■ Editor's Note
Today marks the 80th anniversary of Zweig's death. He was hailed as "the preeminent biographer of history" and a model of European humanistic intellectuals of the 20th century; he was a citizen of the world and a spiritual exile in the true sense of the word. We re-read his life stories and writings, not only because Zweig's works, like his life, are the most beautiful and smooth interpretation of humanitarianism, but also recall and commemorate the golden age that he wrote about, and the immortal humanistic spirit carried.
Written by / Wang Lyric
01
Contemporaneous with Lu Xun
Western Literature Everyone: Zweig
Stephen Zweig was born in 1881 and died in 1942. He was born in the same year as Lu Xun, a famous modern writer in China, so when we make this analogy, we probably have a more intimate understanding that he is a peer of Lu Xun.
He was an Austrian writer, and more importantly, he was a Jew.
A Jewish intellectual, growing up in the late 19th century, in the first half of the 20th century, is both a blessing for them, because they have experienced such an era of ups and downs, but more importantly, a great misfortune, because they are confronted with such a great evil force that will destroy their entire nation.
Zweig is famous for writing a large number of short and medium stories, so he can be regarded as a master of short and medium stories, and the most important thing is that he is good at the psychological analysis of characters. It is said that he had a good relationship with another Austrian cultural figure, Freud, who we know was the founder of the psychoanalytic school, so his literary work was probably influenced by Freud.
He is better known to the world as he is probably the most famous biographer in the world, having written many important biographies. When I was a curator at the National Museum, I once did an exhibition called "Leo Tolstoy and His Time", and when the chapter "Final Epilogue" was written, I used Zweig's evaluation of Tolstoy in his biography of Tolstoy, coming and going as a conclusion.
02
A Jewish writer
Wandering from Europe to Brazil
Zweig was originally born into a Jewish merchant family, so life was very superior, it was a standard European middle-class life, and there was no need to worry about chai rice oil and salt.
But by the 1930s, Austria was also caught up in the clutches of the Nazis. In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, declared germany and Austria united, and began to persecute the Jews on a large scale. Zweig had no choice, and Zweig emigrated to England.
We know that in 1939, the following year, he was very fortunate that he had come to the free world before an Iron Curtain fell. But in 1939, World War II soon broke out. At this time, Europe, including Britain, was also facing the danger of war. Zweig left London again, traveled to New York, and finally reached Brazil.
In Brazil, he was welcomed by the Brazilian government and people, because at that time Brazil felt that it was an honor to have a cultural master with such a reputation throughout Europe to come to his country, so he was a guest of honor of the Brazilian government and received good treatment.
In 1941, Zweig published a very important book of his later years, called The Story of Chess and his autobiography, the last book of his life, called The World of Yesterday. Both books are indicted to the harm done to intellectuals and the world at large by the fascist dictatorship of thought.
Shortly after writing Yesterday's World, by early 1942, Zweig and his wife, Charlotte Altman, committed suicide by taking sedatives in a place near Rio de Janeiro.
Before committing suicide, he left a suicide note, which was addressed to the Brazilian government. What he meant was that my suicide was not because I was dissatisfied with Brazil, I thanked the Brazilian government and people for their love for me, that my suicide was out of voluntary and rational thinking, that I was motivated by a deep anguish over the destruction of a Europe, my spiritual homeland.
This is the story of Zweig, the Zweig experience.
03
Zweig's world culturalism
Let's take a look at the Zweig written by the well-known literary critic Clive James in the book Cultural Amnesia. Born in Vienna's Golden Age, James said, Stephen Zweig remembered cultural cosmopolitan ideas and looked to the past for the roots of those ideas. Stephen Zweig was the embodiment of humanitarianism, so he chose suicide in the end, which in itself convincingly shows that what we hold dear can only survive in a free environment.
Here are a few words, this is a very sad text, here are a few sentences that deeply touched me. For example, the phrase " A story of wanting to make a difference in the face of desperate circumstances" is said. We may encounter desperate circumstances from time to time in our lives, so when faced with despair, how do we do it, we have no choice but to resist despair. We also have to make a difference in a desperate environment, which is often the dilemma of many people.
There is also a word here called "remembering the concept of cultural cosmopolitanism", which is to say that Zweig's value system, his value system is called cultural cosmopolitanism, or one of the main themes of the book we mentioned earlier, the core idea of this book is that he is going to find universal humanism, which is a value system that was really born in the Western world after the Enlightenment.
This value system advocates us to transcend these narrow boundaries of nations, nations, regions, and religions, and to communicate with and shake hands with people in different destiny regions.
