The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World by George Prochnik (review)

The last few years have seen a renewed surge of academic and non-academic interest in the life and works of Stefan Zweig. In The Impossible Exile, George Prochnik provides a new biographical account of Zweig, the first such study to appear in English since Donald Prater’s landmark biography Stefan Zweig: European of Yesterday (1972). Prochnik’s evocation of Zweig as “the quintessential exile manqué” proves a fertile ground for a reconsideration of this most famous author of his age, one whose life ended so infamously, with a suicide pact in a post-imperial outpost near the Brazilian jungle.

“What makes the good exile?” Prochnik asks at the outset of his book, duly noting that the trauma of dislocation that haunted the likes of Zweig and Bertolt Brecht in the new world was felt to a much lesser extent by other European war exiles who, like Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt, would eventually thrive across the Atlantic. The difference in age (Zweig was just short of sixty when he permanently left Britain for the Americas; Marcuse and Arendt were in their thirties when they went into exile) can only account for so much of that dissimilarity once one considers that quite a few other authors of Zweig’s own generation, most notably Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, did successfully reestablish themselves as teachers within the American university system.

In order to answer his own question, Prochnik takes the reader on a well-documented tour through various significant places and moments of Zweig’s decade-long exile in Britain (his first destination after leaving Austria in 1934), the United States, and Brazil. There are mandatory stops at the countryside house in Bath where the pastoral surroundings inspired Zweig to write an essay on the relationship between English calm and the national propensity for gardening; at the Wyndham Hotel in New York City where, in June 1941, Zweig threw a cocktail party for the many exiled European intellectuals that had descended on Manhattan; at the house in upstate New York where, in a weeks-long frenzy of sometimes seventy pages a week, he drafted his autobiography; and, finally, at the fated rental bungalow where he and his second wife, Lotte, took a lethal dose of veronal in February 1942.

If travel had long been a favorite pastime of the financially and commercially privileged Zweig (the publication of his first volume of poems in 1902 established him overnight as one of Vienna’s literary stars), it took on a distinctly different tone in the final decade of his life, when, due to the ever-worsening political situation on the continent, he saw himself forced to keep moving. To his own astonishment, this pacifist and universal lover of mankind saw himself branded an “enemy alien” once England declared war on Nazi Germany. In one of the many letters on exile cited by Prochnik, Zweig remarks on his inability to reconcile the person in his passport with his own current sense of self. “The more proof of who he was he had to carry around with him,” Prochnik writes, “the less he felt like himself.”

A crisis of identity, then, is at the root of Zweig’s inability to become at home within homelessness. As Prochnik duly notes, aspects of this crisis included both the sense in which Zweig saw himself stripped of his former identity—as in the newfound ambivalence that characterized his relationship to the Nazi-tarnished German language—but also the way in which the specter of exile imposed a group identity on a writer for whom freedom and individuality had always been all. Exile, Prochnik writes, made the likes of Zweig “lose their class immunity,” incorporating them into a larger subaltern category of bereft refugees. Even though Zweig had often written lovingly about the downtrodden and continued to mine his connections to help friends and acquaintances get out of Europe, the unprecedented demands placed on...