Zweig, no longer just auxiliary Nietzsche reading

Perhaps only in central Europe, stricken, pulverized and torn out apart by rival totalitarianisms, have what Theodore Dalrymple calls “pre-ideological” intellectuals really become popular heroes in the 20th century, those such as Franz Kafka, Vaclav Havel, and also, perhaps, Stefan Zweig, who seems to be remembered now in America, by myself included, as a somehow important intellectual but only actually read through tangential association with more influential writers, such as his biography of Nietzsche, for example. Dalrymple is evidently out to revive Zweig as a signal beacon for the beleagured minds equally repelled by every ideology, and he further advances, or at least does not refute, Zweig’s own claim that the Viennese milieu before the world wars was the place of greatest freedom in Europe precisely because no formal codification of a particular ideology of freedom existed. Perhaps pre-ideological, after all. While Dalrymple clearly sympathizes with and admires such a view and such a world, the connection between Zweig and Nietzsche is a curious one, because Nietzsche, regardless of the facts of his own life, would almost doubtless have despised utterly both the type of existence that Zweig emulated and the one that he actually conducted, a sort of rootless cosmopolitanism, passive, indecisive, prone to fits of self-martyrization, and above all not so much consciously doubting as merely unsure. Zweig himself mounted a defense of this way of living:

“In wars of ideas, the best combatants are not those who thrust themselves lightly but passionately into battle, but those who hesitate a long time before committing themselves, and whose decision matures slowly. It is only once all possibilities of understanding have been exhausted, and the struggle is unavoidable, that they enter the fight with a heavy heart.”

And in fact his application of this to his relationship to the Nazis, for example, while drawing widespread scorn both at the time and since, is in fact of a very deep kind, though the principal element is undoubtedly weariness:

“it is true that he joined no anti-Nazi groups and hardly raised his voice against the Nazi horror. As a free man, he did not want the Nazis to be able to dictate his mode of expression—even if it were in opposition to them. The insufficiency of this fastidiousness at such a conjuncture needs little emphasis. But Zweig felt—in his own case, since he did not speak for others—that strident denunciation would grant the Nazis a victory of sorts. And—like many intellectuals who overestimate the importance that the intellect plays in history and in life—Zweig viewed the Nazis as beneath contempt. Their doctrine and world outlook being so obviously ridiculous and morally odious, why waste time refuting them?”

Well, so perhaps Zweig was overly content with the impotent intellectual existence that drove Nietzsche to insanity. But it is interesting that while Nietzsche, in succumbing to insanity, essentially surrendered the fight against his intellectual demons, Zweig in fact, by killing himself, was the one who actually took the rote course of existentialist heroes, willing himself out of an existence whose constraints could no longer be suffficiently recompensed for him. Ultimately perhaps Zweig can be judged similarly to the manner in which he judges the main character of his novella Buchmendel:

“Zweig makes it clear that though Buchmendel was eccentric and his life one-dimensional, even stunted, he could offer his unique contribution to Viennese civilization because no one cared about his nationality. His work and knowledge were vastly more important to his cosmopolitan customers than his membership in a collectivity.”

I have no illusions that Vienna before the war was such a paradise as Zweig made it out to be, but at the same time that imagined paradise seems to have found expression and life at least in his own personal existence and in his imagination, which is as far as any of us should seek to inflict our ideals.