[Music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host Gil Roth, and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show through the iTunes Store, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, or at our new site, VMSPod.com. You can also find us on Twitter @VMSPod at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. My guest for this week's show is George Prochnick, author of the new book The Impossible Exile, Stephen Zweig at the End of the World, published by Other Press. Now, I'm a huge mark for Stephen Zweig, so I was ecstatic to get a chance to talk with somebody who studied his work and his life so intently. I'm not sure where to begin in explaining the significance of Zweig and my own connection to him. We could start with some facts. He was born in 1881, and these are some pretty scant facts, by the way. I'm really laying out the basics. He was born in 1881 in Vienna to a well-to-do Jewish family. He became one of the best-selling authors in the world during his peak from the 1920s to the 1930s. He recognized the threat of Nazism and left Austria for England in 1934, although he went back several times in the next few years before the Anschluss. He divorced his first wife and married his assistant, Lata, who was almost 30 years younger than him. As a situation in Europe got worse, Zweig and Lata moved to New York City and then Asening, New York and finally, Petropolis, Brazil, where they committed suicide together in February of 1942. In his last years, Zweig produced some of his best work, including the autobiography, The World of Yesterday. His books fell out of favor in the U.S. and U.K. after the war, though they stayed popular elsewhere in Europe. In recent years, Pushkin Press and New York Review Books Classics have spearheaded a revival of interest in Zweig's work. And actually, Wes Anderson said his new movie, the Grand Budapest Hotel, was inspired by Zweig's fiction in his life. I watched it. I enjoyed the hell out of the movie, but I have to admit I found the connection a bit tenuous, but maybe I'm just a blockhead. In a way, I first read Stephen Zweig in October of 2012, a month or so after reading Leo Carey's appreciation of him in the New Yorker. I bought Chest story, which is the last novella that Zweig finished before his suicide. While I was waiting for a flight home from a business trip, and I read it on the plane in one sitting, and then read it over again two days later. And it's pretty rare that I reread a book immediately after finishing it, but I was absolutely wrapped by Zweig's story of obsession and imagination and the royal game. It's so artfully written. It's a melodrama or a psychodrama, but it's just, well, it's impossible. It's so wonderful. It inspired me to read many more of Zweig's works. I've given out at least a dozen copies of Chest story to friends and guests of the show. I've also read his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, and put together a pretty good shelf of Zweig's books, which I hope I'll have time to get to. So what you need to understand, and this may just be a case of self-selection for monomaniacs, is that I would do a 10-hour mega-podcast about Zweig if I could. And I've even put together a list of potential guests who could help me fill it. It's that much of an obsession of mine. And this actually includes one thread from my pharmaceutical industry life. In 2013, I was manning our booth at a trade show in New York City when this older Latin American man came by to ask some questions. He gave me his card, and I noticed that his last name was Zweig. And I said, "Oh, that's funny. You have the same name as one of my favorite authors." And he said, "You mean Stefan Zweig? He's a distant cousin of mine." And this guy told me about how he and some other family members in Europe had raised funds to preserve Zweig's final home in Petropolis as a museum and how he'd attended the opening of the place. I still have his card, in fact. Although the only time he's going to hear from me probably is when I send him the link to this episode. And this gets us back to George Prochnick's book, The Impossible Exile. See, I've been wondering how Zweig ended up at the end of the world like this, how he ended up going from England to New York City upstate New York, well, up to Westchester, and then Brazil of all places for this cultured Viennese Jewish author to go off to essentially the jungle, at least in my culturally stereotyping ways of putting it. And George focuses a biography on Zweig's later years after the exile from Austria, and he explores a degree to which the war just shatters Zweig's life. But he also draws on a lot of other sources to explore how Zweig was, in a sense, in exile even when he was living in relative safety as a youth in Vienna and Salzburg, how he was always out of place. It's a really fantastic book, and while he's telling the story of Zweig and exile, he also relates his own family's flight from Austria and their experience in America and how it differed ultimately from Zweig's. The Impossible Exile is a fantastic book if you're interested in Zweig's work and his life, or even if you just want to learn more about the way German and Austrian literary culture was just torn to pieces by the Nazis. And if you consider yourself any sort of reader, you're doing yourself a disservice by not reading Zweig's work. I mean, discovering Zweig for me was like finding out the Beatles had a bunch of albums I'd never heard before. It was just a revelation. So go pick up some of those New York Review Books classics and push and press editions of his work. I always tell people to start with chess story, but don't read the introduction until you've read the novella. I also tell them to give themselves about two hours when they finally sit down to open it because they're probably not going to want to stop until they finish it. You can also find collections of a short fiction, which are awfully good, and there's a new translation of his amazing autobiography, The World of Yesterday, from University of Nebraska Press. Now, I haven't read his biographies, but I'm hoping to make time this summer for the Nietzsche I and maybe Mary Stewart or Marie Antoinette. We'll see. I'm also hoping to get the Erasmus I and I don't know if his book on Montaigne was ever translated into English, but, you know, duh. Now, I do want to kick myself because every time I do one of these shows, there's always something else I should talk about, and in this case, I made a gigantic omission. I only realized it afterwards, but at no point in my conversation with George do we talk about Zweig's second wife, Lotta, who killed herself along with him in that bungalow in Patropolis. And George's book really explores her life and helps restore her reputation a bit. She'd previously been portrayed as frail and maybe shallow and sort of just dragged along by Zweig everywhere, and not really a full person, more of a manuensis for Zweig. And he does a lot to really give her agency and portray her as a person and full caught in just an impossible situation. But, see, during our talk, George calls Stefan Zweig's life inexhaustible, and the only excuse I claim is that there are just too many aspects of Zweig to pin down in a single conversation. I mean, the moment we finished, I thought, "Wow, I really should have talked to you about Zweig as a Jew in Europe, and yet we just never got to it." I mean, I wish I could show you guys the sheet of notes I had in place for this talk, and then all the topics we never got to. But Zweig's a wonderful writer, and his life and history just provides us with so much to talk about. So, in that vein, I hope you enjoy the virtual memories conversation with George Prochnick, author of the Impossible Exile, Stefan Zweig at the end of the world. ♪ With still a million things to say ♪ ♪ I love you, I love you ♪ ♪ No ♪ What led you to write a biography of Stefan Zweig