They constitute the indispensable foundation; it is within the law of contrast, the final compromise between conscious and unconscious that the artist is imprisoned. Within the limits of this law he remains free.”
The collection closes with ‘In This Dark Hour’, one of Zweig’s final addresses, a touching speech made to the Pen Club in New York, 1941, heavy with portent and yet displaying characteristic eloquent resistance. Here, Zweig broaches the subject of being a writer in German at a time of acute German shame, stating how he welcomes the fact that he and others have been rejected by “those who have plunged this world into the greatest catastrophe in all history”, but how the burden of being an accessory to their crimes by dint of origin weighs heavy: “we must bear these violations as a secret and odious shame.” Zweig confesses that he cannot abandon the German language, despite the poison with which it is now infected, for, true to form, he argues that it was the language in which “we fought against the self-glorification of nationalism”. Zweig, though, does not, as Thomas Mann did, conveniently distinguish between a Germany of Nazis and a free Germany; Zweig sees Germany as guilty one and all. He has rejected Germany, the country he was closest to, where he was published and admired, yet this rejection was a long time coming and painfully borne. In divers letters to Joseph Roth we see this struggle, as Roth constantly beseeches Zweig to loose the mooring.
Zweig’s last hope is that the supreme evil of Hitler and his cohorts has inadvertently given rise to a reactive surge for a renewed sense of liberty and inner strength. “It was necessary for this dark hour to fall, perhaps the darkest in history, to make us realize that freedom is as vital to our soul as breathing to our body. I know—never has the dignity of man been so abased as now, nor peoples so enslaved and maltreated; never has the divine image of the Creator in all His forms been so vilely defiled and martyred—but never, my friends, never ever has humanity been more aware than now that freedom is indispensable to the soul.” These essays in a sense announce the spiritual will and testament of Stefan Zweig, serving as lucid and expressive declarations of his inner conviction. Though, due to the perennial human aptitude for stupidity and folly, we might not yet be in a position to execute them, even entertain their plausibility, and perhaps never will, we can at least respect the intellectual knowingness and openness with which they are imbued, the insatiable curiosity and sagacity they display, the personal courage they exhibit—a powerful statement of one man’s belief in the potential of humanity to regenerate and compensate for its most heinous crimes.
WILL STONE
October 2015
THERE IS LESS SLEEP in the world today; longer are the nights and longer the days. In each land of this limitless Europe, in every city, every street, every house, every apartment, the reposeful breath of sleep is now clipped and feverish; like an oppressive and stifling summer night, this inferno of an epoch glows over us, throwing the senses into confusion. Numberless are those who, on whichever side, would otherwise drift through the nocturnal hours in the dark skiff of sleep—gilded with colourful and gently fluttering dreams—but nightly now hear the clocks march, march, march along the hellish path from daylight to daylight, enduring the burrowing beetle of anxieties and dark thoughts relentlessly gnawing and devouring, until the heart is left raw and ailing. From now on all humanity is in thrall to this fever both night and day, a state of terrible and all-consuming watchfulness, sending its shower of sparks across the heightened senses of millions, fate entering, invisibly, by thousands of windows and doors, chasing out sleep, chasing forgetfulness from every couch. There is less sleep in the world today; longer are the nights and longer the days.
Today no one can be alone with himself and his destiny, each peers out furtively into the far distance. At night, at the hour when he lies awake in his safely locked, guarded house, thoughts turn to friends and those far away: perhaps, at the same hour, a measure of his destiny is fulfilled, a cavalry charge in a Galician village, a naval attack, everything that has happened at every second across thousands and thousands of miles, all that relates to his one single life. And the soul knows, she extends and feels the intimation of a yearning to grasp it all, the burning air of all those desires and prayers, which wing back and forth from one side of the world to the other. A thousand thoughts restlessly on the move, from the silent towns to the military campfires, from the lone sentry on his watch and back again, from the nearest to the most distant, those invisible gliding threads of love and tribulation, a weft of feelings, a limitless network now covering the world, for all days and all nights. How many words they whisper now, how many prayers they send up into the indifferent ether, how much lucid love pulses through each hour of the night! Unremittingly the air quivers with secret waves for which science has no name and whose amplitude no seismograph can measure: but who can judge if they are futile, these desires, if this colossal will, burning from the depths of the soul, can overshoot distances like the vibrations of sound or the convulsions of electricity? Where there was once sleep, unsubstantial rest, there is now a desire for images: always the soul struggles to perceive through the dark night those beings far away, those held close to the heart, and via the imagination each now lives with a range of destinies. A thousand thoughts burrow into sleep, ever and again its swaying edifice topples and the image-rich darkness inclines vacantly over the solitary. Watchers of the nights, men are now also watchers of the days: at this hour, in the most ordinary people one encounters, lies living proof of the power of the orator, the poet, the prophet, for what is most secret in man is, through the diabolical pressure of daily events, forced to the exterior, so that each individual experiences a sudden burgeoning of his vitality. In the same way as elsewhere, in the exterior world, on the field of battle, plain peasants who have spent a lifetime calmly tilling their land in silence and peace are suddenly seized at the emotive hour by the heroic, and some visionary force rises like a lithe flame in people ordinarily taciturn and prone to grumbling; each and every one steps outside the communal circle of existence; those normally only concerned with the working day now sense in every message inspired reality and a compelling image. Today the people endlessly haul their plough of anxieties and visions across the barren soil of night, and, when they finally sink into sleep, surrender themselves to outlandish dreams. Then the blood runs hotter in their veins, and in this sultriness bloom tropical plants of horrors and nervousness, the dreams come, and one’s only salvation is to wake and shrug them off as nothing but useless nightmares, the appalling realities of mankind’s most terrible truth: the war of everyone against everyone.
Even the most peace-loving today dream of battles, columns rising for the assault and rushing across sleep, the dark blood roaring in the reverberation of the cannon. And if you suddenly awake terror-stricken you hear, with eyes wide open, the thunder of the wagons, the clatter of boots. You listen, lean from the window: and yes it’s true, they’re coming now in long procession, carts and horses along the deserted streets. Some soldiers lead a troop of horses by the reins, steeds that trot obediently with their heavy, deafening tread on the echoing cobbles. And they too, who normally would be resting through the night from their labours in their warm stables, these placid teams are forced apart, their benign brotherhood broken. In the stations you hear cows bellow from the cattle trucks; these patient beasts, wrenched from the warm, soft summer pastures and led into the unknown, even for them in their stupor, sleep is troubled. And the trains force a path through slumbering Nature: she too is startled by the clamour of humanity; flocks of riders gallop at night over fields which for eternity had rested peacefully in the darkness, and above the black expanse of the sea the light pools of the searchlights gleam in a thousand places, brighter than moonlight and more dazzling than the sun, while even below the darkness of the waters is disturbed by submariners seeking their prey. Shots ring out across the mountains, echoing, chasing the birds from their nests, no sleep can be assured, and even the ether, that eternally pristine space, is streaked with the murderous velocity of the aeroplane, those ill-omened comets of our time. Nothing, nothing can bring calm or rest in these days; humanity has dragged animals and nature into its murderous struggle.
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