It's worth noting that the European Jewish community has never recovered from the Holocaust and what is left of it is numerically insignificant. I say this as someone writing from one of the few European Jewish communities not directly affected by the Holocaust. Any revived European culture will be largely bereft of direct Jewish contributions, even if it is influenced by earlier Jewish art.
👏👏👏👏👏👏 A fifteen-minute standing ovation for this Pulitzer Prize worthy article, Liza! Not that it’s the first one by you but this is amazing writing and the point behind it is so sad but true! Truly Liza you are one of the great intellectuals of our time! Stefan Zweig himself would’ve teared up with gratitude and happiness reading it! The article is like a modern version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It’s a warning to us all about the cultural decay and antisemitism that is driving the decline of Europe and the West and that something needs to be done to roll it back and restore Europe’s Jewish cultural and intellectual tradition!
RIP Stefan Zweig and Charlotte Altmann! May both their memories be a blessing! May they fly high with the angels in heaven! Mr. Zweig foresaw the malaise that the continent finds itself in today. Sadly, the Nazis were only the beginning in a sense. For antisemitism on the continent and the corrosion of Europe and its culture had only just begun. Today we see a Europe where fertility rates are plummeting, the family is broken, political polarization and tribalism are tearing society apart, the press is totally untrustworthy, the wealthy elites have co-opted the political system to do their bidding, a new generation of weak and feckless politicians runs the show, mass immigration, identity politics and political correctness plague every nation, young people are committing suicide at alarming rates and are more miserable, lonely and rootless than ever, their militaries are weak and underfunded, and the Jewish people and Israel are under attack on all sides.
Antisemitism has skyrocket to 1930s levels in Europe and antisemitic boycotts like the one you describe by antisemite and radical leftist author Sally Rooney are widespread. Israel’s very existence is questioned and the Jewish state is slandered and libeled as an “Apartheid state.” Never mind nothing even remotely close to that exists in Israel or the occupied West Bank. Israel is accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Never mind that the former is downright false and the latter couldn’t be further from the truth. Israel takes extraordinary measures to protect civilians in wartime. Oh yeah, the Israeli Arab and Palestinian populations are also growing, so if it’s a genocide, it’s the worst genocide ever!
Jews are targeted for verbal and written harassment, threats, being physically attacked in the streets, spat on, having their shops and homes vandalized, and their property destroyed or stolen. Especially if they are in Arab or Turkish communities, they’ll want to avoid wearing their Kippa or Star of David necklace. Sadly, Zweig was essentially a profit who foresaw what would be to come in the next century. Europe’s intellectual and cultural foundations were built to a large extent, by its Jewish community. It is time we showed appreciation for that and that we heed Zweig’s words and take steps to reverse Europe’s social, political, economic, and cultural decline! It is time for a second Renaissance!
I think the rumors of Europe’s death have been greatly exaggerated and it can weather the current storm. But action must be taken now to treat what ails it. First off, a whole new generation of European political leaders who take after the likes of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer must be elected. Mass immigration legal and illegal, must be brought to a permanent halt. Every European nation must pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation, assimilation must be pushed hard, accepting the culture and values of the host country emphasized, newcomers must follow the laws of that country, and patriotism should be promoted among new immigrants to Europe. Mass deportations of illegal immigrants should commence immediately. Every European country should build a border fence and put the military on the border. Immigrants who can’t accept Jewish life in Europe or whom have been convicted of a crime should be deported. Lastly, the rules for who can claim asylum should be tightened.
Europe should undergo a massive cultural and spiritual resistance with a revolution in music, art, literature, philosophy, and poetry. The nuclear family should be restored, divorce rates brought down, marriage rates brought up, and the birth rate of every European country should be brought up to 2.1. More money should be put into mental health care and social events should be created where young people can make friends or meet their future wife or husband. There would also be events like these for LGBT folks too. The inner cities should be cleaned up and government programs started to lift immigrants and minorities out of poverty and help them become Middle Class. All European nations will increase defense spending and the size of their militaries ten-fold.
Aggressive measures will be taken to combat antisemitism and every European nation will declare itself in support of Israel and sign defense pacts with it while also supporting the Palestinian people and their aspirations for statehood under a government that isn’t Fatah or Hamas. All European states will declare their support for the two-state solution and an Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. Pro-Palestinian and Pro-Hamas protests will be not banned, but regulated.
Organized religion will make a huge comeback and churches will begin to fill up again with worshippers. This is already gradually starting to happen as I understand it. The European Union should be reformed and Britain should trash Brexit and return to it. Europe needs to be united as one now more than ever. A peace agreement should be immediately negotiated between Ukraine and Russia.
