Messages from a Lost World
STEFAN ZWEIG
MESSAGES FROM A LOST WORLD
Europe on the Brink
Translated from the German
by Will Stone
PUSHKIN PRESS
LONDON
What extraordinary changes and advances I have witnessed in my lifetime, what amazing progress in science, industry, the exploration of space, and yet hunger, racial oppression and tyranny still torment the world. We continue to act like barbarians, like savages we fear our neighbours on this earth, arm against them and they against us. I deplore to have lived at a time when man’s law is to kill. The love of one’s country is a natural thing but why should love stop at the border, our family is one, each of us has a duty to his brothers, we are all leaves of the same tree, and the tree is humanity…
PABLO CASALS
CONTENTS
- Title Page
- Epigraph
- Foreword By John Gray
- Translator’s Introduction
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- The Sleepless World—1914
- The Tower of Babel—1916
- History as Poetess—1931
- European Thought in Its Historical Development—1932
- The Unification of Europe—1934
- 1914 and Today—1936
- The Secret of Artistic Creation—1938
- The Historiography of Tomorrow—1939
- The Vienna of Yesterday—1940
- In This Dark Hour—1941
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- Details of First Publication
- About the Publisher
- Copyright
It is not surprising that readers are returning to the writings of Stefan Zweig. Extremely prolific and for a time extremely popular, he has suffered the neglect that often follows extraordinary literary success. The suspicion that he was overrated hung over him for many years. Yet the range and depth of his work—his arresting short stories and novellas, his vivid biographies and wide-ranging cultural commentaries, together with The World of Yesterday, one of the definitive twentieth-century memoirs, and Beware of Pity, his only full-length novel and one of the most darkly penetrating explorations of the human costs of sympathy ever written—belie this reputation. When we read Zweig now, we are rediscovering one of Europe’s great writers.
The quality of Zweig’s work is reason enough to return to him. But it is his quintessentially European outlook that makes him such a necessary writer today. Zweig embodied some of the central contradictions of the twentieth-century European mind. High idealism coexisted in him alongside a painful perception of the fragility of civilization. He believed passionately that Europe could cease to be a continent of squabbling nationalities and ethnicities. Yet his attachment to the old “world of security”—the liberal Hapsburg realm that he described with nostalgic fondness in The World of Yesterday—prevented him from embracing the faith that society could be reconstructed on a radically different model. He never shared the belief—or delusion—that a new civilization was being built in Soviet Russia. For Zweig, a better world could only be an extension of the world he had lost.
If Zweig did not share the faith in Communism of so many interwar European writers and thinkers, neither was he confident that the liberal civilization in which he had been reared could be renewed. Zweig’s professions of idealism sound more like triumphs of the will over an essentially pessimistic intellect than genuine affirmations of hope, and in some ways they blinded him to the extremities of his time. Deeply attached to cosmopolitan ideals, he failed to appreciate how these ideals were already being challenged in fin-de-siècle Vienna, where a virulently anti-Semitic mayor came to power in 1897 after several attempts by the Emperor Franz Joseph to block the appointment had failed. Some of the texts collected here show him struggling with the enormity of the catastrophe that followed Europe’s descent into civil war in 1914. Towards the end of ‘The Tower of Babel’, published in May 1916, he writes of “the monstrous moment we are living through today”. But he was slow to respond to the threat of Nazism, seeing it as merely an extreme manifestation of the familiar evil of nationalism. He repeated this view in his lecture on ‘The Unification of Europe’, scheduled to be given in Paris in 1934 but never delivered, and—failing even then to grasp the unprecedented and radical evil that Nazism embodied—reiterated it again in 1941 in his speech to the New York Pen Club, ‘In This Dark Hour’. The signs of danger were clear, but—unlike Nietzsche, whose conception of a “good European” he admired and attempted to realize in himself—Zweig could not acknowledge that modern Europe harboured a deadly potential for a new type of barbarism.
It was probably only when he had decided to kill himself that Zweig really came to believe that Europe had itself (as he put it) “committed suicide”. Having fled the Nazi-dominated continent where his books were being burnt, first for Britain, then America and finally Brazil, he seems to have come to the decision after hearing of the fall of Singapore. When he and his wife Lotte ended their lives on 23rd February 1942, not much more than a week after Singapore fell, it was as if he were drawing down a curtain on any possibility of a rebirth of the European civilization he loved. To the end he continued writing, finishing and sending off the manuscript of The World of Yesterday to his publisher only days before he ended his life. But his will to go on living had foundered.
Zweig was most European in his acute self-awareness. It is hard to read Beware of Pity—the story of an Austrian cavalry officer who out of compassion for a crippled girl makes her promises he cannot fulfil and which lead to her taking her own life—without thinking of Lotte, who could surely have made a future for herself if she had not been persuaded to intertwine her fate so closely with Zweig’s. Her self-sacrifice was tragically unnecessary. By the time she and Zweig acted on their suicide pact, the tide of barbarism had started to turn. America joined the war in December 1941, soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Soviet forces were bringing the Nazi advance into Russia to a standstill.
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