David Herman
Stefan Zweig, “The World of Yesterday”

David Herman - Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

- My name is David Herman, and this evening I’m going to be talking, or this afternoon if you’re in America, I’m going to be talking about the great Central European writer, Stefan Zweig. I’m going to talk for about 45 minutes, and then try and answer any of your questions for the final 15 minutes. Stefan Zweig was one of the great Central European writers of the 20th century, and “The World of Yesterday,” which I’m going to be talking about mainly, is one of the best books he wrote. It was written just before he and his wife left America for Brazil, where they committed suicide together in 1942 in a suicide pact. A superb evocation of turn of the century Vienna, the book, Zweig was already aware as he wrote it that he was writing about a vanished world. The world of yesterday, indeed. And that’s what gives the book its very distinctive flavour, both its nostalgia, but its sense of loss, which speaks to us perhaps more now than at any time since it was first published in 1942. Zweig was a major figure in his day. He met Brahms and Herzl. He watched Trojan at work in his Paris studio. He collaborated with Richard Strauss and spoke at Freud’s funeral in London. He saw himself as part of a great cultural chain, stretching back to what he called the heroic olympian world of Beethoven and Tolstoy and Mozart. “Perhaps,” he reflects, “I am the last who can say today I knew someone on whose head Goethe’s hand had rested affectionately for a moment.” The crucial words here are the last. Zweig writes, “As a whole, civilization is coming to an end.” Zweig’s work has never been more timely. He was out of fashion for some decades after the war.

But now, as we see hundreds of thousands of refugees and brutal attacks on civilians in Ukraine, this book, “The World of Yesterday,” by a Jewish refugee whose books were burned, who fled for his life, and who witnessed the assault on the values he fought for all his life speaks to us with extraordinary resonance. Overlooked for many years, Stefan Zweig is, once again, our contemporary. There are two main translations, and I will be reading from the Pushkin Press translation from 2009 by the eminent translator, Anthea Bell. But I have to say that my own favourite translation is the 1943 English Castle hardback, which oddly doesn’t name the translators. I’m afraid I can’t name them. But, you see, you have the choice. So, see which you think is the one that suits you and appeals to you best. Zweig’s life, as described in “The World of Yesterday,” can be divided into three parts. And I’ll go through each part inter. The first part I would say is from 1881 to 1914. He was born in 1881. The son of a middle class Jewish textile manufacturer. And he was born in what he called, unforgettably, the golden age of security, a bourgeois world of stability and order. “Anything radical or violent,” he wrote, “seemed impossible in such an age of reason.” He lived in the seemingly secure world of the affluent upper middle class. And the second stage is from 1914 to ‘34, which is a very strange mix in his life. On the one hand, it was his literary heyday.

He was one of Europe’s most widely read and translated and acclaimed authors. At the same time, as we shall see in some detail, it was also a very dark time for him personally, but also for his native Austria and also for the whole of Central Europe, and later for the whole of Europe. And we’ll look at the different ways in which he wrote as an observer and a witness of all these dramatic changes in between the wars. And then the third and final stage, 1934 to '42 is his period of exile, first of all to Britain, secondly to the United States, and finally to Brazil and South America where he died in 1942. But although there are these three very distinct periods or phases in his life and his career, there are some consistent themes. He writes very early on in “The World of Yesterday” as an Austrian, a Jew, an author, a humanist, and a pacifist, and all these are perfectly accurate depictions. But perhaps the crucial word here is humanist. Not a word we hear that often these days. And this is why he wrote in the preface with such emotion, “Against my will, I’ve witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time.” Secondly, he was a European, a passionate European, and Europe was at the heart of much of his thinking. One point, he refers to it the “true home of my heart’s desire, Europe,” which is partly why the First World War was such an enormous blow to him. To see Europe torn apart, his beloved Europe torn apart by such a brutal war. And then of course, the rise of Nazism, and we’ll come to that later.

And thirdly, what one might call high culture. The book is full of memories of great writers, artists, and composers he knew personally and a vanished culture. The book isn’t just about name dropping. He was widely read and deeply cultured at home in the modern literature, art, and music of the late 19th century and the early 20th century. And he did actually know many of the greatest figures of European culture during that time. And many of these figures were close friends of his. So, to start at the beginning, he was born on the 28th of November in 1881. His parents were wealthy, cosmopolitan, and secular Austrian Jews. His father was Moritz Zweig, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and his mother was Ida Zweig, born Brettauer, from an Italian banking family. His father was born in Prossnitz in Moravia in 1845. And in 1850, when his father was only five, his grandfather moved the family to Vienna, and they were part of that extraordinary influx of Central European Jews who moved to Vienna from areas like Galicia, Moravia in the mid and late 19th century, like Freud’s family also from Moravia who came to Vienna. Zweig was part of that extraordinary generation of Central European writers, thinkers, and creative figures born in the 1870s and '80s that included Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Krause, Schoenberg, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Fritz Kreisler, Bruno Walter, Hesse, Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Baltuch, Schnabel, Kafka, Vauban, Hermann Broch, Kostka, and Wittgenstein. All born within a few years of each other. Many of them from the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

Many of them known personally by Zweig. And perhaps most famous chapter in “The World of Yesterday” is the first chapter, the World of Security, which is a remarkable evocation of a particular moment in Viennese and Austrian culture. The 1880s and '90s were a time of remarkable stability and security for well off bourgeois families like Zweigs. “Everything,” he writes, “in our Austrian monarchy seemed built to last. Everything in this wide domain was firmly established, immovably in its place. Anything radical or violence seemed impossible in such an age of reason. Both my father and my grandfather,” he writes, “lived their lives in a single direct way without many vicissitudes, without upheaval and danger, a life of small tensions, imperceptible transitions, always lived in the same easy, comfortable rhythm as the wave of time carried them from cradle to grave. They spent all their days in the same country, the same city, usually even in the same house. It was a time,” he wrote, “of faith in uninterrupted, inexorable progress.” And he lists the kind of key components or elements of this age of progress. Firstly, new miracles of science and technology. Certainly true.

