Journeys by Stefan Zweig (review)

The publication of Stefan Zweig’s Journeys makes available in English for the first time what translator Will Stone calls a “representative selection of Zweig’s writings on Europe” (xvi). Written over the span of almost half a century and first compiled in German under the title Auf Reisen in 1976, these travel essays reveal Zweig’s gradual identification with what he would come to call a Europe of the spirit. That this identification was a gradual one and not, as Zweig’s own memoir The World of Yesterday suggests, part of the natural habitat for any aspiring writer growing up in cosmopolitan turn-of-the-century Vienna is clearly evident from the earliest essays here included. These essays show a young poet—the genre within which Zweig first rose to fame—eager for his belated share of the Romantics’ Grand Tour yet also particularly struck by the cultural differences among the European nations rather than by their spiritual kinship or unity. Visiting London in 1906, the city where he would go into exile following Hitler’s rise to power, Zweig remarks, for instance, that its streets have no room for “the spectacle of the flâneur” that enlivens the boulevards of Vienna and Paris (32). He goes on to negatively compare Hyde Park to a walk to the Alhambra Palace or the Parisian Parc Monceau, describing its “rhythm” as that of “the Englishman of commerce” (36).

If these early essays seldom transcend the level of the strictly personal, then the later travel impressions adopt a larger and more philosophical perspective, with Zweig developing himself as the traveling spokesman for “our generation.” That generation is one that witnessed the carnage of World War I, an event that as much shaped Zweig’s coming of age as a remembering European—as he famously categorizes himself in the subtitle of The World of Yesterday—as it spelled the end of his beloved Austro-Hungarian empire’s European claims. The fine essay here on the Belgian port city of Antwerp, originally written in 1914, offers a good example of the larger canvas that Zweig sketches in these postwar essays. As Stone points out in his translator’s introduction, Zweig by this point had started work on his biographies of such figures as Erasmus and Balzac, and this biographical research directly informs his travel writings. Much like the Balzac part of Zweig’s Master Builders opens with a bold but well-argued comparison between the literary imperialism of the French author and the actual empire building of his compatriot Napoleon, so Napoleon’s particular obsession with Antwerp provides the occasion for a reflection on this city’s strategic and cultural significance both past and present. Antwerp, so Zweig argues, “seduced [Napoleon] above all with its aura of invincibility, for no siege since the time of the Romans was at that time as famous as that of the Flemish town of which Schiller gave us a classical description” (41). He then goes on to add, between brackets, that “one can only cordially recommend all to reread it today for, by way of chance, present circumstances happily lead us to this great work” (41). If the reference to the ongoing German siege of Antwerp signals Zweig’s growing political consciousness, then the urge to go read Schiller indicates the complementarity of travel and reading in Zweig’s intellectual lobbying for a European brotherhood of the spirit.

The paradox, however—of which Zweig seems to have become increasingly aware in these essays—is that travel as he liked to practice it, free-spirited and on a whim, was more and more disappearing in favor of the “contractual travel” of the modern tourism industry. Like Karl Kraus, whose indignation over World War I “battlefield tours” Stone cites as a possible influence (xii), Zweig fulminates against the tourist masses, “mostly American and English,” who, as he puts it, no longer travel but are being traveled: “For them a mathematical organization has thought of everything in advance, prepared everything; they need search for nothing, figure out nothing...