David Herman
Stefan Zweig, “The World of Yesterday”
Summary
David Herman discusses the life and work of Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), one of the great Central European writers of the 20th century. Specifically, Herman focuses on one of Zweig’s best books, “The World of Yesterday” (1942), and explores why it’s resonating in a new way in today’s world.
David Herman
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years he has written almost a thousand articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre and JW3. He is a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival on the contribution of Jewish refugees to British culture.
Well, we don’t really, I think he was massive … Well, he was of course massively depressed, like many refugees, dispossessed of their language, their home, their world, the world of European culture, he felt, and of European reason, which mattered to him more than any single thing, just was being destroyed around him. And he didn’t know whether there was any kind of future for him in Europe at all. After he committed suicide in ‘42, what if the Germans were to win the war? Would he, he would never be welcome anywhere in Europe. He would be at danger if he set foot anywhere in Europe. For him not to be able to even possibly go to Paris or Vienna or Berlin was just a tragedy not to be published in his own native language, not to have access to many of his closest friends. Roth had already died as we’ll see when we come to that another time. You know, many had fled in exile, the Frankfurt School obviously, and countless, countless people. So, many of his, there were few of his friends left in Austria or Germany. And if they were left, not just by 1942, of course, they weren’t left at all by 1942. You know, their lives were in danger. And so, they fled. They fled for their lives. And he fled for his life. And I think he just found it all desperately, desperately sad and tragic, and he couldn’t live with that, I think.
No, no, and no is the answer. He had no Jewish education. He had certainly no bar mitzvah. He grew up in a secular, assimilated family. He himself was thoroughly secular and assimilated. His friends and his teachers were secular and assimilated. Did he have children? No, but he did have stepchildren, stepdaughters. He had a bizarre, not from his second marriage, but from his first marriage, which was a bizarre relationship. Just to give you an indication, in one of the more recent biographies, it is mentioned that there were no women apart from the bride at the wedding to his first wife. It was a very peculiar relationship throughout. I’m not entirely clear whether he was heterosexual, or why on earth he married her at all. And the marriage didn’t last terribly long. His second marriage to his former secretary, Lotte, was a much, seemed to be a much happier relationship, but was, certainly, he was not going to have children, and she seemed to accept that.
No, he was not. He worked in a military archive at the beginning of the war, and then he moved to Switzerland in 1917 because it was neutral and because it meant he could spend time with his beloved French writers and Belgian writers. So, no, he wasn’t.