Zweig and Strauss: caught in the headlights!
Just up the Rhine valley from Bregenz is the quiet, charming little town of Hohenems, huddled against the steep cliffs of the Arlberg Mountains. It has its Schloss, its Graf (Count), its churches, its concerts within the magnificent Schubertiade Festival and, rather surprisingly, it had, once upon a time, its Jewish Quarter with its Synagogue, its school, its poor-house, now commemorated by a very active museum lead by its tousled headed curator, Hanno Loewy. He and I became good friends after we were fortuitously embroiled in a political incident. Across the border in Switzerland, there is a virulent right wing political party which has produced some inflammatory publicity over the years, including an infamous poster which showed veiled women with guns and minarets transforming into rockets. One year our local Vorarlberg right-wingers – the equivalent of Ukip I suppose, but with a share in the ruling conservative-lead local coalition, decided to take a leaf out of the Swiss book, and produced some very offensive posters basically urging foreigners – i.e. Turks in this instance – to go home. Quite by chance, Hanno and I both had press conferences on entirely different topics on the same day, and we both commented on these offensive posters, saying this was not the way to welcome foreigners to an International Festival, I was myself a foreigner etc. The leader of the party rather over-reacted with an offensive speech in which he instructed “the exile Jew” (because he had spent time in America) and “der Brite” (me!) to shut up and stay out of Austrian politics. He was promptly thrown out of the coalition: by chance I had performed the only useful political act of my life!
Every year Hohenems organises a Festival, the Emsiana, to celebrate the one-time Jewish quarter, and this year I have to deliver the opening speech, touching on the brilliant author Stefan Zweig whose mother’s family came from this community.
Stefan Zweig was not only an urban intellectual, but an urbane man – a man of the city, a man of subtlety, sophistication and study, whose pointedly analytical stories of obsession are closely akin to Freud’s early case studies in their literary and inventive quality, as well as their psychological perception. Nonetheless, part of his roots lay here in Hohenems, in Vorarlberg, which may seem today the close cousin of urban sophistication, but was surely not in the late 19th century. One of the things that most certainly separated the Jewish community in Hohenems from the Christian communities that surrounded it was that fact that for so many in the Jewish community Hohenems was merely the springboard from which they ventured out across Europe and beyond, tapping into that astonishing network which sustains the international Jewish community, and is often observed by others with rancour and outright jealousy, - a jealousy that has been a virulent source of prejudice and conspiracy theory. As Zweig described, his ancestors set out “…from this little town on the Swiss border and were from earliest times spread out across the world. One went to St. Gallen, others to Vienna and Paris, my Grandfather to Italy, my uncle to New York, and these international connections gave them a better polish.” If there is such a thing as genetic memory, Stefan Zweig should have been well prepared for exile: he wasn’t.
He was in fact a delicate man, perhaps even pampered. He described himself as coming from a wealthy family which set great store by its elevated status, and in true haute bourgeois style examined anyone who purported to be a friend of Stefan’s to see if they would pass muster. Their status of bourgeois exclusivity was as important to them as to any other non-Jewish middle class family in Paris, Vienna or Berlin: “This kind of assumed “nobility” amongst Jewish families both amused and irritated me and my brother. We constantly heard that these people were “suitable” and these people were “unsuitable”. This endless classification seemed to us ridiculous and snobbish, because with all Jewish families it boiled down to the fact that 50 or 100 years before we had all come out of the same ghetto.”
By the time Zweig wrote this, he knew that he could no longer afford to be so detached and ironic about his Jewish heritage, but then it is a bitter irony that it was anti-Semitism that forced many Jews into an unwonted focus on their origins. Jean Améry, the “Philosopher of Auschwitz”, was exasperated by this classification:
“If being Jewish means sharing religious convictions with other Jews, or cultivating a Jewish National ideal, then I am a hopeless case. I don’t believe in the God of Israel. I know very little about Jewish culture. I see myself as a boy stomping through the snow at Christmas to midnight Mass; I hear my mother exclaiming “Jesus Mary and Joseph!” over little domestic accidents, rather than any Hebrew oaths to God. The image of my father, who I hardly knew, as he remained where the Kaiser had sent him to defend his country, did not conjure up a bearded Jewish sage, but a Tirolean Kaiserjäger in his WW1 uniform.
