Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (52 page)

After spending several weeks in Rio they set off in September for an extended tour of the interior. Stefan had long been planning to write a book about Brazil. Following the various reports and feature articles he had written for newspapers in the wake of his earlier visits, this was to be his first attempt at a comprehensive account of a whole country. What he had in mind was a travel guide or handbook for foreigners who, just like himself and Lotte, arrived in the country full of wonder, yet knew very little about it. From the end of October to mid-November they travelled around Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, where they had been warned to expect a tight schedule and crowded lecture halls. So much for the restful interlude they had been looking forward to. This time it was Lotte who wrote home to report on the frantic round of engagements. On 23rd October she wrote to her brother and his wife from Rio:

… we are again feeling like in a madhouse—leaving Saturday for Buenos Aires, today Stefan’s conference in French “Vienne d’hier”, since two hours a phone call from Buenos Aires announced without name and not yet come through, urgently some books to sign for people who are leaving Rio today, tomorrow a Jewish charity affair where Stefan has to speak an introduction, a men’s luncheon tomorrow and the last rehearsal of the Spanish lecture on Friday. In between Stefan dictates a lecture in English, that is to say I shall translate it and he will revise it, another lecture for the refugees in Buenos Aires and revises his other lectures in French which he might have to give, and sometime I shall have to pack—and pack carefully because we fly and I have to select what to take.
⁴

Zweig’s Argentinian translator Alfredo Cahn had informed him in good time about the various lectures and speeches that had been planned. As a passionate devotee of Zweig and his works he had played a major role in arranging his travel programme. On 29th October Zweig was scheduled to speak in Buenos Aires, and two days later in Rosario. On 4th November he was to speak at the University in Córdoba, on the 6th at the city’s Jockey Club, and on the 12th he was back in Buenos Aires again, where he was due to address an audience of Jews. Zweig intended to donate his earnings from these appearances to various refugee organisations. His Spanish was now reasonably good—good enough for him to read out speeches from the printed page. He had studied the language a little back in 1932, and now worked on his pronunciation and the finer points of style and idiom. He also tried to learn some Portuguese, as best he could in these circumstances.

In Argentina he had an important administrative matter to attend to alongside his various lecture engagements. On 5th November Lotte and Stefan were issued with a permanent residence visa for Brazil at the Brazilian Consulate General in Buenos Aires. This meant that if it proved impossible for them to return to Europe, and the USA refused them a visa, they would at least have a safe haven for the long term. While Lotte and Stefan were constantly having to deal with tedious matters relating to entry permits and visas, in faraway Germany the process of depriving Zweig of his citizenship was being completed. It was a mere formality, which had no real impact on him. In fact, it is doubtful whether he ever knew about it, or about the subsequent rescinding of his doctorate. In the
Reichs- und Staatsanzeiger
of 5th December 1940 it was officially announced that three days previously 171 persons had been stripped of their German citizenship under current legislation. The last names on the list, at Nos. 170 and 171, are Stefan and Friderike, who are here given the additional generic first names that were now required for Jews in the German Reich: “Zweig, Stefan Israel” and “Zweig, Friderike Sarah Maria, née Burger, divorced name Winternitz”.
⁵

From Argentina Lotte and Stefan returned to Rio, where they soon recovered from the exertions of their travels at the Hotel Central. After
entering the country they had both secured a Brazilian alien’s passport in addition to their new residence visa, which offered them extra security for the future. The climate was still tolerable for the end of November, and so Stefan spent most of the time during the day writing in his room or on the terrace overlooking the bay. He was now working on the book about Brazil and on his autobiography, while other projects were at the planning stage—another novel, and an essay on Amerigo Vespucci, who had given his name to the continent on which Zweig was now attempting to establish himself.

Stefan and Lotte stayed in Rio for the Christmas holidays. As a Christmas greeting to his friends Stefan sent them his translation of a stanza from
Os Lusíadas,
the epic poem by the Portuguese national poet Luís Vaz de Camões published in 1572:

By sea such tempests, such sore injury,

with Death so often showing near and sure!

