In Suid-Afrika is Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) as skrywer en mens feitlik onbekend. Daar was 'n tyd toe sy skryfwerk so gewild was dat dit meer as die van enige ander outeur vertaal is (bron hieronder, Kindle 4878). In die vorige eeu was hy die gewildste Europese skrywer, veral vanweë sy fiksie. Mettertyd is eerder sy nie-fiksie, veral sy biografieë, gelees, maar bowenal sy herinneringe, The World of Yesterday (1942). Hierdie verloop stem ooreen met Zweig se eie ervaring van "realizing early in his career that his talents as an interpretive, recreative artist were greater and more important than his original creative gifts" (K 183). Om hierdie rede het hy dikwels eerder vertaalwerk gedoen.
Die genoemde herinneringe en van sy ander boeke word deesdae in elektroniese weergawe deur Plunkett Lake Press bemark; ook sy eerste vrou, Friderike (1882-1971), se biografie, Married to Stefan Zweig (1946). Hy moet nie met 'n ander skrywer, Arnold Zweig (1887-1968), verwar word nie. In die teks wat volg, is daar baie wat op plaaslike toestande toegepas kan word. Ek vestig die aandag bloot op hierdie moontlikheid en doen dit nie hier uitdruklik nie.
Stefan Zweig was Frans en Italiaans en in mindere mate Engels magtig, maar het in sy moedertaal, Duits, geskryf. Sy herinneringe is deur Benjamin Huebsch en Helmut Ripperger in Engels vertaal. Die rede waarom ek die vertalers noem, is omdat hulle 'n uitstekende, vloeiende teks geskep het, met behoud van die kenmerkende lang sinne en paragrawe. Harry Zohn se voorwoord is 'n insiggewende inleiding tot die teks. Hy toon aan dat die boek nie 'n tipiese outobiografie is nie, maar veel eerder 'n vertelling gebaseer op deurleefde ervaring: "It is a mirror of an age rather than of a life" (K 143).
Zweig was die tweede seun van 'n welvarende Joodse tekstielvervaardiger. Op 15-jarige ouderdom is van sy gedigte en op 19 sy eerste digbundel gepubliseer. Die sorg van sy vader se onderneming is aan sy ouer broer toevertrou, gevolglik was Zweig vry om aan die Universiteit Wene te studeer en sy literêre vermoëns te ontwikkel. In 1904 het hy 'n doktorsgraad verwerf. In 1920 is hy en Friderike, wat reeds twee dogters gehad het, getroud. In 1933 was sy boeke onder die wat die Nazi's in 34 universiteitsentra as ongewens verbrand het. Drie jaar later is sy geskrifte amptelik verbied. Nadat sy huis deur die owerheid deursoek is, het hy en sy sekretaresse, Lotte Altmann (1908-1942), in 1934 na Londen uitgewyk, terwyl Friderike in Oostenryk agtergebly het. Hulle is in 1938 geskei.
In 1934 is Zweig se biografie oor Erasmus gepubliseer, wat hy 'n "veiled self-portrait" genoem het (K 5776). "In 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave" (K 6135). "None could then even suspect how great a capitulation was imminent. Everybody ... thought that Chamberlain was going to Munich to negotiate, not to surrender" (K 6257). "Over the radio came the message 'Peace in our time', an assurance to our tried generation of further opportunity to live contentedly, to be free of anxiety, to assist in building a new and better world" (K 6267). "In France there was a proposal to build a monument to Chamberlain" (K 6288). Hierna volg "the shameful betrayal of Czechoslovakia" (K 6294). "In spite of all they tried to maintain the delusion that promises were promises, treaties were treaties, and that Hitler could be negotiated with if one but reasoned with him as man to man" (K 6301).
Toe die Tweede Wêreldoorlog in 1939 uitbreek, het Zweig uit die gevaarlike Londen getrek en hom in die veiliger Bath gevestig en met Altmann getrou. "There is nothing heroic in my nature. My natural attitude to all dangerous situations has always been to evade" (K 3567). "Bath ... reflects more faithfully and impressively than any other in England a more peaceful century, the eighteenth" (K 6493). "Never in my life had I been so cruelly conscious of man's helplessness against world events" (K 6461). "I lived in England only spatially and not with my whole soul" (K 5974).
In 1940 het hy Britse burgerskap verkry, maar daarna probeer om in New York City te woon. Teen 1941 was The World of Yesterday in konsepvorm voltooi. As 60-jarige het Zweig hom in Petrópolis (aan die baai oorkant Rio de Janeiro in Brasilië) gevestig. 'n Dag voor sy dood het hy die manuskrip van sy bekendste kortverhaal, "Schachnovelle", aan sy uitgewer gepos. 'n Afrikaanse opsomming van hierdie verhaal, onder die opskrif, "Skaaknovelle", is in Frank Magill se Duisend Beste Boeke (Kaapstad: Rubicon-Pers, 1983, p 2089-2090) gepubliseer.