These are all the ways we can restore Europe and rescue the western intellectual tradition the Jewish people gifted us with centuries ago. I say to Stefan Zweig up there in heaven: you will never be forgotten and we hear you and rest assured there are many of us who care and want to restore Europe to the continent you remember. The western intellectual tradition will survive Mr. Zweig! God bless the Jews of Europe! God bless Europe! Liza Libes has blown me away and made my jaw drop once again. T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner and Edith Wharton would be so proud of you, Liza!
There is a very interesting correspondence between Zweig and his close friend Richard Strauss (Zweig wrote librettos for his operas). Strauss was never a Nazi sympathiser, but was always rather complacent and "apolytical", and kept being the director of the Reichsmusikkammer well into the 1930s. If you get a chance, I recommend reading their letters to each other, they remind me a lot of my own conversations with some of my friends.
I think you are being very generous to Richard Strauss though (as he is to himself in his letters). Strauss was happy to take opportunities from the Third Reich that others (Walter, Klemperer, Toscanini) wouldn't. He signed the manifesto against Thomas Mann. The Reichsmusikkammer was founded by Goebbels in 1933 and Strauss was appointed as its first president.
His post-war defence, basically that he wasn't a fascist but merely a careerist, might be credible but is hardly laudable.
This is a very interesting (and relevant to the modern times) conversation. Martin, I have the luxury of being on your side here. I don't think that any form of collaboration with a totalitarian regime would be acceptable for me.
However, I know people who live in Russia and continue to do so, and to work and pay taxes there. I cannot agree with their choice, but I try to understand that there are many possible circumstances there. Some people cannot leave the country because their loved ones are immovable. Some people are held hostage in a variety of ways.
We know a lot about Strauss, but we were never privy to his conversations with Goebbels, and the conditions of him working in the Reichsmusikkammer. I don't agree with his choices, but I have some empathy towards his position.
Now wait a minute: didn't Strauss have half-Jewish grandchildren he was desperate to protect? You do what you need to do to protect your own grandchildren. And he did, in fact, insist on working with Zweig, even though the Nazis would certainly have preferred an "Aryan."
I find it hard to accept that becoming the figurehead of Nazi music was the only choice available to wealthy and world famous Richard Strauss to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice, in 1933.
In March 1933 Joseph Goebbels warned/threatened the Berlin Philharmonic that there would be violence in the concert hall if Jewish maestro Bruno Walter was allowed to conduct. Walter withdrew. Embarrassingly, the authorities struggled to find a replacement. Who would want to benefit from, and tacitly endorse, such blunt antisemitism? Even Wilhelm Furtwangler rejected it. Richard Strauss stepped in.
When Strauss was fired as Reichsmusikkammer president in 1935 over his correspondence with Zweig he started to realise what he'd gotten into and who he was dealing with. From this point, he was motivated by protecting his family and his options had narrowed. He was able to use his connections to keep Alice and his grandchildren under house arrest and out of the camps, but not Alice's Jewish family. They were murdered in Theresienstadt.
In the early 30s the Nazis wanted to increase government funding for musicians and to restore works of the Wagnerian German tradition (such as those of Richard Strauss) to centrality in the repertoire. Richard Strauss was very much in favour of both, and in fact brought this up in his 1948 denazification tribunal (he was cleared).
I think he was so dazzled by those lights that he failed to see where the train was going.
Thank you for your reply. Re: "I think he was so dazzled by those lights that he failed to see where the train was going." Well, that says it all, doesn't it? He didn't see where the train was going. And neither did plenty of other people, because it wasn't, in fact, obvious at the time. I mean, take a look at the way that black Americans were treated at the time. Pretty appalling, wouldn't you say? And that did not, in fact, lead to gas chambers. And as you yourself say:
"When Strauss was fired as Reichsmusikkammer president in 1935 over his correspondence with Zweig he started to realise what he'd gotten into and who he was dealing with. From this point, he was motivated by protecting his family and his options had narrowed. He was able to use his connections to keep Alice and his grandchildren under house arrest and out of the camps, but not Alice's Jewish family. They were murdered in Theresienstadt."
There you have it. And 1935 is actually pretty early to start realizing where the whole thing was going (it was before Kristallnacht, after all).
I wonder about the suicide...as somebody who wonders about suicides...letter and all...what a deep desperation must that be, and how very sharp the pain -or maybe the vastness of the emptiness ahead, I don't know. What I do know though -it can be really hard knowing you stayed alive, while others didn't.
This is a very interesting read. I had spent the last few months of my life in Brussels, Belgium and I am leaving next week. It has become perhaps the greatest symbol of European cultural decay and for sure the greatest bastion of antisemitism.
I am going back to my home country, Brazil. My only point of disagreement with Stefan Zweig is that it could be described as "civilized" or anything remotely close. I want to come back to Europe as soon as I can as I think it is worth fighting for.
