Stefan Zweig, Judaism, and the Death of Europe

How One of the 20th Century’s Greatest Writers Mourned the Cultural Suicide of His Spiritual Homeland

In February 1942, Viennese literary behemoth Stefan Zweig committed suicide by barbiturate overdose and was found dead in his Brazilian home, hand in hand with his beloved wife Charlotte Altmann. Despite the detailed account of his inner life that he left in his renowned memoir The World of Yesterday, which he posted to his publisher the day before his death, the circumstances of his suicide remain elusive. As The World of Yesterday’s award-winning translator Anthea Bell observes in her translator’s note, Zweig’s suicide is both unexpected and perplexing. Zweig was one of the 20th century’s most celebrated and translated authors; he rose to worldwide prominence at the age of 19 and enjoyed widespread literary fame throughout his lifetime; he narrowly escaped the Anschluss, relocating to England in 1939 and later settling outside Rio de Janeiro; in The World of Yesterday, he writes of plans to begin a new life abroad, affirming that many books of his remain unwritten in the final pages of his memoir. Why, then, would Zweig, a successful novelist who embodied none of Kafka’s dread or Hemingway’s cognitive decline, choose to prematurely end his life?

A comment on Zweig’s suicide letter makes the somewhat erroneous judgement that Zweig was despondent over the Nazis’ victories in Euope. “Suicide for nothing,” the commenter writes. “3 years later, all of Western Europe was freed from the Nazis.” Anthea Bell puts forth the same theory in her note: Zweig committed suicide because he did not see a way out of the Nazi occupation of Austria and command over greater Europe. Yet it is not solely the Nazi rule of Europe that troubled Zweig, for there is great evidence that Zweig saw hope of liberation. In the final words of his memoir, he writes, “Only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline—only he has truly lived.” As Bell observes, these words are an encomium on the value of life; they are the definition of seeing the silver lining in times of darkness.

Bell thus identifies the most likely cause of Zweig’s death as his hopelessness in the face of cultural decay: it was likely, she speculates, that Zweig did not believe that humanity would be restored to the world in the aftermath of the current bloodshed, regardless of the outcome of the war. Even so, Bell is puzzled, noting that Zweig died before the details of Holocaust concentration camps became known to the general public. His idea of Jewish persecution was not mass murder but a loss of citizenship and other human rights. Furthermore, in December 1941 the United States entered the war, giving the rest of the world hope for a better tomorrow. It was clear, Bell writes, that Nazi Germany would not withstand American intervention and that the war would end in the coming years. And most importantly, Zweig and his wife had escaped. Despite having left everything behind, the Zweigs did not live under the constant threat of persecution and the possibility of death. As Zweig himself notes in his memoir, Brazil was peaceful and welcoming, and, in his suicide note, he thanks the country for its hospitality. It cannot be, then, as Bell observes in her short note, that Zweig was driven to suicide merely by the decay of civilized culture, for he seems to have found precisely that sort of culture in Brazil. Having read The World of Yesterday several times, I concur with Bell’s assessment of Zweig’s despondency over the state of culture, but there is an additional dimension that Bell omits from her analysis. Zweig was not simply lamenting the decay of culture. He was lamenting the decay of European culture.

To Zweig, European culture was not merely a bastion of intellectualism and freedom of expression—it was also uniquely Jewish. In his pithy suicide note, Zweig writes that, though he had been welcomed in Brazil with open arms, his spiritual homeland, Europe, had destroyed itself. Interestingly enough, he does not claim that the Nazis destroyed Europe; instead, he writes, “meine geistige Heimat Europa sich selber vernichtet”: Europe has destroyed itself. Zweig saw the fate of Europe and the dominance of the Nazis as the natural result of the broken Europe that had allowed the Nazi Party to rise in the first place. The motives for his suicide thus likely stemmed from his recognition that the Europe he had once loved had devolved so far that it allowed the Nazis to take power; the Nazi Party, in turn, having undermined the values of liberalism and high culture, had ruined not only Jewish freedom but the intellectual heritage of Europe itself—that is to say that, to Zweig, European intellectual heritage was Jewish. Indeed, in the opening chapter of The World of Yesterday, Zweig identifies the end goal of the “good Jewish family” to be not wealth or professional success but the “rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.” With their focus on intellectual and cultural tradition—the unique facets of European civilization that Zweig admired most—the Jews didn’t just contribute to 20th-century Europe’s intellectual heritage—they created it.