Secondly, social welfare, and Vienna was the centre of all kinds of changes and developments in education, children’s education, psychoanalysis. Thirdly, the judiciary lay down the law in a milder and more humane manner. And fourthly, he mentions the right to vote. But what is really intriguing, if you read these passages carefully and closely, is the language, the vocabulary. He speaks of security, permanency, stability, rights, parliament, currency, immutability, well-regulated order, solidity, and sobriety. And so, it’s not so much the content, it’s this constant chorus of adjectives and nouns which build up a sense of a well-ordered and stable world and culture. “My Viennese friends,” he goes on to say, “almost all came from the bourgeoisie, and indeed nine-tenths of them from the Jewish bourgeoisie.” So, it wasn’t just a bourgeois world he lived in and grew up in, it was a Jewish bourgeois world that he grew up in. And when Zweig looks back on the comfortable and quiet existence that his parents and grandparents enjoyed in what he called “the golden age of security,” he doesn’t seem see them as untypical. “10,000 or 20,000 Viennese families,” he writes, “lived just as my parents did. And above all,” and this is what really forms Zweig, “it was also a moment of extraordinary cultural creativity.” Zweig has no doubt that this creative explosion was driven by the Jews of Central Europe. “The party,” he writes, “played by the Jewish bourgeoisie in Viennese culture through the aid and patronage it offered was immeasurable. They were the real public.

They filled seats at the theatre. And in concert halls, they bought books and pictures, visited exhibitions, championed and encouraged new trends everywhere with minds that were more flexible, less weighed down by tradition. They had built up virtually all the great art collections of the 19th century. They had made almost all the artistic experiments of the time possible. Nine-tenths,” he writes, “of what the world of the 19th century celebrated as Viennese culture was, in fact, culture promoted and nourished or even created by the Jews of Vienna.” Jews like Mahler in ’s-Heerenberg, Hofmannsthal, Freud, and Zweig himself, at one time, the most translated writer in the world. No, and this wasn’t just through Vienna. He writes, “It is not chance that a Lord Rothschild became an ornithologist, a Warburg, an art historian, a Cassirer, a philosopher, a Sassoon, a poet.” For him, the Jewish bourgeoisie, the Jewish intelligentsia were the great driving force of what was new and exciting in Viennese and Austrian culture, in Central European culture, and indeed in European culture. Already, as a school boy, and he comes across as an extraordinarily precocious young man. He mixed in avant garde circles and had a passion for high culture. As he writes, “At 17, I’d not only read all the poems of Baudelaire and Walt Whitman, I knew most of them by heart. To have seen Gustav Mahler in the street,” he writes, “was an event to be reported to your friends next morning like a personal triumph.

A premiere of a work by Gerhart Hauptmann intrigued our entire class for weeks before classes began, before rehearsals began.” He describes his first encounter with the work of Paul Valery, the French poet. “We found what was new because that was what we wanted because we were hungry for something that belonged to us alone, not to the world of our fathers. We suddenly learned to see,” he writes, “with new eyes. And at the same time, we learned new rhythms and tonal colours in music through the works of Moussorgsky, Debussy, Strauss, and Schonberg. In literature, realism dawned with Zola, Strindberg, and Hauptmann, the demonic Slav spirit with Dostoevsky, and a previously unknown sublimation and refinement of lyrical art in the works of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarme. Nietzsche revolutionised philosophy. We were the vanguard, the shock troops, promoting every kind of new art just because it was new, just because it would change the world for us.” Zweig met Hofmannsthal when he was 16 and Herzl when he was barely 20. He writes, “Herzl was the first man of international stature who I’d met in my life.” “I’m glad to tell you that your fine piece is accepted for publication in the Neue Freie Presse,” Herzl tells the young Zweig. Zweig writes, “It was like Napoleon presenting a young sergeant with the cross of the legion d'honneur on the battlefield.” He published his first book of poetry at 20. His first novella and his first translation of Baudelaire, both at 21.

Not just Baudelaire, he writes how He also translated some poems by Verlaine, Keats, William Morris, and a novel by Camille Lemonnier, 'To Get My Hand In.’“ At just 26, he has his first play performed at Vienna’s Burgtheater. When he’s 23, in 1904, he travelled to Paris. "I saw Renoi’s studio,” he writes. He met Rilke, spent an hour in Rodin’s studio. And from Paris, he travelled to London where he heard Yeats give a poetry reading. Already in his early twenties, the key themes of his life were laid out. Firstly, travel. Zweig loved to travel, travel all around Europe, all around the world. Secondly, the world of high culture, not just the works he immersed himself in, but the people he met. His life was to be full of such encounters. And then there were the drawings and the manuscripts and the autographs he collected. He was a passionate, lifelong collector. Already in his twenties, he’d collected a drawing by William Blake, the manuscript of one of Goethe’s most beautiful poems. As Zweig writes, “In his bold, free handwriting.” A page of a proof collected by Balzac, a small Mozart manuscript, a treatise by Freud, a book of poems given to him by Rilke. And later, Beethoven’s desk. a quill pen that had belonged to Goethe. Zweig was immersed in European high culture from the long 19th century, from Blake, Mozart, and Goethe in the late 18th century, to Rilke and Freud in the early 20th century. Thirdly, there’s the cosmopolitanism. He was born and grew up in Vienna and wrote in German, and he constantly travelled around Europe and writes about the greatest French, Belgian, German, and British writers and thinkers.

