Journey Into the Past

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 Second 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 Confusion.

ANTHEA BELL is the recipient of the 2009 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Stefan 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.

ANDRÉ ACIMAN is the author of the novels Eight White Nights and Call Me by Your Name, the nonfiction works Out of Egypt and False Papers, and is the editor of The Proust Project. he teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

JOURNEY INTO THE PAST

STEFAN ZWEIG

Translated from the German and with an afterword by

ANTHEA BELL

Introduction by

ANDRÉ ACIMAN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

CONTENTS

Biographical Notes

Title Page

INTRODUCTION

JOURNEY INTO THE PAST

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

Copyright and More Information

INTRODUCTION

The word that keeps coming back is fluent. Stefan Zweig was born fluent. Fluent in everything. Everything seemed to come easily to him. Born in 1881 into a very wealthy, open-minded, Viennese Jewish family, he lived well and traveled widely; published at a very early age; finished his dissertation at an equally precocious age; acquired unparalleled inter national fame as a biographer, novelist, play wright, essayist, and librettist; and had a roster of friends and acquaintances so exhaustive that it is difficult to think of any European worthy of notice in the early decades of the past century whose biography would not at one point or another invoke the name of Stefan Zweig. He appears everywhere, knows everyone, and is translated into more languages than any of his contemporaries. Just about everything he put his mind to is stamped with the telltale ease, polish, and effortless grace of people whose success, literary and otherwise, seemed given from the day they were born or picked up a pen. He never quarreled with his tools; his tools were happy to oblige. He didn’t spend nights searching for the mot juste; the mot juste simply came. Agony was not his style. In his work there is not one trace of difficulty over come. Difficulty never came. There is—and one spots it from the very first sentence in almost everything he wrote—an unmistakable lightness of touch that makes him at once solemn and liant, humble and patrician, scholar and raconteur. The irony is seldom overblown, the drama never overstretched, and the psychology, for all its unsparing, disquieting probes into “spiritual upheavals ... unknown and unsuspected,” remains spot-on and mischievously subtle. You won’t hear the lumpish footfalls of over-the-top sorrow or pick up the false accents of fin de siècle melancholia. Zweig is firm and fluent. Everything in its time, everything just right, never a false move, not one sleight of hand. The story almost writes itself, from beginning to end. He’ll stop either when he has nothing more to say or when it’s no longer safe or necessary to go any further.

Though similarities to Hoffmann and Maupassant—as well as to Maugham, Schnitzler, and Moravia—are tempting, in Zweig we are in the brooding, highly urbane Central European universe where sepulchral obsessions and the shady regions of the soul can only be glimpsed and not examined, much less explained, and where redemption is seldom given or earned. He is the master of hidden impulses, of passionate excesses, of l’amour fou, of desires that run amuck, and of “the confusion of sentiments,” which is the title of one of his novellas—or, as he writes in that same novella, of “the unimaginable depths of human emotion.” Dostoyevsky, Verlaine, Nietzsche, and, of course, that other free-thinking Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud—these are the voices to whom Zweig, as a scholar and biographer, had already devoted many pages and whose timbre both underscores the penumbral cast of his fictional universe and explains his near-libidinal urge to penetrate the darker chambers of the heart.

Odd psychological states have a positively disquieting power over me; I find tracking down the reasons for them deeply intriguing, and the mere presence of unusual characters can kindle a passionate desire in me to know more about them, a desire not much less strong than a woman’s wish to acquire some possession.

Stefan Zweig was a cosmopolite, a prototypically Pan-European emancipated Jew, who managed to shed all belief systems with the exception of pacifism. To this day he remains, paradoxically enough, Europe’s most gracefully defeated and disabused optimist. As of the early 1920s, he had picked up the menacing rumbles in Adolf Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. By 1933 he showed sufficient prescience to see that life was no longer viable for Jews in the German-speaking world and soon moved to England.