The opening chapter of The World of Yesterday is the most telling in Zweig’s assessment of Jewish contribution to the European—and specifically Viennese—intellectual tradition. And what was Viennese, according to Zweig, was also fundamentally European, for “the genius of Vienna,” he writes, “was always that it harmonized all the national and lingual contrasts. Its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures.” Because the Jews were always outsiders, they created a welcoming space for all cultures to intermingle and “through a miracle of understanding, they gave to what was Austrian, and Viennese, its most intensive expression.” In music, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg pioneered the transition from quintessentially Romantic music to the modernism of the 20th century. In literature, the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler (and Zweig himself, of course), achieved the highest level of spiritual activity. In the university, Sigmund Freud introduced a new dimension of psychological thought that would forever change both the field of psychology and the domain of artistic expression. Zweig does not mention visual art in his assessment of Viennese intellectual heritage, but it was, indeed, also revolutionized through the Jewish spirit of artists such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Richard Gerstl. This was the Europe of late modernity, the period of Zweig’s childhood that would forever shape his understanding of art, culture, and humanity. This was the Europe that Zweig loved. And it had, arguably, been created by the Jews.

When antisemitism thus poisoned the European spirit, it not only created a restrictive societal order where Jews were stripped of their humanity, but it also created a world bereft of intellectual heritage. In Zweig’s eyes, the hallmark of great art was “freedom of thought and action.” Yet barred completely from publication in his home country, Zweig identifies a Europe that has devalued Jewish intellectual expression, and, in so doing, obstructed the creation of a future that values synthesis of Western thought. Indeed, without the Jews, there was no future for Europe.

And Zweig was certainly correct in his foresight. Indeed, today, we live in a world where European culture as Zweig knew it no longer exists. The antisemitism of the Nazi Party has not abated. If anything, it has been fueled by a new fervor, disguised as anti-Zionism, which attempts to similarly bar Jews from creative expression. The notoriously antisemitic Irish author Sally Rooney, for instance, signed a letter calling for a mass boycott of the Israeli publishing industry, effectively silencing the voices of half of the world’s Jewish population. In a gesture that would have been all too familiar to Zweig, many Jews are now ostracized from the publishing world in a manner that is eerily similar to the bans on Jewish writing in the early stages of Hitler’s Germany. Douglas Murray, in the preface to his 2018 book The Strange Death of Europe, observes that the “catastrophe” that Zweig predicted has already come true: in waging war on Judeo-Christian culture, Europeans have created their own demise. French writer Michel Houellebecq warns of a similar dying, antisemitic Europe in his fictional account of a European future in his novel Submission. Indeed, in Houellebecq’s home country of France, antisemitic violence has surged, with high-profile murders targeted specifically at Jews such as Mireille Knoll or Sarah Halimi, contributing to a mass exodus of French Jews and signaling a deteriorating sense of security in the very country Zweig himself admired for its intellectual tradition.

It is undeniable that the Jews are the backbone of European culture, and in the ongoing war against the Jewish people, Europe, indeed, has suicided itself today in much the same way the Zweig predicted nearly a century ago. As we continue to write history, we must pay heed to Zweig’s warning and celebrate the intellectual heritage that the Jews left behind in hopes of reviving a Western world that values true freedom of expression—in hopes of restoring a unique cultural soul that has been relegated to the world of yesterday.

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