It's an awkward and antagonistic observation, for many people, but it seems that: a culture without a discrete identity and innate pride, enough children, religion, or hope for the future AS THAT CULTURE will quickly wilt and die. The people who don't want to hear that are precisely the people who seem to be arguing that these things don't matter. Pride? We can replace it with inclusivity and relativism. Children? We can replace them with individual choice and consumerism. Religion? We can replace it with 'spirituality' and pop psychology. Hope? We can replace that with zeal for change and reform. I don't think there's any evidence that these things are adequate substitutes though. They're actually part of the problem. The funny thing is that no one is claiming that Europe is well, or thriving, or robust. They just imply that it's inappropriate to ask such questions.
Your formulation of European = Jewish is very close to the formulation used by Nazis and today's EU- and Soros-hating nationalists. I don't say that to criticize the formulation, but I'd like to ground it in the historical experience of Jews as successful, urban minority in an age of nationalisms. Of course some of them are well-positioned to advocate being more "Cosmopolitan" than your average citizen, more likely to articulate an alternative to the strong gods of faith, community and fatherland. As a cosmopolitan myself, I think this is a valuable perspective, though it is being strongly contested at the moment.
I think there's sort of a balance between cosmopolitanism and the 'strong gods', and we've swung too far toward cosmopolitanism and that's why the birth rate is falling. That doesn't mean cosmopolitanism is all bad or that more of it isn't necessary in certain time periods.
I agree that the anti-nationalism, anti-majority left has gone overboard in the last decade. I imagine most people subscribed here do. And I wouldn't have had to move to rainy Oregon if sunny California actually allowed houses to be built. It should be easier to have kids. And the rightwing in Poland and Hungary have been successful in prioritizing that. I hope Democrats here do that, too. The rightwing should not own the pro-natalist position. Russia, after all, is the closest we have to rightwing paradise, and the birthrate there is abysmal.
To get a really good answer, you'd have to ask a postliberal rightwinger. Or read N.S. Lyons on substack. But as far as I can tell, it's because Russia has a king and a single church subordinate to the state, and because the FSB has adroitly positioned Russia as the antidote to both Western wokeness and the alliance of liberal democracies that boxed in autocrats since WW II but has also been expensive for America, which has taken on a leadership position that led them to fight a bunch of disastrous wars in the last couple decades.
Thanks Matt. I hadn't read any N.S. Lyons. I've read quite a bit in the last hour and I better understand 'strong gods'.
In my (dated) conception of left/right it had something to do with the individual and the state. That's why I find it super hard to conceive how somewhere with so little concern for the rights of the individual as does Putin's Russia can be positively regarded by anyone on the right.
I used to be a regular business traveller to Moscow. I haven't visited since 2022 when the Russian offices were closed and everyone laid off in order to avoid delivering up 10% of the workforce for compulsory military service. Everyone I knew in Russia has fled (US, UK and Israel), the last literally jumping off the Kaliningrad train in Vilnius to illegally escape through Lithuania (the train physically stopped even though it wasn't a "stop")
It's astonishing to me that in some sectors of option Putin seems to get a hall pass simply by being 'anti-woke'
I share your astonishment. Getting old is above all, strange. Who in 1980 would have guessed that a faction of conservatives that would dominate the federal government in 2025 would admire Russia?
Totalitarian states, whether left or right at the beginning, mirror each other. Ask the people of Eastern Europe who weathered both the Nazis and the Russians.
When I think of Zweig, I also think of Walter Benjamin, another genius who ended his life because he saw no way out. Yet Zweig’s death feels even sadder to me. Benjamin was trapped, physically and politically, at a closed border. Zweig, by contrast, was safe, welcomed, and materially secure in Brazil. His despair ran deeper, it wasn't driven by immediate danger but by a profound sense of cultural and civilisational disintegration.
BS”D: Dear Liza, I agree with your father that your article is well and cogently written, but I can’t accept your explanation of Zweig's suicide. A man does not, as a rule, kill himself unless threatened in life, livelihood, or reputation – including his own self-esteem. A man doesn't kill himself (and his wife, too, by the way) over the realization that the degeneration of Europe has “devalued Jewish intellectual expression and “obstructed . . . the synthesis of Western Thought.” You write that Zweig realized, to his dismay, that “without the Jews, there was no future for Europe." No, Liza. He realized that without Jewish intellectual expression, there would be no more Jews and no more Judaism! He saw, at the last, that the "synthesis of Western Thought" for which he had worked so enthusiastically during his literary life, had not only turned into abject barbarism, but had set the stage and provided the props for the annihilation of his own People.
Read again the last chapter of The World of Yesterday, "The Agony of Peace". It is clear from Zweig’s telling, that Freud's agonizing repudiation of his final work, Moses and Monotheism (confessed personally to Zweig) made a deep impression on Zweig. Freud, he writes, "had presented Moses as a non-Jew, an Egyptian, thus giving offense by this allocation of dubious scientific worth to devout Jews and to those holding the nationalist ideal. He had come to regret having published the book right in the most terrible hour of Jewry. ‘Now that everything is being taken from them, I had to go and take their best man!’” (page. 424, U. Nebraska Press).
