Zweig and the later constructors of the union all overlooked or optimistically sidelined a disturbing fact: that people might sign up to a collective if it does not disadvantage them, primarily in economic terms, but all the same they have the door to the motherland left ajar, ready to leap through it with the national flag whenever the time is right. The union does not replace the old enmities, the old fault lines. In their rush to renovate the European house, the decorators of the union merely laid consecutive layers of fresh wallpaper over a mouldy wall, and now those living in the house see the mould showing through again. Zweig’s grand European hothouse of the soul, a microclimate where hostility is an anachronism, did not come to pass, nor—let us be candid—did Zweig probably expect it to; but for us today, these ardent “lost messages”, in their endorsement of a stillborn yet still possible future, surely hold a special relevance, for they have been found, translated and made available to anglophone readers at a precarious moment for Western civilization, as to Europe’s outer walls the outriders of atrocity are gathering.

III

In May 1916, at the dark heart of the First World War, Zweig’s brief essay ‘The Tower of Babel’ was simultaneously published in the warring countries of France and Germany. Zweig employs the ancient myth of the doomed tower, more as an attractive template than as an effective analogy, for the grave situation in which the stricken vessel Europe presently found itself, holed and rudderless in an ocean of unprecedented ruin and dislocation following the storm surge of nationalism unleashed by war. The Babel essay appeared in the April/May edition of the Geneva-based journal Le Carmel, supported by Romain Rolland, and on 8th May ‘Der Turm zu Babel’ was published in the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin. As is well known, the Tower of Babel myth concerns mankind’s attempt, through communal ambition and spiritual accord, to build a tower high enough to reach heaven; it is spotted by God and humanity is summarily punished with eternal disunity for its excess of pride. The workers of all nations abandon their labours half finished and return for good to their individual lands, to reside in new-found insularity and suspicion. The half-completed tower falls into melancholy decay. Zweig enters at this point, transforming the tower into a symbol of Europe’s destiny, urging the workers (the European nations) who have downed tools and fled into their relevant clans to return to the construction site and continue work on the noble edifice they started and which, because of their desertion, is now a ruin. Zweig’s premise is simple: that humanity is capable of achieving unimaginable heights when it works together, pooling its creative resources and individual strengths in a common ambition, but conversely will achieve nothing, become degraded and eventually self-destruct when it is split into rival communities, each believing it is superior to another. It is a way out of this depressing cycle, this human impasse, that Zweig probes in these texts, highlighting history and artistic creativity as our most instructive guides.

Into the 1920s, with the war still fresh in their minds, Zweig and his “Good European” brethren believed that if Europe was to save itself from a further even more unimaginable catastrophe, a spiritual renaissance in Europe must be sought. The brutal shock of the war, the attendant protracted freezing of borders and physical impossibility of travel, the unimaginable casualties had rudely interrupted this boon of fluid cultural exchange. Whilst the roaming poet Walt Whitman sang of the pre-eminence of the continent of America, a piqued Émile Verhaeren, generally viewed as his Old World equivalent, retorted with insistence on the continued pre-eminence of the old European one. But Verhaeren, one of the elder statesman of Europe’s writerly elite, whom Zweig revered as a quasi-prophet of the new age, was fatally crushed by a train in Rouen station six months after Zweig published his Babel essay. Zweig, whose close relationship to Verhaeren was nevertheless eroded by the war, was hemmed in by closed borders and could not attend the funeral. Each had been stuck in his own land for the duration and there, to a lesser or greater extent, was infected initially by national pride. All were caught up in the event and few were immune from this scourge, at least initially. Zweig himself was guilty: his passions aroused, he enthusiastically logged the German army’s first triumphs. Even the scrupulously judicious Rilke penned ill-starred lines he later renounced, but worst of all the pro-European elder they all looked to, Verhaeren, had succumbed, penning La Belgique sanglante (Belgium Bleeding, 1915), scabrous, unbridled criticisms of German culture following massacres by German troops in Flanders, before eventually coming to his senses. These aberrations on the part of ordinarily deep-thinking, sensitive, peaceable writers and poets reveal to us just how radical and disorientating the course of events was, how the abrupt breaching of the dam of peace caused a deluge of virulent mutual accusation and national self-justification even amongst those supposedly immune from it. However, only two months into the war Zweig was already writing the poetic prose of ‘The Sleepless World’, the piece which opens this collection, a haunting, almost hallucinatory vision of the perpetual state of watchfulness, anxiety and confusion war induces in all sentient beings it touches. “Each became gradually enmeshed in the great event; no one could remain cool in the fiery delirium of the world. Constancy is helpless when realities are utterly transformed, none could stand aloof, secure on his rock above the waves, looking down and smiling knowingly at a world wracked with fever. Whether aware of what was happening or not, all were borne on the current, with no idea where it was leading.” It is, then, these four years of trauma, of horror, isolation and landlocked frustration, the melancholy procession of those reluctant coffin-bearers of the “golden age” that languished up to the summer of 1914, which form the crucible to Zweig’s fervent appeals for a united Europe two decades later. The loss of that pre-war Europe dogged Zweig until the moment he bowed out in Petrópolis, Brazil. He was in effect a man carrying a sickness which he could never recover from and for which in any case there was no cure.

Interestingly, ‘The Tower of Babel’ enjoyed a resurrection when it was republished in the Budapest-based German-language paper Pester Lloyd on the auspicious date of 1st January 1930. Incredibly, on the very first day of a new decade, which will usher in the most devastating series of events ever to blight humanity, Zweig is there with his call for reconstruction. And Zweig revisits the myth again two years later in the essay ‘European Thought in its Historical Development’, given at a conference in Florence on 5th May 1932. With Hitler warming up for his election triumph the following year, Europe’s alternative construction foreman Zweig is busy handing out spades and picks.