The Impossible Exile – Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, George Prochnik, Other Press, New York, 2014, 369pp, £20 (hardback)

To be published by Granta in the UK, November 2014.

Until now, Stefan Zweig’s protracted and convoluted period of exile 1933-42, the necessarily painful withdrawal from his European heart-land, has been well trawled by book blurbs and journalistic articles on the recently reappraised writer. However, the threads running into this legendary downfall have been obscured by the bewitching intricacies of Zweig’s contradictory nature, and the unspecified romantic nostalgia that unfailingly lingers about his presence. The reaction of shock and in some cases outrage to Zweig’s suicide in February 1942 was revealing in that it showed how few of his contemporaries understood the depth of his corro-sive depression, long kept in check beneath the surface gloss of a cultural maven with the congenial bonhomie of a veteran social butterfly. This tortuous interior struggle, lethally exacerbated by the incremental despair of exile, the usurping of values once deemed sacrosanct and a growing conviction that the historical evil genie of fanatical nationalism wearing a modern mask would triumph in global terms, left Zweig vulnerable to the ultimate sanction.

Although the German language, its art and literature embodied the roar-ing hearth of Zweig’s spiritual home, even after the poisoning of the well by World War I, it is the European continent which is his homeland, not only Austria, for Zweig felt himself a genuine citizen of all countries, the supreme cosmopolitan. His myriad friendships, publishing associations and connections secured over decades of uninhibited movement across Eu-rope’s borders, extended like an ever-burgeoning vine, whose fruits Zweig cultivated and selected at the opportune moment. Zweig’s relentless weav-ing from one destination to the next, as his world shrunk and his options narrowed, the lengthy deliberations and about turns, the excited resolu-tions, disabling depressions and sudden departures leave behind a visibly fractured trail, a maze of half lit paths and teasing dead ends.

Now the gifted American writer George Prochnik has ventured into this labyrinth and sets out his stall in the highly impressive The Impossible Exile – Stefan Zweig at the end of the World, a timely book which, with the brisk pace and inveiglement of a novel, ambitiously combines literature, biography and cultural history, in the vein of W.G. Sebald. Throughout, Prochnik shows his carefully considered admiration for Zweig but eschews sentimentality and is not afraid to criticize when necessary. Prochnik con-vincingly serves up fact and probability, judiciously seasoned with plausi-ble suggestion. The result is a majestic meditation on the trauma of Jewish exile, the nature of fame and the challenges of irrevocable loss. Fittingly the research involved much travelling, both to Europe and closer to home, for Prochnik is particularly keen to fillet out the true nature of Zweig’s heavy hearted sojourns in the New York of 1940, following the hammer blow of France’s capitulation and the expectation of England’s imminent fall. By travelling to locations relevant to Zweig, Prochnik clearly hopes to surprise a ghost or at least prise out some vestige of atmosphere from a time now hopelessly buried under decades of unprolific modernity. These excur-sions often prove futile in their original sense but can bear some unforeseen fruit, or else in their melancholy refusal to reward the visitor, encroach on Woody Allen territory, as when Prochnik tracks down Zweig’s house bizarrely selected in the unlikely suburb of Ossining, an uninspiring sterile terrain near the notorious Sing Sing execution facility, where in hermetic toil much of The World of Yesterday was transcribed. The anticipating seek-er tentatively knocks on the door…

Prochnik’s study reveals just how many troublesome gaps existed in the story of Zweig’s final years, a series of neglected potholes on the long road from Salzburg in 1933 to Petropolis in 1942, which made for an uncomfortable ride. What Prochnik does, like some ingenious engineer, is not only to erect bridges over these gaps which can bear the weight of the heaviest conjecture, but explore Zweig’s actions and behaviour at different moments of his flight and before, through fascinating vignettes, culled from letters and conventional biography, which due to their as-tonishing detail are all the more convincing. For example, to spotlight Zweig’s compounded sense of irritation, embarrassment and pity towards the Jewish diaspora, Prochnik highlights a comment Zweig makes to a friend when spying some antique heavy wooden chests in a Munich mu-seum, ‘Do you see these two here? They are mounted on wheels. They belonged to Jews. In those days – as indeed always! – the Jewish people were never sure when the whistle would blow, when the rattles of the pogrom would creak. They had to be ready at a moment’s notice … Yes, these chests on wheels are striking symbols of the Jewish fate!’ Such piquant detail corroborates Zweig’s long standing preoccupation with the bitter fate of Jewish exile, from ‘Im Schnee’ (In the Snow), a short story written in 1901, about snow-bound victims of a Russian pogrom to his es-say on the Jewish ‘Shelter’ in London ‘Das Haus der Tausend Schicksale’ (House of a Thousand Fates) in 1937.

Prochnik has his own fascinating story to tell, which fatefully crosses that of Zweig, since he is of Austrian Jewish descent himself and his grandfa-ther was also obliged to flee Nazi occupied Vienna. Prochnik judiciously incorporates this story into his search for Zweig, so we find the author in Vienna seeking both the spectre of Zweig and inadvertently the ghosts of his own family. This auspicious personal overlapping, a kind of empathic shadowing, never seems shoehorned in or overblown and lends Prochnik’s book a unique timbre which elevates it from the ordinary.

