The World of Yesterday

Zweig on von Hofmannsthal

Author

Anne Cunningham
February 23, 2024

I am in the midst of reading Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. It is a beautiful and devastating account of a life in the arts in a lost Vienna. Zweig tapped into decades of memories to conjure up a kaleidoscopic portrait of his hometown after being chased out of it by the Nazis, and as you read every page you think about the fact that he killed himself upon finishing it.

The heavy emotional weight of it makes it somewhat challenging to read at a regular pace. I keep having to put it down after a particularly harrowing line.

I read Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna in college, where Zweig makes an appearance, though more in the citations than the text itself. Schorske seemed to borrow or critique Zweig’s vibe more than he engaged with his writing or place in Vienna’s history. So I was familiar with Zweig as a kind of specter over the Vienna of the imagination, but not as an author in his own right. Most of his work was out of print in the US and the UK until the 1990s, so English translations of it were hard to come by at the time I first heard his name.

The Vienna of Zweig’s youth was defined by the arts. The Hapsburg monarchy in its slow decline was not known for its military prowess, so it promoted stability and a love of music and theater and a general sense of the good life. And as Hapsburg patronage petered out, the Jewish bourgeoisie of the city stepped into the breach. They wanted to become true Austrians, and saw no better way than supporting the city’s opera house, its theaters, and its artists and musicians. As Zweig points out, they poured their whole beings into the cultural life of Vienna, and were rewarded by forced emigration and murder.

I was struck by Zweig’s discussion of the poet, novelist, and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who made a tremendous impression on him when he was still at school. If the Vienna of his early years had a fault, it was its stodginess and conservatism; the appeal of Hofmannsthal was the passionate intensity and fullness of his talent in his youth:

The appearance of young Hofmannsthal is and will remain remarkable as one of the great miracles of early perfection. I know no other example in world literature, except in Keats and Rimbaud, of similar infallibility in the master of language at such a young age, of such a breadth of inspired ideas, such a mind, full of poetic substance even in the least of his lines, as in that great genius, who had written his way into the eternal annals of the German language in his sixteenth and seventeenth year with imperishable verse and prose that is still unrivalled today.

Hofmannsthal had to publish his first pieces under the pseudonym “Loris” because schoolboys were not allowed to appear under their own names. Hermann Bahr, the editor of the journal acquiring Loris’ pieces, was astonished to meet the fresh-faced boy in short trousers who showed up at the café for an appointment to discuss the next issue. He thought Loris had to be an old man, because of the variety of his references.

Zweig explains the effect of Hofmannsthal’s youth on his own cohort of aspiring artists:

Without hoping that any of us could ever emulate the miracle of Hofmannsthal, we were invigorated merely by his physical existence. It was visible evidence that there could still be a writer of distinction in our own time, our own environment. After all, his father, a bank manager, came from the same Jewish middle class as the rest of us; the genius had grown up in a home like ours, with the same furnishings and the same moral principles as other people of our social class. He had attended an equally tedious grammar school; he had learned from the same textbooks and spent eight years wearing the seat of his trousers out on the same wooden benches; he was as impatient as we were, as passionately devoted to all intellectual values. And lo and behold, even when he was still sitting on those benches and having to trot around the gymnasium, he had succeeded surmounting the constraints of school, family and the city by virtue of that rise to boundless heights.

It is one of the more vivid accounts of the effects of representation that I have ever read. It made me wonder how it might have been different for a girl in the audience of one of Hofmannsthal’s readings. How much of ambition is example? And not just example but tangible likeness. Down to seeing how you wear your short trousers out in the same way.

I am only scratching the surface here on my impressions of the book. It is sad, but also heady. I will be back with more.