I really have nothing as a Jew in common with the Jews: neither language, nor cultural tradition, nor childhood memories. In Austrian Vorarlberg there was a landlord and a butcher who people told me could speak fluent Hebrew. He was my great grandfather, and it must be nearly 100 years since his death. My interest in Jews and Jewishness was, until the catastrophe, so slight that amongst my acquaintances of that time I could hardly say who was Jewish and who not. “
Both men shared this relaxed, even disdainful acknowledgement of their origins, which perhaps explains the innocence of Zweig’s initial engagement with Richard Strauss. When Strauss’s long term, ideal collaborator Hugo von Hoffmansthal died before the premiere of their last collaboration, Arabella, Strauss thought his opera writing career was over. He would never find another librettist. On the other hand, he had to find another librettist because, as he later wrote to Zweig, he knew that he was no longer in the first flush of youth as a composer. He could no longer create dazzling orchestral works like Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben. He needed the input, the distraction, the inspiration of a theatrical subject – or so he put it to Zweig in his rather bluff, jolly-Bavarian frankly-not-very-credible way.
Strauss seemingly liked marriages of opposites. He was famous for his sparring relationship with his wife, who he nonetheless adored. He was the ebullient, vulgar, skat playing counterpart to Hoffmansthal’s etiolated aestheticism. So it was a canny move of the Insel Verlag publisher Anton Kippenberg to put him in touch with another almost pathologically modest and retiring writer, Stefan Zweig. The two met for the first time in 1931, and once Zweig had managed to persuade Strauss out of his idea that what he needed was a raunchy intrigue with a grande dame heroin as a spy or a confidence trickster – one rather regrets the absence of Strauss’s Mata Hari opera – he convinced him that their ideal project was an adaptation of Ben Johnson’s comedy “Die Schweigsame Frau.” (The Silent Woman) Meanwhile, there was a slight delay as both men had other things to finish off, and here you can see that both were in cloud cuckoo land, their heads so far up in the clouds that the crevasse opening up at their feet was invisible.
Zweig was toying with the very last stitch on the very last brocade gilet of his heroine, Marie Antoinette, revelling in the gently erotic downfall of a great Austrian aristocrat, happily transporting himself back into the cocoon of a Hapsburgian past. Not to be outdone, Strauss was busy orchestrating Arabella, one of the slenderest operas about debutante delight, a nostalgic reverie for the lost world of Viennese balls and horse-drawn carriages. When both men came out of this rosy mist, and started work on Johnson’s domestic comedy, they looked up and noticed with some dismay that Hitler had seized power. Strauss was almost oblivious, lost in the delight of composing: “None of my earlier operas was so easy to compose or gave me such light-hearted pleasure.”
Zweig was, to be fair, more realistic and fully expected Strauss to break off work, knowing that a performance would be unthinkable. But Strauss stuck firm, reassuring Zweig in a stream of letters that there would be no problem. At the same time as maintaining this quasi heroic posture, Strauss fell closer and closer into outright collaboration with the Nazis, perhaps imagining this would buy him the ability to defend Zweig, amongst others. However, I doubt that he ever thought as strategically as that. He wanted to defend Bayreuth, so agreed to stand in for Toscanini who had resigned in protest. He wanted to help out the Berlin Philharmonic, so stood in for Bruno Walter, ditto. Placing himself thus inevitably in Goebbels’ net, he then discovered that he had been nominated as President of the Reichsmusikkammer, answerable to Goebbels himself. Zweig appreciated Strauss’s efforts on his behalf as a librettist, but observed his manoeuvres with the Nazi government with his usual laconic objectivity:
“I must admit that at the same time as supporting me, he indulged in activities that were to my eyes less sympathetic – coming ever closer to the powers that be, more and more frequently in direct contact with Hitler, Goebbels and Göring, and even at a time when Furtwängler had publicly refused the position, allowing himself to be nominated as President of the Nazi Reichsmusikkammer. This public participation was extremely important to the National Socialists at that moment. Unfortunately for them, all the most important authors and musicians had openly repudiated them, and the few who did support them were unknown outside a very small circle. At such a potentially embarrassing moment to have the most famous German musician publicly on their side was an invaluable asset for Goebbels and Hitler, in purely decorative terms. “
Strauss of course knew exactly what sort of music should be encouraged by an enlightened government, and having been given this post, albeit by an un-enlightened government, immediately set about warning local band leaders to play less Léhar (because Strauss considered him a bad composer!), and, if you please, warning theatres like the Hamburg Staatsoper who played “6 operas by Verdi and Puccini in one week” to play more German music. With an unwitting eye for historical irony, he promoted a Festival of non-atonal music in Vichy, thus pre-ordaining the ultimate shrine of collaborators.
