Messages From a Lost World: Europe on the Brink

  II

  In the pieces collected here, Stefan Zweig strives to bring his European ideal down from the clouds and place it on terra firma; for example, in places he argues robustly for progressive education, in order to change deep-seated attitudes on race and Fatherland and encourage a new fluidity of thought, the interweaving of languages and cultures. The reader will soon see that these essays themselves interlink and one is merely reinforcing another; though the outlying theme may be different the central message remains the same. Nationalism is the sworn enemy of civilization, whether past, present or future, its malodorous presence thwarting the development of intelligence, its tenets those of division, regression, hatred, violence and persecution. In nationalism, with the Nazis as its most lethal form, Zweig sees the agent which may finally destroy his European heartlands, finishing the job the First World War started. Zweig’s Europe is an almost mystical conviction that whatever remains of the European spirit, the sum of artistic achievement that has accrued for centuries, can only survive the modern plague of nationalism, materialism and philistinism, can only safeguard its crown jewels of philosophical thought, art and literature through a practicable spiritual integration, a higher guild of amiable coalition. What Zweig proposes is a moral defence of the European soul against the very same forces which menace our Europe now in 2015, sanity against insanity, unity against division, tolerance against intolerance, intelligence against ignorance.

  But what of this spiritual unity? Is it just another word for pan-Europeanism, such as the mobile professional elites enjoy in the privileged strata of a technologically unified Europe today, or a rhetorical comfort blanket for those who see their national language and traditions dying on the world stage (notably the French, who habitually accord Zweig mythical proportions), or is there any substance to it? In these disparate pieces, culled from declarative pauses during his wanderings in exile, Zweig argues forcefully that there is. Moving and haunting, especially with the gift of hindsight, inherently tragic when planted before the brush fire of bestial realities sweeping across the continent as he wrote, yet paradoxically also morally persuasive, these pieces show Zweig repeatedly setting out his manifesto for cultural health through fraternity in the face of a Europe gradually slipping away into fanaticism, apathy, political expediency and the spectre of genocidal terror. Whether delivering a lecture in Rome or Zurich, in London or Paris, whether attending yet another conference in the ever-shrinking free-thinking world, humanistic symposiums whose influence on events he knew only too well were depressingly limited, Zweig is urgently reiterating the need for change, for action not more words. Yet in the unstable climate of imperialist muscle-flexing and virulent propaganda during the 1930s, the action required, the necessary turnaround, which he espouses so earnestly in his speeches, is held in check by the sheer physical and psychological power of the extremist forces which are already unleashed.

  Since the present appears hopeless, Zweig looks to the future and the generation beyond his own, the survivors, like himself after the First World War, speaking to an audience both within and crucially beyond the present calamity. Of course that future did herald an eventual Franco-German dream collective of European nation states, and out of this techno-bureaucratic conglomeration one could argue that something of Zweig’s dream has become a reality, namely in the successful European exchange of culture, sport and the arts. But Zweig’s exultant vision of fraternity under one continental roof has hardly been realized, since nation states have in spite of the past clung on to their self-serving national powers and their nationalist arrogance with tenacity. In the extraordinary, recently discovered text ‘The Unification of Europe: A Discourse’, a speech prepared to be given in Paris in 1934 but then mothballed, Zweig puts forward the novel idea of a “capital city of Europe” whose location would change each year, giving each country a chance to be master of the greater union. Today’s policy of “European capital of culture” is something Zweig would have certainly applauded, but it is really attractive window-dressing. The sad truth is that Zweig’s noble premise of nations purged of animosity towards one another, intellectually advancing in interlingual creativity, could only happen, then as today, if the people of Europe really wanted it to happen. But through the progressive decades of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, behind the self-congratulatory fanfares and chatter of policy-making from Brussels, nationalism lurked in one gruesome form or another, apparently muzzled on the fringes, kept at bay from the great project. Now, as fanatical Islam extends its grip and correspondingly Islamophobia rises, as the union stutters and stalls in monetary crisis, the far right is emboldened as never before, has slipped its chains, and we watch helpless as it sends out its hideous spawn. Zweig and the later constructors of the union all overlooked or optimistically sidelined a disturbing fact: that people might sign up to a collective if it does not disadvantage them, primarily in economic terms, but all the same they have the door to the motherland left ajar, ready to leap through it with the national flag whenever the time is right. The union does not replace the old enmities, the old fault lines. In their rush to renovate the European house, the decorators of the union merely laid consecutive layers of fresh wallpaper over a mouldy wall, and now those living in the house see the mould showing through again. Zweig’s grand European hothouse of the soul, a microclimate where hostility is an anachronism, did not come to pass, nor—let us be candid—did Zweig probably expect it to; but for us today, these ardent “lost messages”, in their endorsement of a stillborn yet still possible future, surely hold a special relevance, for they have been found, translated and made available to anglophone readers at a precarious moment for Western civilization, as to Europe’s outer walls the outriders of atrocity are gathering.

