The third in a series of posts in which we ask writers about the cultural influences on their work.
Travel is my favorite stimulant, and while I was writing “ The Impossible Exile,” a portrait of the Viennese author Stefan Zweig, hunting-and-gathering expeditions to Zweig’s far-flung haunts felt imperative. Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881, but he became one of the most representative Viennese writers largely in absentia—idealizing the city’s cosmopolitanism while doing his best to embody it by making himself at home all across Europe. After the First World War, he set up his primary residence in Salzburg, but for large parts of the following years he was on the move—writing, in hotels, the short stories, essays, and biographies for which he became famous all over the Continent, and, ultimately, in the New World as well. But after Hitler’s ascendance Zweig’s chosen life of perpetual motion became compulsory, his destinations dictated by forces beyond his control and confined to a dwindling number of refuges. Travel—for so long his greatest delight—became torture. Part of the reason Zweig’s books remain so powerful is that he eloquently valorized the kaleidoscopic panorama of human possibilities, and then captured the horror that came from watching so many cultural microclimates being erased from his map of the world. (Leo Carey wrote about Zweig for the magazine, in 2012.)
My book follows the final, zigzag trajectory that took Zweig from Austria to Brazil, and so I focussed my travels on the principal stations of Zweig’s life, before and after exile: Vienna, Salzburg, London, Bath, a café on Fifty-eighth Street that was once the lobby of Zweig’s residential hotel when he stayed in Manhattan, Ossining, Rio, and Petropolis. Naturally, much has changed in each of these places since Zweig’s time. But they retain traits that I could locate on a spectrum from Zweig’s bold-stroke descriptions in letters and essays.
Bath was still the prettiest, and the most claustrophobically prim, of his refuges. Petropolis, the dreamiest and the most lushly evocative. Salzburg, a too flush masterpiece, jovially sinister. Vienna, the most fantastical and psychologically fraying. (On my last visit, I literally walked into a glass wall: the hotel where I was staying had unexpectedly shut a glass door over the entrance to the dining room. I’ll never forget the expressions on the faces of the breakfast crowd as—my nose taking the first smack—blood sprayed across the glass. Everyone looked horrified, and no one moved a muscle, even when I stumbled to the floor. Ah, Vienna …) Zweig’s seasick remarks about Manhattan still apply—it remains the most motion-hungry and physically assaultive of the places in which he took shelter. London can still feel at once utterly cosmopolitan and as closed as a bank after hours: a few years into his exile in England, Zweig wrote to a friend that nowhere in the world made him feel so isolated. Rio still offers a disarmingly extravagant panorama; Zweig likened the city to an open book whose pages you never grew tired of turning.
In the introduction to “The Impossible Exile,” I recount the visit I made to Ramapo Road, in Ossining, the improbable, forlorn spot, a mile uphill from Sing Sing Prison, where, in the summer of 1941, Zweig wrote the first draft of his self-effacing, historically revealing memoir, “The World of Yesterday.” I knocked on the door of the house, and it was answered by an elderly lady who was wearing a baggy red T-shirt stamped with the word “DEVILS.” She did not invite me inside but instead broke into a singsong diatribe about all the reasons it would be pointless to let me see the interior. “I don’t know where this man sat when he was writing his books,” she began. “I don’t know whether he sat upstairs or downstairs or in the porch or in the basement. How can anyone know?” She went on from there, detailing all the things of Zweig’s that she did not possess, beginning with his desk, his pens, and his typewriter. It was a tonic reminder of the limits to any literal reconstruction of the past with which historians and biographers must grapple.
Even when objects touched by our subjects do still exist, these individual talismans only carry us a tiny distance into the welter of vanished circumstances informing past lives. (I’ve held a few score of the more than thirty thousand letters that Zweig composed. The dash and verve of his handwriting in these pages is a perfect counterpoint to the beguiling letterheads from grand hotels, which many of them carry.) But the quarry of my travels is an aura, rather than any one particular icon. And, through dense constellations of relics and sensory perceptions, I think we can sometimes trick the atmosphere of another era back into legibility. If we can’t locate a particular window in a specific house, we can still study the sky.
When I travelled to Zweig’s residences and pastoral retreats, I made only the loosest of itineraries. Wherever I went, I would wander for hours and try to get lost. My hope is always that, by disorienting myself thoroughly in space, I’ll stumble out of time and chance upon something I didn’t know I was looking for. If I really knew what I was seeking, for my purposes it would be dead on arrival. “When we travel, it’s not only for the love of distant lands,” Zweig once wrote. “We are drawn by the desire no longer to be at home and therefore no longer to be ourselves.” I need to be surprised out of myself in order to slip out of the present and to identify as fully as possible with other lives. Often, while I’m walking I’m scribbling notes that later even I can barely decipher: impressions of atmosphere, smells, sights, sounds, snatches of conversation. I’m snapping pictures, scavenging for little bits and pieces—pebbles, prints, leaves that I’ll stick between the pages of a book, flea-market fragments. I’m looking for shards of a broken past that I can assemble, back home, into a mosaic of words.
