Three Lives A Biography of Stefan Zweig by Oliver Matuschek

Author:Oliver Matuschek
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781906548957
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Seeing the photographs later, I realised that the road we had travelled together was the very one where the murderers lay in wait, not long afterwards, for the same car: it was only by chance, really, that I was not on the scene to witness this historically fateful act at first hand. So I felt a more directly personal and emotional connection with the tragic episode that marked the beginning of Germany’s—and Europe’s—calamity.29

The mood of unrest in Germany was making Zweig increasingly watchful and suspicious. This time he had made early arrangements to avoid the summer festival season, planning a trip to the North Sea that would get him away from Salzburg for a good two weeks from the middle of August. His itinerary would take him via Munich and the obligatory visit to his publishers in Leipzig to Hamburg and finally on to Westerland on the island of Sylt. Victor Fleischer had suggested a change of destination, proposing that they spend some time together on Langeoog. But Zweig had evidently heard a report of anti-Semitic demonstrations taking place on this same East Frisian island. Just a few days after the assassination of Rathenau he wrote to his friend Fleischer and rejected his alternative travel suggestions, offering his own view of contemporary events and a disturbing forecast of what was to come:

I can’t bear to be anywhere near these Pan-German louts. Give me Frankfurt Jews, give me Norderney any day, rather than the cast of mind that could murder a man like Rathenau and then send anonymous letters to his seventy-five-year-old mother, mocking her even as she mourns the death of her only son. These people are the scum of the earth! And the saddest thing of all is that they will succeed in their aims once again—just as they got their U-boat war and succeeded in prolonging the war itself, they will plunge us all into a new war. They’ll stay safely back behind the lines again while the young lads are mown down: in France the whole country is on a war footing. All the signs are there. Things are going to get rough.

So L[angeoog] is not on. I’m not going to excuse myself and be “tolerated”, especially when I’m paying good money. I’d rather go to a spa with 700,000 Galician Jews! I can do without that—I’d rather go to Marienbad or Italy, if I can’t find the right thing here. If I’m breathing the same air as them, they’re stinking out the whole of nature for me—I feel for this lot what I normally don’t allow myself to feel—utter hatred.30

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