and his final years? It was actually a very unexpected decision for me. I came to Stefan Zweig late. I had not read him growing up at all, and even though my father is Viennese and had introduced me to certain aspects of Viennese culture primarily through the visual arts, I had no exposure to Zweig's work. And it was oddly enough when I was researching for a completely different kind of a book project. I was working on something about Brazil and went to the New York Public Library and kind of yanked every book off the shelf. And among those was Svigg's "Brazil Land of the Future," which leapt out of that particular shelf of rather mostly dense and academic and uninteresting approaches to Brazilian history. And what I really liked about what Svigg had done was, first of all, that he had mixed genres, which is something that I'm always attracted to, so that there was travel log and anecdote and speculation on the future of the country and a really rich medley of forms that he seemed able to deftly move between. And also, I was very struck by the beginning of the book, the tone of self-effacement and even self-denigration that he was willing to adopt in relationship to Brazilian culture as a well-known European. He specifically said in the introduction that he came to Brazil with all of the prejudices of the typical arrogant European expecting to find a swampy backwater fit for adventurers with no indigenous culture worth exploring and was struck both by the extent to which it was Brazil presented an active literary and visual culture that compared with certain things that he thought of in Europe. And also that he was more impressed with the humane elements of Brazilian society that he saw actually superseding anything that was happening in Europe at that moment. - In terms of racial tolerance. - In terms of racial tolerance. And we know that he, at this point it's clear that he was idealizing the situation in Brazil in the 1930s, but also relative to what was happening at that point in Austria and Germany, just the sight of mixed race men and women holding hands walking down the street I think was extraordinary. So I was very, I found the book very appealing and then began learning a little bit about his biographical history and the extent of his fame. And at that point I started speaking with friends of mine who were teaching-- - Teaching with five pounds? - Not five pounds. People who were teaching, teaching compliment and scholars and trying to get a better handle on him. And I just, in my initial outreach, I didn't find anyone who'd even heard of him. And I just found that striking. People who were so, so erudite and so aware of that era's literary glories, who didn't know his name. I found this intriguing and then that brought me to begin exploring a little deeper into who he was and finding that the complexity of his life and of his character in my estimation was so not just remarkable for its depth, but for all the different directions it opened into other experiences of Viennese, high culture Viennese, low culture and of course exile, which I was particularly interested in because of my own families. - Can you expand on that point in your own history with exile? - Yes. Well my father grew up, spent the first years of his life in Vienna. His father was a well-to-do doctor and they had a very nice, the family had a very nice life. His father in a manner that was also the case of many other Viennese, of his Jewish milieu, had been something of a war hero. In the First World War he'd been decorated in his case because he had early on become a prisoner of war in Siberia and had helped save his fellow prisoners during a cholera outbreak and then ended up being in Siberia for a year after the First World War, which was something that happened to a number of people. So he was deeply identified with Austrian culture and was one of those who found it inconceivable that the state would turn against him, so they stayed very, very late. I forget exactly how many months but a considerable time even after the Anschloss that finally, only because my grandfather had as a patient a man who became a relatively high-ranking Nazi officer and this guy warned him that they were going to be picked up in 24 hours. So in the end he went into, the family went in hiding overnight and then wound their way to Zurich and from Zurich to Genoa in a semi-miraculous way managed to get over here. But I had always as a child understood this story as a story of hardship followed by the success of establishing themselves in the United States. My grandfather even though he was over 50 managed to and hadn't known a word of English managed to learn enough English to pass his medical boards, establish a practice and both his children went to Boston, Latin and on to Harvard, and it was a story of suffering banishment and then a new life. However, as I became older, I was forced to engage with the ways in which, with despite all of their external flourishing, the family had suffered certain kinds of losses that were not repaired by setting up life anew in the United States. And Zweig's story, in part because his own exile was so unhappy, was also a way to start reflecting on the complexities even of exile where life seems restored in a new world. It's a line from the book actually jumped out at me that Zweig's story is particularly revealing for what it says about the predicaments of exile that aren't resolved when freedom is regained, that you focus on, again, with Zweig, there was always that sense of being on the run. Even when there was no threat to him, he had to keep running, but in your own family's situation, also that sense of everything had been torn asunder and had to be put back together. In my family's case, it was, I think, partly a split between my grandfather and my grandmother. My grandfather, because from the point of view of employment, he actually had to push himself out into the world. I think was ultimately happier in the United States than my grandmother, who had been extremely social in Vienna and was an accomplished pianist and had a wide circle of friends and never really got the language particularly well and never really got a life. So I think that their experiences were split and their attitudes towards their children were also divided and never resolved, and I think that this is as I researched more into some very interesting studies by social scientists in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and also some of them actually begun while the war was still going on. You see again and again this problem of parental expectations being so split between a desire for their children to assimilate and make their way successfully, and also an angst at the knowledge that part of that process of flourishing in the new world involves almost invariably erasure of the experience of the old in which the parents themselves are still embedded. And that comes up throughout the book, that's a key part of the book I think when you discuss, sorry I'm getting all pedantic. Zwag's relationship with Zionism and the passage where Gersham Shalem essentially says you think you're assimilated culturally belonging to Germany but it's a sad and tragic illusion, you're never going to be German, you're going to be Jews and admits that a number of major figures from Vienna in that world would never have made it in Israel, where he himself or Palestine, where he himself had gone, but that sense of, well it was a thing that struck me throughout the book, that sense of Zwag's faith in building, in civilization and culture, being dashed ultimately, that sense that it was going to be the redeeming factor for Jews and allow them to be part of European culture and yet, you know, scratch the surface and the building means nothing. I think it's a theory that I want to discuss with you that sense of his continuing exile to the point of essentially ending up not only in the new world