As Harry Zohn writes in his Introduction to the Nebraska Press edition, “Zweig did not derive spiritual sustenance from Judaism. His religion was Europe.” However, cautions Zohn, “he never renounced his Jewish faith or repudiated his Jewish background and associations.” He was not blind to the horrendous plight of his brethren, nor deaf to their cries. Read again his vivid description of Jewish suffering under the Nazis! Nor had the memory of Freud’s agonizing confession faded in Zweig’s memory. Well then, had Zweig not done to his brethren essentially what Freud had done? Had he not, like countless other Jews seduced by the intellectual and artistic brilliance of the Enlightenment, turned his back on the timeless effulgence of his own neglected Jewish Heritage to assume the mantle of modern, Europeanized Jew? And now, here he was again, safe and sound in Brazil, immersing himself in Montaigne, starting a new novel, preparing to resume his biography of Balzac!
The awakening must have hit him hard. He and his wife were not the only refugees in Brazil. He could not have escaped the flow of refugees carrying fresh news, fresh reports, fresh wounds, rumors and corroborations of arrests, roundups, transports, camps, mass executions. Freud had repudiated one book. Was Zweig now to repudiate his whole life?
It is curious to point out that neither you, Liza, nor the so-far 35 commenters to your good article – that not one of you seems to have noticed that Zweig's suicide note contains not one thank-you, not even a grateful mention - to the faithful wife who joined him in this wanton, desperate act of characteristically European Sturm und Drang. I point this out not to judge a great man facing his tragic moment of truth, but merely to draw attention to the utterly distraught and self-obsessed state of mind in which Zweig - notwithstanding all the opportunities open to him - chose to condemn himself and his life-companion to an ignominious death - a death he clearly regarded as less dishonorable than continuing to live in irremediable shame and regret.
So, Liza, that is why I am unable to accept your version of the end of Zweig. He certainly would have agreed with you that the European culture he believed in was gone forever, but he never would have accepted your proposition that the intellectual heritage of Europe – as beautiful and great and attractive as it was - was “Jewish.” It wasn’t, and it isn’t.
I hope that you may see our approaching Festival of Pesach as an opportunity to participate in one of the many kosher communal Sedarim that will be available to you. It is a time specifically designed by our ancient Sages, not only to renew and reinforce our Jewish consciousness, but to bring Jewish children and uninitiated Jews to a basic, hands-on encounter with the origins and mysteries of our incomparable spiritual Heritage.
Wishing you and your Jewish followers a “Fraylichen Kosher Pesach!”
I hope all of Europe, Ireland especially, is taken over by Islamists. It’s already happening. The countries in middle Europe couldn’t exterminate or deport their Jews fast enough. The Jews themselves only wanted to be left alone or to join society peacefully. Well now they are full of Muslims who are not assimilating. Too damm sad. And Sally Rooney- I hope you are forced to wear hijab.
I read the post at your dad's recommendation. It illuminated some thoughts I have had about what happened to Europe in the post-war period, or as you suggest, even earlier. Good job.
This is a great article Liza. I have been questioning why Zweig felt the need to end himself for a while especially when you consider that the end of his memoir does not read like a suicide note. So thank you for your psychological insight.
I think you make some good points in the article and you are right when you say that the problems Zweig warns about have not gone away. Wish I had some comprehensive solution for the issues you raised but alas I am no statesman.
Side note I read world of yesterday and absolutely loved it. Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
I don't know what K-12 public schools and universities in New York City are teaching these days, but in the 1960s and early 1970s English teachers only taught works written in English. I read French, German and Russian writers on my own, but I didn't hear about Zweig until about a decade ago, when a cousin gave me Zweig's hardcover "Collected Stories" (translated by Anthea Bell)(over 700 pages). I liked 16 of the 22 stories, some very much. Later I read Zweig's Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan (published 1938) (translated by Eden & Cedar Paul), a very well written and researched biography including maps and illustrations. While it's unclear why Zweig and his much younger wife reportedly overdosed on "Veronal," he had just completed a novella called Chess Story the day before about a man confined to a hotel room by the Gestapo with nothing to see or do, and not even a pen to write (Muhlstein, New York Review, May 8, 2014, p. 13 ff). The world looked very ugly to Jews in February 1942, even from the possibly transient refuge of Brazil.
I am reasonably well educated, but I never heard of Zweig before I stumbled across The World of Yesterday in a used book store. What made him disappear from general view?
It's worth noting that the European Jewish community has never recovered from the Holocaust and what is left of it is numerically insignificant. I say this as someone writing from one of the few European Jewish communities not directly affected by the Holocaust. Any revived European culture will be largely bereft of direct Jewish contributions, even if it is influenced by earlier Jewish art.