  III

  In May 1916, at the dark heart of the First World War, Zweig’s brief essay ‘The Tower of Babel’ was simultaneously published in the warring countries of France and Germany. Zweig employs the ancient myth of the doomed tower, more as an attractive template than as an effective analogy, for the grave situation in which the stricken vessel Europe presently found itself, holed and rudderless in an ocean of unprecedented ruin and dislocation following the storm surge of nationalism unleashed by war. The Babel essay appeared in the April/May edition of the Geneva-based journal Le Carmel, supported by Romain Rolland, and on 8th May ‘Der Turm zu Babel’ was published in the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin. As is well known, the Tower of Babel myth concerns mankind’s attempt, through communal ambition and spiritual accord, to build a tower high enough to reach heaven; it is spotted by God and humanity is summarily punished with eternal disunity for its excess of pride. The workers of all nations abandon their labours half finished and return for good to their individual lands, to reside in new-found insularity and suspicion. The half-completed tower falls into melancholy decay. Zweig enters at this point, transforming the tower into a symbol of Europe’s destiny, urging the workers (the European nations) who have downed tools and fled into their relevant clans to return to the construction site and continue work on the noble edifice they started and which, because of their desertion, is now a ruin. Zweig’s premise is simple: that humanity is capable of achieving unimaginable heights when it works together, pooling its creative resources and individual strengths in a common ambition, but conversely will achieve nothing, become degraded and eventually self-destruct when it is split into rival communities, each believing it is superior to another. It is a way out of this depressing cycle, this human impasse, that Zweig probes in these texts, highlighting history and artistic creativity as our most instructive guides.

  Into the 1920s, with the war still fresh in their minds, Zweig and his “Good European” brethren believed that if Europe was to save itself from a further even more unimaginable catastrophe, a spiritual renaissance in Europe must be sought. The brutal shock of the war, the attendant protracted freezing of borders and physical impossibility of travel, the unimaginable casualties had rudely interrupted this boon of fluid cu
ltural exchange. Whilst the roaming poet Walt Whitman sang of the pre-eminence of the continent of America, a piqued Émile Verhaeren, generally viewed as his Old World equivalent, retorted with insistence on the continued pre-eminence of the old European one. But Verhaeren, one of the elder statesman of Europe’s writerly elite, whom Zweig revered as a quasi-prophet of the new age, was fatally crushed by a train in Rouen station six months after Zweig published his Babel essay. Zweig, whose close relationship to Verhaeren was nevertheless eroded by the war, was hemmed in by closed borders and could not attend the funeral. Each had been stuck in his own land for the duration and there, to a lesser or greater extent, was infected initially by national pride. All were caught up in the event and few were immune from this scourge, at least initially. Zweig himself was guilty: his passions aroused, he enthusiastically logged the German army’s first triumphs. Even the scrupulously judicious Rilke penned ill-starred lines he later renounced, but worst of all the pro-European elder they all looked to, Verhaeren, had succumbed, penning La Belgique sanglante (Belgium Bleeding, 1915), scabrous, unbridled criticisms of German culture following massacres by German troops in Flanders, before eventually coming to his senses. These aberrations on the part of ordinarily deep-thinking, sensitive, peaceable writers and poets reveal to us just how radical and disorientating the course of events was, how the abrupt breaching of the dam of peace caused a deluge of virulent mutual accusation and national self-justification even amongst those supposedly immune from it. However, only two months into the war Zweig was already writing the poetic prose of ‘The Sleepless World’, the piece which opens this collection, a haunting, almost hallucinatory vision of the perpetual state of watchfulness, anxiety and confusion war induces in all sentient beings it touches. “Each became gradually enmeshed in the great event; no one could remain cool in the fiery delirium of the world. Constancy is helpless when realities are utterly transformed, none could stand aloof, secure on his rock above the waves, looking down and smiling knowingly at a world wracked with fever. Whether aware of what was happening or not, all were borne on the current, with no idea where it was leading.” It is, then, these four years of trauma, of horror, isolation and landlocked frustration, the melancholy procession of those reluctant coffin-bearers of the “golden age” that languished up to the summer of 1914, which form the crucible to Zweig’s fervent appeals for a united Europe two decades later. The loss of that pre-war Europe dogged Zweig until the moment he bowed out in Petrópolis, Brazil. He was in effect a man carrying a sickness which he could never recover from and for which in any case there was no cure.

  Interestingly, ‘The Tower of Babel’ enjoyed a resurrection when it was republished in the Budapest-based German-language paper Pester Lloyd on the auspicious date of 1st January 1930. Incredibly, on the very first day of a new decade, which will usher in the most devastating series of events ever to blight humanity, Zweig is there with his call for reconstruction. And Zweig revisits the myth again two years later in the essay ‘European Thought in its Historical Development’, given at a conference in Florence on 5th May 1932. With Hitler warming up for his election triumph the following year, Europe’s alternative construction foreman Zweig is busy handing out spades and picks. “This myth taken from the opening pages of the Bible is a wonderful symbol that with humanity as a community all is possible, even the highest aspirations, but only when it is united, and never when it is partitioned into languages and nations which do not understand each other and do not want to understand each other. And perhaps—who knows what mysterious memories can still be traced in our blood—there is still some vague reminiscence in our spirit of those distant times, the Platonic memory of when humanity was united and the persuasive, haunted longing that it might eventually recommence the unfinished work; in any case, this dream of a unified world, a unified humanity, is more ancient than all literature, art and scientific knowledge.” With almost a seer’s conviction, Zweig sees the answer to today’s disintegrating Europe in terms of the re-emergence of deep longings and dreams actively realized in a distant past. Rather unhelpfully sounding like some ironic inversion of Nazi blood theories, Zweig believes that the potential for spiritual development is buried deep within each of us: having been secreted in the blood of our ancestors, it passes down to us through the ages and through enlightenment and education it can be restored, however barbaric the epoch in which we reside. Only then can the half-finished work be completed, only then can the tower rise to its intended heights.

