Free Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig by Oliver Matuschek

A World of Tomorrow?
Sois ton bourreau toi même!
N’abandonne l’amour de te martyriser
A personne, jamais.
Sei selbst dein Henker! Gib
An niemanden die Lust, dich zu misshandeln
An keinen, nie und nimmer!
Be your own executioner! Give
To no one the pleasure of tormenting you
To none, not ever! 1
    Émile Verhaeren,
translated into German by Stefan Zweig in 1904
    O NE SUMMER MORNING IN 1941, it must have been in July or August, Klaus Mann, then in his third year of American exile, was walking the streets of Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue he saw Stefan Zweig coming towards him; he had met him only a few weeks earlier at a cocktail party in Zweig’s hotel. On that occasion Zweig had invited a few friends from Austria and Germany to join him for drinks, and had chatted away relatively freely in this company. But now he wore a distracted look. Stony-faced and unshaven, he wandered through the urban canyons and failed to recognise his young colleague, who expressed surprise at this unaccustomed sight: “I looked at him, the stubbly chin, the dark, staring eyes, and thought to myself: ‘What’s up with him?’ I went up to him: ‘So where are you off to? And why the great hurry?’ He started like a sleepwalker hearing his name called. A second later he had composed himself and was able to smile, chat and joke again, engaging, animated as ever: the urbane and elegant, slightly too smooth, slightly too ingratiating ‘ homme de lettres ’, speaking with the nasal twang of the Viennese and unquestionably a man of ‘impeccably pacifist sentiments.’” 2
    At the time of this encounter Lotte and Stefan Zweig had left England more than a year previously. At the end of June 1940 they had booked passage on a steamer from Liverpool to New York. Their last few weeks in Bath had been anything but restful and relaxing. Since the beginning of May, when the German Wehrmacht had attacked the Benelux countriesand France and was now continuing its relentless advance, Zweig’s worst fears seemed about to come true, sooner than even he expected. At the time he contemplated the possibility of embarking on another lecture tour of South America—was this one way of escaping the madness? Where would intellectuals like him be needed in future? In Europe? In the USA? In the countries of South America, where boatloads of European refugees were now arriving? Or had existence itself become pointless?
    It was not an easy decision, but in the end they chose to travel across the ocean to America. They planned to spend time in the USA first, and then journey on to Brazil. Lotte had received her British passport shortly before their departure, and a few days later Stefan and she were granted a tourist visa for Brazil, valid for six months from the date of issue. Now came a period of anxious waiting and to-ing and fro-ing, since neither of them as yet had tickets for the passage, which could not be obtained without a visa. They were finally able to reserve two tickets in third-class accommodation through the intervention of Zweig’s confidant, the antiquarian book dealer Heinrich Eisemann. The tickets were upgraded to first class by the ship’s captain, who, upon learning that he had such a celebrity and his wife on board, promptly relinquished his own cabin to them.
    When they left the house in Bath, Stefan and Lotte left most of their belongings behind. All they took with them were a few steamer trunks packed with clothes and other essential items, including of course Lotte’s typewriter. Stefan had not packed the finished chapters of the Balzac biography, nor the related source material. Although he feared the worst for the coming months, or perhaps even years, of the war, the plan was to return to Bath sooner or later, when he would resume his work there. But he did take a few valuable manuscripts from his collection with him, along with two drawings by Rembrandt that he had only recently acquired. These were all precious works that meant a great