There is also a word that is the embodiment of humanitarianism. Zweig's life and his work are undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and fluid interpretations of humanitarianism.
Here James quotes a quote from Zweig's last book, The World of Yesterday. This sentence says that this is what Zweig said:
"We spent a warm time there, looking out over the beautiful and peaceful scenery from the balcony".
Yet none of us have ever doubted that on the opposite side of the Berchtesga mountain, there was a man sitting there who would one day ruin it all. Berchtesgaden is a scenic area in the Alps near Austria in southern Germany today, and I have been there, and this scenic spot is actually very famous in Chinese guidebooks, and we Chinese like to call it Königssee.
There's a man sitting there, who is that man referring to? It was Hitler, and Hitler's hometown was in Berchtesgaden.
James expanded on this sentence, saying,
The warm hours don't sound so cheesy in German. Zweig had a house in Salzburg, with a balcony overlooking Germany on the other side of the border and the mountains where the Angel of Extinction was preparing to attack. If Hitler had looked in the other direction, he would have seen on Zweig's balcony that there was everything he was determined to destroy, not only because it belonged to the Jews, but all the important figures of European culture knew Zweig, which was one of his gifts, and he believed in dealing with civilized people.
In the long run, however, this belief may have also cost him his life. When he committed suicide in Brazil in 1942, he already knew that the Nazis could not win the war, but the Nazis had already won the war against balcony gatherings.
Salzburg is just north of Berchtesgaden, very close, so in Salzburg you can see Hitler's hometown, which is a very beautiful place. When I went there in 2016 to drive myself, I could never have imagined that such a beautiful hideaway would give birth to a demon like Hitler. Walking through Berchtesgaden is another mozart's hometown, Salzburg, which was once where Zweig lived.
His balcony is a symbol — in James's pen, it symbolizes a stage of civilization where cultural people from all over the world who admire Zweig meet and mingle.
This kind of cultural cosmopolitanism, which we now often call a universal value society, is simply what others think is bad and I think it is bad, and what others think is good I also think is good.
In London, it is not elegant for you to spit on the ground, and it is not elegant to spit on the ground in Beijing. In Beijing, you have to follow all kinds of rules, rules, you have to give way to pedestrians on the zebra crossing when you are driving, it should be the same in London, it should be the same in New York, it should be like this in New Delhi, it should be like this in Afghanistan, this is the universal value, it is not so complicated.
"We are a lost generation and will never see a unified Europe again." In the Zweig Biography by Erwin Rigel, it is said that Zweig said this on his deathbed.
James believed that Zweig's generation faced a more terrible enemy, but his suicide in 1942 was forever shrouded in mystery, and he did not seem to be in tune with the situation at that time, the Americans had entered the war, the Nazis seemed impossible to win, and he had no reason to think that he could not regain his glorious international status when the war was over.
But Zweig was faced with a problem of the mind. Despite his fame and many notable friends, he was on the brink of despair for most of his life. From the moment of his awakening, Zweig poured everything into the idea of an ongoing legacy of European humanism. By the time the Nazis came to power, his pessimism had nowhere to go but to fall further into despair.
04
Zweig perhaps
Similar to Kingdom Dimension?
Zweig's suicide puzzled many people, because by this time he had escaped Nazi control, and he had become a guest of the government and the people in Brazil, and he lived in good conditions, and he could think freely and publish freely.
At this time, the European battlefield has passed a turning point, the victory of the Anglo-American alliance is just around the corner, Hitler has become thinner and thinner, why would he commit suicide at such a moment? This is something that many people do not understand.
Just as we Chinese, we do not understand the fact that in 1927, in the context of the Northern Expedition, the famous scholar Wang Guowei committed suicide in Kunming Lake, we do not understand, we do not understand the destruction of a person's culture, his own beloved, the degree of destruction of his heart after the destruction of the soil of the culture in which he grew up.
So I think, Zweig's despair, I think we can use a sentence on the preface written for him by Mr. Chen Yinke, another academic ambassador of Tsinghua University, after Mr. Wang Guowei's suicide in 1927, as an explanation, Mr. Chen understands Wang Guowei's death, he said:
"When a cultural value declines, those who are transformed by this culture will feel pain, and the greater the process of expressing this culture, the greater the suffering they will suffer."
We can say that Mr. Chen is a confidant of Mr. Wang Guowei, and we can even say that Mr. Chen is a confidant of Zweig. In the hearts of true cultural people, we can all see a common value, which is the love of humanism and the mixed feelings of humanism.
-end-
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