but in, we'll say a jungle in the new world, being a sense of trying to escape whatever was rotten at the center of culture and civilization as he knew it. There's no actual question there but if you want to comment on it, that'd be great. What you say opens up in so many fascinating directions. I think one thing at the start that's important to recognize about Zwag's investment in Beldung is that although in his memoir, he addresses the subject primarily in terms of Jewish as you eluded to the ways in which Beldung became a way for Jews to rise up in their social stature and with that all the implications of increased professional opportunity, etc. In his life, certainly, it was as disastrous a disappointment or a corrosive event that his belief in Beldung, the power of Beldung, I want to be a little careful in my words here but to enfranchise the lower classes whose discontent with the state as it stood had revolutionary potential either in a left-leaving direction or a right-leaving direction and I came to believe that Zwag really, his, I guess, sense of social responsibility, we would say today, was primarily directed towards enacting the faith that if he could make the masses feel a sense of ownership with the cultural legacy, the high cultural legacy of the German Austrian world that this would diffuse some of the dismay that their class position imposed upon them which had the potential to make things go terribly wrong So this is a long way of saying that the ways in which Zwag was indubitably a popularizer in many of his works, that's what he was doing, it's what his detractors accused him of and also many of those who found his work inspiring was directed towards a very specific and at least uncertain of his works and I'm thinking in particular of some of the later historical studies and biographies in particular the book that he wrote on Erasmus, which came out in this country in the first year of his, in the first year of his exile in 1934 and I believe he was only begun after Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship and there's a remarkable, there's a remarkable passage in that work where Zwag talks about the failure of Erasmus and more even than Erasmus himself, of his circle of humanists to whom Zwag felt himself deeply both indebted and in some way he felt himself allied with their project where he addresses what he saw as their failure to properly understand the masses in language which is identical, more or less identical to many of the critiques that were later leveled against Zwag himself and I was recently, I saw this review that had been done, I think it was in the New York Herald Tribune of his autobiography that was written and published in this country in 1943, I think the review was from the same year that the name of the title of the review was "glass enclosed record of a mind" and the whole question of what role education can play in changing political dynamics is such a vexed one and one that I don't think we have worked through to this day, it's one of the reasons I feel so far continues to be important as a figure both as a character and as writing to think about because we now of course face this moment and also of widespread social discontent which involves lots of sense of both being excluded from economic rights and also simply rights of being heard and I think Zwag was aware of the unbelievably charged moment that he lived in that this demanded some kind of intellectual response as well as a strictly economic philanthropic effort and the ways that he saw what didn't didn't work but couldn't really change what he did is very powerful so I don't think that's really an answer to your not exactly question Do you think he had a certain naivete about those benefits or about how useful the act of education was going to be? You know, it's not something I feel resolved on and one reason is if we look at the situation today in countries with a great deal of political turmoil there is so much concern with a sense of the state, the authorities failing to respect them as individuals as equal agents to their own, you know, to the powers that be that I think there's something to be said for that idea that if we can make people feel included in the cultural, the dominant cultural space that this can make the introduction of more just economic policies easier You know, I don't think they can be separated and that's one point that I try to make in the book, I mean Zwag was criticized for failing to sufficiently participate in the efforts of the socialist government of Salzburg where he was living at the time because his focus had been more on the educational obligations but, you know, Hitler's, what's the word? Hitler's slogan, one of the slogans of the rising Nazi movement was "bread and freedom" These two ideas were linked and were linked also with calling out the economic forces that Hitler saw as responsible for the German Patee Bourgeoisie and middle classes disenfranchisement It was the architects of Versailles and the Jews, so I just think, I tend to think AIDS comes attached to social positions, and Zwag put his weight on one side of that equation and not on the economics, although he was an extremely generous person and that shouldn't be under That can't be overstated and shouldn't be underestimated, but it was a much more personal form of generosity than it was thinking in a, say, Marxist way about how the whole economic system might be restructured And for a monstrously successful novelist and biographer, maybe Marxism wasn't exactly the economic direction that's a good point In the process of writing this, what was the, I guess, the temptation or the ability to resist, making Zwag into a symbol in the process? I mean, it's a very difficult rope to walk along, to manage to get across the facts of these final years, but also understand them as emblematic of the era A lot of people tend to take that double suicide as a statement of whatever point they need to make, particularly And I don't think you push that in this book, which was refreshing, you actually had a very interesting take, very near the end, which I don't want to give away because it's such a beautiful passage What was that temptation like, though? Was there an issue where it came to? I think in a way it wasn't a temptation. I had been reading Zwag for so long before I started this book, I recently came across an interview that I did when I was working on a completely other iteration of it Seven years ago, and I hadn't even realized that I had been that immersed in him that long because I'd done a couple of things in between, but I never stopped reading him So, when I began this, I felt the words of his books and his letters, so I felt that I'd incorporated them to such an extent that his humanity was always present I don't, by no means present him as a hero, but I think that if I hadn't found his own human ambiguities, what's the word, his deeply contradictory nature, so inexhaustibly interesting The ways that he also linked up to different historical currents of the time wouldn't have been able to continue to interest me But he seemed so human to me, and even when I might like to believe that I would have made different choices, or at least reading the choices, learning the choices that Zwag made, I would like to learn from them and not make those choices If I was ever in a kind of situation that he faced, I find him really believable You can understand why he chose what he chose? I do feel like he's vivid to me, he's vivid to me in his foibles as much as his grander gestures Let me ask, as somebody who's read mainly his fiction, I've only read the world of yesterday, his autobiography among his nonfiction Do you find a danger in reading everything as though it points towards the end? His suicide? Is there a sense of everything about it? I wouldn't mind addressing that, actually, because one reviewer of the book made a critique not unlike