Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (45 page)

In July Zweig stayed for a few days in Pontresina in the Engadine, where he met up with Erich Ebermayer. Recalling their earlier encounters, Ebermayer observed a marked change in Zweig’s mood: “He’s here with his young secretary Lotte Altmann, a clever creature with melancholy eyes. Zweig hardly talks about Salzburg, or the Kapuzinerberg, and not at all about his wife. I make a point of not asking any questions. [ … ] He seems to be going through a serious personal crisis, you can hear it in every word he says. His old life is falling apart. He is busy building himself a new one.”
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Whenever he was in Austria, Zweig now avoided spending more time with Friderike in Salzburg than was strictly necessary. In September 1935, following a stay in Marienbad to take the waters, he was back living in the Hotel Regina in Vienna again. The official excuse for his absence from his former home, wheeled out when writing to less intimate acquaintances, was his notorious insistence on escaping from Salzburg during the Festival season. From Vienna he wrote to Geigy-Hagenbach: “I am so pleased to be missing all the fuss in Salzburg. They are doing some wonderful performances, but the snobs who filled Salzburg this year seem to have been more ghastly than ever. All the arty wheeler-dealers and the cultural in-crowd—the ‘been there, done that’ brigade—were in town, and my
house would have been a restaurant, hotel, ticket office, tourist information office and bank, all rolled into one.”
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What Zweig did not tell his fellow collector was that while he was in Vienna he was already conducting negotiations on the side to sell off major portions of his manuscript collection. With the change in his circumstances and lifestyle he wanted to reduce the size of the collection, cutting it down to just a handful of treasured items. As it was, he had not kept the most valuable manuscripts in the house for some time now, having deposited them in the vault of a Salzburg bank; this meant that he could no longer take them out and study them at any time, which rather defeated the purpose of owning them, and in the long run threatened to reduce the manuscripts to the status of a mere financial investment. To avoid unnecessary complications with the authorities if he tried to export the material, Zweig decided to sell selected manuscripts in Austria instead. “It’s all tied up with the reorganisation of my life thanks to Herr Hitler and all that’s happening at present”,
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he later wrote to Rolland. To undertake this major project he chose the antiquarian book dealer Heinrich Hinterberger, who had only recently opened his own shop. Prior to that he had worked for the long-established firm of Heck, and amongst other things had arranged the purchase of Beethoven’s desk and the other memorabilia for Zweig. Hinterberger did not enjoy Zweig’s total confidence, but he was renowned for the speed with which he could catalogue and sell a collection. As Zweig wanted to be sure that the matter would be handled as quickly and efficiently as possible, Hinterberger seemed to be the right man for the job. And there was every reason to suppose that he would take special trouble over it, given the chance, so soon after setting up his business, to put such an important collection up for sale. In view of the problems he was having with Friderike, which he did not wish to make any worse, he decided not to tell her about the plan for the time being.

Zweig began by putting a few minor manuscripts by Viennese authors up for sale (including four adaptations of Verlaine poems by Richard Schaukal, which proved to be completely unsaleable). These were followed at the end of 1935 by more than three hundred manuscripts, most of them of firstrate quality. In order to make it a more interesting proposition, Zweig was prepared to let some of his prize specimens go. Even Goethe’s much-quoted
Mailied
was up for sale, although the double leaf from
Faust Part II
, of which Zweig had once said to Kippenberg that only death or hardship would make him part with it, he kept for himself, along with some other items that he
would not sell. True to his reputation for speed, Hinterberger produced the sale catalogue within a very short time of receiving the manuscripts. Under the title
Repräsentative Original-Handschriften. Eine berühmte Autographen-Sammlung. I. Teil
[
Fine Original Manuscripts, A Renowned Collection, Part 1
], the catalogue went into print at the beginning of 1936, although it contained no mention of Zweig’s name. Hinterberger however, anticipating possible problems with currency values and export restrictions, soon got cold feet, and even before the catalogue came back from the printers he was worried that he would not be able to sell the items for the asking price. He made several attempts to persuade Zweig to sell the collection as a complete whole, offering prospective buyers a substantial discount as an incentive; but Zweig categorically refused. Given what was on offer, he confidently predicted that buyers would soon show up—and he was proved right. The Swiss Martin Bodmer, brother of the “Zurich moneybags” and Beethoven collector Hans Conrad Bodmer, bought nearly all the manuscripts in the literature section of the catalogue for his private library. In a second round of buying Bodmer then acquired a large proportion of the music manuscripts as well, and in the end Hinterberger, to his relief, was spared the need to print a separate catalogue for the manuscripts of foreign authors, because Bodmer agreed to take those as well. Goethe’s
Mailied
, however, priced at 2,500 Swiss francs, was too expensive even for Bodmer, and remained on offer to buyers.

One of the curious features of the sale was the offer of another item that Zweig had purchased only a short time previously at an auction in Paris. Apparently unnoticed by other interested parties, he had managed to buy the manuscript of Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s poem
Das Lied der Deutschen
for a very modest price. As he already owned the manuscript of Haydn’s Variations on the theme
Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,
this acquisition gave him both the words and the music of the German national anthem in the original hands of the respective authors; but he was only interested in retaining the musical score, and wanted to sell on the poem, with its unedifying lines “
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
”, as quickly as possible (and for the best possible price). Hinterberger took on the sale of this manuscript too, even printing a special brochure for prospective buyers; and he suggested to Zweig on a number of occasions that it could be offered, discreetly and in confidence, to a certain interested client by the name of Adolf Hitler. Zweig declined to express a view, and was glad when he heard from Vienna very soon afterwards that this valuable manuscript too had found a new owner in Martin Bodmer.