By land such warfare, such foul treachery,

so much of curst necessities t’endure!

Ah! where shall weary man take sanctuary,

where live his little span of life secure?

and ’scape of Heav’n serene th’ indignant storms

that launch their thunders at us earthen worms?

[Canto I, stanza 106—cited here in the 1880 English version by Richard Burton]
⁶

In January they planned to return to the USA, but Stefan was clear in his mind that he did not want to spend any length of time in New York. He could do without all the hustle and bustle, the endless visitors, the constant ringing of the telephone and the depressing stories told by the new arrivals from Europe. But in order to carry on working on his own texts he did have urgent need of some rare books. So he decided to settle for a while in New Haven, where he could pursue his researches in the library of Yale University.

Before Lotte and Stefan left New York for their next destination, he had a curious encounter in late January 1941: “On the morning of the 23rd I went with my daughter to the British Consulate”, writes Friderike Zweig in her memoirs, “and when I stepped out into the foyer from one of the many elevators, who should I see standing in front of the door as it opened but Stefan. He had arrived by plane from Florida half an hour earlier, and had
gone straight to the Consulate with his and Lotte’s passports to be registered, as he was required to do. Among the seven million people who live in New York, we had run into each other by chance. Fate decreed that our reunion should not be left in doubt for more than half an hour after his arrival.”
⁷
After months of uncertainty they now met again, safe and sound, and embraced warmly. What Friderike does not mention in her memoirs, however, is that Stefan was accompanied that day by his brother Alfred, who had turned out to welcome him in his new home city of New York. Alfred’s presence at their reunion had cast a shadow over the event. Following the drama of the divorce—though he had heard only Stefan’s side of the story—Alfred regarded Friderike as a devious character, who was still trying to retain her hold over Stefan after their separation. Alfred was not at all pleased to run into her of all people, among New York’s population of seven million. The relationship between Stefan and his brother was severely tested in the coming months, after Alfred had discovered that Stefan was continuing to correspond with his divorced wife, was even consorting with her socially again before very long, and to cap it all had agreed to pay her an annuity.

From mid-February to the start of April Stefan and Lotte stayed as planned at the Taft Hotel in New Haven, where he found some peace and quiet to get on with his work. In March the book about Brazil was finished, and the manuscript was sent off immediately to his publisher in Rio, who was keen to get this promising new title on the market as soon as possible. But even in their hotel retreat they could not avoid news about the war and its consequences. On top of their general concerns they had continuing worries about family and friends. Only now did Stefan learn that Erwin Rieger had died the previous year in North Africa under mysterious circumstances, while Lotte was worried about the fate of her brother and his wife in England, which had been under heavy attack from the German Luftwaffe for some time now. The BBC’s Broadcasting House in Portland Place, just around the corner from Stefan’s former apartment in Hallam Street, had been hit by bombs, and the actual building in which he had lived was also badly damaged in an air raid. At least Lotte’s eleven-year-old niece Eva had been sent a few months earlier to a boarding school in Croton, north of New York, where they knew she would be safe.

From New Haven—a town that offered no other diversions apart from the University library, as Stefan discovered—he returned with Lotte to New York and the Wyndham Hotel, where they moved back into the same suite they had occupied before. One thing was certain—they would
not be wanting to stay here for long. Nor would they be able to, as things stood, because their length of stay in America was limited by the fact that both of them only held a transit visa. While Stefan continued to provide guarantees and financial support for other European exiles, he did virtually nothing to advance his own affairs. He felt extremely uncomfortable in his situation, and yet could not escape from the role he was called upon to play. He went on looking after the interests of his colleagues with his customary solicitude, even though, as he said, they often expected miracles from him that he was not in a position to deliver. Zweig dictated letters in his usual suave tone, praised their books and encouraged them to publish further texts. In the case of Ivan Heilbut, a native of Hamburg now living in Manhattan, he even agreed to write a brief foreword to his forthcoming collection of poems.

