If Zweig had hung on only a few months longer and not surrendered to panic, he would have seen that despite all the crimes that Nazism would yet perpetrate—including the supreme crime of the Holocaust—Europe’s self-destruction was not yet final or complete. He and Lotte could have lived on. Instead, the potent and unstable mix of high-minded European idealism and no less European pessimism that infuses Zweig’s work produced the despair that paralysed him and then killed them both.

Zweig’s suspicions regarding Europe are more compelling than his insistent declarations of faith in its future. This is especially so today, when Europe seems to have reverted to an historical mean of chronic crisis. With a resurgence of nationalism in many countries and the inability of European institutions to come up with any coherent response to the migrants who are fleeing to the continent in search of safety, Zweig’s hopes of European unity are remote from any realistically imaginable future. But this is what gives the texts collected here their urgent topicality. Suspended between unrealizable ideals and unmanageable realities, the self-division of Europe finds striking contemporary expression in this brilliant and self-divided writer. His doubts and fears are those of his readers, and resonate as strongly today as ever.

JOHN GRAY
October 2015 

There is no doubt that the European spirit exists, but it is still in a latent state. We can be as certain about that as the astronomer who sees appear in his telescope a star whose mass has revealed to him existence. Although the European spirit may not be manifest, we know with mathematical certitude that it exists.

	STEFAN ZWEIG
	(From: ‘Response to an enquiry on the
	European spirit’, published in Les
	Nouvelles littéraires, 4th July 1936)

What then are the evils which weigh on humanity at this hour? What at this moment is the principal danger? Is it the excess of sangfroid, of reason, of critical acumen? Good God, no! On the contrary, it is the vertiginous development amongst the masses of these new fanaticisms, which are fascism, racism, nationalism, Communism, or the diverse strains measured out from their mix. It is the culture of exaltation as a system of government; it is official production and the procession of gratifications from scientists who conjoin old knowledge with new technological procedures. It is admiration for certain individuals driven up against the most degrading forms of idolatry. It is the savage prohibition of all critical spirit, of all exercise in lucid reason. It is an assemblage of feverishly aroused states who report from the most insanely barbaric ages and who are quite justly terrified of those spiritual worldly leaders of humanity who have safeguarded the essence of its destiny.

JULES ROMAINS                                          

(From: Stefan Zweig, grand Européen, 1939)

Thanks to the pathological alienation which the nationalistic idiocy has established and still establishes among European peoples, thanks as well to the short-sighted politicians with hasty hands who are on top today with the help of this idiocy and have no sense of how the politics of disintegration which they carry on can necessarily only be politics for an intermission, thanks to all this and to some things today which are quite impossible to utter, now the most unambiguous signs that Europe wants to become a unity are being overlooked or wilfully and mendaciously reinterpreted.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE                     

(From: Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

I

In the course of his long and creatively buoyant period of exile through the 1930s, Stefan Zweig expressed, in a slew of speeches and articles presented in conferences across Europe, one thing more than any other: his ardent desire to see a unification of European states, a Europe pledged to friendship, united around pluralism, freedom of thought and movement, a vigorous pan-Europeanism to offset the mounting threat of nationalism, totalitarianism and imperialism. Despite the increasingly desperate situation during the 1930s as Nazism consolidated its grip and prospects for peace faded, Zweig kept up his utopian mantra well beyond the point of no return, for presumably no other reason than that it was in his view right and honourable to do so, advancing the humanistic argument, the only rational and dignified response in his eyes to the deranged machinations of Nazism. But Zweig was an internationally famous author, perhaps more widely read than any other in these years; his historical biographies and fine-cut gemstones of fiction were devoured the world over, and people waited on his word—the Jewish community, the top tier of European artists and writers—for it was expected of the great cosmopolitan author that forceful anti-Nazi statements would be made, denunciations of Nazi crimes, perhaps even a veiled call for a Jewish homeland. But Zweig did not deliver any of these things, visibly shrinking back from the Realpolitik of the hour; and this failure to weigh in publicly and visibly like other writers such as Thomas Mann, who made radio broadcasts denouncing the Nazis, was seen as indefensible by the majority of his contemporaries, casting a partial shadow over his exile and later colouring responses to his suicide.

Zweig abhorred politics, seeing it as the Antichrist to spiritual freedom, and thus distanced himself from it all his life. He saw a corrupt politics as having brought about the inferno of 1914 and the unstable aftermath. He firmly believed that he would do more harm than good to be sucked into a partisan position, even on Hitler. His pathological fear of his words being used for another’s ends, of his well-intentioned statement inadvertently stoking the flames, caused an impulse to recoil from any intervention, however justified. In this calculation it can logically be argued that he was wrong, for Hitler was surely a special case of extreme evil, a civilization-destroyer who required a beyond-normal-behaviour reaction; but Zweig indentified perhaps too literally with the humanist peacemakers and tolerance-preachers of the past, such as Erasmus or Castellio, and living “counsellors” like the arch-pacifist Romain Rolland. This conviction to keep above the melee was further endorsed by his eleventh-hour reading of Montaigne, whom he found had pursued a similar solitary path, extricating himself from the feelers of the opposing factions and thereby, in Zweig’s eyes, retaining his inner authenticity in an earlier time of chaos and barbarism. Yet Zweig despised Hitler and the Nazis as much as anyone and harboured a special loathing for Goebbels’s insidious propaganda, which he rightly saw as the most dangerous element in Nazism’s machinery of diabolism. Even as his books were tossed on the pyres and he was obliged to break with his long-standing German publishers Insel Verlag, Zweig wore his pacifist cosmopolitanism, his right to stand apart from politics, like cerebral body armour. But this was the same man whose conscience had commanded him to express his revulsion for war, his condemnation of the madness of the time, the overreaching spirit of violence and conquest in his poetic and prophetic drama Jeremias (1917).

Much has been said about Zweig’s tendency to hang on too long in perilous situations and then make ill-starred decisions. Friderike Zweig was only too aware of her husband’s difficulty in this respect, his tendency to waver until too late. When he did make a political calculation it was often deemed naive or a blunder of sorts. In his biography European of Yesterday (1972), Donald Prater states: “Zweig’s political ideas were generally immature and ill thought out, and where he appeared to possess political insight this was often more from instinct than from clear or logical perception.” This phobia of politics and resolute “apolitical” stance has its origins in the Nietzschean drive for aestheticism, which Zweig seized on, for he like Nietzsche saw the political class and materialism as the mainstays of nationalism and European spiritual decay. But it also comes from Zweig’s instinctual sense that the zone of art and literature is quite apart from anything political or social, that the inward self must stay pure. This is surely why we see him drift away from Romain Rolland’s influence only at the moment when the old man falls under the spell of Communism.

This ideal may seem to us repugnant when faced with the threat of Nazism, but this is simplistic, for Zweig was looking I suspect beyond his rhetorical public statement to what uncontainable tentacles would inevitably sprout from it, and he sincerely believed for better or worse that he could do more to persuade through his works, for example Erasmus (1934).