👏👏👏👏👏👏 A fifteen-minute standing ovation for this Pulitzer Prize worthy article, Liza! Not that it’s the first one by you but this is amazing writing and the point behind it is so sad but true! Truly Liza you are one of the great intellectuals of our time! Stefan Zweig himself would’ve teared up with gratitude and happiness reading it! The article is like a modern version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It’s a warning to us all about the cultural decay and antisemitism that is driving the decline of Europe and the West and that something needs to be done to roll it back and restore Europe’s Jewish cultural and intellectual tradition!
RIP Stefan Zweig and Charlotte Altmann! May both their memories be a blessing! May they fly high with the angels in heaven! Mr. Zweig foresaw the malaise that the continent finds itself in today. Sadly, the Nazis were only the beginning in a sense. For antisemitism on the continent and the corrosion of Europe and its culture had only just begun. Today we see a Europe where fertility rates are plummeting, the family is broken, political polarization and tribalism are tearing society apart, the press is totally untrustworthy, the wealthy elites have co-opted the political system to do their bidding, a new generation of weak and feckless politicians runs the show, mass immigration, identity politics and political correctness plague every nation, young people are committing suicide at alarming rates and are more miserable, lonely and rootless than ever, their militaries are weak and underfunded, and the Jewish people and Israel are under attack on all sides.
Antisemitism has skyrocket to 1930s levels in Europe and antisemitic boycotts like the one you describe by antisemite and radical leftist author Sally Rooney are widespread. Israel’s very existence is questioned and the Jewish state is slandered and libeled as an “Apartheid state.” Never mind nothing even remotely close to that exists in Israel or the occupied West Bank. Israel is accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Never mind that the former is downright false and the latter couldn’t be further from the truth. Israel takes extraordinary measures to protect civilians in wartime. Oh yeah, the Israeli Arab and Palestinian populations are also growing, so if it’s a genocide, it’s the worst genocide ever!
Jews are targeted for verbal and written harassment, threats, being physically attacked in the streets, spat on, having their shops and homes vandalized, and their property destroyed or stolen. Especially if they are in Arab or Turkish communities, they’ll want to avoid wearing their Kippa or Star of David necklace. Sadly, Zweig was essentially a profit who foresaw what would be to come in the next century. Europe’s intellectual and cultural foundations were built to a large extent, by its Jewish community. It is time we showed appreciation for that and that we heed Zweig’s words and take steps to reverse Europe’s social, political, economic, and cultural decline! It is time for a second Renaissance!
I think the rumors of Europe’s death have been greatly exaggerated and it can weather the current storm. But action must be taken now to treat what ails it. First off, a whole new generation of European political leaders who take after the likes of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer must be elected. Mass immigration legal and illegal, must be brought to a permanent halt. Every European nation must pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation, assimilation must be pushed hard, accepting the culture and values of the host country emphasized, newcomers must follow the laws of that country, and patriotism should be promoted among new immigrants to Europe. Mass deportations of illegal immigrants should commence immediately. Every European country should build a border fence and put the military on the border. Immigrants who can’t accept Jewish life in Europe or whom have been convicted of a crime should be deported. Lastly, the rules for who can claim asylum should be tightened.
Europe should undergo a massive cultural and spiritual resistance with a revolution in music, art, literature, philosophy, and poetry. The nuclear family should be restored, divorce rates brought down, marriage rates brought up, and the birth rate of every European country should be brought up to 2.1. More money should be put into mental health care and social events should be created where young people can make friends or meet their future wife or husband. There would also be events like these for LGBT folks too. The inner cities should be cleaned up and government programs started to lift immigrants and minorities out of poverty and help them become Middle Class. All European nations will increase defense spending and the size of their militaries ten-fold.
Aggressive measures will be taken to combat antisemitism and every European nation will declare itself in support of Israel and sign defense pacts with it while also supporting the Palestinian people and their aspirations for statehood under a government that isn’t Fatah or Hamas. All European states will declare their support for the two-state solution and an Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. Pro-Palestinian and Pro-Hamas protests will be not banned, but regulated.
Organized religion will make a huge comeback and churches will begin to fill up again with worshippers. This is already gradually starting to happen as I understand it. The European Union should be reformed and Britain should trash Brexit and return to it. Europe needs to be united as one now more than ever. A peace agreement should be immediately negotiated between Ukraine and Russia.
These are all the ways we can restore Europe and rescue the western intellectual tradition the Jewish people gifted us with centuries ago. I say to Stefan Zweig up there in heaven: you will never be forgotten and we hear you and rest assured there are many of us who care and want to restore Europe to the continent you remember. The western intellectual tradition will survive Mr. Zweig! God bless the Jews of Europe! God bless Europe! Liza Libes has blown me away and made my jaw drop once again. T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner and Edith Wharton would be so proud of you, Liza!
Thank you, Liza!
