This at first seems rather a bland book about the writer Stefan Zweig, born in Vienna in 1881, who grew up to inherit a textile fortune and seemed to have everything, but who took his own life 60 years later, having been one of the most successful and most translated writers in Europe. He was also the collector of autograph manuscripts, including those of J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, William Blake, and Goethe (some of which were donated by Zweig’s heirs to the British Museum).

He had a loyal wife, Friderike – more faithful than him – who was perhaps more a close friend than a carnal wife, and remained a friend after he left her for another woman, Lotte. Both women were not only good companions to him, but good secretaries.

However, Oliver Matushek’s book sometimes lets Zweig speak for himself, often in letters, and the further it proceeds through the disaster years of European history, the more possible it becomes to understand the enigmatic, restless Zweig, who seems to be always on the move, yet somehow able to secrete works of matchless, sometimes almost perfumed prose, which he wrote in his favourite, appropriately purple, ink

His friendships and acquaintances alone provide a cross-section of European culture: the Belgian poet and Nobel Prize winner Emile Verhaeren, Kafka’s editor Max Brod, the French writer and First World War pacifist Romain Rolland, Hermann Hesse, Joseph Roth, Sigmund Freud (whose funeral oration Zweig gave in Golders Green), the soon-to-be assassinated German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss’s librettist, whom Zweig replaced when Hofmannsthal died (Zweig was Jewish, so this got Strauss into trouble).

Comparatively little attention is given by this German biographer to Zweig’s considerable time in London (he also bought a house in Bath), but he does include a rare transcript of a television interview Zweig gave to the famous broadcaster Leslie Mitchell in Alexandra Palace in June 1937, only a few months after such broadcasting began.  

Zweig expressed strongly his happiness to be in London, where people mind their own business and he felt free.  

When asked: ‘Is there any language into which your work has not been translated?’ He answered: ‘Well, I don’t know whether the Tibetans have shown any interest yet!’

This biography is stronger on the life than on the work. It does not help that German titles have not been translated, so that readers will have difficulty in recognizing works like Beware of pity or The royal game.
 
Those who know his finest work – his autobiography, The world of yesterday – will be surprised to find it written so close to his suicide. However, this book has the virtue of showing in his own words why he and his wife chose to end their lives in Brazil when he was just over 60.

He had been happy in Brazil, described its landscape beautifully, and expressed his gratitude to the country. He had been a depressive all his life, miraculously able to fight depression by writing. But he was now exhausted and saw the triumph of National Socialism, about which he had always been prescient, as the end of the European culture for which he had lived.

When the writer Thomas Mann heard of Zweig’s suicide in February 1942, he wrote to a friend: ‘I can’t feel shocked. However, such an end is always depressing because it always looks like the triumph of the “irresistible forces of history”. They won’t triumph over me, unless they actually have me killed – but that wouldn’t be very depressing.’

That may seem harsh, but Mann was thinking politically of his German enemies rubbing their hands in glee at the news.  Zweig described himself as ‘completely aloof from all politics’, and that was his greatest weakness.

Oliver Matushek, Three lives: a biography of Stefan Zweig, London: Pushkin Press, 2011

[ Camden New Journal, 12 July 2012 ]