  IV

  The texts gathered in this collection are all stamped with the same hallmark, a stark question which underpins all other concerns for Zweig in these years. The question is this. After the unparalleled disaster of the First World War, will Europe once again transform itself into a battlefield, but this time destroy itself completely? This is the question Zweig carries with him out of the aftermath of the First World War through to the moment he leaves his Salzburg house for exile in London in 1934 and which is finally laid to rest in Petrópolis in February 1942. As the years pass the question becomes ever more onerous to bear. It is futile to ponder the moral intricacies of Zweig’s suicide in Brazil in 1942 without taking into account the veiled anguish revealed in these essays. The reason Zweig ended his life was essentially that the question of Europe’s destruction had for him been definitively answered. Isolated in Brazil, he became convinced that the Europe he had dedicated his writing life to had now destroyed itself, if not quite yet physically then spiritually. Zweig sensed that whatever was left of Europe after Nazism’s fires had burnt themselves out would be unable to resurrect itself as it had in the past following episodes of barbarism. The last chance of the inter-war years would not be replayed. The great project of civilization, as Zweig saw it, which had been evolving for three millennia, the central artery to his creative life, the very essence of his being, had been so retarded by Hitler’s radical evil that whatever came afterwards would be either hopelessly corrupted or, worse, a deceiving doppelgänger, a facade. Perhaps Zweig thought back to Nieuwpoort and Diksmuide, the shell-pulverized villages of Flanders, to Ypres, which he witnessed after the war, shocked at these “dummy” villages and towns, which were exact replicas but lacked any soul. This absence of soul, the possible eradication of the sense of meaning which accrues from the passage of human time, that is, everything “old Europe” represented, must have caused Zweig the most grievous suffering.

  However, what these pieces show us is how deeply Zweig, who was at various moments morbidly depressed, still believed in this seemingly hopeless humanity’s potential for change, the chance of renewed ascension. So even while his books were being tossed on pyres on the Domplatz in Salzburg, his house invaded by police, his right to publish in Germany ended, he could still turn to History, “that poetess”, and see hopeful parallels, how after each impossibly dark stage of history a new light had irresistibly dawned. Even as late as 1938/39, as the borders of Europe thicken with troops and tanks, Zweig is at pains to communicate his ideal as something other than an ideal, to make it appear feasible through concrete examples, however tenuous some may be in practical terms. In order to react meaningfully against the irresistible morbid flow of events, Zweig realizes that words are futile and yet that is all he has. It is this melancholic realization that the implicitly violent and “revolutionary” new age delivered by Hitler has by its very inception and presence moved far beyond the existing parameters, the awareness that the course of destruction is already set that exhausts Zweig. But doggedly he continues his quest because it is the humane one, the right one, the only path which morally guarantees him a purity of intent and a legacy of decency in the face of depravity. In short, it is the only path which allows him to go on living in a world he feels is intolerable. He repeats his message, and the message remains fundamentally the same whether it is 1916, 1932 or 1940.

  It should be remembered, as Jules Romains points out in Stefan Zweig: grand Européen (1939), that the largest part of Zweig’s publishe
d writing is in the domain of the essay form. Beyond the espousal of a European ideal, the essays here not only display some of Zweig’s greatest attributes as a writer, but also reveal crucial elements of biography which serve as foundations for or addenda to The World of Yesterday (1942). This is most clearly the case in the essays ‘The Historiography of Tomorrow’ and ‘European Thought in Its Historical Development’, and most vividly in the haunting and elegiac ‘The Vienna of Yesterday’, which Zweig presented at the Théâtre Marigny on his last visit to Paris in April 1940. The genuine affection of Zweig for his home city is here laid bare and the period of Vienna’s impoverishment after the 1918 armistice vividly and insightfully portrayed. Zweig manages to capture the peculiar atmosphere of the once grand and opulent city reduced to decrepitude, but still remaining proud, through a series of impressionistic flourishes that convince. Music, Zweig reveals to us, as he does elsewhere in these pieces, is the real lifeblood of humanity, and in this case of the old Hapsburg capital. It is also perhaps its saviour. The account of a concert by Vienna’s finest musicians held in an unheated auditorium with an audience of citizen paupers dressed in threadbare coats is to be treasured. The essay closes with a poignantly understated line whose polite vagueness, by veiling the horrific reality, paradoxically emphasizes it: “Of today’s Vienna I can say nothing. We know very little of what is happening there, we are even fearful of interpreting it too exactly.”