that I don't remember the exact words, but there was a line in the review that said the suicide is the least interesting aspect of Stefan Saag And I found that, you know, I thought about that work, and I found it to be ultimately the kind of flourish that when one's in the process of writing an essay, that kind of thing can come out I don't know what it means, I think it's like suicide from the beginning, from before it happened, the ways that people saw his depression as potentially pointing that way They read it symbolically and it is unarguably the case that his suicide had an enormous effect on the refugee community In the immediate aftermath, it was something that people violently reacted against in the main They felt that the suicide represented a betrayal of their community, a surrender to Hitler, a sign that there was no point in going on There were important exceptions among them, Andre Marois, who said that a world in which someone like, he basically said paraphrasing We have to ask ourselves what kind of a world we live in when someone like Stefan Saag feels they can no longer continue to inhabit it But it was reacted to negatively in a manner that also, in the end, the backlash against it was life affirming to a huge extent The people who said whether they thought that Saag was in some way guilty for waving the white flag against these terrible events Or they felt that he had been so hopelessly abused that suicide was inevitable by external forces There was, by and large, in what I read, ultimately a redoubled commitment to living But one that had been informed by the extremity of this act by someone who didn't face the immediate physical hardships and material lack that so many exiles confronted The other important thing in thinking about Saag's suicide and looking backwards at his life is, and this goes to what you said about his fiction How many of his novellas end in suicide? I mean, how many of his works end with an act of voluntary death? It's shocking if you start going through them Suicide was obviously a real and abiding point of fascination for Saag, for reasons that go well beyond any kind of depressive tendencies that he had They speak to, I think, a pervasive angst in that era and, at the very least, an immersion in the problem between the disjunction, the problem of the disjunction between our grand desires for the kind of life that we dream we should be living And the actually extremely circumscribed canvas on which most of us can operate So I don't think that the suicide was inevitable until an incredibly short period before it happened And the evidence for that lies in remarks that he made to different people in the last couple of months of his life when he talked about embarking on a new work And he was working on an article for Readers Digest, he finally killed himself immediately after Carnival in February of 1942 And he had driven down to Rio from Petropolis where he was then living with a friend who was also an editor and a writer and another refugee from Germany And was speaking the whole ride, apparently, about a piece that he was working on for Readers Digest and trying to get suggestions and then was intoxicated by his immediate experience of the city and this great state of revelry So it wasn't decided, but I think of it more like a seesaw on which the weight had been gradually tilting for a long time and then became too heavy on the side of death So was there that sense, though, of considering of reading, say, the world of yesterday as a 400-page suicide note? You know, an idea that this was all his last will for the Vienna that's lost To me, the very first thing I read of his was chess story, which, when I finished it, went back to the introduction and saw, yes, he sent this off and then killed himself Yeah, I can see that, that sort of informs everything that's there Is there that sense of it, though? Do you feel that's an unfair reading necessarily? Or is it a limiting reading, I suppose? I mean, I think both those works coming in the late stages as they did I, you know, first of all, I would say that both those works are, I think those two works are my favorite pieces of writing by swag And you weren't holding them up, microphones at high five, yeah, that's nice And I'll say a word about what I particularly like about the royal game, but one of the things that is very... What is the word, very, very, very sad? Is swag had lost by the last years of his life, not just the last month, a sense of satisfaction in his work? He spoke frequently about the fact that he'd be working on a number of different books, but he had no pep, the work had no zip, it had no... It lacked something for him, but in reality, he was doing, I think, his most extraordinary writing The royal game, you know, what I especially love about that, novella First of all, I think it's more subtle than a lot of his work, and it's the only piece of fictional writing he did that directly engages with events since Hitler's ascendancy It centers on a chess match between a kind of idiot Savant, whose whole approach to the game is one of conquest and the exercise of brute strength And who has an inability to imagine a chess board who has to have a physical board in front of him? Very good point, and someone else who is a culture Viennese who, in fact, learned to play chess entirely in his imagination and learned to divide himself and actually divide himself while he was in a concentration camp because he had no other means of stimulating his mind Divide himself into two different players, and what I find remarkable about that work is that it seems to me an allegory for what happened to Vienna as a city I encourage everyone to read it, and without wanting to delve too much into the plot The problem that that story illustrates through this game is what happens when the imagination becomes so hypertrophy It's so overdeveloped that it's seeing too far in advance of the world of the board as it were right in front of your eyes And it's, I think, something that arguably happened to that city as a whole So the degree to which that story is about suicide is less interesting to me than the ways in which it seems a real meditation on the implosion of a cultural ideal Which is the ideal of absolute dedication to the potential of the imagination, but with the world of yesterday, if it's not a suicide note, I think it is a kind of message in a bottle And it's not a suicide note to my mind in that it's very intently trying to offer to the people who remain on the surface as readers Ways of thinking about history and of human socio-economic socio-cultural relationships that work and don't work as models that can still be applied So it's definitely written with you can feel the angel of death at his back and he wrote that book at a furious pace And surprisingly, in Asanig, New York, just up the hill from Sing Sing Prison, he was writing over 70 pages a week, he wrote the 400 pages in less than two months If I remember correctly, the first draft of that book, it was written with a sense of profound urgency and certainly with a sense of the potential end of everything looming But he's actually trying, I think, to help the living not to explain his despair And he's not going to leave a map behind for how to rebuild something Although again, it seems from the course of his exile, he seems to know that it's lost My initial exposure to Zvi came in maybe 2009, 2010, I was reading Clive James's book Cultural Amnesia, which is a series of autobiographical sketches and essays run alphabetically The final piece within the book, and James is one who I think does fall into the trap of using Zvi as a symbol of something larger First and foremost, he discounts all of the fiction poetry and drama and just focuses on the non-fiction, the essays and the biographies and the autobiography And at the same time, contends that Zvi surely knew the war was already won, that the Nazis