“Unconsciously, every citizen of Vienna,” he writes, “became a supernational cosmopolitan citizen of the world. And the embodiment of this cosmopolitanism was the Viennese cafe.” He writes, “In the better class Viennese cafes, all the Viennese newspapers were available, but not the Viennese alone, but also those of the entire German Reich, the French, English, Italian, and American papers. And in addition, all the important literary and art magazines of the world.” When he later moved to Salzburg, he writes, he chose it because of its geographical position. “For in Austria’s edge, I could get to Munich in two and a half hours by train, to Vienna in five, to Zurich or Venice in 10, and to Paris in 20. It was thus the right springboard to Europe.” What he doesn’t mention, which is a fascinating omission, is that Salzburg by comparison to Jewish Vienna is the centre of the Austrian clerical culture, you might say, Catholic culture, and arguably, right wing culture. And it’s interesting that Zweig doesn’t dwell on this, and lived for many years, very happily in a beautiful old building in Salzburg. Fourthly, we get a sense of his productivity. He was enormously prolific throughout his life, pouring out books of history, biographies of great figures from history, short stories, novels, essays, and then, of course, the success. He was one of the most successful writers of his time, not just in Vienna, but in the whole of Europe. And we’ll come to that when we come to the 1920s and ‘30s. There is something a little bit disturbing about two, three things perhaps.

Firstly, his idealisation of Vienna, and indeed his idealisation, secondly, of the 19th century. What about the antisemitism of Vienna? He writes, “I personally must confess that, neither in school nor at university, nor in the world of literature, have I ever experienced the slightest suppression or indignity as a Jew.” Really? If you think of Freud’s accounts of his formation, his youth, and there’s a famous moment where he describes his father being knocked into the gutter by a non-Jew which is a formative experience for Freud. His father’s reaction to that moment of humiliation. Zweig writes as if that simply didn’t exist, that world of antisemitism. And the other striking thing is perhaps the insularity. For someone so cosmopolitan and international, he’s not so interested in the world outside Vienna, in Austria, whether it’s the small crafts an artisans or farmers suffering from the fallen agricultural prices and the great depression, and the rise of the new department stores, or the situation, as we’ll see, of the Ostjuden of Galicia. It’s a fascinating introduction to the world of fin-de-siecle at Vienna. But there’s something troubling about these omissions, something insular, even complacent. His eyes are on Viennese concert halls and cafes, not really the changing Austria beyond. Let’s come back to the Ostjuden. We encounter them only once or twice in the book, the World of the East European Jews.

There are fascinating reflections on culture 19th century and on Austria, but very little about being Jewish. And there’s a worrying kind of snobbery that emerges whenever he discusses Ostjuden. “Among Orthodox Eastern Jews,” he writes, “in whom the failings, as well as the virtues of the Jewish people as a whole are more strongly marked.” And on the next page, he contrasts those assimilated Western and Central European Jews who long to exchange their Jewish identity for one that is universally human. And for Zweig, the universally human is what people should aspire to, writers, thinkers, to exchange their Jewish identity. “Adjusting to another and perhaps more universal culture,” he writes, “has freed itself or is freeing itself from all the drawbacks and constraints and pettiness forced upon it by the ghetto.” These little moments, and they’re few and far between, but I think they’re very revealing. So, now, we come to the second phase of his life between 1914 and 34, his literary heyday. He was, without question, one of Europe’s most widely read and translated authors. He was certainly the most translated German-speaking author. “I was the most translated writer in the world,” he writes. He’s not slow to blow his own trumpet.

“My success grew slowly greater. Until every time I published a book, 20,000 copies were sold in Germany in the first few days after it came out.” His biography of Fouche, not a familiar figure to many of us today, published in 1929, sold 50,000 copies in a year in Germany alone. In 1932, he published his biography at Marie Antoinette, the best-selling Christmas title of 1932. 50,000 copies by the start of the new year. His book “Decisive Moments in History” sold, he writes, “250,000 copies in a very short time.” By 1931, on his 50th birthday, he wrote it in The World of Yesterday, “I had made friends with many of the finest people of our time. I’d seen and enjoyed wonderful artistic performances, immortal cities and pictures, and the most beautiful landscapes in the world. I’d remained free, independent of any official position or career. My work was a pleasure to me. And even better, it had given pleasure to others. What could go wrong?” he writes. But he already knew when he wrote, not just when he wrote this, but when he was writing about 1931, he already knew that there was a darker side to this period, which he describes brilliantly in “The World of Yesterday.” “All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, he writes. "Revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and immigration.” The world of Viennese culture he describes is the world he grew up in, and describes with fantastic sense of nostalgia. The world of European high culture that was shaken by the First World War, rocked by post-war inflation, and then finally destroyed by Nazism. Although Zweig writes about culture as a leading man of letters, he was also a witness of his time.

