Photo: Pushkin Press
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   ​In the final chapter of his memoir, The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig writes: 
 
In my cosmopolitan reveries, I had often secretly thought what a fine thing it would be […] to be stateless, owing no obligation to any country and for that very reason belonging to them all without distinction. (1942/2011, p. 435)
 
This passage dexterously summarises the paradoxical nature of Zweig’s internationalist fantasies, articulating both his aspirations to live simultaneously within and without society and his eventual recognition that realisation of this dream is an impossibility. His words here – translated from German to English by Anthea Bell – also demonstrate his tendency to elegise, romanticise, and exclude others from his narrative, leaning as it does towards a specific bourgeois experience of a universal crisis. Few, after all, can ever afford to think of statelessness as a perk.
 
   Zweig began writing his memoir in 1934, between world wars. Reading The World of Yesterday today, in the midst of a pandemic that has exposed long-existing social inequalities, it is interesting to notice the similarities between Zweig’s misty-eyed portrayal of imperial Europe and our own wistful evocations of the “old normal”; between Zweig’s bourgeois realisations of a life beyond his own class, and our relatively new awareness of how much better a time we’ve been having. By their perceived universality, catastrophes seem to make us more sentient human beings, more aware of the suffering of others – it’s a kind of postlapsarian humanisation, once we’ve been subjected to what Zadie Smith (2020) has called a ‘global humbling’ (p. 38). As Elvia Wilk (2020) says in her essay on Zweig’s brand of cosmopolitanism: ‘it is only when those who take their security for granted are suddenly made vulnerable, precarious, that they slam up against the violence of the systems they have been benefiting from all along’.
 
   Zweig’s autobiography provides a charming, though specified, view of life in Europe before and between two World Wars. It’s significant to note this temporal liminality: the in-between is a space Zweig is fond of occupying. He’s simultaneously the archetypal Viennese flaneur and a hopeless misfit; a citizen of the world and an international exile; not an activist, yet never truly passive. In one aspect of life, however, he remained resolute: ‘if Zweig was not a consistent pacifist,’ remarks Georg Iggers (1981, p. 2), ‘he was consistent in his cosmopolitanism’. The World of Yesterday is about mourning a loss, but it is also intimately preoccupied with pleasure and joy. Even as he laments the demise of his familiar world, Zweig cannot help but find delight and moments of beauty within the ravages of war-torn Europe. His universe is an epicurean’s elegy, submerged in deeply ingrained cultural and aesthetic appreciation, that even two seismic global tragedies cannot extinguish. Reading his memoir today, one begins to see its renewed relevance in the midst of a pandemic that has shed light on long-existing systems of insecurity, to see in Zweig’s short-sightedness a mirror of our own delusions. It reminds us of how those systems inevitably buckle under pressure, and how the fantasy of cosmopolitanism continues to enthral; a precarious way of life that persists in being shattered, then rebuilt.

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Nostalgic for Empire

   Zweig’s memoir is imbued with nostalgia for imperial Vienna, an idealised home to which he is unable to return not because it no longer exists, but because he is no longer the same person who once inhabited it. It’s interesting to note how Zweig’s conceptualisation of Vienna as the pinnacle of the early twentieth century – his rhapsodies about the growing internationalism, sexual freedom, and a collective European identity of 1910 – coincides with his own intellectual and physical prime. He was twenty-nine years old at the time, a wildly successful writer on his way to becoming the most translated author in the world (Moser, 2014). In The World of Yesterday, the rise and fall of the Europe Zweig loves follows the trajectory of his own life. His boyhood in the then-thriving Empire is wreathed in childish nostalgia. Many contemporary scholars have attempted to uncover just what it was about fin-de-siècle Vienna that made it so susceptible to romanticisation. The monarchy’s propagation of this ubiquitous myth of ‘elusive stability’ (Schlipphacke 2014, p. 2) and ‘decadent beauty’ (p. 14) is often cited as the main culprit. Vienna’s cultural prowess in the late 1890s also certainly had a part to play: Zweig waxes lyrical about the artistic achievements of this time as if he is writing ‘for the Austrian Tourist Office’, as Steven Beller (1996, p. 38) has noted humorously.
 
   ​As a product of this time, shaped by the pre-emptive, self-elegising nostalgia (cf. Beller 1996, p. 41) that characterised Habsburg reign, it is unsurprising that Zweig’s concerns and losses were so bourgeois. He was merely transcribing his situation as he personally experienced it. Still, the subjective nature of memory doesn’t justify his troubling exclusions in The World of Yesterday. Zweig’s romanticisation of empire glosses over what life was like for those who did not benefit from the structures that worked in his favour. His liberalism was contingent the post-1860 monarchy, where a ‘paternalistic, well-intentioned government’ created a society in which the individual could ‘indulge in the luxury of not caring about politics’ (Iggers, 1981, p. 3).
 
