PROCHNIK: Secret chambers in restaurants, and so on. You know, that chapter in The World of Yesterday, “Eros Matutinus,” which I was very happy to see you’ve made one of the selections for this book, is considered by some scholars to be the most historically original part of what he wrote. The kind of taxonomy of the sexual underworld of fin de siècle Vienna Zweig creates there is almost without parallel. There’s an amazing letter that Zweig wrote near the end of his life, just after he’d finished revising The World of Yesterday in Brazil, where he describes the entire book to a friend as “a hard and realistic image of sexuality in our youth.” He ends up converging everything on that one chapter, which was only added when he was in Brazil. It was an afterthought. He had written a whole draft of the memoir while he was living in Ossining, up the river from New York City, and then he adds that one chapter, almost like his own secret, that he couldn’t divulge until the very end.
ANDERSON: Very interesting. It makes sense that he would see it that way afterwards. My experience of reading the book was full of that sense of surprising realities being disclosed. It was the thing that struck me the most. There were so many descriptions of parts of life, which—as much as we may have read or seen something of them in movies—we didn’t really know about from his time, before reading Zweig’s memoir. In particular I don’t think I ever thought about the moment when it became necessary to have a passport, which is hugely meaningful when you see it through his eyes. You suddenly see this control that comes in.
PROCHNIK: I think it was absolutely devastating for him—that loss of geographical freedom, the ability to just cross borders without thinking about it. Zweig was addicted to that sense of access to novelty and heterogeneity in culture and individuals. He was so deeply invested in idiosyncrasy of every sort and there’s just a sense of everything gradually becoming more monotone and congealed. I thought you also did a lovely job of depicting this transformation in the film, near the end, where you have the extraordinary scene in which your protagonists are stopped a final time on the train for their papers and it’s clear just how vital these documents have become—a matter of life and death.
ANDERSON: You can see why for Zweig this turn of events would be the beginning of everything that became too much to bear. Not only because he was someone who had friends all over Europe and collected people actively—made friendships and made these connections and so on. He also collected manuscripts and books and musical scores, and he was gathering things from all over—among artists he admired. And eventually all this, plus his own work, was taken away, destroyed, made impossible for him to continue pursuing in that way. And when you read The World of Yesterday you just see how all the things he invested his life in, this world that he prefers to call the world of security, this life that had been growing more and more refined and free that’s so meaningful to him, is just obliterated.
PROCHNIK: There were friends of Zweig who saw him as invested before the war in creating almost a cabinet of curiosities, a museum of Europe—one person described it as a garden—that would serve as a microcosm of the whole vast continent before it all got blown asunder.
ANDERSON: Vienna—the environment he grew up in was so—I guess, art was the centre of his own activity, and it was also the popular thing. One detail that I remember from The World of Yesterday is that the daily newspapers they got each morning had poetry and philosophical writings. He and his friends went to meet in cafés regularly in groups. And there were new plays continuously being produced, and they were all following these playwrights. Vienna was a place where there was this great deep culture, but it was the equivalent of rock stars—it was the coolest thing of the moment. It was completely popular, and that was Vienna. Zweig was living in the dead centre, ground zero place for this. And he was living there up to the point that it came to an end.
PROCHNIK: One passage that always strikes me in The World of Yesterday is when he begins to talk about what’s happened to the news, and how it’s suddenly just become—in a way this seems to foreshadow our own world—a kind of nonstop disaster feed. Zweig talks about that moment when suddenly the wireless is working, and you’re getting reports of catastrophes in China, and wars in countries that you don’t know anything about. You’re enveloped in a present-ness that is all about the most sensational, most dispiriting acts of bloodthirstiness and natural catastrophe that really seem to suck away the reflective element that had been part of newspapers when he was young.
ANDERSON: Ideas and thoughts. Not just accounts of terrible events. I think one thing that Zweig does very simply, that just seems so clear to him, is that he attributes everything that’s gone wrong to nationalism, and the two ideologies of socialism slash communism and fascism. These two movements might be conflicting, but to him they were just equally disastrous—
PROCHNIK: To the individual.
ANDERSON: Yes, these dogmas take hold so forcefully or forcibly that it’s just the beginning of the end, and he sees it happen right in front of him. Because of the monolithic nature of them. I think there were all kinds of aspects of socialism he would have embraced. But the problem for him was that people began to identify themselves with these dogmas, and then people began to oppose each other on the basis of these causes or dogmatic kind of movements.
PROCHNIK: After the First World War Vienna had arguably the most progressive government in Europe—a socialist government, and people came from everywhere to study the model. Zweig was certainly sympathetic to that. It wasn’t something that he advertised about himself, but I’m sure he would have considered his politics from an economic perspective to be in accord with socialism.
I want to cycle back to his fictions. When you said that Beware of Pity was really your introduction to Zweig—why did you find this work to be so compelling?
ANDERSON: As we discussed, the book takes a form that we sort of overtly lifted for our movie, and I particularly loved the opening scene. There’s a wonderful brief introduction from the author, and then it goes back some years, and we see the author who’s visiting a restaurant that he thought would have fallen out of fashion a long time ago, outside Vienna. But then he’s sort of surprised that he’s still seeing people he knows there and this figure—this guy comes over to him, a guy he knows vaguely. (This author character is well-known, he’s famous like Zweig.) And the guy who comes over to him he describes as the sort of person who knows everybody, at least a bit, and bounces around among people and table hops and name drops. It’s a very familiar sort of person today. You know immediately you can connect him to a few people who you might know and even like, but who do this.
PROCHNIK: I love the phrase that Zweig has for this type—which translates literally from the German as “Also-present” (“hanger-on” in translation).