The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World Paperback – Illustrated, August 25, 2015

When does leaving one country for another become an "exile" as opposed to just plain "emigration"? It can't just be a matter of a forced leaving, because how many Jews who left Germany and other European countries in the 1930's felt they were going into exile? I'd assume most realised they were going to new lives in countries of safety. But for some - like famed author Stefan Zweig - leaving the land of their birth and of their family history, life outside Austria became an exile. Ultimately, in 1942, after living in England and the United States, he and his much-younger second wife committed suicide in their Brazilian village home.Author George Prochnik's new book, "The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World", is not strictly a biography. It covers in depth the years from the 1930's to Zweig's death as he left all he loved and held dear - his life in Vienna - to live in England (London and Bath), then to the United States, and finally, to Brazil. (If you're not familiar with Stefan Zweig - and I wasn't - I'd advise reading the Wiki entry on him to acquaint yourself with the basics his life and works.)Prochnik does an excellent job in detailing the emotional anguish Zweig felt as he left Austria for the last time. Although Vienna had been his home for most of his life, he had lived with his first wife and her daughters in a large house outside of Salzburg. But to leave Austria - even knowing the Nazis would make official the already rampant anti-Semitism embedded in Austrian society - to leave his German language, to leave what he knew and accepted, was, in the end, too much for Zweig.Prochnik follows the Zweigs - Stefan and his first wife - to England, and then to New York. Even though his work was widely published and appreciated, Zweig found it difficult to adjust to life in the United States. As a literary lion, he was feted everywhere, but never seemed to feel settled. He went to Ossining, a small town north of New York City but finally fled to Petropolis, a mountain village north of Rio. It was there he ended his life, seemingly numbed by the terrible war news of late 1941 and early 1942. Would he have committed suicide - at the age of 60 - if he had any inkling that the war would be won by the Allies and that - possibly, he could have returned to his beloved Austria?George Prochnik adds a bit of his own personal history to the book. His family, also Austrian Jewish immigrants during the 1930's, were similar to the Zweigs. I received the impression that Prochnik's family made lives for themselves in the United States. Clearly Stefan Zweig did not. And maybe that's the difference between "emigration" and "exile". I didn't mind his putting his family in the book, but some readers don't like an author's intrusion into a book. Also, and I am not taking any stars away from my rating, but the publisher of the book did not label any of the pictures included in the text. Sometimes it's easy to know the identity of the figure is, but other times it's not. For instance, there's a picture of a young woman who was clearly Zweig's second wife, but a few pages on there's a picture of three women. I have no idea who the women were. Please - Mr Publisher - label the pictures in the next edition!!

I was fascinated by Stefan Zweig's autobiography "The World of Yesterday." Without having read that book first, however, I would have found the current Prochnik book much more difficult to appreciate, partly because it is simply not chronologically organized. Prochnik tells a far more critical tale, bordering on the unsympathetic at times. Thus, the two books together reveal more than either single viewpoint could, on its own. If I were to recommend only one of these two, it would have to be Zweig's own writing, which reveals far more about the entire historical era than just the central figure of the narrative. Nevertheless, given Zweig's own strangely self-deprecating elitism, it is valuable to have a third-person account of his actual place in European culture. Prochnik also adds very significant descriptions of Zweig's life after leaving Europe, first for New York and then in Brazil. Definitely recommended if 1890-1940 in Europe (particularly Austria) is of special interest to you.

Following Stefan Zweig through the years in which the Nazis were gaining power forcing him to leave his beloved Vienna and seek asylum abroad allows the author to examine not only Zweig's personal circumstances but also his place in a network of Exiles in both Europe and the Americas during this tumultuous time. Zweig's inner struggles with living in Exile are related through reference to his own excellent autobiography The World Of Yesterday as well as correspondence and interviews. I've rarely read anything about these years from the perspective of those who escaped the Holocaust with such a depth of feeling and understanding of the combination of restlessness, grief for what was lost and guilt for having left others behind. The author is the descendent of Austrian Jews as well and his common heritage with his subject Zweig gives this book a particular poignancy when discussing the seemingly lost world of pre-Anchluss Vienna.Zweig was a renowned author, a celebrity who quite suddenly finds the rug pulled out from under him in such a devastating way that his story is the perfect example of what those exiled from their homelands during the Nazi era experienced both externally and internally. As an avid reader of Zweig , I found this book incredibly interesting and valuable and recommend it to anyone with an interest not only in Zweig but in this story of those fortunate to escape the death camps but who struggled to find themselves after being cast adrift. Fabulous book.