One of the most interesting guides to the interwar world, and certainly to the 1930s. He brings to life the horrors of the First World War, of the famine and inflation of post-war Austria and Germany in 1923, where, as he writes, “A shoelace cost more than a luxury shop with a stock of 2,000 pairs of shoes. Repairing a broken window was more expensive than building the whole house at once.” So, let’s start with World War I, which really shook his faith in progress, his faith in humanity, his faith in liberalism, and his faith in Europe. His belief in Europe as a united culture. He was, he couldn’t believe that nationalism that greeted the outbreak of World War I. And as he writes, “All the bellicose nations were in an overheated frame of mind. Anyway, in 1914, the worst rumours were rapidly turned into the truth. The most ridiculous slanders were believed.” He writes, “Modest tradesman stuck or stamped the slogan, 'God punish England’ on the envelopes. Society ladies swore never to speak a word of French again. Shakespeare was exiled from German theatres.” Something we might think about when we think about the Welsh concert hall, which banned Tchaikovsky just yesterday. “Mozart and Gardner were banned from French and British concert halls. German professors explained that Dante had really been of Germanic birth. The French claim Beethoven is a Belgian.” Then comes the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. “I was born in 1881,” he writes, “in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg monarchy,” but he would look for it in vain on the map today, it has vanished without trace. And that moment, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire had such a massive impact on Zweig, but also, as we’ll see in a future lecture, on the other great writer, a very close friend of Zweig’s, Joseph Roth.

Many of whose greatest works were about the trauma of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Then comes the poverty of post-war Central Europe, including Vienna. And I think it’s something that we really, in Britain, don’t understand, and possibly changes the whole way we should think about the interwar period in Central Europe and maybe even of the way the First World War unfolded was the scale of famine, actual famine in Germany and in Austria because of the blockade that the British Navy so successfully employed during the later years of the First World War. People were starving. And if you look at the great artworks of Kathe Kollwitz, for example, the German artist, of starving children, and the propaganda posters she drew to draw attention to, for charities to raise money for starving children, starving children in Berlin, in Germany, in Vienna. He had spent the last period of the First World War in Switzerland. And then he returns to Austria to what he describes as now only a grey, lifeless shadow of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy. “There was no bread, no coal, no oil, "he writes. And if I may read you a passage because it will also give you a sense, not just of what Zweig saw, but his ability to evoke it, to bring it to life. A journey to Austria at that time called for the kind of preparations you would make for an expedition to the Arctic. You had to equip yourself with warm clothing and woollen underwear because everyone knew there was no coal on the Austrian side of the border and winter was coming. You had your shoes sold. Once across the border, the only footwear available was wooden clogs.

You took as much food and chocolate with you as Switzerland would allow you to take out of the country to keep from starving until you were issued with your first Russian cards for bread and fats. Baggage had to be insured for as high as sum as possible because most of the baggage vans were looted, and every shoe or item of clothing was irreplaceable. Only when I went to Russia 10 years later, in the Stalin years, did I make similar preparations. Then a couple of pages later, he describes a train journey. You only had to set eyes on those carriages to know in advance what had become of the country. The conductors showing us to our seats looked thin, hungry, and shabbily-clothed. Their worn out uniforms hung loose on their stooped shoulders. The leather straps for pulling the windows up and down had been cut off. Every scrap of leather was valuable. Bayonets or sharp knives have been hacking at the seats as well. And whole chunks of upholstery had been ruthlessly cut away by some unscrupulous person who, anxious to get his shoes mended, was carrying off any leather he could find. The ashtrays have been stolen as well for the sake of their small nickel and copper content. Soot and cinders from the poor quality brown coal used to heat engines these days were blown in through the broken windows by the late autumn wind, leaving black marks on the floor and walls of the compartment.

But at least, the stink of it took the edge off the sharp smell of iodoform that reminded me how many sick and wounded men must have travelled in these skeletal carriages during the war. The mere fact that the train was on the move at all was a miracle, if a tedious one. Whenever the wheels, which needed lubricating, screeched a little less shrilly, we were afraid that the worn out engine was giving up the ghost. It took four or five hours to travel a distance that used to be covered in an hour. And once twilight came on, it was pitch dark inside the train. The light bulbs had been smashed or stolen. So, if you were searching for anything, you had to grove around with the aid of matches. And the only thing that kept you from freezing was the fact that six to eight people had been sitting close together from the start of the journey. And then one last passage, Every foray down to the city was a distressing experience at the time. For the first time, I saw in the yellow dangerous eyes of the starving what famine really looks like. Bread was nothing but black crumbs, tasting of pitch and glue. Coffee was a decoction of roast barley. Beer was yellow water. Chocolate, a sandy substance coloured brown. The potatoes were frozen. Most people trapped rabbits so as not to forget the taste of meat entirely. Almost all the men went around dressed in old uniforms, even Russian uniforms collected from a depo or a hospital clothing in which several people had died already.

You often saw trousers made of old sacks. Every step you took along the streets where the shop windows were as empty as if they’d been looted. Mortar was crumbling away like scabs from the ruinous buildings, and obviously undernourished people dragged themselves to work with difficulty. And then comes the post-war inflation. And again, the trauma that’s experienced in Austria and in Germany was to prove crucial in the coming decade. Soon, no one knew what anything cost. Prices shot up at random. A box of matches could cost 20 times more in a shop that had raised the price early in another where a less grasping shopkeeper was still selling his wares at yesterday’s prices. "Nothing,” he writes, “as we have to keep reminding ourselves, made the German people,” by which he means the German speaking people, including the Austrians, “So bitter, so mad with hatred, so ripe for Hitler as the inflation of 1923.” And then he describes his first sightings of Nazis. “Bands of young men suddenly turned up in the neighbouring border towns of Reichenhall and Berchtesgaden.” Berchtesgaden, of course, was Hitler, summer residence. “Places that I visited almost every week. These gangs were small at first, and then grew larger and larger. The young men wore jack boots and brown shirts and each sported a garishly coloured armband with a swastika on it. They marched and held meetings. They paraded through the streets, singing songs and chanting in chorus. They stuck up huge posters and defaced the walls with swastikas.”