The fate of Die Schweigsame Frau is, like the opera itself, of no real interest, except that Strauss’s continuing naiveté ensured that it was surrounded by scandal. Two days before the premiere, he was in the middle of a game of skat when he suddenly asked to see the poster. He discovered that Zweig’s name was omitted. He insisted that it be re-instated. Hitler and Goebbels cancelled their tickets at once. Zweig also wrote to Strauss, withdrawing from future collaboration. Strauss’s reply was explosive, ultimately not so much on grounds of the injustice being meted out to Zweig but, one has to say, more with the sense of outrage at the inordinate inconvenience Strauss was being subjected to. After all, they had at least two more operas on the stocks. Among other indiscretions, Strauss wrote:
“Do you believe that I have ever in any matter allowed myself to be guided by the fact that I am German? Do you believe that Mozart consciously wrote “Aryan music”? …for me the people (Das Volk) exists only in the moment that it becomes an audience. Whether it is made up of Chinese, Upper-Bavarians, New Zealanders or Berliners is all the same to me, so long as the people have paid the full price at the box office…”
Of course it had never occurred to him in his Garmisch ivory tower that the Gestapo was monitoring his mail, even though the letter was addressed to Zweig in England. When an official appeared at his door requiring his resignation as President of the Reichmusikkammer he was pointedly carrying a copy of the offending letter marked with the stamps of several Government offices in Berlin.
Zweig in his usual tolerant and polite way sought to understand Strauss’s motives for getting so close to the fire:
“Strauss’s participation was more deliberate. To his artist’s egoism, which he freely and insouciantly confessed to, every regime was the same. He had served the German Kaiser as Kapellmeister and orchestrated military marches for him, then the Austrian Kaiser as Hofkapellmeister in Vienna and he was equally persona gratissima with the subsequent German and Austrian republics. He also had a pressing reason to get close to the National Socialists because he had, in National Socialist terms, significant blots on his record. His son had married a Jewess, and he was anxious lest his grandson, who he adored above all else, would be barred from university. His new opera was tarnished by me, his earlier operas by the impurity of Hoffmansthal’s Aryan roots, and his publisher was Jewish. All the more important it seemed to him then to protect his back, and he moved quickly to achieve this. He conducted wherever the new authorities wished him to, he composed an Olympic Hymn for them, and simultaneously told me in his astoundingly reckless letters what little pleasure he got out of all these activities. In reality, his artistic ego was only interested in one thing: to keep his works alive and in performance, and above all to ensure the premiere of his new opera which was very close to his heart. “
Of course Zweig himself also had the option to withdraw his collaboration on Die Schweigsame Frau, but perhaps taking his cue from the title of the work, he demurred with characteristic reticence to place himself in the front line:
“My friends pressured me from all sides to protest publicly against a performance in National Socialist Germany. But firstly, I shy away on principal from such public and sentimental gestures, and secondly it is very much against my inclination to make difficulties for a genius of Richard Strauss’s calibre. Strauss was after all the greatest living composer and 70 years old, he had committed three years to this work, and during this whole time showed towards me the most friendly attitude, correctness and even courage. That is why I chose to remain silent on the side-lines and observe the outcome of events.”