My desk becomes a repository of relics and plunder from these expeditions. Right now, old editions of Zweig’s books frame a miniature portrait of a young Austrian in his military dress uniform, whose high crest of hair reminds me of the boy in the photograph on the cover of W. G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz,” and whose bright expression of ambitious hopefulness resonated with my mental image of Hofmiller, the protagonist of Zweig’s one completed novel, “Beware of Pity,” about the snowballing disaster of a young cavalry officer’s efforts to atone for an unintentional insult to a disabled heiress. I bought the picture at a Vienna flea market, where I also purchased a little brown album filled with black-and-white photos of a sporting event involving elated young Nazis. The object caught my eye in part because of a passage in Zweig’s memoir in which he remarks that, when it comes to all competitions in sport, “I have always been of the same opinion as the Shah of Persia who, when urged to attend the Derby, replied with Oriental wisdom: ‘Why? I know that one horse can run faster than another. It makes no difference to me which one it is.’ ” (Zweig wasn’t just being snarky about physical contests: Nazism made sports into the cornerstone of all education, and made athletic victory coequal with military heroism. Goebbels stuffed his speeches with metaphors from boxing matches, football, and racing.)
On my desk there is also a sprig of dry violets that I plucked in the Wienerwald, the swirling, wooded hills on Vienna’s western edge. They evoke, for me, along with the centrality of that romantic setting to so much Viennese literature, Zweig’s penchant for writing with purple ink. Postcards from Petropolis lie next to a copy of Reader’s Digest from 1941, which contains an essay by Zweig, titled “Profit from My Experience.” It’s an unruly array, but when I look at these objects and touch their surfaces they play off each other, conjuring some spectral glow of Zweig’s time.
In Vienna, my ramblings took on an illicit aspect. My father’s family had been dispossessed of their entire existence in that city, and so I felt a certain calling to loot back the past there. Trespassing was a matter of honor: I snuck by muscular caryatids into palaces and, through side doors that were clearly off limits to the public, into bitter, old gray buildings of the official state bureaucracy. I wandered into the courtyards of fancy apartment blocks in the Inner Ring, and slipped under fences around the Prater. I darted up cordoned-off stairways in places like the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where Hitler’s application to study art had been rejected. Ignoring a guard’s startlingly loud orders to stop, I snapped pictures of Bosch’s “The Last Judgment,” which hangs in a gallery on an upper floor there, a painting that Hitler may have spent time contemplating in the years before he began creating his own representation of hell.
In these forays into places where I did not belong, I felt perhaps a faint hint of what my father and my grandparents—as well as Zweig’s mother, Ida Brettauer—had experienced after the Anschluss, as the whole city gradually became forbidden to them. My father remembers when the parks first closed to Jewish children. Cinemas and most restaurants were also proscribed. In one of the most moving passages in “The World of Yesterday” Zweig marvels at the monstrosity of the law that forbade Jews from sitting on public benches—it effectively prevented his mother from walking anywhere, since she was infirm and needed to be able to pause and rest during her constitutionals. The freedom to travel became more and more circumscribed for Jews in that city until, finally, all movement was criminal.
But, when I finally snuck into my father’s old apartment building and began climbing the stairs, I found my plunderer’s scheme turning against me. The longer I stayed in that building, the more vividly and uncontrollably I felt myself falling prey to the scene of his family’s escape from that place, after they learned that they were about to be arrested and had to creep away, into hiding. I hadn’t expected to be overwhelmed. I knew that this was just an old, slightly run-down residential building, yellow-walled and dull, cobwebbed, and filled with people caught in their own nets of history. Yet absence, too, can work on our imaginations, like a charged artifact.
And the hole into which my father’s childhood world had vanished here was so vast that the present, too, seemed to be sucked into that vacuum. I did not feel that I’d conjured the past into my field of vision but, rather, that I myself was disappearing. This was the moment in which I found as good an explanation as any for the end of Zweig’s story. Some kinds of loss are too great to be absorbed. When we encounter them, they stop us dead in our tracks, leaving us full of nothing but mourning. In my own journey through Stefan Zweig’s worlds of yesterday, this was the moment when his exile came home to me.
George Prochnik is a New York-based writer and editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine. The Impossible Exile comes out on May 6th.
Above, from top: The view from Zweig’s balcony in Petropolis; three postcards from Zweig; a portrait of a young Austrian boy in uniform; a stairway fresco at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art. All photographs by George Prochnik.