   Although Austria–Hungary at the turn of the century was a flawed civilisation, suffering from strong traces of governmental anti-Semitism (Beller, 1996, p. 39) and chronic political turbulence, it wasn’t difficult for Zweig and those of his milieu to overlook these issues and buy into the Habsburg myth. ‘If antisemitism was prevalent in the city,’ Beller (1996) notes, ‘it was not so extreme that normal life was impossible’. In other words, if a Jewish family was established enough, they ‘could choose to ignore’ (p. 39) these traces of discrimination, as Zweig’s family was certainly able to afford. ‘Wealth comfortably draught-proofed your windows and walls in those times’, he himself recounts in the book (p. 27).
 
   ​While Zweig explicitly acknowledges these privileges, he takes care to defend their bases and to highlight their vulnerability. His family’s way of life was ‘typical of the Jewish middle classes that had made significant contributions to Viennese culture, only to be exterminated root and branch by way of thanks’ (p. 27). This paradigm seems oddly ensconced in the notion of a ‘narrative of gratitude’, as Tiara Sahar Ataii puts it – of feeling the need, that is, to justify what should be inalienable rights to life and human respect (Goodyear, 2020).
 
   Zweig uses the cultural contributions of his Jewish milieu not only as justification for receiving wealth and privilege in return, but also – far more disturbingly – as elegiac evidence of the criminality of the Holocaust, as if outrage at genocide needed any further justification. Zweig comes across as self-consciously defensive as he writes: ‘in that era of security, ten or twenty thousand Viennese families lived just as my parents did’ (p. 43), but he fails to mention the more financially vulnerable Jews who existed outside this exclusive circle. His portrayal of Vienna as an egalitarian cultural hub, where all were equal and equally appreciative of the culture, feels at times remarkably ignorant, eliciting problematic forms of exclusion which are quite contrary to his genuine intentions. 

Photo: The New Yorker

​Between the Wars

   In the light of the Great War and with the encroachment of the second, Zweig’s aestheticism underwent a subtle shift. While his veneration for high culture prevails, there’s a new humility underpinning his pleasure in the arts to be read in the latter half of his memoir. He describes going to the opera ‘in those days of our greatest need’ as an endeavour that entailed groping one’s way ‘through dimly lit streets’, paying for a seat ‘with a bundle of banknotes that would once have allowed you to hire a luxurious box’, and having to sit ‘pressed close to [one’s] neighbours for warmth’ because the auditorium was unheated (p. 319).
 
   There is, of course, an epicurean tint to the degradation Zweig describes – this is still, after all, a bourgeois representation of dire straits – but the sentiment is more humane than his previous descriptions of Viennese theatre. Art is no longer represented as a ‘duty incumbent on everyone in the city’ (p. 43); instead, it’s a vehicle of respite in times of duress, a ‘unifying power’ (p. 224) between citizens who have collectively borne witness to mass destruction. ‘Everything seemed doubly desperate in this scene of former luxury and imperial extravagance,’ Zweig remarks (p. 320). The Burgtheater stage is transformed from the ‘bright mirror in which society could study itself’ into a miniature performance of a now unattainable idyll. And, for the first time, Zweig, ‘the quintessential insider’ (Herman, 2012, p. 224), is outside with everyone else, straining to peek in from the hyperinflated cheap seats.
 
   From being ‘so enclosed within the world of art that he was simply oblivious to what was going on outside’ (Beller, 1996, p. 40), Zweig’s perspective opens onto more global concerns as the memoir progresses. He begins to chart his interactions not just with other intellectuals of his set, but with people from varied walks of life. In Tarnów, he describes the bittersweet comradeship between the Tyrolean reservists and Russian war prisoners with newfound respect: ‘I had an irresistible feeling that these simple, even primitive men saw the war in a much clearer light than our university professors and writers,’ he records, where ‘anyone else who was the victim of such bad luck was a kind of brother’ (p. 271). Although still elitist in tone, this statement indicates a vast departure from his condescending pre-war attitude towards to the non-bourgeois Other: earlier in the memoir, Zweig observes the peripheries of society from a distance, horrified and fascinated by these strata, to which he acknowledges he has absolutely no relation.
 