would never come And I think, especially from reading your version of his final days, he does not seem to have certainty of that, he seems to see the Nazis lurking, you know, he asks somebody near the end if he thinks they'll invade South America Yes, I suppose they could, and that immediately drives them to a panic and fear So yeah, that's part of the understanding I'm trying to develop of Zvi is both the fiction and the non-fiction and how we interpret both of those modes for what he was doing and what he achieved, but also what they may have been saying about him that perhaps he didn't see at the time, both in terms of who he was selecting as his biographical examples It does seem from your description that he knew who he was choosing and why for his biographies and that his second wife also was pushing him to write about certain subjects because it might revivify him By the end, right? But yeah, how much of a challenge is that? I know within your book, there's much more of a focus on the non-fiction Is it difficult to sort of try to understand the genesis of some of the novellas and some of the stories and what they're trying to get across? I understand the genesis, well, you know, let me come at that obliquely, I have tried to think about why his fiction struck the kind of chord that it did, and it was so immensely popular And I think there are two major explanations, at least, that linger for me in that regard First of all, Svai became a friend of Freud's when he was still a relatively young man and admired Freud profoundly And wrote a quite long monograph about Freud that I think is perhaps the first study of Freud that looked at him as a character in relationship It's not a detailed biography, but that held biographical, or if not even so much biographical elements as elements of an actual portrait of Freud as a man in relationship to his theories And it looks very hard at Freud's notions of the unconscious, in particular, and there's no question for me, but that Svai read Freud as an artist, meaning more perhaps in line with how Freud is used today in cultural studies, et cetera He saw there was a way in which Freud's approach to the mind could be applied to the development of character and plot Freud, interestingly, writes Svai, about one of Svai's works, that what made the work so powerful for him was that there was something about Svai's language that seemed to mimic the way in which symbols and meaning accumulate in a dream He actually likened the quality, the texture of Svai's prose and narrative trajectory to something of dream work And I think that one of the reasons that Svai was able to attract the enormous following that he did, and again that's an aspect of Svai that should never be far from one's thinking One one is viewing him as a character is the incredible movie star like popularity that he had, and the way that he was not one of the high culture Viennese in his popularity at all, but was a mass, had mass cultural appeal I mean, tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of copies of his books were sold, he was able, partly, I believe, through his understanding of Freud to give his characters the dignity, no matter what station in life they occupied of having an incredibly rich inner life that was in some way suppressed truncated by their social circumstances, so that again and again we find in his fictional world protagonists who are filled with this rich symphonic inner life that is squashed one way or another and compels them to the characters to go through life with these very flat affects and ordinary sets of occupations while they're conceiving of themselves in these overwhelming situations of desire, unrealized desire, that really I think that works because so many of us, most of us, go around feeling that our lives don't really express the intensity of our emotional being so that's, I think, important for recognizing his popularity, and I think it's something that he does with a strange fluency, you know, is a word that it may even be Clive James, or no, I believe it might have been Andre Asiman who applied to him, but he has this ease of narrative that was also a target for some of his detractors who felt that his work could have been more powerful, had it felt more fraught in some way, but the other thing that I just want to quickly mention in terms of popularity is because it's an explanation that Spike himself assigns for his fame, what he describes as a character flaw, his radical impatience, which led him to ruthlessly cut and cut and cut his stories until they were just very streamlined, they really move, and it's another reason also that they've proven so fruitful for cinematic adaptation What do you think accounts for his, well, his disappearance from the culture and his, I would say revival, we're going through, at least in our literary circles, the Zweig revival of the past decade? Do you think essentially it was the suicide and the economic situation in post-war Europe that led to the essential disappearance of Zweig and his work? I think there was a confluence of factors, the suicide certainly within the Anglo world, which is where he has particularly vanished, and it's important to remember that in France he never stopped selling And James mentioned that, he said the books just keep getting re-released in France and the best sellers, to this day you can find them in airport carousels, and he is extremely popular, also still in Brazil, if not quite on that level, and in other places around Europe, so it's particularly here and in England that he vanished so completely I think that the message of the suicide was certainly not a message that is very, it harmonizes very well with a lot of American thought about how hardship should be approached, drink yourself to death as one thing Right, it doesn't play well, I also think that Zweig's work is so representative of and immersed in both in its narrative structures and in its different scenarios in the Europe before the First War Which had, by the end of the second, in the immediate aftermath of the second, there was a tendency here in particular to look back at all of the ways that that project had failed, that Europe was not a Europe that people were interested in, particularly interested in capturing the aura of, you know, it seemed contaminated and Zweig embodied in some ways that failure, so that didn't help matters, there were also just changes in the focus of publishing in the post-war United States in particular But beyond that, I think Zweig's own reflections on the subject are really important, and there's an essay that he wrote in 1934, again the first year he was in exile, he was in London, after visiting a book exhibition at which his British publisher Desmond Flowers had organized an exhibit of best sellers since 1830 Zweig describes walking around this exhibition and realizing that he can't, doesn't recognize many of the titles, that for certain years they couldn't find a single edition of the best seller that year, and he speaks quite movingly about the tonic nature of recognizing if you are fortunate enough to be touched by fame, it is, the accident is survival, first of all I said, and the arbitrariness also is something that he's very conscious of, because he says what makes a work have lasting values, in fact is nothing to do with fame, and he says of himself and he constantly reiterates this in other places as well that he knows that in some way, he knew that in some way what he was able to do was to channel the zeitgeist, that is why he was as popular as he was, I mean it's why something has that kind of sweeping cultural fame, but once that zeitgeist is something else, there's all the reason for you not to be present anymore What do you think accounts for his revival here then? Besides Edwin Frank and the New York Review Books classics guys? And Pushkin, and Pushkin Press. Right. Well for one thing, I think that the simplicity