In 1942 het Zweig en sy vrou gesamentlik selfmoord gepleeg. Daar is talle ooreenkomste maar ook verskille tussen hierdie gebeurtenis en die gesamentlike selfmoord in Londen van die Hongaarse skrywer, Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), en sy Suid-Afrikaanse vrou, Cynthia Jefferies (1927-1983). Die mans was albei Jode wat hulle vir Europese eenheid beywer het. Albei die vroue was hulle voormalige sekretaresses. Al vier het gif gedrink. Dit was Zweig se tweede en Koestler se derde huwelik. Zweig se daad word aan depressie toegeskryf en dié van Koestler aan siekte (Parkinsonsiekte en leukemie). Al was albei vroue baie jonger as hulle eggenote, het hulle blykbaar nie kans gesien om sonder hulle mans te bly lewe nie.
In sy afskeidsnota verwys Zweig na "the world of my own language having disappeared for me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself" (K 6566). Sy kragte "have been exhausted by long years of homeless wandering. So I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labor meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on earth" (K 6573).
The World of Yesterday het aanvanklik "Three Lives" as titel en "Memoirs of a European" as newetitel gehad. Die drie lewens waarna verwys word, is eerstens Zweig se belewenisse voor die Eerste Wêreldoorlog, toe Wene sy tuiste was; tweedens sy verblyf in Salzburg na hierdie oorlog; en derdens sy ontheemding van 1934 af: "I belong nowhere, and everywhere am a stranger, a guest at best. Europe, the homeland of my heart's choice, is lost to me" (K 261). "On alien soil one's self-respect tends to diminish" (K 6217). Franz Grillparzer het die genoemde drie eras soos volg opgesom: "The road of modern culture leads from humanitarianism via nationalism to bestiality" (K 172). Zweig het geskryf: "Against my will I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages. Never ... has any generation experienced such a moral retrogression from such a spiritual height as our generation has" (K 261).
"It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world" (K 480). Oostenryk kon nie militêr en tegnologies met Duitsland meeding nie, daarom "the native pride had turned more strongly toward a desire for artistic supremacy" (K 501). Van vroeg af was Wene "a fortress, and advance outpost to protect Latin civilization against the barbarians; and more than a thousand years later the attack of the Ottomans against the West shattered against these walls" (K 507).
Dit is hoofsaaklik Jode wat die kunste en ander hoë kultuur in Wene waardeer en bevorder het. "To have seen Gustav Mahler on the street was an event that was proudly reported to our comrades the next morning as a personal triumph" K 908). Uiteindelik sou Oostenrykse kuns nie opgewasse teen Duitse militêre aggressie wees nie. Romain Rolland het gesê: "Art can bring us consolation as individuals, but it is powerless against reality" (K 3224). Sigmund Freud "denied the supremacy of culture over the instincts; but his opinion that the barbaric, the elemental destructive instinct in the human soul was ineradicable, has become confirmed most terribly" (K 6378).
Zweig wou kreatief wees. Hy het inspirasie uit die oorspronklike, fisiese dokumente van skrywers en ander kunstenaars geput en het die finansiële vermoë gehad om sulke voorwerpe te versamel. "What I sought was the originals or the sketches for poems or compositions, because the problem of the creation of a work of art, both in its biographical and psychological forms held my attention more than anything else. That mysterious moment of transition in which a verse, a melody, emerges out of the invisible, out of the vision and intuition of the genius, and is graphically fixed in a material form - where else can it so well be examined and observed as in the tortured or trance-born manuscript of the master? ... to understand completely great creations one must have seen them not only in their perfection but have pursued the process of their creation" (K 2633). "There had always been a particular sense of reverence in me for every earthly manifestation of genius, and besides my manuscripts I collected whatever relics I could lay hands on" (K 2661).
"Nationalism ... has poisoned the flower of our European culture. I was forced to be a defenceless, helpless witness of the most inconceivable decline of humanity into a barbarism which we had believed long since forgotten" (K 295). Hierdie agteruitgang het hom hewig ontstel, want dit behoort nie net te gaan om die behoud van wat goed is en met moeite opgebou is nie, maar ook om vanweë die voortgesette strewe na volmaaktheid daarop te verbeter. "It is only early in life that one believes fate to be identical with chance. Later one knows that the actual course of one's life is determined from within" (K 2853). "The more European a life a man had lived in Europe, the harder he was punished by the fist that battered Europe" (K 4250).
