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

deal to Zweig; but now they had an additional value for him as financial assets. Whereas shares and property had turned out to be poor investments, and liquid assets were constantly threatened by inflation, there was always the hope that each of these manuscripts or drawings could be sold off in an emergency at a profit, or at least for not much less than he had paid for it. And it was useful, to say the least, to be able to carry this unusual form of currency around with him in a handy package wherever he went. “Two suitcases, one of them containing clothes, the earthly necessities, and the other manuscripts, the intellectual wherewithal, and one is at home everywhere”, 3 as Zweig hadwritten in his diary in September 1935, en route from Paris to London. And now he was hoping to travel halfway round the world on that same principle.
    The ocean crossing was overshadowed by the news that Friderike was now in danger following the German invasion of France. Together with thousands of other refugees she had fled Paris at the last moment and headed south. Suse and Alix were both with her when she finally reached the safety of Marseilles. In the meantime both daughters had got married in France—Suse’s husband was the Austrian photographer Karl Hoeller, while in 1939 Alix had married Herbert Karl Stoerk, a doctor, whom Friderike had known since he was a child (his parents, both doctors themselves, were the friends of hers who had been killed in an avalanche in 1916). The two husbands had also managed to escape to the South of France, and now the five of them attempted to make their escape across the Atlantic. Their first plan was to travel to Mexico, but then they decided to sail across to the USA. There Stefan had already applied to the Emergency Rescue Committee for an entry visa, though not without letting Friderike know how pointless it was for him to apply for such a document for five people at once. His old resentment towards Suse and Alix played a not insignificant role in this: now that they were married, reasoned Stefan, it was the job of their husbands to secure all the necessary paperwork—an entirely superfluous dig on his part, because of course on the other side of the ocean they had not been as idle as he chose to think. In the end Friderike and her daughters and sons-in-law were able to make their way via a circuitous route to Spain, and thence to Portugal; and from here they travelled on visitor visas to the USA, where they were due to arrive in mid-October.
    Before leaving on the next leg of their journey to Rio in August, Stefan and Lotte stayed for a few weeks at the Wyndham Hotel in New York, where they had stopped off on their last visit. This was not one of those vast American hotels with two or three thousand rooms, but a comparatively small establishment with apartments. Here the Zweigs had rented a two-room apartment with bathroom. The Wyndham was situated on 58th Street, not far from Fifth Avenue, and just one block from the southern end of Central Park.
    They encountered familiar faces at every turn, for sooner or later nearly all European writers ended up in the USA. Klaus Mann was already living here, as was his father, Thomas. Heinrich Mann would arrive in the autumn, on the same ship as Friderike, and Carl Zuckmayer had also moved to America—to name but a few. While he could manage it Zweig did hisbest to help out less fortunate émigrés with his money and his connections, but as in London the whole business threatened to get out of hand. For good reasons he gave out his hotel address only to a select few, and he had his mail sent c/o his publisher, Ben Huebsch.
    Prior to his departure from New York Zweig met frequently with his fellow Austrian Berthold Viertel, with whom he now shared his old and unfinished ‘story of a postwoman’. Together they took the subject matter of the unfinished novel and developed it into a screenplay for the film Das gestohlene Jahr. Would it have been possible