War and disenchantment in Stefan Zweig

The writer Stefan Zweig, whose death is now 80 years old, knew heaven and hell in the 20th century. Two devastating world wars came to shake Europe with unusual cruelty. It could be said that his life embodied not only his personal disenchantment, but also that of a century that witnessed the fall of all the promises of freedom, progress and harmony.

the golden years

Zweig remembers the world before the First World War wistfully. in his memories yesterday’s world described the happy feeling of security and freedom. On the one hand, the comfort of a world in peace, gentrified and uneventful. On the other hand, the individual freedom to live according to a cosmopolitan lifestyle.

It was the happiness of living in Paris, “the city of eternal youth”, among friends like Auguste Rodin, with whom he learned that the greatness of people always lies in kindness and simplicity, and that the secret of all great art and all great human work is concentration. It was the joy of walking with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke“to find a meaning in things of lesser appearance and contemplate them, it would be said, with enlightened eyes”.

Zweig remembers that time with a half smile: “Before 1914 the Earth belonged to everyone. Everyone went where he wanted and stayed as long as he wanted. There were no permits or authorizations; I am amused by the surprise of young people every time I tell them that before 1914 I traveled to India and America without a passport and that in fact I had never seen one in my life.

The disaster and meaninglessness of war

But the militaristic delusions arrived, the currents of visceral anger and patriotic ardor. And also nationalism, which was for Zweig “the worst of all plagues, which poisons the flower of our European culture”. Warmongering and the virus of hate triggered the dreadful First World War.

And voices were raised bravely against the war…

Between 1915 and 1917, Zweig wrote the play Jeremiaha kind of cassandra in biblical record: you will warn of the coming ruin but no one will believe you! The hate propaganda subdued all clamor for peace and brotherhood.

“Do not listen to those who only seek to flatter your ears with their words! They are laying a trap for you, don’t fall into it! Do not listen to the hypocrites who push you to venture into slippery terrain, do not fall into the nets of those who want to hunt you down like little birds!”

To the collective stupidity, all Jeremías, all defenders of peace, were suspected of being traitors, defeatists and antipatriots. This would happen to Zweig in his native Austria and, in France, to his friend Romain Rollandwho volunteered for the Red Cross and published the pacifist manifesto in 1914 beyond the strife:

“The love of the country does not demand that we hate and kill the pious and faithful souls of the other countries. The love of the country demands that we honor them and try to join them in search of the common good”.

In an open letter to the warmongering poet Gerhart HauptmannRolland wrote: “War is the fruit of the weakness of peoples and their stupidity.” And he criticized leaders, intellectuals and opinion makers, the “cabinet heroes and press slaughterers” who encouraged the war from the petty comfort of the rear.

But Jeremiah remained unheard. And, like Jerusalem, Europe succumbed to the unflappable wrath of destruction:

“War is a cunning and voracious animal that consumes the flesh of the strong and sucks the marrow of the mighty, crushes the cities with its jaws and tramples the country with its hooves. Whoever wakes her up doesn’t put her back to sleep.”

the nazi horror

After the First World War, hell seemed to have been left behind. A devastated Europe suggested the beginning of another world, one in which the bloody mistakes of the past would not be repeated. It was a time of hunger and hardship, of humiliation and scarcity, of speculators and hyperbolic inflation:

“There was no other virtue than being skillful and flexible, having no scruples and jumping on top of the galloping horse instead of letting yourself be stepped on by it”.

And, beneath that seemingly calm surface, the values ​​of life and liberty of the Roaring Twenties that followed the post-war scarcity were celebrated. But “dangerous undercurrents ran through Europe.”

With the rise of totalitarianism, the most miserable resentment and the desire for domination were felt to reappear. And what seemed impossible, the return to the brutality of war, resurfaced as a certainty that no one wanted to believe, despite the tragic experiment that had been the Spanish Civil War.

At a time when Nazi fanaticism spread and unstoppably ignited the most irrational and ruthless hatred in the heart of Europe, it was not easy to maintain a deep faith in the world and Humanity.

the bonfires of burned books at the behest of Third Reich they were commonplace and Zweig’s works were banned in Germany and Austria. In his memoirs, perhaps trying to make sense of so much suffering, he wrote:

“Every shadow is, after all, the daughter of light and only he who has known clarity and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only he has truly lived.”

The inhumanity, injustice, xenophobia, racism, torture and brutality of nazi extermination spread in Europe with the demonic WWII:

“Europe seemed to me condemned to death by its own madness, Europe, our holy country, cradle and parthenon of our Western civilization.”

“Helpless as a fly”, dispossessed, isolated and exiled, Zweig found himself trampled by the Nazi machinery that stigmatized him, by human beings transformed by indifference, heartless automatons like the character Mirko Czentovic that he described in his last written work chess novel:

“He did not do anything that was not explicitly ordered, he never asked anything, he did not play with other boys, nor did he ever occupy himself spontaneously if it was not expressly indicated.”

the bitter goodbye

Stefan Zweig ended his days sunk in a deep and battered disenchantment, as sorry as Jeremiah for a Europe, his spiritual homeland, that was destroying itself.

In exile in Petrópolis, Brazil, Zweig committed suicide with his wife Lotte on February 22, 1942. In one of the suicide notes he wrote:

“I prefer, therefore, to end my life at the appropriate moment, erect, as a man whose cultural work has always been his purest happiness and his personal freedom.”

Anthony Fernandez VicenteProfessor of communication theory, Castilla-La Mancha university

This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.