Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (32 page)

No breath of wind, no dancing flame

Chilled, unwarmed and deep in snow

We sit up here and stake our claim

Where you are welcome—as you know.
⁹

All that was now about to change, as gangs of tradesmen came up to the house and installed a central heating system with much crashing and banging, leaving Friderike with weeks of work to get the place cleaned up again, and little time for anything else. At the end of the year, after so many
travels undertaken on his own, Stefan spent a few weeks together with her in Switzerland and France. They began by visiting Rolland in Villeneuve. On 28th November they were in Paris and celebrated Stefan’s birthday with a group of friends, including Frans Masereel and Erwin Rieger, while Felix Braun house-sat for them in Salzburg.

Sitting in his now readily heatable rooms, Zweig had reflected prior to his departure on a subject that for some time now had given him pause for thought, not least on account of the quantity of correspondence that entered and left his office every day. Asked to supply an afterword to a book edited by Otto Heuschele, he wrote an essay on
The Art of the Letter
:

I don’t know if others feel the same sense of shame, but every time I stand in Goethe’s house and see how that most august master of the German language, whose pen did his bidding as if by magic, drafted his letters, however important or unimportant, two or three times, correcting them before he judged them ready for sending; or how Nietzsche composed drafts of nearly every letter in his own hand—I always ask myself the question: how many of us, with an infinitely poorer command of language and infinitely less assured, still have the diligence and the moral patience to devote so much love and respect to the writing of a humble letter. We have all of us, or nearly all of us, ranked the letter below art. Letters still serve the business needs of artists on occasion, they sometimes have a role to play in the discussion of art; but hardly ever do we entertain the notion that a letter is, or could become, a work of art.
¹⁰

Letters were just one example of a general tendency towards superficiality that Zweig felt he detected on every side, and his travels of recent years had reinforced the impression that life, cities, the world were becoming increasingly uniform and monotonous as a result. In just a few decades the major cities of Europe had grown to resemble each other so much, in his eyes, that their former individuality, which he prized so highly, had virtually disappeared. Paris, according to Zweig, was now three-quarters Americanised. To describe the state of his native city Vienna he coined the term “budapested”—which is what the city now was in his view.

And what was true of the cities was even more true of their inhabitants, he claimed. In 1925 he revealed his thoughts on the subject in an essay entitled
Die Monotonisierung der Welt
[
The Monotonisation of the World
]: “New York decrees that women’s hair should be cut short. Within a month, fifty or a hundred million manes of female hair fall to the
ground, as if mown by a single scythe. No emperor, no khan in world history had so much power, no spiritual commandment was so swiftly obeyed.” While couched in general terms, his observations will not have failed to strike a chord closer to home—much closer to home, in fact. Anyone acquainted with the domestic situation at Kapuzinerberg 5 in Salzburg will hear in this not only the lament of Stefan Zweig the concerned citizen of the world, but also—reading between the lines—the complaint of the sorely tried paterfamilias, who frequently observed with displeasure the goings-on around him. Friderike and her daughters were by no means averse to certain modern pleasures. So it looked as if he was addressing himself not least to them:

One [ … ] example: the radio. All these inventions have but one purpose: synchronicity. The citizens of London, Paris and Vienna hear the same thing at exactly the same time, and this synchronicity, this uniformity, intoxicates people because it is so much bigger than them. There’s something inebriating about all these modern technical wonders, a stimulant for the masses, and yet they carry within them an immense spiritual disenchantment, a dangerous enticement to passivity for the individual. It’s like dancing, fashion, the cinema—the individual conforms to the same herd-like taste, no longer guided in his choices by his own personality, but by the opinions of the world. [ … ]

There is an enormous, unstoppable power in the cinema, the radio, dancing, in all these new means of mechanising human life. For they all satisfy the highest ideal of the man in the street: they offer pleasure without demanding any effort. And their unassailable advantage lies in the fact that they are incredibly
easy
. The latest dance can be learnt by the clumsiest servant girl in three hours, the cinema captivates the illiterate and requires not an ounce of education on their part, and to enjoy the radio all you have to do is to pick up the earphones and put them on your head: your ears are immediately filled with the sound of music and dancing. When things are that easy, the gods themselves are powerless to resist.
¹¹

Complaining about the enervating properties of crackling radios and gramophones did not however mean that Zweig was not to be heard on the radio himself (even if he did like to refer to his audience in private as “
Radioten
”—a conflation of the German words for “radio” and “idiots”). As early as the 1920s he read from his works in live broadcasts on several occasions. On 12th December 1926 listeners to the Funkstunde radio
station, which broadcast from the Herrenhaus in Berlin, could hear a “Stefan Zweig Evening”, organised by the Association of German Writers. Following some words of introduction by Georg Engel, Zweig recited his text
Rahel rechtet mit Gott
, followed by Else Heims, who read
Die unsichtbare Sammlung
from one of his books.