While Hinterberger was handling the sale of the manuscripts, and thus, unbeknown to Friderike, beginning the process of breaking up the Salzburg household, Zweig moved to a new address in London in March. In the long term the furnished flat in Portland Place would not have been large enough to accommodate the things he wanted to bring over from Salzburg. His new lodgings were just one block away from Portland Place, in Hallam Street, where Zweig rented an apartment at No 49. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast with the villa on the Kapuzinerberg. Oxford Street lay barely five hundred metres to the south, the British Museum with its Reading Room was within easy walking distance, and to the north he could get to Regent’s Park in a matter of minutes. In short, Zweig was living right at the heart of Europe’s largest city.

In August a childhood dream finally came true—a tour of South America. On his way to the International PEN Congress in Argentina Zweig planned to stop off in Brazil first and visit his local publisher, amongst other things. Travelling as the guest of the Brazilian government, Zweig had expressly asked them prior to his departure not to make any special fuss of him—but it made no difference. He was unquestionably the most widely read European author in the South American continent, and that was sufficient to ensure him a reception worthy of an official state visitor. En route from Southampton the ship docked briefly in the Spanish port of Vigo. Zweig was one of the few passengers to go ashore, which was not without its dangers, since the city had been occupied by Fascists. But curiosity drove him on, and he even took photographs of heavily armed children roaming through the streets. After a further stopover in Lisbon the ship was at sea for nine days. On 20th August 1936 he wrote in his diary: “Tomorrow Rio de Janeiro! Get up early”.
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Even before the ship had docked, Zweig was enthralled by the city:

Entered the harbour in the morning: what an amazing experience. First the islands, green with vegetation or bare rock emerging from the sea, then in the light morning mist the Corcovado [ … ], the hunchback, and the Pao d’Azucar, rising up like two monoliths, and at their feet, ranged around glorious sweeping bays, the city itself, forever beginning afresh, repeatedly interrupted by the foothills, which reach down like the fingers of a hand to hold it all together. It’s the most beautiful sight imaginable, the city fanned out in this delightful way, and on the water the busy ferries plying back and forth. And already a soft perfumed scent wafting off the land is mixed in with the smell of the sea, enfolding you gently, and entering the harbour really is like a warm southern welcome, whereas New York greets you no less grandly with its stone icebergs and its triumphant clamour. New York calls out, Rio awaits; one is masculine, the other feminine, and there is something about these undulating lines that puts you in mind of a woman rising up from the waves, Venus Anadyomene. The first sight of the city is unforgettable, that image will stay in one’s mind for ever, and the prospect changes every time one looks, while in another sense it remains beautiful from every point of view—Rio doesn’t have just one aspect, like Naples, it looks magnificent from everywhere, from the mountains looking down on the sea, from the sea looking up at the mountains, and from the beach and from every perspective. And then these colours, soft and yet somehow vibrant. There is really something magical about this city.
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The next few days were filled with receptions and other engagements. Zweig donated the takings from his packed lectures and readings to the many refugees from overseas. His publisher Abrahão Koogan arranged additional interviews and events, and everyone—from President Getúlio Vargas and his Foreign Minister downwards—wanted to be seen with the famous author from Europe, who had been assigned his own aide-de-camp to accompany him on his travels through Brazil.

One of his excursions took him by car to the ancient royal city of Petrópolis, and on the way there through the mountains he was visited by memories of home—the landscape reminded Zweig of the terrain en route to the Semmering. The next item on his schedule, he was delighted to discover, was a visit to a coffee plantation. He was much impressed by the quality of his favourite beverage, which was served everywhere here and at prices that seemed laughably cheap to a European: “They drink it differently here—or rather, they don’t drink it at all, they just toss it down their throats with a single flick of the wrist, like drinking a liqueur, only very hot, so hot that a dog, as the saying goes here, would run away howling if you spilt a few drops on him.”
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Finally Zweig was instructed in the correct way to brew coffee at the Instituto do Café in São Paulo, where he was presented with a sack of coffee beans and a coffee-making machine. From the city’s Esplanada Hotel—“here I have only three rooms instead of four”—he wrote to Friderike:

Stefan Zweig on his way to South America in the summer of 1936

The brothers Stefan and Alfred Zweig with their mother Ida

Greetings from the loveliest madhouse on earth. [ … ] Today I witnessed more crazy things. I visited the world-famous prison in São Paulo, one of the finest and most humane correctional facilities on earth, and had my photograph taken forty times—as I do every day. (Everything is done in-house, and when I tentatively enquired what the photographer was in for, I was told he is a triple murderer.) Meanwhile the prison band of thirty convicts was paraded in the courtyard, I was invited to inspect them, whereupon they played the Austrian imperial anthem (in my honour, for the first time in my life), two-thirds of them murderers, one third thieves, etc. The whole thing was pretty grotesque.
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