Daar was "a power that loved violence ... It was the will to violence" (K 6009). "Europe seemed to me doomed to die by its own madness; Europe, our sacred home, cradle and Parthenon of our occidental civilization" (K 6014). Tydens 'n besoek aan Argentinië in 1936 of 1940: "I recognized that this was not foreign soil ... I began to hope and believe again under the Southern Cross" (K 6024). Daarna besoek hy Brasilië: "Europe's contribution to civilization could be extended and developed magnificently here in new adaptation" (K 6038). "I was in a torment of anxiety about Europe and of Austria within Europe. It may seem like narrow patriotism" (K 6049).
Dit het vir Zweig gegaan om morele meerderwaardigheid, innerlike vryheid, passiwiteit in oorlog, Europese eenheid en 'n "intellectual brotherhood" (K 3693), "the reconstruction of European culture" (K 3699), "the intellectual unification of Europe" (K 4962), dus "intellectual solidarity" (K 5986). Hy het uitgesien na "the long promised empire of justice and brotherhood" (K 4290). "I was inoculated to some extent against the infection of patriotic enthusiasm" (K 3557). Ontsteld het hy die irrasionaliteit van politieke gebeure gade geslaan. Rolland: "The more naïve a people are, the easier it is to get around them ... We live in a time of mass emotion, mass hysteria, whose power in the case of war cannot be estimated" (K 3332). "It was [Rolland] who preserved the conscience of a Europe fallen into madness" (K 4093).
Nuwe magte het beheer oor Europa geneem "and, as usual, the dead were in the wrong" (K 3407). Wanneer oorlog verklaar word, "we could not believe it because we did not wish to believe in such madness" (K 3464). Oorlog is "not romantic but barbaric" (K 3541). Die meeste mense "obediently served the war propaganda and thus the mass delusion and mass hatred, instead of fighting against it" (K 3644). "The greatest peril was the inexhaustible faith of the nations in the single-sided justice of their course" (K 3666). Zweig "determined to escape this dangerous mass psychosis, I ... commence my personal war in the midst of war, the struggle against the betrayal of Reason by the current mass passion" (K 3686). In die Eerste Wêreldoorlog het hy skuiling in Switserland en in die Tweede Wêreldoorlog veiligheid in Engeland gaan soek.
Toe die Tweede Wêreldoorlog uitbreek het mense onthou "the disappointments that the last war had brought; impoverization instead of riches, bitterness instead of contentment, famine, inflation, revolts, the loss of civil rights, enslavement by the State, nerve-destroying uncertainty, distrust of each against all" (K 3546). "Victory ... could never justify that sacrifice" (K 3899). Die verskil tussen die Eerste en Tweede Wêreldoorlog is dat laasgenoemde gevoer is oor "ideas and not merely concerned with frontiers and colonies" (K 3509). Dit is omtrent al belangrike opsig waarin tussen hierdie twee oorloë onderskei word. Juis hierdie idees-grondslag het die Jode duur te staan gekom. Tog het Zweig assimilasie bly steun en sionisme deurgaans verwerp.
"I had frequently occupied myself with the problem of the spiritual superiority of the vanquished. I was always tempted to depict the internal hardening which every form of power brings about in man, the spiritual numbness of an entire people which every victory entails, and to contrast it with the energizing power of defeat that plows through the soul so painfully and fruitfully ... Was it not my people that again and again had been conquered by all other peoples, again and again, and yet outlasted them because of some secret power - that power of transforming defeat through will, of withstanding it again and again? Had they not presaged, our prophets, this perpetual hunt and persecution that today again scatters us upon highways like chaff?" (K 3904). "The expulsion of a whole people which was denied nationhood but was yet a people which, for two thousand years sought nothing so much as to stop wandering and to rest their feet on quiet, peaceful earth" (K 6414).
"As long as their religion bound them together they still were a community and therefore a power; when they were segregated and expelled, they atoned for the fault of their own doing by having consciously segregated themselves through their religion and their customs from the other nations of the earth" (K 6425). "As any gesture of martyrdom is so repugnant to me I mention my personal inclusion in the common fate only reluctantly" (K 5549). Die Joodse diaspora "pleaded at the consulates and almost always in vain, for which country wanted newcomers who had been plundered to the skin, beggars?" (K 6399). "One goes wherever one is still admitted" (K 6404).
Ten slotte vier aanhalings. "Goethe said that disorder was more distasteful to him than even an injustice" (K 5474). Shakespeare het voorspel: "So foul a sky clears not without a storm" (K 5813). Zweig het in 'n optimistiese oomblik geskryf: "But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light" (K 6560). By 'n ander geleentheid was sy reaksie: "Nothing remained but to withdraw into one's self" (K 3672).
Johannes Comestor