Diaries(1931–1940) by Stefan Zweig

Reviewed by: Diaries(1931–1940) by Stefan Zweig Ruth V. Gross Stefan Zweig, Diaries(1931–1940). Annotated by Jesús Blázquez. Trans. Ediciones 98, S.L. Madrid: Ediciones 98, 2021. 156 pp. Zweig’s Tagebücher, the diaries that he kept sporadically between 1912 and 1940, first came out in the original German in 1984. With this publication by the Spanish publisher Ediciones 98, we have the first translation of the Zweig diaries into English. This volume contains the later entries, starting in the year 1931; the editor promises that a second volume with the entries from 1912 to 1918 translated into English is in the works and will also be published soon. Zweig was not a diligent diarist—he kept diaries only occasionally, at [End Page 136] times of change or emotional upheaval. That makes the entries we have that much more interesting. The present volume begins with Zweig’s resumption of his journaling after a thirteen-year hiatus in October 1931, at a time when he sensed that the political situation in Austria—and Europe, as a whole—was taking a dangerous direction, and when he was also fully engaged in work on his biography of Marie Antoinette. The precipitating event for his return to diary writing, however, seems to have been the death of his colleague, the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, who at the age of 69 had succumbed to a brain hemorrhage. Zweig notes that Schnitzler had been depressed—“sick and tired of living” (15)—and because Zweig himself gets to that point by the end of these diaries, it is a telling place, in hindsight, for this chronicling to begin. Whatever Zweig’s intentions were as he took up recording his daily thoughts and activities again, he continued entries only through December 6. The diaries then resume in January 1935 for approximately two weeks when Zweig visits New York during a time he describes as a “profound artistic and personal crisis.” Except for his comment about some Jewish reporters who at an event at which he was present seemed “unpleasant,” probably because—as the editor of the volume notes—they may have addressed his “tepid condemnation of Hitler’s anti-semitic policies,” there is no mention of any political situation. It is well known that Zweig was often criticized because he failed to speak out loudly against the rising tide of Nazism, whatever his reasons may have been. This may have caused his increasing discomfort and fear of public events—he recognizes at the end of this set of entries that he wishes no longer “to compete” in that arena (perhaps with people like Thomas Mann and others) to achieve success. The next date on which he entered into his diaries was September 27, 1935, recording a trip from Paris to London, his home at the time. This entry reminds the present-day reader of some of the musings in Zweig’s The World of Yesterday; he laments the current state of the world, remembering a time when borders were crossed without having to wait in line for bureaucrats to stamp documents that attest to one’s citizenship. A year later, in August 1936, Zweig journals for three weeks about his ocean crossing to (and first impressions of) Brazil—the country that he would return to four years later to live and ultimately die in. The editor, in an endnote, has supplied the reader with a description of Zweig’s unhappy circumstances at the time—the breakup of his marriage, the dismantling of his Austrian home and writing haven, his necessary flight to a temporary abode in London, a sick mother in [End Page 137] Vienna, and the lack of any female companion with whom he might travel. In that state of mind, it is no wonder that to Zweig Brazil seemed like a land of opportunity—it might provide a new beginning. Compared with the entries he recorded on visiting New York almost two years earlier in which he seemed to distance himself from the city, it is as if Zweig is already trying to see himself living in Brazil. He sees, rather idealistically, an integrated society of blacks and whites—unlike New

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