And this brings us to the third and the last phase of Zweig’s life from 1934 to ‘42. In 1933, on the 10th of May, his books were burned by the Nazis. “My literary work,” he writes, “In the language in which I wrote it has been burned to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. My books,” he writes later, “had disappeared from their original language. And what I wrote from now on would be unknown in Germany or Austria.” He couldn’t be published in Germany or Austria, in the German speaking world. “My friends were far away. My old circle of acquaintances scattered. The house with its collections and pictures and books was lost to me. Now, at the age of 50, I faced another beginning. And then in November, 1937, possibly the greatest passage in the whole book, he writes his last visit to Vienna to see his elderly mother. On those last two days in Vienna, I looked at every one of the familiar streets, every church, every park and garden, every old nook and cranny of the city where I’d been born with a desperate, silent farewell in my mind. Never again. I embraced my mother with the same secret knowledge that it was for the last time. I turned that farewell glance on everything I saw in the city and the country, knowing that it was a goodbye forever. And as the train crossed the border, I knew, like the patriarch lot in the Bible, that all behind me was dust and ashes, the past transformed into a pillar of salt.” And then begins the period of exile. First, Britain, where he lived in Bath for a while, and in London for a while.

America where he’s mainly in New York. And finally, South America where he lived in Brazil. “I kept thinking,” he writes, “of something a Russian exile had said to me years before. 'A man used to have only a body and a soul. Now, he needs a passport too, or he won’t be treated as a man.’ I trained my heart,” he writes a couple of pages. “I trained my heart to beat as the heart of a citizen of the world,” which is what Zweig had considered himself all his life until then. “On the day I lost my Austrian passport, I discovered at the age of 58 that, when you lose your native land, you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders. So, I belong nowhere now. I’m a stranger. Or the most, a guest everywhere.” Then on the 22nd of February, 1942, Zweig and his second wife, Lotte, who was nearly 30 years younger than him. Zweig was then 60. She was 34. They committed suicide in Brazil together. And later that year, Die Welt von Gestern, The World of Yesterday, was published in German, in Stockholm. It couldn’t be published in Germany or Austria. It had been written mostly in 1941 in America. And it was first translated in England in November, 1943. And he writes, in the foreword, “I write in the middle of the war, I write abroad, and with nothing to jog my memory. I have no copies of my books, no notes, no letters from friends available here in my hotel room.

I have nothing left of my past then, but what I carry in my head. At this moment, everything else is either lost or beyond my reach. So, I ask my memories to speak and choose for me, and give at least some faint reflections of my life before it sinks into the dark.” And then as I mentioned earlier, his reputation went into abeyance after the war, perhaps for half a century or so. And then, certainly from 2000, perhaps a little bit before then, new translations of novels, stories, and essays, including “The World of Yesterday,” which was retranslated in 2009, started to appear. New biographies, a lot of new biographies. Why? Certainly because he was a great writer. It’s the simple explanation. A great writer of essays, histories and biographies, novels and stories. He was extraordinarily diverse. Few great writers have written as much and have written such a range of writing. But then also, perhaps more important even, is the topicality because there are some critics who are not great admirers of Zweig. Some writers who were not great admirers of Zweig. But I think nobody would disagree about his topicality. He became a refugee. He committed suicide. And rereading “The World of Yesterday,” first published 80 years ago, it strikes me that the early chapters on fin-de-siecle Vienna seem a little complacent and insular, evading the realities of late 19th century anti-semitism, and how much of the golden age of security only really applied to the rich bourgeoisie of Vienna and not to the urban and rural poor hit by the great depression of the late 19th century.

And whereas the final chapters on exile and displacement speak to us, and as I said, never more so than as we watch Ukrainian families desperately trying to get onto trains for Berlin and Warsaw. One final reading from out halfway through the book. He’s writing about his first trips to Eastern Europe during the First World War. “Above all, I saw the wretched state of the civilian population whose eyes were still darkened by the horror of what they’d experienced. I saw the misery of the Jews in their ghetto, something of which I’d entertained no idea, living eight or 12 to a room on the ground floor, or in the basement of a building. One Tyrolean reservist took photographs of his wife and children out of his dirty old wallet and showed them to the enemy who all, in turn, admired them, asking questions with their fingers, ‘Was this particular child three or four years old?’ I had an irresistible feeling that these simple, even primitive men saw the war in a much clearer light than our university professors and writers. They regarded it as a misfortune that had befallen them. There was nothing they could do about it. And anyone else who was the victim of such bad luck was a kind of brother.

