birth in November 1881 Girardi had appeared in Johann Strauss’s opera
Der lustige Krieg
at the Theater an der Wien, and as a young man had had his first great success in this work singing tenor buffo. But tonight he was in more wistful mood as he performed a selection of his favourite songs. The garden of the Stelzer Inn was packed, the audience was mixed, and quite a few of the patrons were of Zweig’s age. One of them was a woman who had sat down at a nearby table. Her companion, who was interested in literature and had some acquaintance with the young poets of the day, pointed out to her that the man sitting at the next table, who had smiled at her several times already, was the writer and translator Stefan Zweig, of whom she had surely heard. The name was certainly familiar to her, even if she had not read any of his writings. The evening passed and everyone went their own way. Zweig may well have forgotten the young woman at the next table by the time he left for home. But she would remember this evening in Rodaun for a long time to come, and not only because of Girardi’s acclaimed recital.

During those summer weeks Zweig had also spent time studying the most important travel accounts and other books about India, for his trip was planned for the coming winter and early spring months, when the climate ought to be reasonably bearable for a European. As he prepared for the big adventure Zweig shared his excitement and anticipation with the readers of the
Leipziger Tageblatt
, which published his account under the title
Sehnsucht nach Indien
.
³
From the not insignificant number of books about India he had selected a few volumes, very different in style and content, which he now compared, assessing their practical usefulness—in so far as this was possible ahead of his trip. Colourful reports that read like extracts from oriental fairy tales featured alongside action-packed travel anecdotes and
sober political studies, Ernst Haeckel’s
Indische Reisebriefe
alongside Pierre Loti’s account of his time as an envoy of the French government, tellingly entitled
India (without the English)
.

The timing of his departure required very precise planning. On 26th November the premiere of
Tersites
was due to take place simultaneously in Dresden and Kassel, and he was to leave for India immediately afterwards. After his unfortunate experiences with the Berlin theatre, Zweig wanted to leave nothing to chance, and so he travelled to both cities beforehand in order to attend the rehearsals. He also planned to make a detour to Berlin and pay a brief visit to Kippenberg in Leipzig. After all the doubts and setbacks that had plagued the work in the last couple of years, Zweig had every reason to be pleased with its reception. The critics lauded his poetic artistry, even if they felt that there was a little too much emphasis on exposition at the expense of the rounded character development that the stage demands. But they were united in their praise for his decision to tell the story from Thersites’s point of view, in contrast to all previous treatments of the material. By making the ugly and unappealing figure of Thersites a character in his own right, and the central character at that, rather than just bringing him on as a foil to make the hero Achilles look good, the author had pulled off an interesting trick. Over the coming decades Zweig would successfully adopt this same approach on many occasions, regardless of whether he was developing the characters in his stories or the subjects of his historical biographies.

On his return from Germany he stopped off in Vienna only long enough to collect his luggage and put it on the train to Trieste. Rathenau had rendered him some very practical assistance when he was planning his journey—shortly before Zweig’s departure he sent off some letters of introduction and recommendation which might be useful to him when he got to India. Zweig meanwhile had given Baron Börries von Münchhausen a list of addresses in Europe where he could be reached prior to his departure. As from the end of November, however, he was “a missing person until May 1909”.
⁴

He left Vienna accompanied by an acquaintance, the journalist Hermann Bessemer. Apart from their destination, the two appear to have had few interests in common; but it just seemed more practical not to embark on the impending adventure alone. They boarded the
Lützow
in Trieste and sailed down through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to Bombay, and from there through the interior on to Calcutta, with a detour into the highlands of Darjeeling. Zweig was very fortunate not to
suffer from seasickness, but once ashore they agreed to travel at a leisurely pace, on account of the unaccustomed heat. “We are doing everything
‘schön pomali’
—nice and easy—as they say in Vienna.”
⁵

En route they had time to send postcards and write letters to their most important friends. Zweig even had a camera with him, but his photographs have been lost. We do, however, have a few pictures taken by Bessemer. One of these shows Zweig in a pale lightweight suit with sunglasses and a pith helmet, sitting in one of the buses that were used to take visitors on short excursions into the countryside. For longer journeys one took the train. Although he was used to travelling long distances, Zweig himself was astonished when he reckoned up how many kilometres he had travelled by rail in a month.