There is a very interesting correspondence between Zweig and his close friend Richard Strauss (Zweig wrote librettos for his operas). Strauss was never a Nazi sympathiser, but was always rather complacent and "apolytical", and kept being the director of the Reichsmusikkammer well into the 1930s. If you get a chance, I recommend reading their letters to each other, they remind me a lot of my own conversations with some of my friends.
That is an excellent recommendation.
I think you are being very generous to Richard Strauss though (as he is to himself in his letters). Strauss was happy to take opportunities from the Third Reich that others (Walter, Klemperer, Toscanini) wouldn't. He signed the manifesto against Thomas Mann. The Reichsmusikkammer was founded by Goebbels in 1933 and Strauss was appointed as its first president.
His post-war defence, basically that he wasn't a fascist but merely a careerist, might be credible but is hardly laudable.
This is a very interesting (and relevant to the modern times) conversation. Martin, I have the luxury of being on your side here. I don't think that any form of collaboration with a totalitarian regime would be acceptable for me.
However, I know people who live in Russia and continue to do so, and to work and pay taxes there. I cannot agree with their choice, but I try to understand that there are many possible circumstances there. Some people cannot leave the country because their loved ones are immovable. Some people are held hostage in a variety of ways.
We know a lot about Strauss, but we were never privy to his conversations with Goebbels, and the conditions of him working in the Reichsmusikkammer. I don't agree with his choices, but I have some empathy towards his position.
Now wait a minute: didn't Strauss have half-Jewish grandchildren he was desperate to protect? You do what you need to do to protect your own grandchildren. And he did, in fact, insist on working with Zweig, even though the Nazis would certainly have preferred an "Aryan."
I find it hard to accept that becoming the figurehead of Nazi music was the only choice available to wealthy and world famous Richard Strauss to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice, in 1933.
In March 1933 Joseph Goebbels warned/threatened the Berlin Philharmonic that there would be violence in the concert hall if Jewish maestro Bruno Walter was allowed to conduct. Walter withdrew. Embarrassingly, the authorities struggled to find a replacement. Who would want to benefit from, and tacitly endorse, such blunt antisemitism? Even Wilhelm Furtwangler rejected it. Richard Strauss stepped in.
When Strauss was fired as Reichsmusikkammer president in 1935 over his correspondence with Zweig he started to realise what he'd gotten into and who he was dealing with. From this point, he was motivated by protecting his family and his options had narrowed. He was able to use his connections to keep Alice and his grandchildren under house arrest and out of the camps, but not Alice's Jewish family. They were murdered in Theresienstadt.
In the early 30s the Nazis wanted to increase government funding for musicians and to restore works of the Wagnerian German tradition (such as those of Richard Strauss) to centrality in the repertoire. Richard Strauss was very much in favour of both, and in fact brought this up in his 1948 denazification tribunal (he was cleared).
I think he was so dazzled by those lights that he failed to see where the train was going.
Thank you for your reply. Re: "I think he was so dazzled by those lights that he failed to see where the train was going." Well, that says it all, doesn't it? He didn't see where the train was going. And neither did plenty of other people, because it wasn't, in fact, obvious at the time. I mean, take a look at the way that black Americans were treated at the time. Pretty appalling, wouldn't you say? And that did not, in fact, lead to gas chambers. And as you yourself say:
"When Strauss was fired as Reichsmusikkammer president in 1935 over his correspondence with Zweig he started to realise what he'd gotten into and who he was dealing with. From this point, he was motivated by protecting his family and his options had narrowed. He was able to use his connections to keep Alice and his grandchildren under house arrest and out of the camps, but not Alice's Jewish family. They were murdered in Theresienstadt."
There you have it. And 1935 is actually pretty early to start realizing where the whole thing was going (it was before Kristallnacht, after all).
I think we best hear Strauss' own feelings about all this in his "Metamorphosen".
Very interesting, thank you, Liza
I wonder about the suicide...as somebody who wonders about suicides...letter and all...what a deep desperation must that be, and how very sharp the pain -or maybe the vastness of the emptiness ahead, I don't know. What I do know though -it can be really hard knowing you stayed alive, while others didn't.
This is a very interesting read. I had spent the last few months of my life in Brussels, Belgium and I am leaving next week. It has become perhaps the greatest symbol of European cultural decay and for sure the greatest bastion of antisemitism.
I am going back to my home country, Brazil. My only point of disagreement with Stefan Zweig is that it could be described as "civilized" or anything remotely close. I want to come back to Europe as soon as I can as I think it is worth fighting for.
Im so old that I can remember when the other side were the ones who wanted censorship.
I’m old enough that I’ve seen the sides switch more than once.
OK. Seriously, I am starting to think you are the reincarnation of Allan Bloom. Do the dates check out?
(To clarify: great article, will write more later.)