This was a consoling realisation to accompany me on my entire journey past towns that have been shot to pieces and shops that had obviously been looted because bits of furniture lay about in the middle of the street like broken limbs and gutted entrails. And the well-cultivated fields among the war torn areas made me hope that, within a few years, all traces of the destruction would’ve disappeared. Of course, at the time, I could not yet guess. But just as quickly, as the traces of war would disappear from the face of the earth, so to the memory of its horrors could be blotted out of human memory. I think that’s probably enough from me. So, if you have any questions, I will look at the screen. And if I may read out some of the questions and I will do my best to answer them.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Monty Golden asks, "What was the role of Zweig in the emergence of the Habsburg myth?”

A: Well, Monty, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by the Habsburg myth. But I think, like Joseph Roth, perhaps a bit less than Joseph Roth, I think he was fascinated by the glories of the Austro-Hungarian empire, by its longevity, by its stability as he saw it. He was, I suppose you might say, one of the winners, growing up in a wealthy family in Vienna at the heart of Viennese and Austrian and Central European culture. So, and he wrote a lot about, well, European culture and great European figures of history. But he also wrote a lot of course about… the Austro-Hungarian empire, about Austria, about Vienna, especially in his fiction. And I suppose he does somewhat idealised that world, perhaps because much of his writing came in the last decade of his life, so that it was the past was seen through the lens of the present, and the present was terrible for him. But for many, many others, of course. I hope that’s some kind of answer.

Riva Foreman says, “Humanism equals humanitarian activism today.” Well, he was a humanitarian. During the First World War, even before he went to Switzerland, he and the French writer, Romain Rolland, and others got together to try and promote the virtues of peace and a unified European culture when that was massively under threat during what was what they felt to be a European civil war between Germany, Austria, to a lesser extent, Italy and Turkey on the one hand, and Britain, France, and for some time, Russia on the other. So, he certainly was a humanitarian activist. He wasn’t somebody who just… wallowed in the life of luxury that he acquired for himself. He was a humanitarian and an active humanitarian. But for him, humanism meant more than that. Humanism meant a chain of culture, which goes back perhaps to the Renaissance in particular. I think he didn’t write so much about mediaeval culture or ancient culture. But from Renaissance culture onwards early modern culture, I think that was at the heart of his being, one could say. It’s not just at the heart of his writing and his essays, though he wrote very beautifully about the great figures of European culture. But it was really, at the centre of his being, the centre of his soul was a kind of humanism and a belief that art and culture were at the heart of everything for him.

Q: Monty asks also, “What happened to all the things he collected?”

A: Well, this is interesting. I mean, he did sell a lot of it through auctions and so on in London, and before he left Austria. And some of it, I’m afraid, just got scattered in the constant process of moving because he moves from Salzburg to Britain, and then to America. And within America, he moves a bit up and down the east coast in New England, and then he moves to Brazil. And gradually… he sort of gets rid of his beloved possessions. So, obviously, things like Beethoven’s desk for example, he couldn’t take with him. His beloved autographs and manuscripts he kept with him for as long as he could. But you know, it’s a fascinating question about refugees and emigres. What do they take with them? What do they keep? What do they reluctantly give up? And I remember in my grandmother’s case, for example, she was a Jewish refugee from Berlin and she had some, she kept, all her life, certain little odd pictures, small pictures of no great artistic merit. But for her, they were tremendously evocative, gothic, in gothic print, additions of Goethe, which again symbolised for her as it did for Zweig that vanished world of German culture. So, that’s essentially what happened to all the things. He kept what he could and had to sell what he couldn’t.

Q: And William Chmerkovskiy asks, Chmerkovskiy perhaps, asks, “What is meant by, what do you mean by Jewish identity that is exchanged for whatever in the West?”

A: Not quite sure what that means. What I mean by Jewish identity, well, I suppose, let’s look at what Zweig meant by Jewish identity, which is more important. What Zweig meant by Jewish identity was… the important, massively important contribution that bourgeois Jews in Vienna made to Viennese Austrian and Central European culture. And I think you would’ve said the same about Berlin and Paris. So, for example, one of his closest friends for a long time until he was assassinated in 1922, the centenary of his assassination is later this summer, was the former German foreign secretary, Walther Rathenau, who was a Jew, but like Zweig, an assimilated and secular Jew. Zweig grew up in an assimilated and secular family. His friends were, wherever he describes or gives an indication of them, were secular, assimilated Jews. And that’s why you look with some difficulty to find references to religious Jews and to Ostjuden. And his condescending remarks, just a few, to ad a few in this particular book to Ostjuden are a clue, I think, to his view of East European Orthodox Jews.

Ruth B. says, “The orchestra in Cardiff did not ban Tchaikovsky, just the 1812 Overture as one of their players is Ukrainian, and they thought it would be inappropriate to play it.” Well, that’s absolutely true. To be fair, it wasn’t just Tchaikovsky. It was indeed the 1812 Overture. However, I think it has been roundly condemned by many people as an inappropriate kind of gesture. And I think the question is, you know, as Zweig said at the time, the outbreak of the First World War, Britain, France, and Germany, and Austria may be at war, but don’t for heavens sake ban Wagner, or Shakespeare, or Balzac, whichever country you happen to be in because they were from the opposing country. And that’s what I mean about his, not just his humanism, but his cosmopolitanism, his sense of of United Europe, which mattered enormously to him. Although, I think you might say that by United Europe, what he really meant was the Mediterranean and Western and Central Europe. I don’t think he included Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bessarabia, Bukovina in his notion of the unified Europe.

Q: Ronnie Saba, again, I do hope I’ve pronounced your name correctly, forgive me if I haven’t, writes, “I read Zweig’s Fouche and Marie Antoinette in French some 25 years ago. At the time, there were virtually no English translations on the shelves of series of bookshops. How do you explain his apparent political naivety when he accepted Stalin’s invitation to visit the Soviet Union and wrote enthusiastically about it?”

