Books
Review: Encounters and Destinies
Death looms large in this collection of essays
October 15, 2020 12:18
Death looms large in this collection of essays
October 15, 2020 12:18Encounters and Destinies: A Farewell to Europe by Stefan Zweig (Trans: Will Stone, Pushkin Press, £9.99)
Hannah Arendt claimed that, in his many writings on cultural figures, Stefan Zweig ignored the “greatest poets of the post [First World] war period”, Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht”. But this sells Zweig short. As the essays in Encounters and Destinies show, he had a huge range of interests and was immersed in the culture of his times. Over almost 25 years, he wrote about Mahler and Toscanini, Schnitzler, Proust, Joyce and Gorky. The pieces in this new selection of tributes and eulogies, translated into English for the first time by Will Stone, run from an essay on Mahler in 1915 to the eulogy delivered to his friend Sigmund Freud at his funeral in London in 1939.
The 15 essays gathered here include pieces on artists and composers, writers and thinkers. Some were from the great centres of European modernism – Paris, Vienna, Prague. Others, like Joseph Roth, Joyce and Maxim Gorky were from the European periphery. Many were personal friends. Most striking is the sense of European culture that runs through the book. In an age of rising nationalism, Zweig was one of the great cosmopolitans and it is no coincidence that the last pieces, both from 1939, are tributes to fellow refugees Joseph Roth and Sigmund Freud.
Death looms large in these essays. “I finally saw him,” Zweig writes in his essay on Mahler, as “he lay there, pale as one already in the grip of death, inanimate with closed lids.” The pieces on Roth and Freud were written to be read at their funerals. But, above all, there is a growing sense of the death of European culture, the culture he grew up in and adored throughout his life.
The essays also mark the temporary end of Europe’s café-culture. “I would often run into him,” he writes of his friend, Joseph Roth, “scribbling away at his beloved coffee-house table.” As Will Stone writes in his excellent Introduction, Zweig could have written, “at his table in an Austrian coffee house, Amsterdam bar, Ostend hotel terrace or Parisian café.” Some of Zweig’s subjects are less well known today — the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, the artist Frans Masereel and the British writer, John Drinkwater. Others, like Mahler, Proust, Rilke and Freud, are still seen as major figures.
Overshadowing it all is what happened to Zweig himself. The first essays were written during and just after the First World War, when he was one of Europe’s great cultural figures. The last pieces are from 1939, when he was a refugee in London, soon to leave his beloved Europe for New York and then Brazil, where he committed suicide early in 1942. As in Journeys, another book of Zweig’s essays published by Pushkin Press last year, Encounters and Destinies conveys a sense of decline and loss. Both, too, capture a special moment in modern European culture, caught for posterity on the eve of catastrophe.
David Herman is a senior JC reviewer