Category Archives: Zweig, Stefan

The World of Yesterday: Read from March 06 to April 02, 2016

There are two stories near the end of Zweig’s book that stood out in their sadness and frustration. The first involved his attending a debate between George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Zweig, who is not a native English speaker, listens in to these aging intellectuals as they debate something, the theme of which he can’t quite figure out. He knows there is something brewing between those two minds, but he’s a stranger before them. The other story is of his elderly mother and how she was no longer able to rest during her walks on the public benches in Austria because Hitler stripped Jews of this basic right.

The story of how Zweig, and all of Europe got to the point where he was no longer part of the conversation and Jews were humiliated is what this book is about. We do not get the why, however.

Zweig begins the account of his beloved Austria and Europe as a child living in the strict and ordered German society that only the old were truly allowed to master. Even someone just turned 40 was still considered, in those days, to be too young to be really trusted with important work. A person had to spend their whole life working at a set pace, each year or decade moving up the ladder as if there was a checklist. But society was secure, there was safety, reliability, predictability in everyday life. Even the unpredictable could be managed with insurance and savings.

But Zweig had an artist’s mind and an artist’s youthful enthusiasm. He longed to break through those solid walls that had been mortared up generation after stoic generation, he wanted to be free, free to study art and music and think freely. And for much of his life he did. He rubbed shoulders with nearly every influential artist and thinker of his day. The book is an encyclopedia of who’s who.

But what we don’t get, and what he never saw, was what was happening off stage. While he was reading poetry, young people in the Balkans were planning the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Everywhere there was injustice and poverty, only a select few, like Zweig, could really enjoy the lifestyle he so loved and longed for. When WW1 breaks out it’s almost a surprise for him and he is nearly ignorant of the suffering world:

“Why should we be concerned with these constant skirmishes with Serbia which, as we all knew, arose out of some commercial treaties concerned with the export of Hungarian pigs?”

But I’m not going to be too harsh on Zweig because though he was thoughtless, he was naive in a good-natured way. His life was art, and thinking, and all that is good in the world. Were everyone only concerned with poetry and coffee shops how magical would the world be? How free of pain and suffering? Yet the real world does not take artists very seriously. Someone might make a few headlines with a propaganda poem, such as Ernst Lissauer’s “Hymn of Hate”, but then have to flee after the war because nobody wants to associate with and are ashamed of such hateful rhetoric.

Maybe this is a reason why he killed himself (his wife too, though she is barely mentioned more than four times in the book so her story is obscure)? Maybe he saw himself like the old woman who once lived above him, a woman who once knew Goethe, but the link between them is ephemeral, dry, and dying. She was an old woman dying in her room and he only saw the link between her and a great artist. What of her? What of her suffering? We learn nothing. So perhaps his blindness to the greater evils of the world was what did him in. Maybe he knew that his silence on politics was a mistake, but he might have also known it wouldn’t have mattered anyway for who could have stopped either war? Who could truly oppose Hitler and those who followed him?

And this is why I wanted to read this book now, because of the current political climate here in America, specifically with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Someone like myself who tries to stay away from politics, who sees that man as a buffoon, is reminded how Zweig saw the rise of Fascism. He saw it and was unable to do anything about it until he had to flee his country where he becomes a stranger and outsider everywhere and leaves his elderly mother behind to be humiliated by not even being allowed to sit on a park bench.

All of it is absurd, really. From him sitting in Switzerland with food but drink not 5 minutes away from Austria where everyone starves, to the Belgians using dogs to pull guns on little carts, to men drinking all the beer in one country because it was cheaper than in another and they’d become so drunk they had to practically be rolled back across the border, and where in a war economy when cakes of soap are more valuable than real estate.

And after the first World War he could see how the world had been fractured, where artists like Dali and Joyce rewrite the way we interpret the world through art, where instead of free passage between nations one needs passports and fingerprints and interrogations just to move across a line on a map.

The world went mad, and then went even madder when Hitler began his march. Zweig had become an alien, not just from his country, but from all humanity. He might have as well been from another planet considering how much the world had changed from when he was born. From beautiful, ordered Vienna, to the crazed heat of Brazil as the world tried to blow itself up once more across both oceans.

And the worst part is to be helpless. What good can art do against such forces? Where in the world is there a place for music and literature and the visual arts? How many mouths can an oil painting feed? How much clean water is a poem worth? How many books can save an infant from dying of disease?

And so now we stand on the other side of this question where engineering and practicality and a total lack of empathy for ‘those people over there’ is considered a virtue. Entertainment is ok, but not art, art is a waste of time. Artists should be put to the factories to make computers and ring cash registers.

And I can’t say I disagree with Zweig in not wanting to live in a world where function reigns over art, where a mind must conform to only one way of thinking and that energy is only directly applied to utility.