Apart from the stresses of the war, Zweig was troubled by other anxieties too. His fear of growing old had surfaced again at the approach of his sixtieth birthday in November. In the spring he arranged to meet Carl Zuckmayer at a French restaurant in Manhattan. The conversation flowed easily while they recalled happy memories of yapping dogs and amusing excursions, but when the talk turned to the time nearly ten years earlier when he had “gone on the run” to escape his fiftieth birthday, which they had then spent together in Munich, Zweig’s mood swiftly altered. Sixty years, he confided to Zuckmayer, were enough, he did not expect to live through any more good times—to which his colleague could offer little by way of reply.

On 6th May Zweig deposited his will with his New York lawyers, in which Lotte was named as his sole heir. In the event that she died before him, or that they both perished at the same time through an accident or some other misfortune, his estate would pass to Lotte’s brother Manfred, his wife and their descendants.

At the end of the month Zweig made an appointment with the German-born photographer Kurt Severin, who had been commissioned by the Three Lions Photo Agency to take a series of pictures of the writer. Severin began by photographing Stefan and Lotte at work—the latter taking dictation at the typewriter—and then Stefan busy at his writing (sitting cross-legged in his armchair, a wooden board on his lap and a pencil in his hand). Zweig and Severin then wandered the streets in the neighbourhood of the hotel and took several outdoor pictures: Zweig descending the steps outside the Public Library (with the obligatory book under his
arm, which he had specially taken with him for the purpose); on the upper deck of an open-topped double-decker bus flanked by the skyscrapers of Fifth Avenue; rummaging through the books laid out on a table outside a second-hand bookseller’s on Third Avenue; and visiting his publisher Huebsch. In none of these photographs does Zweig’s facial expression look remotely relaxed.

A few days later Lotte and Stefan held the cocktail reception at the Wyndham that was attended by Klaus Mann and other European acquaintances. The mood was reasonably relaxed, as people chatted and did their best to be amusing. The Zweigs were planning to spend the upcoming summer months away from the city, in some quiet place where the heat would be more tolerable. They chose Ossining on the Hudson, not far from Croton, where Lotte’s niece Eva was living in a boarding school. The little town lay up the Hudson River, a good hour by train from Grand Central Station in Manhattan. The area was not generally known as an idyllic summer retreat from the heat of the city, but rather as the site of the famous—and infamous—Sing Sing prison. When people in New York spoke of someone being taken “up the River”, it did not bode well for the person concerned. It was only when they had found a house that was available to rent for a few weeks that Stefan and Lotte discovered that Friderike had also settled here, together with her daughters and sons-in-law.

Stefan had planned to get his autobiography more or less finished in the coming weeks, having told the journalist H O Gerngross in an interview more than a year earlier that it would be entitled
Meine drei Leben
[
My Three Lives
]. On his last lecture tour of South America Zweig had already talked about ‘The Vienna of Yesterday’ to audiences of European émigrés; and this was also the title of the last lecture that he had given in Europe in 1940. Now he set about developing his theme further and expanding it into a sweeping portrait of his times.

Blick auf mein Leben
[
Looking back at My Life
] was the new title he gave to the manuscript. On the last page Zweig has noted the place and the date: “Ossining 1–30 July 41”.
⁸
It is one of the few works of Zweig’s to have survived in its early draft, and thus affords an insight into the author’s working habits. The handwriting in purple ink extends almost the full width of the closely written lined pages. The text was revised after the first draft, many passages were crossed out and the sentences that replace them are either squashed up between the lines or else written in the narrow margins of the page, their correct position indicated with the aid
of arrows and insertion marks. Zweig’s manuscripts could sometimes look remarkably similar to the ones by other authors that he had once acquired for his collection.