ANDERSON: Well it was also one of the first ones I read. One of the first of his short stories I came upon. Zweig conjures up the experience of this French resort of the past so vividly there, and this woman. He uses the same storytelling technique again. He sets the stage with a whole circle of people who are responding to something happening among them, a sort of scandal happening among them, but eventually that’s not what this story is about. That’s just a sort of prelude. And I loved that form. And then I was also taken with how this person who you get to know on the surface as an older person is so clearly drawn. And when she finally tells her own story that image is completely broken, and you realise how thoroughly you did not know her and her history. Some of Zweig’s short stories have been done as whole films, and I think that this one—you could see Max Ophüls doing Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman and making a masterpiece.
PROCHNIK: With all of the despair in Zweig’s stories and life, he shows us again and again that there were just a hell of a lot of splendid spots around Europe to go to and to spend time in. Even in the little sketches he gives, there’s something so visually charismatic in just the suggestion of what these places were. We somehow feel an aura of that luminous life—
ANDERSON: That luxury.
PROCHNIK: You really show that compellingly. You did an amazing job of revealing how parts of the fairy tale were real in the landscapes—and the hotels of course.
ANDERSON: One thing we came across as we were trying to figure where to do this movie was a collection of images on the US Library of Congress website. There’s this thing, the Photochrom Collection. Two different companies—one Swiss and one American—had a sort of joint venture, where they took black-and-white photographs all over the world, and then they colourised them and mass-produced them. And there are thousands of them. They’re from maybe 1895 to 1910, something like that, all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Prussia, and all over the world. I compare it to the Google Earth of the turn of the century. These are almost all landscapes and cityscapes. There are places that are just known as views. There are many, many of these spots where you can see a little terrace that’s been created, just because people would walk to this place and look out. It’s wonderful, and it really influenced our movie. There’s a wonderful photochrom of the hotel that I always thought of as sort of the model for our hotel, which is the Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, which was Carlsbad. The thing we learned when we visited all sorts of places that we found on this collection of pictures was that none of them were enough like what they once were to work for us. But the photochrom images seemed to tap into a truth about Zweig’s vision of the world that I was able to draw on in developing a visual aura for the film.
In The Post Office Girl, Zweig’s description of the grand hotel in Switzerland is so evocative. The protagonist is a girl who works in the post office. She’s invited to stay in this hotel as a gift from her rich aunt, and when she arrives in this place, the management thinks she’s there to make a delivery. Her suitcase is a basket. Finally they realise she’s actually going to be a guest in the hotel, which is unlike anywhere she’s ever been. Her point of view about this treatment she receives, and her experience of walking in and realising, “This is where I’m going to sleep”, is so powerful. But also that by the time her holiday abruptly ends, she is already addicted to this other way of life, and her existence is so dramatically changed, and a sort of desperation comes over her—and then a connection she makes with someone who is in his own desperate state. The idea of that work being something that had been out of print for that long is sort of surreal.
PROCHNIK: I agree. This idea—that a brief exposure to how good life can be was a fatal infection, in terms of the social order of that time—is rendered so powerfully. The notion that really, when life was good in pre-War Europe, it could be awfully sweet. But it’s interesting—when you described going around looking for a place in the real world to film, and not finding one, I thought also of the sentiment expressed near the end of your film, when the possibility is raised that the world M. Gustave inhabits may really have ceased to exist even before he entered it. There is the suggestion that the whole thing is a feat of imagination. I think this resonates with the embrace of illusion in The World of Yesterday. It gets away from the idea that Zweig was just unable to see reality, and moves more towards the notion that he just had a huge desire to live in the imagination so fully that it would diminish the impact of the real.
ANDERSON: That’s a good one! That might be a good ending.
From
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY
Selections from the memoirs
of Stefan Zweig
THE WORLD OF SECURITY
IF I TRY TO FIND some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our Austrian Monarchy, then almost a thousand years old, seemed built to last, and the state itself was the ultimate guarantor of durability. The rights it gave its citizens were affirmed by our parliament, a freely elected assembly representing the people, and every duty was precisely defined. Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in the form of shiny gold coins, thus vouching for its own immutability. Everyone knew how much he owned and what his income was, what was allowed and what was not. Everything had its norm, its correct measurement and weight. If you had wealth, you could work out precisely how much interest it would earn you every year, while civil servants and officers were reliably able to consult the calendar and see the year when they would be promoted and the year when they would retire. Every family had its own budget and knew how much could be spent on food and lodging, summer holidays and social functions, and of course you had to put a small sum aside for unforeseen contingencies such as illness and the doctor. If you owned a house you regarded it as a secure home for your children and grandchildren; property in town or country was passed on from generation to generation. While a baby was still in the cradle, you contributed the first small sums to its way through life, depositing them in a money box or savings account, a little reserve for the future. Everything in this wide domain was firmly established, immovably in its place, with the old Emperor at the top of the pyramid, and if he were to die the Austrians all knew (or thought they knew) that another emperor would take his place, and nothing in the well-calculated order of things would change. Anything radical or violent seemed impossible in such an age of reason.
This sense of security was an asset owned by millions, something desirable, an ideal of life held in common by all. Life was worth living only with such security, and wider and wider circles were eager to have their part in that valuable asset. At first only those who already owned property enjoyed advantages, but gradually the population at large came to aspire to them. The era of security was also the golden age of the insurance industry. You insured your house against fire and theft, your land against damage by storms and hail, your body against accidents and sickness; you bought annuities for your old age; you put insurance policies in your girl children’s cradles to provide their future dowries. Finally even the working classes organised themselves to demand a certain level of wages as the norm, as well as health insurance schemes. Servants saved for their old age, and paid ahead of time into policies for their own funerals. Only those who could look forward with confidence to the future enjoyed the present with an easy mind.