   After the emergence of war, Zweig is no longer the rootless cosmopolitan allowed to ‘represent while escaping representation’ (Haraway, 1990, p. 188), but one member of the crowd, present in the tableau. The security of his pre-war existence dawns upon him only in retrospect as he sets out for unfamiliar terrain after the onset of WWI, wending his way through Eastern Europe, the United States, and eventually, Brazil. Zweig’s description of arriving in Budapest via hospital train in 1914 is poignant: ‘With the smell of iodoform from the transport of wounded soldiers’ on his clothes, he sees officers buying bunches of violets for women in dresses, just ‘eight or nine hours by express train from the front line’ (p. 273). Instead of anger, he is seized by sympathy for these anonymous Hungarians:
 
Wasn’t it the most natural thing in the world for them to be alive and trying to enjoy their lives? Wasn’t it natural for them to seize on everything that they still could, a few nice clothes, the last happy hours, perhaps out of the very feeling that all this was under threat?
 
   In these slender interactions, Zweig sees something that resonates with his own sensibilities. Not the cosmopolitan’s elitist regard for high art, but a humbler, more profound understanding of pleasure: a gentle appreciation of the ways in which people choose to carry on under trying circumstances, which is perhaps one of the most affecting examples of Zweig’s shift in perspective between the wars. This is epicureanism as a way of being in the world, an enjoyment that isn’t restricted to an ‘alligator shoe wearer, dandy, depressive, café enthusiast’ (Prochnik, 2014, p. 5), but epicureanism that’s accessible to a universal crowd. It is only after undergoing unspeakable change that the simple actions will stand out to one with such lucidity, from noticing the exchange of violets between human hands, to understanding ‘how the prospect of a morning spent promenading by the shining river’ (p. 273) can be reasons for delight and gratitude.
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Reading Zweig Today

    Many of Zweig’s 21st-century readers encounter his work in translation, the most cosmopolitan form of literary circulation. He describes his reaction after stumbling upon an English translation of one of his books in Philadelphia: ‘something of my Self, the Self now drifting unknown and apparently aimlessly through strange streets, had been here before me’. The realisation brings him a sense of connection to his surroundings that ‘for a moment’ alleviates his ‘sense of isolation’ (1942/2011, p. 212), reaffirming his status as a citizen of the world. 

    Most critics write of Anthea Bell’s translations of Zweig’s works in invigorating terms: they ‘rehabilitate’ (Armitstead, 2013) and ‘restore’ (Barber, 2018); they bring his oeuvre to ‘renewed attention’ (Marshall, 2018). Bell herself publicly acknowledged the importance of translation as a means of bridging literary continents: ‘it is incontrovertible that if we are to have international literature, we need translation’ (Bell, 2015). To be cosmopolitan, then, even in the realm of literary circulation, is always to subject oneself to some sort of precarity, to open oneself to the possibility of loss. Zweig recalls an encounter with a Russian author lamenting the banning of his books in his home country. With the threat of Hitler’s ban on literature, he writes that he could now empathise with his fellow writer’s ‘grief that his words could now appear only in translation—in a changed and diluted medium’ (1942/2011, p. 435), as his own were about to disappear from the German language.

    Nevertheless, there is an ‘exclusionary politics’ (Wilk, 2020) to this instance of empathy. While indifferent to the geopolitical inequalities when he is in a position of privilege, in crisis, Zweig tries to universalise an experience of war from an elite perspective, reconfiguring First World War problems as ultimately First World problems. ‘Zweig erases these differences and subsumes them in a we united under idealism,’ Wilk writes, ‘a we whose only rift was the temperamental predilection toward either optimism or pessimism in regard to current events’.

    Yet, reading Zweig today, in the midst of a pandemic that continues to uproot our once perceived ‘stability’ and naïve concept of global security, it becomes difficult to deny that we are guilty of those same delusions. For Zweig, global warfare was the cataclysm that exposed these previously invisible attachments to tenuous others; for his readers today, this violent upheaval comes in the form of a pandemic. Although vulnerability to both upheavals is ‘dependent on wealth, race and other forms of privilege’ (Wilk, 2020), the crises are similar in that no one is inherently immune to their effects: to acknowledge the threat of extermination or contagion is simultaneously ‘to acknowledge, however subliminally, a level of shared vulnerability’ (Wilk, 2020). A virus perhaps throws this into sharper relief than warfare – ‘everyone is interconnected on a cellular level’, Wilk notes – but to some extent in both cases, ‘elites are able to opt out’. It’s only when they’re no longer able to do so that they become cognisant of humanity’s shared plight.