The outcome was that within two years Zweig was obliged, like so many of his forbears, to pack his bags, in stark contrast to his statement in 1933: “I have the strongest possible disinclination to be an émigré, and would only do so under conditions of the direst necessity.”
He was cushioned materially by his immense success as an author, and he used this with great generosity to help his fellow émigrés, but he was unmanned in a certain sense by his retiring and depressive character. He went to London where he took up a regular acquaintance with Freud, though I don’t know if Freud ever actually analysed him. Freud must have noticed the similarity between Zweig’s methods as a novelist and his own as an analyst – especially as several of Zweig’s books use the device of a narrator who has heard the story from someone else, almost as if Zweig with his reticence and his decency wanted to avoid responsibility for having imagined the story in the first place. Even in England, Zweig remained resolutely un-political, preferring to convey his political messages obliquely by focussing on intellectually independent minded men of the past like Erasmus. When war broke out he sought to distance himself from the conflict by emigrating to America.
However, he went further. Following up an earlier literary tour which had been a huge success, he decided to live in Brazil, and after a reconnaissance trip, wrote an eulogy on that country: “Brazil – the land of the future.” With all that had happened to him, you might have thought that he would have been alert to the fact that the dictator in power in Brazil was himself no angel. It did not seem to occur to Zweig that he had handed a regime which was itself close to Nazi ideas – the “Estado Novo” of Getulio Vargas – with a perfect propaganda coup. Zweig became, like Strass before him, the naïve and unwitting tool of a Machiavellian political game.
Perhaps realising that paradise had also betrayed him, Zweig together with his young wife Lotte committed suicide, lying on a bed clasping their hands. Their suicide note acknowledged his “final duty” to thank the land of Brazil, his home now that “the world of my language has gone under and Europe, my spiritual home, destroyed itself” and ended: “Either the storm must end, or one must end oneself.”
The double suicide was a tragic personal end, for sure, but even here Zweig failed to take into account its devastating political effect. Surely his “last duty” was not to the land of Brazil, but to the deeply distressed German émigré community for whom he was still a beacon of lost civilisation. His personal expression of despair was a devastating blow to the morale of the many, including Thomas Mann, who were anxiously looking for signs of Nazi weakness, and needed to sense the sustaining moral strength of the émigré community.
He had been a man who lived on the edge, looking in, and had known the deepest distaste for barbarity and injustice, but perhaps insufficient anger to give him the motive to survive. Jean Améry however in the post war years continues to write of his “ressentiments” against the now apparently clean and forgiven Germany, comfortably rebuilding its invincible prosperity. Yet he too knew that anger is a double edged sword: “Anger keeps you young. But if it is accompanied by the sensation of utter helplessness, it leads to a pain which is not the kind of pain you “work through” in the Psychoanalytic sense, but resignation. And resignation makes you old, without a doubt.”
In the same year that Zweig died, 1942, when a million men died at Stalingrad, when the 19 year-old Zofia Posmych (the author of The Passenger)was arrested on the streets of Cracow and sent to Auschwitz, when Hans and Sophoie Scholl began to write the anti-Nazi leaflets that would lead them to the guillotine, Strauss gave Zweig another little injection of everlasting life by creating an elegant and delicate little conversation piece, a rococo gem on the relationship between words and music which was one of the projects Zweig had originally suggested: Cappriccio. His head still metaphorically in the clouds, Strauss survived into his late 80s, and suffered too the deprivations of war, though in a relative way of course.
When, just after the war, he tried to go to Switzerland to take a cure with Pauline, they were stopped by the occupying French army just beyond Bregenz at the St. Margarethen border, missing one vital document. Having no-where to stay, they were conveniently put up by Prince Friedrich of Saxony at his Schloss, who next day accompanied them to see the impeccably aristocratic French officer (in charge of the largely Senegalese troops – in Vorarlberg!) - M. le Comte d’Audibert, to whom he presented an autographed score of the Alpine Symphony for the Bibliothéque Nationale which had been presciently stored with the Hämmerle family in Dornbirn. That did the trick. Soon the Strausses were in their customary first class carriage. Améry’s “ressentiments” are all too easy to understand.