A: That is a very interesting and very good question. One might say he was not alone. He was not in any way a communist or even socialist, and certainly not a , and not a champion of the Soviet Union. But like… People like the Webbs and H.G. Wells, he was fooled by what he saw. And of course, what he saw. He obviously didn’t see the famine, the terrible famine in Ukraine, which killed three and a half million people. He didn’t see the horrors. He didn’t know someone like Isaac Babel who might have told him about what, more about what Soviet Union under Stalin was really like, or Vasily Grossman, the young Vasily Grossman. So, naivety. I don’t think he was an incredibly perceptive political commentator or political analyst or historian. I think what he was was a very good witness of what he saw with his own eyes. A train going through Austro-Hungary, the famine, the effects of terrible inflation. He wrote later some wonderful accounts of poverty in England and of refugees coming to England suddenly becomes a subject for him, which have been collected in a single volume by Pushkin Press who’ve done much to translate him. So, I think, you know, yes, naive, yes, foolish, yes, not very political. But there were many people who went to the Soviet Union who were duped and fooled by what they saw and didn’t realise that what they saw was a Potemkin village, to make a reference to the days of Catherine the Great. You know, they saw what the regime wanted them to see, and they didn’t get access to what the regime didn’t want anyone to see.

Q: Bobby Steger writes, “who were the bands of young men targeting in their violence, just Jews or others as well? What was the origin of these groups? Were they created or supported by Nazis specifically, or did they just spring up as a violent reaction to the poverty?”

A: Yes, partly to the poverty, partly antisemitism, which, you know, Zweig underestimated, I think, crucially. The other thing was because he was in Salzburg, which was very near the border with Germany, with Bavaria in particular, he described, he makes references to Berchtesgaden, which is later where Hitler had his great famous residence. Because of that, he therefore… The borderlands between Germany and Austria were a sort of centre of Nazism on the rise. And which raises the question, why did he move to Salzburg? Okay, it was before the Nazis. But Salzburg was always a centre of Austrian clerical anti-Semitism. Why on earth did he move there when he could have stayed in Vienna? Or he could have lived anywhere. So, it’s an interesting question.

Q: Gita Khan asks, “Do we know why Zweig killed himself?”

A: 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.

Q: Clarissa Kirschenbaum asked, “Did Zweig have any Jewish education, bar mitzvah? Did he have children?”

A: 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.

Q: Barbara Shaw asks, “Why do you think Zweig’s reputation went into abeyance?”

A: That’s an extremely good and interesting question. I think partly, I wrote a piece a little while ago called “Out of the Deep Freeze” about how central East European culture, literature in particular, was largely ignored. People like Heinrich Burr and Gunter Grass were more popular, especially in the '60s, '70s, '80s, because they wrote about the experience of the war Bell’s German prisoner of war under the Soviet Union. I think his world of fin-de-siecle Vienna, perhaps rather like the wonderful, wonderful films of Max Ophuls, both his films made in Central Europe, and then later in America, “Letter To An Unknown Woman,” which was based on a Zweig novella. That I think was, it seemed a distant world, too distant a world, I think, for many readers after 1945. And I think British culture was somewhat more insular. Not completely, of course, because there was an interest in sort of the classics. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Balzac, and so on. But I think later as the 1980s and '90s wore on, Central and East Europe became somehow more accessible, more interesting. The fall of the Berlin Wall in '89. The breakup of Soviet Union in '91. People became more interested. And you could fly very cheaply suddenly to cities like Krakow, to Riga, and of the great cities of Germany and Austria. And so, Europe, Central Europe, his world suddenly became more accessible. And I think, as I say, his experience as a refugee, as somebody who committed suicide, the darkness of some of the things he witnessed during the First World War, after the First World War began to resonate for an audience. And of course, he was… And the same happened with Joseph Roth. Nobody was reading Joseph Roth in the 1940s and '50s, and even '60s. A bit of an exaggeration. Forgive the hyperbole. Some people were, of course. And there were translations. But generally speaking, both writers absolutely took off in the last 20 or 25 years. They suddenly became must-read writers, partly 'cause they were great writers.

And secondly, because small publishing houses like New York career books classics like Pushkin Press, like Peter Owen started investing in translations. And it’s interesting, you know, there was a translation of The World of Yesterday from 1943, but Pushkin Press in 2009 commissioned a new translation by Anthea Bell, one of the leading German translators, German to English translators. And they were published in paperback. And rather, to everyone’s amazement, they really took off. It seemed that Zweig spoke not only to younger readers. I think older readers rediscovered Zweig and remembered what a joy it had been reading him in the first place sometime before. So, my copy, for example, my original hardback of The World of Yesterday belonged to my father. And there is, in the… On the front page, there’s a very sweet dedication. It says, “Morrine, from Leslie. Christmas 1944.” And I’ve often wondered who were Morrine and Leslie and why did this book mean so much to them both. Anyway, I think that is the reason, that’s why he fell into abeyance. He became peculiarly unfashionable, the world of pre-World War I and interwar, Austria, Vienna, waltses and cafes, and women falling in love. And you know, it just somehow seemed… remote in some peculiar way, which I don’t quite understand. But then, suddenly, it became resonant in a way which is much more obvious.

Q: So, did he ever meet Proust? Now, that is a very, very good question. Sorry, that’s Edwin Green, asked, “Did he ever meet Proust?”