Zweig was not really hostile to technology or progress, and his office even boasted a modern dictation machine recording onto wax cylinders; in his absence his secretary could listen to texts dictated by her employer and transcribe them on the typewriter. But when it came to certain wishes for a supposedly more comfortable and luxurious lifestyle, Friderike was never able to get her way. As early as 1920 she had given Stefan a glowing report of a drive she had taken with a friend in his motor car: “I sat next to him in the front for the whole journey, close to the windscreen, and I learnt all kinds of things about driving. The car was wonderfully smooth and steady on the road”
¹²
—but her husband was deaf to such effusions, unfortunately. Stefan was happy to walk, and when he wanted to get out into the surrounding countryside he travelled by tramcar or bus; their house at the top of the hill would not have been reachable by car anyway. For him, owning a car would have been nothing but a nuisance, and it is highly unlikely that he would have learnt to drive himself. Friderike, on the other hand, would surely have been in her element at the wheel of an open-top car, bowling along through mountain roads and pastures. And doubtless her daughters would have enjoyed it too—even as schoolgirls they had struck Zweig as the type who are always chasing after frivolous pleasures. But it was not to be—they would not be buying a motor car. Friderike would later record this defeat in her memoirs with a barbed aside: whereas Stefan had expressed his astonishment, in an essay on collecting autograph manuscripts, that a handwritten score by Johann Sebastian Bach cost little more than a new motorcycle, she turned his witty remark around, noting that her husband, given the choice between buying a motor car or Beethoven’s desk, had naturally gone for the precious item of furniture …

Relations between Stefan and Friderike’s daughters Suse and Alix had probably never been particularly good or close. In the early days of their time together in Vienna before the First World War he was still able to delight the two children by bringing them cuddly toys and other playthings, and he had admired Friderike for her maternal devotion. By 1925 the girls—who called him Stefferl or Stefzi, and sometimes Bö or Beu—were fifteen and eighteen years old. Now that they had spent
more time together in the last few years than ever before, it had quickly become apparent that mutual understanding only operated within very strict limits. After a visit from Victor Fleischer in Salzburg Stefan wrote him a letter immediately after his departure, which he had composed “on Saturday evening (when I am the only one at home)”:

Dear Victor, I’m just writing a line or two after your departure to thank you warmly for your kind visit. You will understand how it really does me good to be able to speak freely and at length with an old friend. Sorry as I was that you had to witness the scene with the children, in another way I was quite glad, because it gave you an insight into what my life is really like. I know perfectly well that I am not in the wrong here—both children were out this evening, on the very day when they received news that their father is hovering between life and death [ … ]. I simply cannot understand how such behaviour is possible, and how grown children, four hours after receiving news that should shock them deeply, can go out to a public entertainment, or why their mother can’t bring herself to tell them that at this hour of destiny in their lives they should give the dance hall a miss for once. I try to take a fair-minded view, and am bound to say that this incident must surely indicate even to the most detached outsider that there is something not right about the children’s mental attitude (and I don’t just mean their attitude to me). You can imagine what it’s like for Fritzi, who feels it all very keenly, feels how wrong the children are to go off and enjoy themselves with their dancing and their theatricals on this of all days, and yet hasn’t the strength to intervene.

My dear Victor, my life is directed inwards to such an extent that I don’t feel these things as keenly. God knows, I would have been happy to welcome the children into my life, but at such moments I get a whiff of something strange and alien, not just the philistinism of their character, but also that emotional coldness that I find so distressing.
¹³

Felix von Winternitz, whose own father had died shortly prior to this, survived the crisis, but continued to struggle for a long time with the after-effects of his illness. Soon afterwards Zweig embarked on a reading tour of Germany, and so was able to escape the problems at home for a brief time. But his domestic situation was complicated, and with things as they were it seemed unlikely to improve. In letters to his brother Alfred Stefan frequently unburdened himself about his troubles with Friderike
and the girls. His own tendency to run away from problems that he could see coming was in stark contrast to Friderike’s self-assurance, which she repeatedly played up (sometimes unintentionally) in her later writings. In her retrospective account her own pragmatic approach to dealing with family and administrative problems often makes Stefan look helpless and impractical. But Alfred’s later remark to the effect that Stefan was not equipped for family life is in fact aimed a lot lower. A glance at the list of questions referred to earlier that Donald Prater put to Friderike shows that the situation on the Kapuzinerberg must at times have turned ugly probably as early as the beginning of the 1920s. Long after Stefan’s death Prater had asked Friderike why she and Stefan did not have any children together. According to Friderike, this was entirely due to Stefan, who had allegedly threatened to shoot himself if she became pregnant again. When Prater enquired whether Stefan was capable of fathering children, her answer was as eloquent as it was evasive: “He was no Don Juan.”
¹⁴

There were constant family problems in Vienna too, although compared with those in Salzburg these seemed relatively innocuous. Stefan saw his parents surrounded increasingly by people who were not to be trusted an inch: “Here’s an example to show you the vermin Mama is surrounded by and how viciously they upset her”, he wrote to Friderike on one of his visits to Vienna. He had just learnt that someone had told his mother that he had strayed so far from his Jewish roots that he had joined a Christian church. He reported his mother’s reaction: “Now she has secretly asked Alfred
when
I was baptised, if it was a long time ago or has only just happened. She claims to have heard it from ‘someone’
as a definite fact
. Note the lack of candour here, not even telling Alfred who this charming informant is.”
¹⁵
It would seem that Alfred’s wife Stefanie was playing an increasingly important role (and from this distance we cannot be more specific than that) in the Zweig family household. At any rate her involvement was partly to blame for further problems, from shouted arguments with the parlour maid to reports of strange whisperings behind closed doors. On the one hand these were incidents that Stefan could scarcely ignore, but on the other, since he was not living in Vienna, there was very little he could do about them. Worn down by it all, he greeted news of further discord in the Garnisongasse with dismissive references to “Garnisonades”.

Despite all these strains, however, Alfred and Stefan seem to have maintained reasonably good relations and avoided any major falling-out over the dissension within the family. In the end they both knew that the
other had enough to cope with in his day-to-day working life, Stefan with his books and Alfred with the family business, which had to be steered through difficult economic times. In 1923 the company had changed its status to a so-called “Familien AG”—a limited company in family ownership—and been renamed “M Zweig mechanische Weberei AG”. Alfred’s business card now bore the legend: