by M. Allen Cunningham
I can only begin to imagine in how many other biographies Zweig must feature as a tangential character. As testified in his absorbing memoir The World of Yesterday, he was seemingly everywhere and knew seemingly every significant artist and intellectual in Europe from the fin-de-siècle until World War II. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartok, Romain Rolland, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Salvador Dalí —the roster of luminaries goes on and on.
Zweig had an uncanny way of accidentally synchronizing his movements to the larger movements of history. In one characteristic vignette he reports arriving in the Austrian border town of Feldkirch just as the imperial train bearing the last of the Habsburg monarchs, Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, rolls through on its way out of the deposed Austria. “It was the moment in which the almost millenary monarchy really ended” -- and naturally Zweig was there.
Throughout The World of Yesterday, I found myself thinking of Woody Allen’s Zelig and wondering if that nearly homonymic character was somehow inspired by Zweig (rumor has it that he was).
Zweig’s endless associations rival perhaps only Henry James. Both men were also ardently peripatetic, both were spiritually espoused to a polyglot Europeanism, and both experienced various degrees of political/cultural exile.
But it is Zweig’s devout internationalism — or, better, supranationalism — that makes him such a moving figure to me, and renders The World of Yesterday such an engrossing personal account, powerfully immediate even amid its vast historical sweep.
Throughout The World of Yesterday, I found myself thinking of Woody Allen’s Zelig and wondering if that nearly homonymic character was somehow inspired by Zweig (rumor has it that he was).
Zweig’s endless associations rival perhaps only Henry James. Both men were also ardently peripatetic, both were spiritually espoused to a polyglot Europeanism, and both experienced various degrees of political/cultural exile.
But it is Zweig’s devout internationalism — or, better, supranationalism — that makes him such a moving figure to me, and renders The World of Yesterday such an engrossing personal account, powerfully immediate even amid its vast historical sweep.
The late-nineteenth century Vienna that Zweig depicts in his opening chapter is the Habsburg capital at its most enviable, a place of bourgeois and imperial “security,” (though Zweig misses no opportunity to poke fun at its more laughable conventions and oddities). This Vienna is also – more notably — a place of passionate “cultural ideals.” “Here,” Zweig writes, “all the streams of European culture converged … and subconsciously every citizen
became supernational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.”
This Viennese security, this exemplary cultural and artistic richness, sets the tone for Zweig’s life journey and artistic aims and, as the reader is painfully aware, it establishes an era and a Europe that will in the course of Zweig’s chronicle be entirely destroyed.
From his boyhood and artistic coming-of-age in a city “which hospitably took up everything foreign and gave itself so gladly,” a city “whose meaning and culture were founded in the meeting of the most heterogeneous elements and in her spiritual supernationality,” Zweig’s memoir moves in a long, steady (and thoroughly fascinating) arc through the disasters of World War I toward the book’s late chapters in which “Europe finally perished” from the poison of Nazism.
It is a mournful close, and yet Zweig — wide awake multilingual citizen of the world, exponent of art and the artistic spirit wherever it is found, passionate believer in the human community that always transcends the political and dogmatic — is a pure inspiration.
From his boyhood and artistic coming-of-age in a city “which hospitably took up everything foreign and gave itself so gladly,” a city “whose meaning and culture were founded in the meeting of the most heterogeneous elements and in her spiritual supernationality,” Zweig’s memoir moves in a long, steady (and thoroughly fascinating) arc through the disasters of World War I toward the book’s late chapters in which “Europe finally perished” from the poison of Nazism.
It is a mournful close, and yet Zweig — wide awake multilingual citizen of the world, exponent of art and the artistic spirit wherever it is found, passionate believer in the human community that always transcends the political and dogmatic — is a pure inspiration.