BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Impossible Exile’

OPINION:

THE IMPOSSIBLE EXILE: STEFAN ZWEIG AT THE END OF THE WORLD
By George Prochnik
Other Press, $27.95, 390 pages

Is it possible to feel a deep sense of loss for something that never was? Millions of white Southerners, most of whose ancestors led hardscrabble lives as small farmers, day laborers or petty tradesmen, still wax sentimental about a glamorous, “lost” antebellum world that existed mainly within the covers of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind.”

Modern Scot nationalists still toast the memory of a romanticized Bonnie Prince Charlie, in real life a vain, rather dim-witted egotist who led often reluctant peasant clansmen in a doomed uprising that nearly destroyed the Highland way of life. A similar nostalgia for the nonexistent was common among many educated, affluent German and Austrian Jews who had prospered in pre-Nazi Berlin and Vienna only to discover — if they were lucky enough to leave in time — that things were seldom what they seemed in the good old days.

In a 1910 conversation with Teddy Roosevelt, when asked what the purpose of monarchy was in the modern age, Franz Joseph, the elderly emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, reportedly replied: “I am the last monarch of the old school. It is my duty to protect my people from their politicians.” Which he repeatedly did, going as far as refusing to recognize the 1895 election of Karl Lueger, a popular demagogue and virulent anti-Semite, as mayor of Vienna. In Germany, the Hohenzollern dynasty and enlightened statesmen like Otto von Bismarck played a similar protective role against nativist envy and bigotry.

It was great while it lasted. An emerging Jewish upper-middle class, many of whose members were just a few generations from the shtetl or life in the ghetto, was soon influential in business and financial circles. Soon after, the children of these newly affluent capitalists would play a major role in German-language art, science, medicine and scholarship.

But the fall of the dynasties — and the humiliation of defeat in Germany and dismemberment in the Hapsburg Empire — knocked out the protective, anti-populist props that had allowed Middle European Jewry to make impressive, genuine achievements and to sustain an illusory sense of security. The false spring of the Weimar period soon gave way to the rise of Nazism, fueled by resentment over an unjust peace and economic collapse, as well as smoldering prejudices that had never really been extinguished. Then the abyss.

No one man embodied both the achievements and the illusions of pre-Nazi German and Austrian Jewry more than Stefan Zweig. Virtually unknown to most American readers today, his prolific work as an essayist, novelist, short-story writer and biographer won him international best-seller status in his lifetime. Even as a suicidal melancholy began to undermine him in exile, millions of American moviegoers were flocking to view “Marie Antoinette,” a lavish-costume tear-jerker starring Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power and, as the credits proclaimed in large print, “based in part on the book by Stefan Zweig.”

In some ways profound, in other ways frivolous, Stefan Zweig was a talented, energetic idealist and a dedicated writer who placed his faith in a “cosmopolitan” (his own word) European culture with strong German cultural contributions. He was, as his biographer George Prochnik puts it in a characteristically overwritten but temperamentally true passage in “The Impossible Exile,” both a Jew and an Austrian patriot, as well as “[a] stupendously prolific author, tireless advocate for Pan-European humanism, relentless networker, impeccable host, domestic hysteric, noble pacifist, cheap populist, squeamish sensualist, dog lover, cat hater, book collector, alligator-shoe wearer, dandy, depressive, cafe enthusiast, sympathizer with lonely hearts, casual womanizer, man ogler, suspected flasher, convicted fabulist, fawner over the powerful, champion of the powerless, abject coward before the ravages of old age, unblinking stoic before the mysteries of the grave.”

Although financially secure, Zweig never really came to grips with exile — and the collapse of the old (partially imaginary) European moral order that had given his life and art their meaning. In 1942, he and his devoted secretary and second wife, Lotte, took fatal doses of poison. They committed suicide in his bungalow in Petropolis, a lush, sleepy suburb of Rio de Janeiro named after Brazil’s last emperor, Don Pedro II who, like Zweig, was a cultivated believer in education, tolerance and humanism, and, also like him, died a stateless exile.

Fortunately, Zweig had already completed his last major work, one that is more widely read today than any of his earlier best-sellers. “Die Welt von Gestern” (“The World of Yesterday”), like Mr. Prochnik’s biography, is movingly evocative. It might best be described as the realistic depiction of a dream, Stefan Zweig’s fond but unblinking look back at a fascinating, lost Middle European world of artistic refinement, humanist idealism and dreamy coffeehouse afternoons fueled by sex, schnapps and cigar smoke — a world, alas, that was never quite what Stefan Zweig thought it was.

Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.