The essay closes with a poignantly understated line whose polite vagueness, by veiling the horrific reality, paradoxically emphasizes it: “Of today’s Vienna I can say nothing. We know very little of what is happening there, we are even fearful of interpreting it too exactly.”

In the essay ‘History as Poetess’ (1931), Zweig shows the central position of history in his world view and in his writings. He paints history not as the mere roll call of facts and dates, but as “the workshop of God”, where facts are only made meaningful by the poetic authority of those who transmit them. Once more, the notion of a European or world community saturates the text: “history only lives where it achieves a certain poetic grandeur, which is why the highest accomplishment of a people is to transform as much of its national history into world history as possible, its private people’s myth into a world myth”. He also says: “A nation gains more power in the spiritual space, the more poetically it can present its historical existence and development in the world.” Zweig lambasts the “ersatz” history of popular romantic biography favoured in the present, castigating those who muddle historical fact and adjust it to suit their story and in order to sell more copies. Zweig praises the genuine creative storytellers, those who take the raw material of historical fact and, without adulterating it, place it before us in such a way that it becomes meaningful, enhancing our knowledge rather than leaving us with a falsified theatrical approximation.

‘The Historiography of Tomorrow’ (1939) begins with the portrait of Europe being locked in a moral crisis and its peoples the victims of a persistent angst, all a by-product of world war. Like a doctor searching for a cure whilst his patient ebbs away on the operating table, Zweig determines that the artificially feverish atmosphere, like any drug or stimulant prescribed for too long, must be reduced. Zweig has noted how when the war, and thus “the obligatory hatred and murder”, abruptly ends, “like turning off a gas tap”, it cannot be expected that the populace will relinquish the impulses they have become accustomed to over four years. Thus the so-called peace is anything but. Zweig argues that the militaristic generation which inflicted this nightmare on mankind must be shed like a rotten branch, allowing new progressive branches to grow from the European trunk. For this there must be a wholly new conception of history, with a spiritual bent, focusing on intellectual and scientific achievements rather than military prowess and flag-waving heroism. He criticizes the way history was taught in his own youth, always reinforcing a nationalistic outlook, where each country feels that it alone must be the most powerful, the most righteous one. Zweig thunders, “With our blood seething in our veins, we can only tremble at the thought that, due to this kind of skewed education, the innocent and credulous new generation of young people might be heading for an even more appalling bloodbath than the last.” Only by introducing a new vision of history as the holding pen of the creative spirit will mankind recover from this “fever”, this bacillus, and extricate itself from the cycle of destruction. “It is only in this way that we can console ourselves and guard against the insanity of nationalism and dictators who are bent on launching peoples against one another, ever forcing us backwards politically when the natural momentum is to go forwards. Only when we access this new sense of being will we learn the history of tomorrow; only then will it be possible no longer to despair at our epoch and to retain, even if we failed as citizens, the pride to be men of our time. Only then will we be able to face without horror the bloody vortex of history, when we see it as a necessary creative stage for a new and more meaningful future, as preparation for a complete reworking of humanity.”

V

One of Zweig’s preoccupations, which appears in a number of his essays, is the stark difference between the atmosphere preceding the conflict in 1914 and that in 1939 and its repercussions for Europe. In the fascinating comparison essay ‘1914 and Today’ (1936), Zweig sees his generation as being blind to events, craftily hoodwinked, deceived into war by a minority of determined warmongers who took advantage of the naivety and trustfulness of the people who, on the eve of conflict, still believed at the eleventh hour that it could never happen, and that all was being done to prevent it, that the great socialist leaders would never let it happen, when in fact, due to the machinations of a clutch of powerfully positioned, unscrupulous individuals and the irresistible tide of fate, it had already begun. But in 1939/40 we see the polar opposite. “Whilst in 1914 every intellectual, every politician dared not speak of war or seem to glorify it, today in Europe and in Japan whole peoples are educated and disciplined solely with a view to waging war and with blatant cynicism the whole economic structure of the country is galvanized with this single aim in mind.” Zweig repeats this theme in a later essay, ‘Gardens in Wartime’ (Stefan Zweig, Journeys, Hesperus Press, 2010), which he wrote in England in 1940, while he experienced the so-called phoney war. Comparing it with the febrile gung-ho atmosphere of 1914, he explains that “in 1939 war did not arise suddenly, it simply gave concrete forms to fears already present… they endured the war because it was necessary to do so, as something inevitable.” Here, in the 1936 essay, this idea has already formed. “They await war as if for a perfectly natural event, almost as if of necessity, and that is why the current generation has no excuse to be ‘surprised’ by war as in 1914. For it is laboriously announced, prepared quite openly and lucidly. It is not only at the door, it already has its foot in the house.”

Zweig’s attempt to go behind the scenes of the artistic process, ‘The Secret of Artistic Creation’ (1938), consists of his long-gestated musings on the mysterious processes leading to a finished work. This was a subject which Zweig, experienced collector of manuscripts, musical scores and autographs, not to mention psychological profiler of great artistic and historical figures, would have been particularly drawn to. Rather cleverly Zweig compares investigating this phenomenon to elements of criminology. Although he admits we can never truly know the interior process and should not wish to, we can up to a point “retroactively reconstruct it”. This essay is a tour de force of reflection on the laborious trials or relative ease of the creative process, how each masterpiece is formed at greatly differing speeds and through starkly contrasting processes, according to the habits, vagaries and natural creative velocity of the artist. Zweig, with his immense archive of sources, draws on a range of examples, notably in music, comparing Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn and Wagner, and so on. Zweig concludes: “To create is a constant struggle between the unconscious and the conscious. Without these two elements the creative act cannot happen.