    In 1919, Zweig ascertained that he was not ‘needed in Austria during the war’ (1942/2011, p. 306), and accordingly left the country.  He returned home to share ‘in the general suffering’ (p. 306) only once the conflict had officially concluded. Decades later, when the coronavirus was first declared an international emergency, the panicked swarms of city-dwellers leaving to live with their families in more remote homes would recall Zweig’s choice to leave Austria at the moment of crisis. When he laments the cropping up of borders around the world after 1914, he fails to acknowledge that for many, the ‘tangled fence of red tape’ had always existed: what had been for him merely ‘symbolic lines on a map’ (p. 436) had always been insurmountable obstacles to many less affluent others. Zweig spent the ‘three worst post-war years in Austria’ (p. 436) but as soon as he was able to, he hurried out into the world again. It’s easy to draw parallels with the MacBook-toting ‘digital nomads’ (Griffith, 2020) of the coronavirus era, the unencumbered few ‘with steady jobs that were doable from anywhere’ (Griffith, 2020) who could use this moment to travel and set up office in exotic destinations. For Zweig and for 21st-century flaneurs, political conditions are of relatively little consequence, so long as they do not impinge on the cosmopolitan lifestyles of mobility and portable workplaces.

    Despite the genuinely humane concerns on display in much of The World of Yesterday, Zweig’s cosmopolitan perspective feels restrictively idealistic, and limited by his privileged access to mobility, to the highbrow world of art and literature where one’s interdependence with the rest of humanity is a benevolent choice to be donned and discarded at will, not an inescapable reality. For Wilk (2020), Zweig’s failure to reflect on his own privileged circumstances should inspire his readers to do better. If Zweig is a hypocrite, she seems to say, then so are all of us who buy into the cosmopolitan fantasy.

​    To sincerely appreciate Zweig’s lyrical command of language and the elegiac gravitas of his memoir, it’s necessary to acknowledge where his writing descends into sentimentality. To enjoy his refinement of taste and attention to aesthetic detail, it’s important to understand the privileged cultural origins that produced them. To share his delight in the world and indulge his flaneur’s sensibility, it becomes pertinent to ponder the exclusionary politics of which he was undoubtedly a part, and to ask ourselves the same questions about our own relation to the present moment. The World of Yesterday invites us to interrogate the paradox of the cosmopolitan’s perception of her independence and autonomy. One cannot be a real humanitarian while benefiting from elitism. One cannot purport to be part of the whole to which others are bound if one can detach oneself from this whole at will. The two World Wars expose the fissures at the heart of the cosmopolitan ethos of selective interdependence, and Zweig’s memoir is an elegiac and epicurean representation of those ideals falling to pieces, unable to sustain themselves during catastrophe. All the while our real, unchosen relationality to the rest of the world is made glaringly obvious. Yet, amidst these losses, Zweig shows us what emerges from the debris: a world that’s cognizant of its fallibility; an aesthetic culture more rooted in the beauty of the quotidian; and a global community with greater awareness of the tender relations holding it together.

References

Armitstead, C. (2013, November 16). Anthea Bell. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/16/anthea-bell-asterix-translator-interview
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Barber, T. (2018, October). Anthea Bell, translator, 1936-2018. The Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/ed6629e4-d853-11e8-a854-33d6f82e62f8

Bell, A. (2015, February 26). Translation matters: The unsung heroes of world literature. BBC.     https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/kTSNly5yqFpyJG8LVtHKTn/translation-matters-the unsung-heroes-of-world-literature

Beller, S. (1996). The World of Yesterday Revisited: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Jews of Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Jewish Social Studies, 2.2, pp.  37-53

Goodyear, C. (2020, December 22). The student linguist who started a pro-refugee fashion revolution. This Cambridge Life. https://www.cam.ac.uk/thiscambridgelife/tiarasaharataii

Griffith, E. (2020, November 8). The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare for This. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/08/business/digital-nomads-regret.html

Haraway, D. (1990). Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege     of Partial Perspective. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Free Association Books. 

Herman, D. (2012). Falling Apart. Salmagundi, 176, pp. 218-230

Iggers, G. (1981). Some Introductory Observations on Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. In M. Sonnenfeld (Ed.), Stefan Zweig: The World of Yesterday’s Humanist Today: Proceedings of the Stefan Zweig Symposium (pp. 1-8). State University of New York College. 

Marshall, A. (2018, October 19). Anthea Bell, Translator of Freud, Kafka and Comics, Dies at 82. The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/obituaries/anthea-bell-        dead.html

Moser, B. (2014, May). A Story Told in Twilight. Book Forum. https://www.bookforum.com/print/2101/a-new-biography-examines-stefan-zweig-s-final-years-in-exile-12971

Prochnik, G. (2014). The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World. Other Press.

Schlipphacke, H. (2014). The Temporalities of Habsburg Nostalgia. Journal of Austrian Studies, 47.2, pp. 1-16

Smith, Z. (2020). Intimations. Penguin Books.

Wilk, E. (2020). The World of Yesterday. The Baffler 54 https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-world-of-yesterday-wilk

Zweig, S. (2011). The World of Yesterday. (A. Bell, Trans.) Pushkin Press. (Original work published 1942)

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