of Zweig's narrative style, which in fact was dissonant with the kind of work that was popular in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, is now more in favor I mean something about his narrative style seems to me extremely contemporary for all that he has certain 19th century conventions of storytelling He often has a narrator who meets someone who tells, begins talking to them, confessing some complicated story that then becomes the story we're learning but ultimately ends up affecting both the storyteller and the listener I think he feels more, he feels also for the length of so many of the works, the digestibility of them, it feels to me, it feels contemporary in certain ways With this, I also think we are seeing this larger re-conjuring of Vienna, a fascination, you know, this year unrelated to any of the Zweig interest, there was a big series of concerts at Carnegie Hall and there was a film series at MoMA and there have been various painting exhibitions as well, so why we as a culture at this point are again looking at Vienna is a provocative question I mean I think it's not necessarily a good sign altogether because it was a dark place for all of its aesthetic glories What do you think it may indicate? What do you think is prompting it, I suppose? I'm sure you've theorized about it I think of something that Zweig said in his official declaration of suicide which was written within a day of his death In that document, he says that he feels it's the right time to depart for one who has always felt that personal freedom is the highest good and intellectual labor, the greatest joy that this world could offer He felt those two values had been crushed by the last years since Hitler's rise certainly, and it began well before that during the First World War You know, this is a moment in time clearly where wherever you are on the political spectrum, I think that there is a sense of personal freedom jeopardized and certainly it is not a moment in which intellectual labor is particularly valued I'm talking to a guy who dries around on his weekends with a couple of microphones trying to get good conversation, but go on, yes I'm thankful for people like yourself I think we feel on the one hand that a number of old-fashioned ideas of beauty are imperiled by the whole direction that the culture is moving and Vienna, both correctly and incorrectly, seems to evoke for many people a valuing of beauty and not just beauty but also intellectual dedication leading to important scientific work There's a recent book that looks at the scientific flowering of that moment as well and obviously that goes far beyond Freud whose scientific value has been challenged I think it's an astalgic impulse in a sense that there is a nameless something in this hour that feels threatening Do you think perhaps it's an idea that there was a central, that there was a locus for this? Given that we're such a decentralized, internet world, or everything is just, you know, distributed everywhere, the idea that there was one place, a sense of a garden of Eden which also brings me back to why Zweig ends up running to the jungle by the end Do you think in a sense that both that impulse and the one you're talking about is this idea of returning to some sort of primeval place? I think that's very nice, I mean there are two very different kinds of gardens obviously but the absence of anywhere now that everyone agrees is a place of enormous cultural flowering cities that obviously are attracting young people for certain sorts of art, engagements with the arts but it's not that complete, that sense of complete dedication to the possibilities of the human imagination and of the human intellect and of physical work that Vienna in its idealized form seems to offer people I think the other thing about Vienna for anyone who's spent time there, it's not just that it was in one locus but it wasn't a very big locus, you know, you can walk that whole city in not so many hours and you can not only walk the city, but critically, Vienna has these extraordinary woods that are on the periphery on one part of the western edge in particular, the Viennese woods which are the site of as many novellas and stories even well beyond swag as they are inspirations for different musical works, etc so Vienna was a city that in the eyes of its residents was inordinately successful at fusing the benefits of nature with the benefits of civilization and when swag ultimately makes the move to petropolis, it was very consciously in part a challenging of all of the possibilities of civilization or a resignation to their absence for which he'd worked for so long and there's an amazing letter that he wrote very close to the end of his life to the film director Berthal Verthal in which he talks about feeling that he's gone back in petropolis to the world before the world of yesterday that his life there he saw as so, so returned to elementary forms the way that, just the way that you bought live chickens in the market and the places, the ways you were exposed to the elements and the intensity of nature's fertility now I will say something that complicates this for me I had the great fortune to meet a wonderful woman who grew up in petropolis it grew up in Rio in the 1930s and then moved to petropolis just after I believe just after swag killed himself, so was still in that world and one thing that you don't get from swag's portrait of where he is that this woman spoke about very poignantly was the intensity of even in this very small town of the refugee life and in fact the cultured refugee life so swag, you know, she actually became this, my guide there actually became overwhelmed emotionally as she spoke about, you know, sort of the sense that she had growing up from her parents who had a very complex Jewish ancestry of the tragedy of swag not finding them like why didn't we know he was there, why didn't that connection happen? So these were bourgeois families working, that petropolis had a very developed textile industry that it became to a significant extent Jewish operated and it wasn't a world that Swag was naturally going to find himself in but she talked about musical recitals and things so that his sense of isolation in the middle of the jungle and it's so primitive, et cetera it was also something he wanted to believe about where he was and it wasn't Vienna or even Rio but it wasn't quite either it seems as though he was conceiving of it as something Edenic in its primitiveness that's right and that's what makes me wonder about the sense of exile first leaving the continent for England then crossing the ocean to New York and it's a question I long had until I read your book why he was incapable of handling life in New York City in the 1930s into the early 40s and then bailing and all that first for Westchester and then on to Brazil that progression does seem as though it's an abandonment each time that he's leaving something more behind until by the end he's leaving behind anyone to talk to that's right, I come back to the introduction to Brazil end of the future in which there's one particularly moving passage where he speaks about he actually begins, it's an interesting rhetorical move where he begins to acknowledge what Brazil does not have by way of technological development such as his European peers are used to et cetera and he goes through this list and then he says on the other hand as the events of recent times have forced us to recognize and he's writing this in the latter half of the 1930s once we recognize how all of those gauges of progress by which we lived by which we determined value in Europe essentially levels of productivity statistically ascertainable comfort and convenience once we recognize that all of that stuff that was defining progress for us can coincide with such depths of bestiality we have to confront the fact that maybe all of our notions of progress are incorrect and this