By George Prochnik
Granta,£20
Among German-language authors of the early 20th century, Stefan Zweig is being repositioned near the top. Some contemporaries considered him "among the first rank of the second rate", to use Somerset Maugham's self-deprecation, and in the moments of depression that darkened his later years, Zweig may have seen truth as well as envy in such a tag.
He was lucky, however, to have huge numbers of admirers, a public which bought his books in the hundreds of thousands, fellow exiles and humanists who shared his ideal of a finer pan-Europe and, above all, an adoring young second wife, who followed him in his restless search for a final resting-place and joined him in suicide there.
Zweig was a child of privilege in fin-de-siècle Vienna and one of its most famous sons by the 1920s. Writer of novellas, plays, libretti, biographies, mini-histories and a memoir, he worked indefatigably, travelled peripatetically, loved with shallow promiscuity and, by the mid-1930s, was in full flight from the mad expressionism of National Socialism, with which his overwrought style and dangerous enthusiasms had aspects in common.
Hitler and Zweig were compatriot contemporaries. Goebbels and Rosenberg read Zweig's books. Suicide with younger wives would happen in the Berlin bunker, too. Victim and victimiser emerged from contiguous milieux.
George Prochnik does not flinch from such ironies in his deft, unusual approach to the problem of Zweig. And Zweig is problematic - a writer in whom the disease of the age was ever apparent, not least in his end. Where, in a world beset by furies, could an individual of devout European culture turn? London took him, for a time; he retreated to Bath; but eventually found English sang-froid insipid.
New York also took him for a time; he retreated to a quaint hamlet on a bluff overlooking Sing-Sing.
America enjoyed bounty while Europe convulsed in war and its citizens starved. Zweig, rich from both inheritance and book sales, was beleaguered by indigent fellow-refugees wishing introductions, begging cash.
On top of it all, where in the US could one find a proper café, that institution so central to Viennese cultured life?
If the detail sounds banal, it is crucial to the tale Prochnik tells. For it is not just Zweig in exile whose plight he analyses but the condition of flight from Hitler's Europe altogether, especially for Jews who, in a few generations, had gained and now were losing the splendeurs et misères of high civilisation. Where to go, what language to write in, who to be?
One may have found shelter in the US but what then? The world they knew had vanished. They wandered hither and thither, haunted, bickering with one another, hating while being obliged to love where they'd come. Zweig's solution? To penetrate further into a new world, land of the future - Brazil.
Nature in the hills overlooking Rio was gorgeous, the coffee to die for. And that was it. Utter deracination. At 60, the man was played out. A worse tragedy, whose promptings can never quite be known, is that his young wife should, like some Brünnhilde of myth, have cast herself into personal Götterdämmerung with him.
The finale has caused speculation. Laurent Seksik published a novel about it in French in 2010, available in English from Pushkin Press and as graphic text from Salammbo (The Last Days of Stefan Zweig by Laurent Seksik and Guillaume Sorel, £13.99).
In this form, the tale is accessible for those who are unlikely to read Zweig's massive oeuvre or more challenging work proliferating about him. Whatever the dominant motive for his dramatic end, the novel musters its probable elements: his exhaustion, his wife's asthma, melancholy of exile, horrors engulfing those left behind, a killing nostalgia, temperamental allergy to the new, bourgeois mittel-European fragility. This truly was no country for old men. Suicide is a pathetic response, however, and surely no country either for a loving young wife.
On the basis of the evidence, it is hard not to construe that the great writer was, at his exit, neither a worthy exemplar nor a responsible husband.