So where do we go from here, those of us who have lived on after Zweig? What is left for us? What good can art do? What use is an artist?

I hadn’t intended to grow so pessimistic by the end of my review, but it does parallel Zweig’s feelings on the state of the world. And while I have no intention of doing myself in, I do have a great sadness for his world of yesterday, too.

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I wonder if there is anger towards Zweig about his collaboration with Strauss on the Opera? Strauss was, after all, working with the Nazis, and though his justifications are perfectly valid, it’s still complicated. Zweig, though 2 degrees removed could have walked away from the project, but he explains himself quite well as why he didn’t . Too bad art has to suffer like this.

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some student went took a big risk slipping him that letter saying how things really were in Russia, how freedoms were restricted and everyone was watched. And at the time Zweig was a very famous man whose words could reach millions, yet he chose to write only a few paragraphs about Russia when he returned. What happened to that student? The student knew French, so perhaps some former noble class?

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At 36 he’s part of the old set. Youth is in power and only the new and the destruction of the old is worthwhile. Yet look what passion and extremism led to. Is there not something to be said for the classic, Zweig’s way of life? If only the old guard had been more inclusive, it might have fared better. But empathy is always in short supply and those in power like to stay there, no matter their age or politics

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Max Schneckenburger’s ‘Watch on the Rhine’:

A voice resounds like thunder-peal,

‘Mid dashing waves and clang of steel:

The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine!

Who guards to-day my stream divine?

Dear Fatherland, no danger thine;

Firm stand thy sons to watch the Rhine!

They stand, a hundred thousand strong,

Quick to avenge their country’s wrong;

With filial love their bosoms swell,

They’ll guard the sacred landmark well!

Dear Fatherland, no danger thine;

Firm stand thy sons to watch the Rhine!

The dead of an heroic race

From heaven look down and meet this gaze;

He swears with dauntless heart, “O Rhine,

Be German as this breast of mine!”

Dear Fatherland, no danger thine;

Firm stand thy sons to watch the Rhine!

While flows one drop of German blood,

Or sword remains to guard thy flood,

While rifle rests in patriot hand,

No foe shall tread thy sacred strand!

Dear Fatherland, no danger thine;

Firm stand thy sons to watch the Rhine!

[And whether my heart in death does break,

French we will not let them you make,

Rich in water as is your flood,

So Germany is in heroes’ blood!]

Dear Fatherland, no danger thine;

Firm stand thy sons to watch the Rhine!

Our oath resounds, the river flows,

In golden light our banner glows;

Our hearts will guard thy stream divine:

The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine!

Dear Fatherland, no danger thine;

Firm stand thy sons to watch the Rhine!

[So lead us on, you are well-proved;

Trusting in God, reach for the sword,

Hail Wilhelm! Down with the brood!

And redeem dishonor with enemy blood!]

Dear Fatherland, no danger thine;

Firm stand thy sons to watch the Rhine!

Source of English translation: Eva March Tappan, ed., The World’s Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art, 14 vols., vol. 7, Germany, The Netherlands, and Switzerland. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914, pp. 249-50.

Lissauer’s ‘Hymn of Hate’:

French and Russian, they matter not,

A blow for a blow and a shot for a shot!

We love them not, we hate them not,

We hold the Weichsel and Vosges gate.

We have but one and only hate,

We love as one, we hate as one,

We have one foe and one alone.

He is known to you all, he is known to you all,

He crouches behind the dark gray flood,

Full of envy, of rage, of craft, of gall,

Cut off by waves that are thicker than blood.

Come, let us stand at the Judgment Place,

An oath to swear to, face to face,

An oath of bronze no wind can shake,

An oath for our sons and their sons to take.

Come, hear the word, repeat the word,

Throughout the Fatherland make it heard.

We will never forego our hate,

We have all but a single hate,

We love as one, we hate as one,

We have one foe and one alone —

_ENGLAND!_

In the Captain’s Mess, in the banquet hall,

Sat feasting the officers, one and all,

Like a sabre blow, like the swing of a sail,

One seized his glass and held high to hail;

Sharp-snapped like the stroke of a rudder’s play,

Spoke three words only: “To the Day!”

Whose glass this fate?

They had all but a single hate.

Who was thus known?

They had one foe and one alone–

_ENGLAND!_

Take you the folk of the Earth in pay,

With bars of gold your ramparts lay,

Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow,

Ye reckon well, but not well enough now.

French and Russian, they matter not,

A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot,

We fight the battle with bronze and steel,

And the time that is coming Peace will seal.

You we will hate with a lasting hate,

We will never forego our hate,

Hate by water and hate by land,

Hate of the head and hate of the hand,

Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,

Hate of seventy millions choking down.

We love as one, we hate as one,

We have one foe and one alone–

_ENGLAND!_

Translation by Barbara Henderson, as it appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES of Oct. 15th, 1914.