Confusion

STEFAN ZWEIG (1881–1942), novelist, biographer, poet, and translator, was born in Vienna into a wealthy Austrian Jewish family. During the 1930s, he was one of the best-selling writers in Europe and was among the most translated German-language writers before the Wecond World War. with the rise of Nazism, he moved from Salzburg to London (taking British citizenship), to new York, and finally to Brazil, where he committed suicide with his wife. New York Review Books has published Zweig’s novels The Post-Office Girl and Beware of Pity as well as the novellas Chess Story and Journey Into the Past.

ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the 2009 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Zweig’s Burning Secret. in 2002 she won the Independent foreign fiction Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for her translation of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

GEORGE PROCHNIK is the author of Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology and In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. he has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Playboy, and Cabinet, among other publications.

CONFUSION

STEFAN ZWEIG

Translated from the German by

ANTHEA BELL

Introduction by

GEORGE PROCHNIK

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

CONTENTS

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

CONFUSION

Copyright and More Information

INTRODUCTION

I

A photograph of Stefan Zweig taken in 1928, not long after the publication of Confusion, shows him a little paunchy in an open-necked white shirt and knickerbockers, seated in an elegant garden chair before the old archbishop’s hunting lodge where he’d made his home atop a formidable hill overlooking Salzburg. He leans forward; his right hand clamped firmly to the back of his beloved water spaniel, Kaspar; his left, obscured, appears to clutch for the dog’s collar. Zweig appears the epitome of the rooted country squire, until you notice the fretful, perhaps resentful, anyway off-kilter smile playing over his long, elegant countenance, the deep lines around his mouth—and the famously dark eyes. Then abruptly the picture cries, “Get me out of this damn costume.”

Zweig was in his middle forties and at the height of his career when he wrote Confusion. Throughout the 1920s, he reeled off biographies (studies of Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and the sinister french police chief Joseph Fouché among them), plays, reviews, articles, essays on everything from the works of Otto Weininger and Ben Jonson to the increasing homogenization of world culture—and one novella after another. Confusion was published in 1926 in a volume that included two other fictions destined to be among his most popular, 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman and Beware of Pity.

When Zweig wasn’t at home writing, he made frequent appearances at the lectern and behind the radio microphone. He addressed large audiences across Europe on literary topics and as an advocate of the pacifist cause to which he’d come rather belatedly to subscribe during the first world war. Travel always enlivened his spirits—though accolade discomfited him as much as it flattered. He worried that easy popularity might induce a kind of sclerosis of the passions on which his creativity relied. During one lecture tour through Germany undertaken while he was working on Confusion, he wrote home that his talks had been going for the most part “swimmingly”—and his books sold “very well,” adding that the Germans were extraordinary in their respect for literature and art, “everyone down to the hotel porter knows who you are.” one friend likened the experience of Zweig’s company in those years to the “quiet but explosive whirring of a high-speed engine.”

Back at the grand lodge on the Kapuzinerberg where he lived with his first wife, the indomitable friderike Maria von Winternitz, and her two adolescent daughters from a previous marriage, Zweig entertained a steady stream of cultural luminaries and received countless uninvited admirers who made the pilgrimage up the zigzag hill path carrying dog-eared copies of his books past shrines to the stations of the cross erected by brethren of a neighboring monastery. Assisted by a series of punctilious secretaries, he perfected a methodology of bookkeeping to track the copious editions of his works in print. He was on the verge of becoming the world’s most widely translated author. Friderike was a game, competent hostess. The servants were devoted and diligent. The dogs were idolized.

Zweig enjoyed all the trappings of international literary celebrity and a somewhat imperious domestic carte blanche—yet he yearned for nothing so acutely as the collapse of this Austrian idyll. All the laurels and kowtowing were no substitute for the crackle of an inner bonfire that he felt certain age was steadily, irreversibly smothering. In 1925, when he was forty-four, he succumbed to one of his periodic depressions. In a letter to Friderike he explained it as “a crisis growing out of advancing years, tied up with uncompromising clarity of insight . . . I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don’t have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things . . . I expect nothing from the future; it’s a matter of indifference to me whether I sell 10,000 or 150,000 copies.