A GOOD EUROPEAN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4559, 13 April 1942, Page 6

A GOOD EUROPEAN

STEFAN ZWEIG’S WORK AND TRAGEDY

REMARKABLE CAREER

(By

H.M.)

The death of Stefan Zweig, the diSt tinguished Austrian author, in tragic circumstances in South America recently is one more reminder that the black forces of reaction now engulfing the world have been responsible for striking down many of Europe's noblest spirits.

Zweig was one of that fine, sensitive band of men and women driven out of Europe by the savagery of the Nazis. Men like Zweig, Thomas Mann, and Einstein were among the best elements in pre-war Europe. They were fired with teh passionate idealism of the saying that “ they best love Europe who love in Europe only what is best.”

Such men (and women) contributed that clear-cut thinking which gave structure to intellectual creation. They had in extraordinary measure the wealth of mind, the quickness of heart and sense, the acuteness and

comprehensiveness of imagination which made whatever was abstract, concrete, and human and positive, which brought philosophy from the clouds to the service of the people, and yet left unimpaired the winged power which sees all things with larger, dther eyes than ours. These men represented the hope for a better, saner Europe, for they believed, with Wordsworth: By the soul Only the nations shall be great and free. And now another of them, Stefan Zweig, has gone, destroyed by his own hand, because he could not bear any longer the rack and anguish of this vale of tears; could not contemplate any longer the senseless horrors that disgrace Europe to-day. In his farewell letter Zweig said: “ I saw my country fall and my spiritual land, Europe, destroying itself, and, as I reach the age of sixty, it would require immense strength to re-construct my life.” THE SECOND SHOCK Before Zweig is judged it should be

known that once before in his life he had to carry out such a re-construc-tion. Born of Jewish parents in Vienna in 1881, he was well educated, and published two volumes of verse during his university career. He travelled extensively, finding companionship in Rome, Paris, London, Florence, and Berlin. The shock of the last war brought to Zweig the same crisis as he faced in 1938, when the Nazis occupied his homeland and "publicly burnt his books. He faced it in 1914-18 because he was in the transitional thirties, and when the world was overthrown and little remained; he was re-made by the experience, and at its conclusion spiritually reintegrated. A new life undreamed of dawned before him—a life of conscious literary endeavour. He deserted his beloved Vienna, settled in the beautiful Austrian town of Salzburg (home of Mozart .and Reinhardt), and proceeded to carry out a literary programme that made him a conspicuous figure in Continental letters. His works were translated into several languages, including English. A volume in French, with an introduction by Romain Holland, appeared, and his complete works were published in Russian with an introduction by Maxim Gorky. There were two phases of literary achievement in which Zweig excelled: biography and psychological stories. These had popular as well as intellectual appeal, for they had qualities above the ordinary. To his biographical studies he brought compassion, understanding, of character, and an intense, vital sense of .expression. In his psychological stories he succeeded in a form of fiction most rare in its perfect presentation. To show the processes of reasoning, the inter-play of motive, the power of feeling acting upon feeling, and the intricate combination of these, calls for the most clear-sighted understanding of man and a most sensitive skill in any other form of literary endeavour, must the author blend artistically the real and the ideal. A MASTERLY STUDY The main work done by Zweig in this field was “ Beware of Pity,” a masterly psychological study of the disastrous predicament in which a young officer of the Austro-Hungarian army places himself by his pity for a crippled girl. The author dissects the psychological situation "with wonderful skill. This book bears an acute

sense of life; the reader feels it has been drawn from vital sources. It is real and intensely alive in every page. “ Conflicts,” three psychological studies of novelette length based on a motive furnished by a morbid sex lure, and “ Amok,” a short novel telling the tragic fate 4 * of a white man in the Dutch East Indies, are two other striking ventures into the same realm. Of his biographical books, “ Marie Antoinette ” is outstanding for the penetrating portrait it gives of an average woman who had greatness thrust upon her. “ Joseph Fouche ” is a biography of the politician who rose to power in the time of the French Revolution and became Minister of Police under Napoleon, and whose ability to shift sides at opportune moments amounted almost to geniusin “ Adepts in Self-Portraiture ” Zweig held up to the mirror of their own writings Casanova, Stendhal, and Tolstoy, while in “ Three Masters' ” he gave short interpretative sketches of the lives and works of .three men whom he considered “ the supremely great novelists of the nineteenth century, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky.”

Other books written by Stefan Zweig included “ Mental Healers ” (studies of Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, and Freud),Mary Queen of Scots,” “ The Right to Heresy ” (Castellio against Calvin), “Erasmus,” and a modern adaptation of Ben Jon--.on’s famous comedy “Volpone,” which has been produced in Germany, all over Central Europe, and in America. He also wrote “ Jeremiah ” (a drama), and an excellent biography of another good European like himself, “ Romain Holland.”

“ A Good European ” is indeed the most apt description that can be applied to Stefan Zweig.