is not the direction that leads to greater civilization he makes this move in the process of praising Brazil for what he sees as its intentional nurturing of more humane values so Spheig's movement and it encompasses as well England where he was the longest by far after leading Austria and he lived there over five years with a lot of movement back and forth to the new world and as long as possible within the continent but still he was based in England he was partly fascinated by the English fourth-year relationship to gardening and one essay that became extremely important to what I wrote and how I thought about Spheig's experience of England was an essay he wrote called Gardens in War Time which is actually an effort to understand how the English against the Austrians sustained the equanimity of temperament and what he saw is the sobriety and its commitment to ideals of civilization and justice that it did he saw as related in some way to the unbelievable dedication that the English evidenced to their plans of land to their working with a kind of democratic spirit of horticultural well communality and then he reminded me somewhat of Orwell's England, your England where he brings up why fascism could never have arisen in England of his time just because there's that sense of well taking the piss ultimately where the Goostep could never have been adopted because you would be laughed out of any place in England again that sense of it's my plot you know there's always you know that's right and the humor too the humor too the irony the irony you know that's something the lack of humor that at least as you know with the possible exception of some very bitter irony that was expressed in some of Goebbels' writing the sort of joyless humorlessness of the Nazi enterprise was something that the Viennese were particularly conscious of as a society that had dedicated itself in the ways that it did to the cultivation of wit and lightheartedness in different ways first that does your correct help us to understand the whole trajectory of his movement to these more and more first to the cultivated gardens of England and then to wilder and wilder states of nature first arguably in North America where he lives once he leaves New York City and he goes up the Hudson at that time the relatively pastoral I mean pastoral is maybe the wrong word but it's not exactly suburban either what listening was at that point it's a small town on the river surrounded by lots of green however he was he was very frustrated when he was there by the sense that he couldn't get anywhere without a car and this comes up again and again because he didn't really drive at least I haven't seen him writing about driving anywhere he seemed to feel dependent on other people to get around already in 1941 the idea that in America you needed a car to function was clearly on his mind is something that made it unappealing but in Brazil he believed that what had not gone the European direction in terms of I guess what we would have to call a more natural way of life all the problematic aspects of that definition and of it actually applying to Brazil at that time you know he liked what he saw as simpler human values and then he killed himself and then he killed himself because he missed all of that he had everything he loved that's what it is to me that it's always that oh it's so wonderful here it's just I guess the question obviously at the core of it all why does he kill himself to me reading the world of yesterday it seems that he knows that even if it's one there's no rebuilding not for him having gone through post World War I in Vienna and Salzburg I think he understands that at 60 something years old whatever he's going to be when the war ends he's not the man who can go back to Europe and go through what he would assume would be another period of hyperinflation and all the troubles that it would cause but I don't know beyond that outside of of course ascribing things to you know depression mental illness why he finally throws in the towel well the the importance of his sense of being too old for all this is absolutely undeniable and spied with someone who had always been very conscious of aging he wasn't he clearly wasn't a person who was afraid of death but he was famous among his friends for I mean I don't know if it was exactly vanity although I wouldn't leave vanity out of the equation he hated the thought that he was getting older and there's a story that was told by a good friend of his the playwright German playwright Carl Zukmeyer who was about 10 years younger than him I think at least 10 years younger than him who on Sugg's 50th birthday when he was living in Salzburg and he was at this point at the height of his fame he didn't want to be in at a home for his birthday he didn't want all the special deliveries of mail that were sure to be coming his way and he dragged Zukmeyer off to Munich which is although the German border is very close to Salzburg he's not all that close he took him there to an old Jewish restaurant which also is sort of interesting I mean a very old fashioned place where he was going to have blue carp and goose these different these different Jewish specialties any any says to Zukmeyer in the course of this elegiac dinner you know I think really the good years are behind us at this point it's over and Zukmeyer is sort of says to him you know I'm 10 years younger than you what are you saying I'm like I'm barely 40 but but already at 50 so I felt he was too old and there's no question but that his exhaustion overwhelmed him but he also knew that even though the Nazis would be defeated ultimately and he does write about this there were certain elements of the world of pre-war Europe that he cared about most that seemed unimaginably far from being resurrected I think he was right well not to kill himself but do you think he's right that that's a very interesting question because one could say I mean there's there's some point at which he describes you know it's Feig invested himself as much in his work on behalf of pan-Europeanism and pacifism as he did in his literary work and there's some point at which he describes the efforts of the pan-European movement that loosely formed movement or multiple movements that he was involved with as the effort to create the coming world Switzerland and arguably you could say aspects of the EU might not be so far from this however the EU is so mired in bureaucracy that well I think five would have been obviously grateful for the ways that with some important examples which are some of them unfolding before us now in Eastern Europe that the continent engulfing conflicts seem hard to it seems difficult to imagine that happening again although one doesn't one doesn't know for certain what has not returned that mattered so much to Feig was a world in which personal individual freedom had so much scope to operate at least and critically within his economic strata you know I think I think there even if we look at the most progressive countries in Europe in Scandinavia say in Northern Europe perhaps the regulation of life to make it function in the politically correct ways that it does even if they're admirable I think it would have been enough to him to sort of the sense of how much you are how much you are regimented in your enactment of progressive policy and it's certainly something that comes up both in your book and in the world of yesterday that sense that around the turn of the century he was able to travel to India and New York and elsewhere and never had a passport you can't get over that what passports are introduced into the world that becomes a limit I think that's worth I think that's worth lingering on both because of the incredible joy that you rightly identify as what it was to move around without identity documents and also for why that would have been such an issue for him and you know it again in a very late letter he