To understand Zweig’s decline, one must start with his suicide. After years of uprooting, packing, unpacking, placating functionaries, settling into new abodes in strikingly different cultures, the evasion game ends with a blunt refusal to entertain the future, played out in the humid bedroom of a mod-est bungalow perched high in the forests above Petropolis. But Zweig did not die alone, his young wife Lotte Altmann also lay in death beside him, drawn close, turned on one side tenderly reaching out towards the corpse of a husband who could offer no further protection or explanation. Prochnik’s account, though beginning elsewhere, actually picks its way painstakingly back down from tragedy’s icy summit to fathom which route Zweig took to reach such a denouement, or which paths and choices he was unconscious-ly steered towards as his breathing space gradually diminished. Prochnik zips us back and forth across borders and time, Vienna, Paris, London, Zurich, then New York, whose soaring canyon avenues trumpeting the future incommodiously loom over the extraneous European. A revealing picture taken from a low angle, shows Zweig on the open top deck of a bus travelling down Fifth Avenue, the European intellectual banished by his own continent’s sins to the new world, claustrophobically hemmed in, subordinated by the diffident blocks and skyscrapers to either side. Proch-nik includes such images to emphasize the common fate of the exile, and more personally for Zweig the growing awareness that his most coveted possession, freedom, was no longer his to control and perhaps, despite ap-pearances, never had been.

But although Prochnik defends Zweig’s controversial personality, gamely parrying the recent accumulation of bromidic criticisms, he finds the unflat-tering corralling of the cornered Lotte into a suicide pact much harder to ac-cept. ‘Lotte’s death is shocking’, states Prochnik categorically. But Zweig’s death is foreseeable. His habitual references to suicide liberally pepper his works, his fictional characters often submit to or consider it, and equally significantly it looms large in his portrait essays on those artists he felt a strong existential bond with, or whose fanatical inner ‘demon’ he strove to unpick, notably Kleist, Hölderlin, Dostoyevsky and most implicitly, Kleist. In researching Montaigne, Zweig seized on the curious essay ‘A custom of the isle of Cea’, which espouses the notion of suicide as the noblest course of action for a man of high spiritual values at the propitious moment. It can hardly be doubted that this work had a bearing on his decision.

Prochnik’s fluent prose offers innumerable details and anecdotes, from the memories of a clutch of venerable star witnesses, snippets of conversa-tions, talks given at PEN club dinners etc., which encapsulate the perennial fragility of Zweig’s position, visibly torn between satisfying the doubters by the issuing of clear public denouncements of Hitler or expounding the Zionist cause and his own secret determination to remain at all times, in the words of his pacifist counsellor Romain Rolland, ‘above the mêlée’. Spasmodic deliberations, sudden skeins of hope reached for, alternating endowment and lack, ebb back and forth with the overbearing sense of an exotic prey cornered, unable to remain himself, whose rightful era is now trapped irrevocably behind glass.

Prochnik alludes to Zweig’s depression as early as 1926, when Charles Baudouin visits Zweig in his Salzburg eyrie, at No. 5, Kapuzinerberg and is led into the impressive library, to see the books all ranked, in order and seeming composed, whilst their guardian is clearly to the contrary. And this a full fifteen years before the outbreak of the Second World War, at the very height of Zweig’s fame and success, when he is still secure in his Austrian ‘citadel’ at Europe’s heart. Zweig is gripped by the growing realization, fol-lowing the naïve jubilation and ominous decadence of the immediate post-war years, that he was merely trapped in the anteroom to further catastro-phe. “By then he was telling friends that he was perpetually exhausted and ‘played out’, aware that he was living in a lull between disasters, part of a ‘beaten generation’…fed with hatred, purged again with terror, attacked by stupidity, our spirit distracted by the senseless fireworks of money games. How can we create something complete…based on peace, when our pow-ers are so obsessed with externals?” Furthermore, are we not to be forgiven, as Prochnik no doubt intends, for seeing here the conspicuous resonance with our own time?

Prochnik shows that as the manacles of exile tighten, Zweig felt his life to be no longer authentic, that he was a shadow, moving aimlessly in a world that was no longer his, his actions enforced by others, one of millions of nameless beings thrown together by a murderous irrational theorem, ‘Only exile swept them along together like dirt in the street…’ (Prochnik). In England Zweig felt only temporary deliverance. His initial enthusiasm for English stoicism, their peculiar calm and sang froid in the face of Hitler was clouded when he was deemed an ‘enemy alien’ and his freedom to travel restricted. Latterly he became concerned that English reserve might in fact just be a ‘lack of imagination’. Zweig saw the Nazi invasion of England as a given, and as Prochnik discovers when he visits Rosemount, the Zweig’s house in Bath, that he had even envisaged a long siege and had anxiously packed the cellar to the rafters with provisions. Later in Petropo-lis, his now entrenched morbid pessimism was rewarded by the spectacular collapse of the British army at Singapore in 1942, proving the final nail in a long run of allied debacles. But whatever the conflict’s final outcome, and ironically the tide of the war turned only months after his death, Zweig was unshakeable in his belief that Europe had totally destroyed itself and ‘his’ time was over.

Zweig’s exile was impossible. His unswerving commitment to personal freedom in a time which made a priority of annihilating it on every level, left him eventually clutching at air, as cumulative bestial reality frustrated and mocked even the most stoutly defended highborn pledges. Herein lies the Zweig tragedy and Prochnik’s pen artfully renders the shimmering chameleon presence of the exiled Zweig in these pages, where necessary sympathy is tinged with the electrifying potentiality of his high born legacy belatedly occurring, a unified humanistic reaction to a disfigured Europe like that of today, where the unchecked tendrils of nationalism are currently forcing their way up through cracks in the paving laid so assuredly seven decades ago.