A: Not that I know of. But fortunately, there’s an index to the paperback, the Pushkin paperback. And there is just one reference in the index. And he writes, “From 1900 to 1914, I never saw the name of Paul Valery mentioned as in either Figaro or Le Matin. Marcel Proust was considered a dandy who frequented the Paris salons. And Romain Rolland was thought of as a knowledgeable musicologist. Well, I’m sure, had he known Proust, he would’ve said so because he was a fantastic name dropper and collector of famous artistic and literary figures. So, I think one must assume that he didn’t. But I don’t know that for certain.

Q: Barry Epstein asks, well, or perhaps Epstein asked, "Was Zweig a soldier during the First World War?”

A: 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.

Q: Yes. Jeremy Bard asks, “What was Zweig’s experience as a child? Did he suffer trauma or loss?”

A: No, I don’t think he did. I mean, it’s quite hard to connect Zweig’s somewhat strange later life, I think, his personal life, I mean. He was a bit of a dandy. As I say, his first marriage was very peculiar. It’s rather hard to make sense of that without thinking, “Did he suffer a trauma or loss of some kind?” It’s not clear that he did. And he certainly doesn’t write about any traumas or losses. And I don’t know whether his close friend Sigmund Freud, another Austrian Jew from Moravia, whether he’d ever had any insights into Zweig’s life or psychological life. And he doesn’t really, you know, if you read this autobiography, it is after all an autobiography. And he doesn’t really, it’s not just that he doesn’t talk about historical things, which you think he might mention. Viennese antisemitism, for example. He doesn’t really mention, he doesn’t really talk about, for example, his disastrous first marriage. He doesn’t really talk about all kinds of things about his parents that you’d think he might be want to reveal. But perhaps, I suppose 1941-42, when he wrote it, that was not a time perhaps when people did write revelatory autobiographies or memoirs. And he was far more interested clearly in the great cultural figures that he knew and the great historical events that he witnessed. And particularly, the world of fin-de-siecle Vienna, which was vanishing without trace before his very eyes. And I think that image of the great patriarch, Lot, from the Bible, I think evokes a sense of how he saw himself as somebody just looking back and seeing whole world obliterated. And I think that’s when we think about, why has he become more fashionable? Why is he becoming widely read again? I think that’s the reason. Because I think that speaks, one thing people think of the wars in the former Yugoslavia or think of some of the civil wars in the Middle East, and certainly now in Ukraine. You know, I think people think, yes, he’s a witness to these. He speaks to us in a very clear and evocative way about what he saw in wartime, Eastern front, and then post-war, post-war Vienna and Germany. He travelled a lot, and he wrote about what he travelled and what he saw. And I think perhaps just one more, one last question, which I’ll try and try and answer.

Q: “When did he write 'The Forty Days of Musa Dagh?’” writes Kita Smith, “And how was it received?”

A: Well, I’m afraid to say, I don’t know how it was received. And I’m just looking to see. There’s a bibliography in the old hardback. 40 days long. Well… I’m afraid, in this very long German bibliography, it doesn’t mention this book. So, I’m afraid I can’t answer that question.

One final question then, let’s see if I can at least answer this.

Q: Lily asks, “He never targeted Hitler as the cause of all the troubles, never mentioned him by name. Zweig was often criticised for not using his powerful pen against Hitler. Why did he abstain from doing so?”

A: I think because he had a sense, although he was fascinated by great figures of history, Napoleon, Fouche, Marie Antoinette, he loved writing biographies, historical biographies. So, he was fascinated by great figures of history. I think because he had a sense that really, the problems were deeper rooted than one man. I think his sense of the, his first glimpses of young Nazis after the First World War on the German-Austrian border, his sense of the enormous trauma of the inflation, of the breakup of the Austria-Hungarian empire. And we must remember, although Austrians for many years after the war, considered themselves the first victims of Nazis. I don’t think that view is widely shared today. And I think, at the time, Austria, Austria clearly was one of the prime movers of Nazis and many of the leading Nazis were themselves, Austrians. So, I think, I don’t think he saw Hitler as the sole… I don’t think he’s, yes, I don’t think he saw Hitler as the main source of Nazism and of the troubles that tore apart his world. And so, I think that’s why, just as he doesn’t write about Lenin or Stalin really in any great depth, or Mussolini. I just don’t think he was sort of interested in those figures. The people who really fascinated him were great figures from history, from 18th century, Erasmus. The Renaissance Reformation, and the great cultural figures. Those were the people who absolutely fascinated him. And I think the reason he collected their autographs and memorabilia and books and pictures was because it somehow brought him closer to these astonishing figures, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Balzac. These are the people who fascinated him. And he was a fantastic slob. And I think he just saw Hitler as unworthy of his attention, frankly.

So, I think, I’m afraid we should probably leave it there. Thank you so much for your questions and I’ve tried to answer as many of them as I can.

One final point, if I may. One very curious omission in “The World of Yesterday,” another curious omission, is a longtime friend of Stefan Zweig, the great writer Joseph Roth, also Austrian, also Jewish. and I’ll be back on Tuesday the 29th of March to talk about Joseph Roth, one of the great Central European writers in the 20th century. And I look forward enormously to seeing you again then. Thank you so much for your patience. Thank you for joining me this evening.

• Thank you, David. That was excellent. Thank you for a really riveting presentation. Much, much appreciated. And thank you, Lauren. And thanks to everybody for joining us.