Having said all this there is also evidence which shows that Zweig at certain moments acted boldly and decisively, even ruthlessly, his sudden departure from Salzburg being the most obvious. And in all these departures and arrivals during his intercontinental exile he behaves rationally and methodically, not to mention thoughtfully, sorting out his affairs beforehand, ensuring his manuscripts and library will serve the public good, that friends and domestic staff are well taken care of. Whilst in London, a city he claimed he loved because he was largely left to himself, Zweig worked tirelessly from his Hallam Street flat for Jewish friends and the stream of exiles who appealed to him for help with visas, connections and so forth, their constant entreaties exhausting his resources of patience and time. As always with Zweig there are curious contrasts, the interplay of conscious proaction and inaction proving a labyrinthine challenge for critics and biographers.

With the advent of Hitler, Zweig was initially drawn into the radicalizing potential of the National Socialists, before leaping out as it were from a burning building. Zweig thought this new movement, though evidently repulsive, might stir things up, liberate the middle classes and offset what he saw as the infection of bourgeois materialism menacing the treasured spirit of France in particular. Zweig adored France above all other nations and unsurprisingly viewed her as the natural cradle of the arts and civilized intellectual activity, the model of his civilized Europe of the spirit. He like others presumed Hitler was a transitory phenomenon, an aberration, a spark of extremism which might have beneficial side effects before being summarily extinguished. Although this delusion was short-lived, as was his episode of Germanic pride at the outset of the First World War (discussed later), it appears to reinforce what Prater claims regarding Zweig’s slowness to realize the course of events at the beginning of momentous political change. But conversely it may also explain why Zweig corrected himself by later abandoning his Salzburg home so suddenly and thoroughly. Zweig might have been slow to see the light, but once his eyes were opened he acted without deliberation.

Zweig’s spiritual internationalist outlook was really based on a long-developed and honed network of culturally enriching relationships across central Europe, or as Prater has it, “Zweig was quietist, seeing in internationalism not a political programme, but the sum of personal connections forged through friendship.” His vision was to extend his own model, to upgrade the most valuable element of the lost “golden age” before the First World War when these friendships were formed, both to act as a foil to the pernicious and ever more unstable reality represented by totalitarianism, and to provide a design for a future European situation beyond that of the present, whose survival he severely doubted. Zweig’s inherent idealism, his overriding passion for establishing a creatively ennobling society of nations, was underwritten by periods of striking artistic achievement in the past, most notably the Renaissance. At first sight all this may appear to us today laudable, naturally desirable, yet surely grossly out of touch with the bestial realities taking place on the ground, amongst peoples cut off from Zweig’s privileged elite. His determination to imagine Europe as a kind of spiritual engine house for the next key stage in mankind’s ascension appears now, in our present age of commonplace violent extremism and materialist decadence, as out of time as it did then, at the moment when Hitler, engorged with imperial fantasies, swept his hand impatiently back and forth across the map table in Berchtesgaden. However, the sheer passion and belief, the intelligence, the evident richness of learning, the valuable sediment as it were of a lifetime’s thought and reflection Zweig conjures in support of his dream remains valid and curiously seductive. Whatever the retorts, this is no vague chimera.

II

In the pieces collected here, Stefan Zweig strives to bring his European ideal down from the clouds and place it on terra firma; for example, in places he argues robustly for progressive education, in order to change deep-seated attitudes on race and Fatherland and encourage a new fluidity of thought, the interweaving of languages and cultures. The reader will soon see that these essays themselves interlink and one is merely reinforcing another; though the outlying theme may be different the central message remains the same. Nationalism is the sworn enemy of civilization, whether past, present or future, its malodorous presence thwarting the development of intelligence, its tenets those of division, regression, hatred, violence and persecution. In nationalism, with the Nazis as its most lethal form, Zweig sees the agent which may finally destroy his European heartlands, finishing the job the First World War started. Zweig’s Europe is an almost mystical conviction that whatever remains of the European spirit, the sum of artistic achievement that has accrued for centuries, can only survive the modern plague of nationalism, materialism and philistinism, can only safeguard its crown jewels of philosophical thought, art and literature through a practicable spiritual integration, a higher guild of amiable coalition. What Zweig proposes is a moral defence of the European soul against the very same forces which menace our Europe now in 2015, sanity against insanity, unity against division, tolerance against intolerance, intelligence against ignorance.

But what of this spiritual unity? Is it just another word for pan-Europeanism, such as the mobile professional elites enjoy in the privileged strata of a technologically unified Europe today, or a rhetorical comfort blanket for those who see their national language and traditions dying on the world stage (notably the French, who habitually accord Zweig mythical proportions), or is there any substance to it? In these disparate pieces, culled from declarative pauses during his wanderings in exile, Zweig argues forcefully that there is. Moving and haunting, especially with the gift of hindsight, inherently tragic when planted before the brush fire of bestial realities sweeping across the continent as he wrote, yet paradoxically also morally persuasive, these pieces show Zweig repeatedly setting out his manifesto for cultural health through fraternity in the face of a Europe gradually slipping away into fanaticism, apathy, political expediency and the spectre of genocidal terror. Whether delivering a lecture in Rome or Zurich, in London or Paris, whether attending yet another conference in the ever-shrinking free-thinking world, humanistic symposiums whose influence on events he knew only too well were depressingly limited, Zweig is urgently reiterating the need for change, for action not more words. Yet in the unstable climate of imperialist muscle-flexing and virulent propaganda during the 1930s, the action required, the necessary turnaround, which he espouses so earnestly in his speeches, is held in check by the sheer physical and psychological power of the extremist forces which are already unleashed.

Since the present appears hopeless, Zweig looks to the future and the generation beyond his own, the survivors, like himself after the First World War, speaking to an audience both within and crucially beyond the present calamity. Of course that future did herald an eventual Franco-German dream collective of European nation states, and out of this techno-bureaucratic conglomeration one could argue that something of Zweig’s dream has become a reality, namely in the successful European exchange of culture, sport and the arts. But Zweig’s exultant vision of fraternity under one continental roof has hardly been realized, since nation states have in spite of the past clung on to their self-serving national powers and their nationalist arrogance with tenacity. In the extraordinary, recently discovered text ‘The Unification of Europe: A Discourse’, a speech prepared to be given in Paris in 1934 but then mothballed, Zweig puts forward the novel idea of a “capital city of Europe” whose location would change each year, giving each country a chance to be master of the greater union. Today’s policy of “European capital of culture” is something Zweig would have certainly applauded, but it is really attractive window-dressing. The sad truth is that Zweig’s noble premise of nations purged of animosity towards one another, intellectually advancing in interlingual creativity, could only happen, then as today, if the people of Europe really wanted it to happen. But through the progressive decades of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, behind the self-congratulatory fanfares and chatter of policy-making from Brussels, nationalism lurked in one gruesome form or another, apparently muzzled on the fringes, kept at bay from the great project. Now, as fanatical Islam extends its grip and correspondingly Islamophobia rises, as the union stutters and stalls in monetary crisis, the far right is emboldened as never before, has slipped its chains, and we watch helpless as it sends out its hideous spawn.