makes the remark my problem is that I paraphrasing my problem is that I cannot identify with the me of my passport the me of exile the me of my identity papers I think that he felt that the more we have to we have to produce documents official documents to indicate who we are the more we are reduced to that to that strip of paper and Feig in a very rich leaving in his way was committed to the ideal of the mass multiplicity of persona you know he quotes Nietzsche about every genius wears a mask and I think when we look at the way that Feig moved through life he moved for so many years like a dancer and there was a friend of his a French with psychoanalyst who watched Feig at his home in in in Salzburg and describes him balletically really there being something feline and like a mercury in the way that he moved through society the ways that he was able to serve as a broker bringing together making connections between people something that he loved doing and was very good at he was so fluid in his mobility and not just geographically there was a satiric volume published caricaturing different Viennese writers when he was still in the first part of his career that characterized Stefan's Feig as the Steph's Feig a beast made up of every part of the animal you know the feathers and the tail et cetera and he had that you know he had that chameleon sense which I think in something that I write about a bit I think it's so apparent in his in his the photographs of him of which there are many he was so incredibly photographed and I really do have the feeling and I've gone back since writing the book and and I've been introduced to other archives where this is only further confirmed for me that he looks he blends in if he's standing next to Aldous Huxley in the south of France in a white suit he looks like Huxley if he's by Joseph Roth in a cafe when Joseph Roth is already declining as an alcoholic you know he looks Feig looks battered and disheveled and it's when he's in Brazil he he standing amidst dignitaries and Bahia he seems to take on their swarliness and their particular the panache of their stance so it's this really strange quality that he had which means that once you're just that Stefan's Feig born in Vienna Jewish discolorized this height et cetera that I think it was an existential terror to be reduced to those metrical features and you think he has a literary or intellectual successor? You know I had a conversation with someone just the other day about this and my friend Wayne Costenbaum who's a cultural critic made a very interesting and unexpected comparison he said maybe maybe the person not quite a contemporary but almost who is most akin to Feig in this culture would be Susan Sontak Now Sontak did not ever have Feig's level of popularity but she worked between many different genres in the manners Feig and she a great part of her project was popularizing ultimately bringing you know this was something again that Feig was not always praised for by any means but Sontak made us aware of high cultural figures that we might not otherwise have been exposed to so I think it's problematic on the political level because Feig's political is default political position was silence keep a low profile and this was not Susan Sontak but in terms of their cultural resonance maybe there's something in that final question what are you reading what am I reading now a pile of books I am reading one biography I'm finally reading I'm finally reading the great Joseph Frank study of Dostoyevsky and I've been reading in terms of contemporary fiction I'm reading the noise guard because I interviewed Lin Elman and completely mispronounced Thank you so thank you it is a tour de force you know there's just there's just no question and I'm always reading the first I'm always rereading the first yeah when did you first finish him when did you first go through the other books I was I was in university and I had a very close friend who wanted to re-proost with me and I remember we I went to Harvard and we went every day to the you went an hour and a half before mentioning Harvard that's got to be a record that's sorry go on I only mention it now because we went to a particular library in the fog art museum which was way underground and was absolutely silent and absolutely untrafficked at that time and we would just read for hours and absolutely immerse ourselves and conjure up this this wonderful world and I've read it like people read the Talmud every every few years since I just think you know the combination and I will say that for me that's that's a work that I never cease to be amazed by how differently it reads every time I pick it up what what I what I find especially powerful and and and educating and what's my book would you which a push on a friend? well with with you I would certainly push his his memoir the world of yesterday and I would also push royal game there there are a couple of there there are a couple of other novellas that don't get read as much that I'm a fan of one of them is I think that the I it's it's out of print but not that hard to find I believe the title in English is an impromptu study of a of a hand a craft I think and it's a actually a very strange story that involves a narrator who is in a crowd identifies a man who he realizes is a detective watching out for problems in the crowd and then gradually the narrator realizes that the man is actually a thief and his own then the narrator's own over identification with this character as he moves through the crowd increasingly wonder whether he's begun actually abetting his crimes gets at a lot of issues for me that we haven't talked about about Fogg's voyeuristic character and sort of his his mobility between extremes of self exposure and extremes of reticence and observational intensity I think you summed it up relatively well as being an extrovert who fantasized about being an introvert that's right also for the book George Prochnick thank you so much for coming on the virtual memory show thank you so much for having me on and that was George Prochnick like I said I feel like a heel for not talking about Zweig's wife and the conversation but I think you get the idea that we could have gone on for hours about Zweig and his work and his life had still not touched every subject that we'd like Now George's new book The Impossible Exile Stefan Zweig at the end of the world was published by Other Press and is available in bookstores now you should check out George's website George Prochnick.com for more on his books articles and reviews and now the spelling bee part of the show that's G-E-O-R-G-E-P-R-O-C-H-N-I-K Also do yourself a favor and read Stefan Zweig's fiction and the autobiography Thank Pushkin Press and New York Review Books Classics for bringing his books back to English language readers and you can find those editions the NYRB ones in better bookstores and at nybooks.com/books And that's it for this week's virtual memory show and what I hope was our first installment in a series of conversations about Stefan Zweig if you guys will put up with it Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Katie Skelly, a cartoonist, Nabokov fan and maybe Edie Sedgwick Repopularizer You might also get a monologue from me about trigger warnings if you're lucky or unlucky I guess Meanwhile, please hit up our websites VMSPod.com or chimeraobscura.com/vm to make a donation to this ad-free podcast You can also find past episodes on our sites and get on the show's email list there And if you've got ideas for guests drop me a line at groth@chimeraobscura.com or at VMSPod on Twitter or at our Facebook page Facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow And you can always go to the iTunes store and look up the virtual memories show and subscribe to it there and maybe leave me a nice review and a rating Until next time, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way [Music] [Music]
