European issues that resonate - The Jewish Chronicle

Messages From a Lost World
By Stefan Zweig (Trans: Will Stone)
Pushkin Press, £16.99

Summer Before the Dark
By Volker Weidermann (Trans: Carol Brown Janeway)
Pushkin Press, £12.99

Why is there such a revival of interest in Stefan Zweig? Of course, there is the range and depth of his work and the fascination with Zweig's suicide. But, as John Gray writes in his foreword to Pushkin Press's new selection of Zweig's essays, there is something in his writing that speaks to us today with a new urgency.

Writing in 1940, in one of the pieces in Messages From a Lost World, Zweig talks of Vienna's "place at the heart of European culture." He knew what he meant by "European culture". Today, as governments put up borders against migrants and there are signs of a return of authoritarianism in central Europe we are less sure. These essays speak to this new uncertainty about what we mean by European civilisation.

The crisis of Europe is a recurring theme for Zweig. Writing between 1914-41, he tries to make sense of what has happened to the Europe in which he grew up. In his childhood in late-19th-century Vienna, Europe stood for progress, order, civilisation and "spiritual unity". "Ascent" is a key word.

All of this was blown away in 1914. An essay from 1914 is suddenly full of words like "inferno", "hellish", "diabolical" and "nightmares". Zweig writes about a conflict in European culture between an old, unified civilisation and a rising tide of nationalism, militarism and irrationalism. These essays are not about politics (he barely mentions Hitler or Nazism by name). They are about a crisis of values, a sense of deep cultural pessimism, which darkens through the 1930s.

Volker Weidermann, literary editor at Der Spiegel, brings this sense of crisis to life in his beautifully written book about Zweig and Joseph Roth. Weidermann relates how a remarkable group of Jewish refugees come together in Ostend in the summer of 1936. Along with Zweig and Roth, it includes Arthur Koestler, Ernst Toller and others.

Zweig is at the height of his fame: "His name," writes Weidermann, "is as internationally famous as that of Thomas Mann, his books outsell those of any other German author." Roth grew up a fatherless Jew from Galicia. By 1936, he is desperate, alcoholic, faced with poverty and consumed with rage.

Roth looks to Zweig for financial and moral support. Zweig admires the younger writer and they develop a close literary collaboration. Roth (author, four years earlier of The Radetzky March) is a great writer, too, but he offers Zweig something else, a feel for the vanishing Jewish world of east Europe.

Weidermann brings this world alive just as it faces collapse; 1936 is the year of the Berlin Olympics, the start of the Spanish Civil War, a time when German publishing houses close their doors even to Zweig. Writers are looking anxiously beyond Europe to America.

It is a fascinating story, brilliantly told. These writers come together for a summer and then move on, providing a snapshot of the desperate situation of the mid-1930s.

Both of these books speak to us about Europe on the brink of catastrophe. Most disturbingly, they don't feel at all out of date. With their talk of impending tragedy and refugees they feel strangely topical.

David Herman is the JC's senior
fiction reviewer