It's an awkward and antagonistic observation, for many people, but it seems that: a culture without a discrete identity and innate pride, enough children, religion, or hope for the future AS THAT CULTURE will quickly wilt and die. The people who don't want to hear that are precisely the people who seem to be arguing that these things don't matter. Pride? We can replace it with inclusivity and relativism. Children? We can replace them with individual choice and consumerism. Religion? We can replace it with 'spirituality' and pop psychology. Hope? We can replace that with zeal for change and reform. I don't think there's any evidence that these things are adequate substitutes though. They're actually part of the problem. The funny thing is that no one is claiming that Europe is well, or thriving, or robust. They just imply that it's inappropriate to ask such questions.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-managerial-class
Your formulation of European = Jewish is very close to the formulation used by Nazis and today's EU- and Soros-hating nationalists. I don't say that to criticize the formulation, but I'd like to ground it in the historical experience of Jews as successful, urban minority in an age of nationalisms. Of course some of them are well-positioned to advocate being more "Cosmopolitan" than your average citizen, more likely to articulate an alternative to the strong gods of faith, community and fatherland. As a cosmopolitan myself, I think this is a valuable perspective, though it is being strongly contested at the moment.
I think there's sort of a balance between cosmopolitanism and the 'strong gods', and we've swung too far toward cosmopolitanism and that's why the birth rate is falling. That doesn't mean cosmopolitanism is all bad or that more of it isn't necessary in certain time periods.
I agree that the anti-nationalism, anti-majority left has gone overboard in the last decade. I imagine most people subscribed here do. And I wouldn't have had to move to rainy Oregon if sunny California actually allowed houses to be built. It should be easier to have kids. And the rightwing in Poland and Hungary have been successful in prioritizing that. I hope Democrats here do that, too. The rightwing should not own the pro-natalist position. Russia, after all, is the closest we have to rightwing paradise, and the birthrate there is abysmal.
Why is Russia "the closest we have to rightwing paradise"?
To get a really good answer, you'd have to ask a postliberal rightwinger. Or read N.S. Lyons on substack. But as far as I can tell, it's because Russia has a king and a single church subordinate to the state, and because the FSB has adroitly positioned Russia as the antidote to both Western wokeness and the alliance of liberal democracies that boxed in autocrats since WW II but has also been expensive for America, which has taken on a leadership position that led them to fight a bunch of disastrous wars in the last couple decades.
Thanks Matt. I hadn't read any N.S. Lyons. I've read quite a bit in the last hour and I better understand 'strong gods'.
In my (dated) conception of left/right it had something to do with the individual and the state. That's why I find it super hard to conceive how somewhere with so little concern for the rights of the individual as does Putin's Russia can be positively regarded by anyone on the right.
I used to be a regular business traveller to Moscow. I haven't visited since 2022 when the Russian offices were closed and everyone laid off in order to avoid delivering up 10% of the workforce for compulsory military service. Everyone I knew in Russia has fled (US, UK and Israel), the last literally jumping off the Kaliningrad train in Vilnius to illegally escape through Lithuania (the train physically stopped even though it wasn't a "stop")
It's astonishing to me that in some sectors of option Putin seems to get a hall pass simply by being 'anti-woke'
Interesting experience! Also as for the state, yes, this new stripe of conservatism does juggle our categories.
I share your astonishment. Getting old is above all, strange. Who in 1980 would have guessed that a faction of conservatives that would dominate the federal government in 2025 would admire Russia?
Totalitarian states, whether left or right at the beginning, mirror each other. Ask the people of Eastern Europe who weathered both the Nazis and the Russians.
I didn’t read that as her formulation, but as her suggestion that it was Zweig’s.
I should say that I am not Jewish. And I don't want Jews holding the bag for non-strong-gods civilization. We're there with you!
When I think of Zweig, I also think of Walter Benjamin, another genius who ended his life because he saw no way out. Yet Zweig’s death feels even sadder to me. Benjamin was trapped, physically and politically, at a closed border. Zweig, by contrast, was safe, welcomed, and materially secure in Brazil. His despair ran deeper, it wasn't driven by immediate danger but by a profound sense of cultural and civilisational disintegration.
BS”D: Dear Liza, I agree with your father that your article is well and cogently written, but I can’t accept your explanation of Zweig's suicide. A man does not, as a rule, kill himself unless threatened in life, livelihood, or reputation – including his own self-esteem. A man doesn't kill himself (and his wife, too, by the way) over the realization that the degeneration of Europe has “devalued Jewish intellectual expression and “obstructed . . . the synthesis of Western Thought.” You write that Zweig realized, to his dismay, that “without the Jews, there was no future for Europe." No, Liza. He realized that without Jewish intellectual expression, there would be no more Jews and no more Judaism! He saw, at the last, that the "synthesis of Western Thought" for which he had worked so enthusiastically during his literary life, had not only turned into abject barbarism, but had set the stage and provided the props for the annihilation of his own People.