STEFAN ZWEIG WAS ONE OF THE GREAT WRITERS OF THE 20th CENTURY...HE NOT ONLY WROTE HISTORICAL WORKS AND BIOGRAPHIES OF THE FAMOUS BUT HIS PROSE EVEN IN TRANSLATIONFROM GERMAN WAS FLAWLESS..HE EVEN WROTE THE LIBRETTOS FOR RICHARD STRAUSS OPERASWHEN HIS BOOKS WERE BURNED BY THE NAZIS HE LEFT AUSTRIA AND FINALLY WOUNF UPIN BRAZIL...WHERE HE AND HIS WIFE TOOK THEIR LIVES...HIS DEPRESSION FOR HIS EXILE FROMHIS BELOVED VIENNA WAS TOO MUCH FOR HIM..THE BOOK EXPLORES HIS LIFE IN AMERICAAND THE OTHER EXILES HE KNEW...IT IS A MASTERWORK

informative, but mostly such a pleasure to read

This a book about exile. It's a long, discursive meditation on it, focusing on the peripatetic life of the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. It is a fine example of what might be termed 'the new biography' which eschews the linear narrative approach, the cradle-to-grave account, in favour of a series of linked chapters, which have the feel of essays. Each one of these have a sort of focus, eg friendship; New York, which he visited four times and lived for a while nearby; his love of books and autograph manuscripts; relations with his mother (who was deaf) and his need for silence; his Jewishness and relationship to Zionism - he rather favoured the diaspora; his ambiguous attitude to the language of his pen, which the Nazis were busy corrupting; the importance of the Viennese and Parisian cafes where artists, writers and thinkers could meet to exchange ideas (alas, no cafe culture in the USA or Brazil!); his stay in Bath and his thoughts on the English love of gardening, the calmness of the English in the face of war, their lack of a certain spiritual wildness; the new freedoms he found in Brazil, in terms of the inhabitants' freer attitudes to race and sex; living beside a jungle which took you into the heart of untamed nature. Prochnik roams freely over these and many other points of interest, linking them to the biographical facts and meditating on their possible meanings.He sometimes puts the narrative in the context of his own family history, drawing parallels with his own father's emigre experience. This brings a personal element of quest into the story - a post-modern approach to biography which is increasingly common within the genre.It's not always an easy read, though the style is clear and elegant. Not easy because it presumes a good working knowledge of its subject and his novels, stories, memoirs and biographies. Without this background knowledge, a good deal of the text might be obscure. However, for those 'in the know' and keen to know more, the book is a delight. It rises to the intelligence of its subject. Looking at the extensive bibliography and chapter notes, one can see that the author has immersed himself in every relevant text, of which there are hundreds; besides which he has visited the key sites, has spoken to those close to Zweig or his circle who are still alive, including Zweig's beloved niece Eva, now in her 80s, and has submitted successive drafts of his book to a circle of critical colleagues. It's an impressive labour of scholarship, of writing, of love.At one level of this multileveled text is an acute study of exile. Not just physical exile (being separated from one's home, one's library, one's neighbourhood), but geographical (he moved restlessly from Austria to Switzerland to England, to the USA, ending in the wilds of Brazil), culturally (cut off from his Austrian roots, cut off from his German reading public); linguistically (he felt alienated from the Nazi use of German; he was forced to speak languages other than his own to survive); politically (all the liberal values he upheld were crumbling under fascism); psychologically (he was a man always in conflict with himself). Given these multiple pressures of exile, it's not hard to understand his periods of depression and his increasing despair as his life drew to an end. The suicide remains a mystery, though. There's a chapter on that, telling how it happened. At the end of the chapter one turns the page and there is a photograph of Zweig and his wife lying dead on the bed together. It was so unexpected and shocking, I gasped when I saw it. I could barely bring myself to look at it, it's so powerful, so chilling. Brilliantly placed by the picture editor.A chronology of his life would have helped, and an index: but one has to accept that this is not a conventional biography. It is a brilliant mix of biography, comment, memoir, autobiography, literary criticism (not much of that, though), essay and cultural history. There is a general movement - or drift - in the larger narrative through to Zweig's later years (the early years, before 1934, are barely sketched in) towards his final resting place, but the narrative jumps from point or fact or event, weaving different perspectives and time periods into one rather dazzling tapestry. On the level of literary art, the text has its own appeal.The last full, conventional biography of Zweig in the English-speaking world, was published over 40 years ago. We've had a recent one from Oliver Matuschek ('Three Lives' 2011) which I did not feel quite rose to the occasion. As I said in my review of that book, Zweig deserves the full biographical treatment, the kind one takes for granted when discussing, say, Henry James, Proust or Thomas Mann. I hope someone is working on that right now. In the meantime, Prochnik's book is the best one available on the subject.

