“This myth taken from the opening pages of the Bible is a wonderful symbol that with humanity as a community all is possible, even the highest aspirations, but only when it is united, and never when it is partitioned into languages and nations which do not understand each other and do not want to understand each other. And perhaps—who knows what mysterious memories can still be traced in our blood—there is still some vague reminiscence in our spirit of those distant times, the Platonic memory of when humanity was united and the persuasive, haunted longing that it might eventually recommence the unfinished work; in any case, this dream of a unified world, a unified humanity, is more ancient than all literature, art and scientific knowledge.” With almost a seer’s conviction, Zweig sees the answer to today’s disintegrating Europe in terms of the re-emergence of deep longings and dreams actively realized in a distant past. Rather unhelpfully sounding like some ironic inversion of Nazi blood theories, Zweig believes that the potential for spiritual development is buried deep within each of us: having been secreted in the blood of our ancestors, it passes down to us through the ages and through enlightenment and education it can be restored, however barbaric the epoch in which we reside. Only then can the half-finished work be completed, only then can the tower rise to its intended heights.

IV

The texts gathered in this collection are all stamped with the same hallmark, a stark question which underpins all other concerns for Zweig in these years. The question is this. After the unparalleled disaster of the First World War, will Europe once again transform itself into a battlefield, but this time destroy itself completely? This is the question Zweig carries with him out of the aftermath of the First World War through to the moment he leaves his Salzburg house for exile in London in 1934 and which is finally laid to rest in Petrópolis in February 1942. As the years pass the question becomes ever more onerous to bear. It is futile to ponder the moral intricacies of Zweig’s suicide in Brazil in 1942 without taking into account the veiled anguish revealed in these essays. The reason Zweig ended his life was essentially that the question of Europe’s destruction had for him been definitively answered. Isolated in Brazil, he became convinced that the Europe he had dedicated his writing life to had now destroyed itself, if not quite yet physically then spiritually. Zweig sensed that whatever was left of Europe after Nazism’s fires had burnt themselves out would be unable to resurrect itself as it had in the past following episodes of barbarism. The last chance of the inter-war years would not be replayed. The great project of civilization, as Zweig saw it, which had been evolving for three millennia, the central artery to his creative life, the very essence of his being, had been so retarded by Hitler’s radical evil that whatever came afterwards would be either hopelessly corrupted or, worse, a deceiving doppelgänger, a facade. Perhaps Zweig thought back to Nieuwpoort and Diksmuide, the shell-pulverized villages of Flanders, to Ypres, which he witnessed after the war, shocked at these “dummy” villages and towns, which were exact replicas but lacked any soul. This absence of soul, the possible eradication of the sense of meaning which accrues from the passage of human time, that is, everything “old Europe” represented, must have caused Zweig the most grievous suffering.

However, what these pieces show us is how deeply Zweig, who was at various moments morbidly depressed, still believed in this seemingly hopeless humanity’s potential for change, the chance of renewed ascension. So even while his books were being tossed on pyres on the Domplatz in Salzburg, his house invaded by police, his right to publish in Germany ended, he could still turn to History, “that poetess”, and see hopeful parallels, how after each impossibly dark stage of history a new light had irresistibly dawned. Even as late as 1938/39, as the borders of Europe thicken with troops and tanks, Zweig is at pains to communicate his ideal as something other than an ideal, to make it appear feasible through concrete examples, however tenuous some may be in practical terms. In order to react meaningfully against the irresistible morbid flow of events, Zweig realizes that words are futile and yet that is all he has. It is this melancholic realization that the implicitly violent and “revolutionary” new age delivered by Hitler has by its very inception and presence moved far beyond the existing parameters, the awareness that the course of destruction is already set that exhausts Zweig. But doggedly he continues his quest because it is the humane one, the right one, the only path which morally guarantees him a purity of intent and a legacy of decency in the face of depravity. In short, it is the only path which allows him to go on living in a world he feels is intolerable. He repeats his message, and the message remains fundamentally the same whether it is 1916, 1932 or 1940.

It should be remembered, as Jules Romains points out in Stefan Zweig: grand Européen (1939), that the largest part of Zweig’s published writing is in the domain of the essay form. Beyond the espousal of a European ideal, the essays here not only display some of Zweig’s greatest attributes as a writer, but also reveal crucial elements of biography which serve as foundations for or addenda to The World of Yesterday (1942). This is most clearly the case in the essays ‘The Historiography of Tomorrow’ and ‘European Thought in Its Historical Development’, and most vividly in the haunting and elegiac ‘The Vienna of Yesterday’, which Zweig presented at the Théâtre Marigny on his last visit to Paris in April 1940. The genuine affection of Zweig for his home city is here laid bare and the period of Vienna’s impoverishment after the 1918 armistice vividly and insightfully portrayed. Zweig manages to capture the peculiar atmosphere of the once grand and opulent city reduced to decrepitude, but still remaining proud, through a series of impressionistic flourishes that convince. Music, Zweig reveals to us, as he does elsewhere in these pieces, is the real lifeblood of humanity, and in this case of the old Hapsburg capital. It is also perhaps its saviour. The account of a concert by Vienna’s finest musicians held in an unheated auditorium with an audience of citizen paupers dressed in threadbare coats is to be treasured.