Read again the last chapter of The World of Yesterday, "The Agony of Peace". It is clear from Zweig’s telling, that Freud's agonizing repudiation of his final work, Moses and Monotheism (confessed personally to Zweig) made a deep impression on Zweig. Freud, he writes, "had presented Moses as a non-Jew, an Egyptian, thus giving offense by this allocation of dubious scientific worth to devout Jews and to those holding the nationalist ideal. He had come to regret having published the book right in the most terrible hour of Jewry. ‘Now that everything is being taken from them, I had to go and take their best man!’” (page. 424, U. Nebraska Press).
As Harry Zohn writes in his Introduction to the Nebraska Press edition, “Zweig did not derive spiritual sustenance from Judaism. His religion was Europe.” However, cautions Zohn, “he never renounced his Jewish faith or repudiated his Jewish background and associations.” He was not blind to the horrendous plight of his brethren, nor deaf to their cries. Read again his vivid description of Jewish suffering under the Nazis! Nor had the memory of Freud’s agonizing confession faded in Zweig’s memory. Well then, had Zweig not done to his brethren essentially what Freud had done? Had he not, like countless other Jews seduced by the intellectual and artistic brilliance of the Enlightenment, turned his back on the timeless effulgence of his own neglected Jewish Heritage to assume the mantle of modern, Europeanized Jew? And now, here he was again, safe and sound in Brazil, immersing himself in Montaigne, starting a new novel, preparing to resume his biography of Balzac!
The awakening must have hit him hard. He and his wife were not the only refugees in Brazil. He could not have escaped the flow of refugees carrying fresh news, fresh reports, fresh wounds, rumors and corroborations of arrests, roundups, transports, camps, mass executions. Freud had repudiated one book. Was Zweig now to repudiate his whole life?
It is curious to point out that neither you, Liza, nor the so-far 35 commenters to your good article – that not one of you seems to have noticed that Zweig's suicide note contains not one thank-you, not even a grateful mention - to the faithful wife who joined him in this wanton, desperate act of characteristically European Sturm und Drang. I point this out not to judge a great man facing his tragic moment of truth, but merely to draw attention to the utterly distraught and self-obsessed state of mind in which Zweig - notwithstanding all the opportunities open to him - chose to condemn himself and his life-companion to an ignominious death - a death he clearly regarded as less dishonorable than continuing to live in irremediable shame and regret.
So, Liza, that is why I am unable to accept your version of the end of Zweig. He certainly would have agreed with you that the European culture he believed in was gone forever, but he never would have accepted your proposition that the intellectual heritage of Europe – as beautiful and great and attractive as it was - was “Jewish.” It wasn’t, and it isn’t.
I hope that you may see our approaching Festival of Pesach as an opportunity to participate in one of the many kosher communal Sedarim that will be available to you. It is a time specifically designed by our ancient Sages, not only to renew and reinforce our Jewish consciousness, but to bring Jewish children and uninitiated Jews to a basic, hands-on encounter with the origins and mysteries of our incomparable spiritual Heritage.
Wishing you and your Jewish followers a “Fraylichen Kosher Pesach!”
I hope all of Europe, Ireland especially, is taken over by Islamists. It’s already happening. The countries in middle Europe couldn’t exterminate or deport their Jews fast enough. The Jews themselves only wanted to be left alone or to join society peacefully. Well now they are full of Muslims who are not assimilating. Too damm sad. And Sally Rooney- I hope you are forced to wear hijab.
I read the post at your dad's recommendation. It illuminated some thoughts I have had about what happened to Europe in the post-war period, or as you suggest, even earlier. Good job.
This is a great article Liza. I have been questioning why Zweig felt the need to end himself for a while especially when you consider that the end of his memoir does not read like a suicide note. So thank you for your psychological insight.
I think you make some good points in the article and you are right when you say that the problems Zweig warns about have not gone away. Wish I had some comprehensive solution for the issues you raised but alas I am no statesman.
Side note I read world of yesterday and absolutely loved it. Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
I don't know what K-12 public schools and universities in New York City are teaching these days, but in the 1960s and early 1970s English teachers only taught works written in English. I read French, German and Russian writers on my own, but I didn't hear about Zweig until about a decade ago, when a cousin gave me Zweig's hardcover "Collected Stories" (translated by Anthea Bell)(over 700 pages). I liked 16 of the 22 stories, some very much. Later I read Zweig's Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan (published 1938) (translated by Eden & Cedar Paul), a very well written and researched biography including maps and illustrations. While it's unclear why Zweig and his much younger wife reportedly overdosed on "Veronal," he had just completed a novella called Chess Story the day before about a man confined to a hotel room by the Gestapo with nothing to see or do, and not even a pen to write (Muhlstein, New York Review, May 8, 2014, p. 13 ff). The world looked very ugly to Jews in February 1942, even from the possibly transient refuge of Brazil.
I am reasonably well educated, but I never heard of Zweig before I stumbled across The World of Yesterday in a used book store. What made him disappear from general view?