最近よくzweigについての作品を目にしますね。そういえば、昨年も同じような作品( The Last Days )を読みました。もっともそれはあくまでも小説という形態をとっており、その時間的な射程もかなり凝縮されたものでしたが。本作品は、小説ではありません。そして時間は凝縮されることはなくzweigの結婚生活を含めた全生涯を扱っています。ただ著者の視点はzweigの生涯の最後からその生涯を振り返るというbackward interpretationです。最後はというと、いうまでもなく長い亡命生活とその果てのブラジルでの自殺です。物理的な危険からの脱出には成功したzweigですが、その果てにアメリカで待っていた生活というのは予想以上に空虚なものでした。著者はその空虚さの痕跡をzweigの米国での具体的な生活に克明にたどっていきます。そしてそこに浮かび上がるのがドイツオーストリアという文化圏から切断された一群の大陸の知識人たちです。知識人にとって存在の核であるドイツ語という文化から切り離された人々が、アメリカという「善意」の過激派が巣食う場所で感じる違和感というのは、つまるところ彼らにとっての世界の「果て」でもあり、「世界の終り」でもあったわけです。著者の家系史（著者自身が三世のアメリカ人）が示すように、非知識人も避けることのできない疎外を味わいますが、彼らはその「技術」を使い応用し最終的には適用していきます。でもドイツ語とドイツ文化圏にその本質が依拠している知識人にとってはアメリカへの適応は自分の死でもあるわけです。そして自分の最終的なよりどころでもあったドイツ文化圏からは、彼らユダヤ人たちは拒絶されているという二重の疎外の構図になっているわけです。著者はzweigに関係のある様々な場所への訪問（英国のbathやブラジルまでもが含まれています）、そして現在も生存しているzweigの姪とのインタビューも含まれています。そして自分自身の家系のヨーロッパからの逃亡とアメリカでの生活の軌跡もzweigの足跡に絡ませていきます。このような手法が著者自身の想像力の桎梏を超えてどの程度作品として成功しているかについては疑問が残ります。本書の最期に現れる著者のウイーンの古いアパートへの訪問の部分は多分に著者の思い込みが生み出した色彩が濃厚でどうもしっくり来ない部分でもあります。もうこの種の作品に手を出すのはやめた方がいいのかもしれないという読後感が強く残る読書体験でした。 The Last Days

I loved SZ's memoir and reading this just clarified so much that had puzzled me. I feel that it was best to read them in this order to fully appreciate the mood of the first.

Stephan Zweig's life and writings embody humanity's hope for a world a peace, freedom from the pettiness of states' ambitions and the centrality of human achievements, desires, weaknesses and dreams. Living at the time and places he did, he had to be somewhat of a dreamer to maintain this hope. Enjoying the privilege of a large fortune certainly helped but, in the end, reality caught up with him. One wonders whether he would have given up if he had persisted a little longer because, after 1942, arguably the prospects for the world began to look a little brighter...or did they? This a very readable and well researched book because the biographer, while an admirer, is not blind to his subject's weaknesses and blind spots.