Zweig’s Obsessive Protagonists

 

 

     Apart from folk stories, most ancient and medieval narratives concerned gods or aristocrats undergoing major upheavals.  Novel writers found drama then in bourgeois and sometimes even proletarian milieux.  By the time of Chekhov overt drama came to seem unnecessary.  Character could be revealed by the smallest of events, a vague impression, a velleity, a trivial accident.  With the insights of Freud the significance of matters of apparently little consequence emerged, justifying attention to details that could sometimes generate major crises.

     Stefan Zweig was a good friend of Freud’s, corresponding with him and visiting for decades.  In a letter of October 21, 1932, Zweig wrote: “Everything that I write bears your influence and perhaps you can tell that the strength to tell the truth, possibly the essential element in my work, is due to you.  You have provided a model for an entire generation.” [1]  Zweig’s stories depict more or less ordinary protagonists, driven by one stimulus or another into odd and extreme cathexes, producing overmastering obsessive-compulsive behaviors that come to dominate their lives.

     In the world of Stefan Zweig’s stories, a façade of stable respectability (not unlike that that marked most of Freud’s patients) masks turbulent emotions, usually erotic, that prove uncontrollable and ultimately ruinous.  The psychoanalytic influence is evident, but in no formulaic application but rather in the general sense of a more or less calm-looking ego fronting, as long as possible, for a cyclonic id.  In one novelle after another the reader finds minds in extremis, helpless to manage obsession.  Whether the psychological structure mirrors the apparent cultured bourgeois satisfaction of the Vienna of the author’s youth thrown into the madness of Nazism or not is debatable, but the parallel seems apt.

     In Zweig’s “Chess Story” (“Schachnovelle”) the political analogy is explicit as the protagonist is forced into a kind of madness by Nazi persecution.   To escape the irrational lunacy of a criminal government, he mentally retreats to the ordered if competitive world of the chess, a realm entirely abstract and idealized, empty equally of virtue and wickedness.  The ego is entirely overpowered by his absorption in this world of the mind, producing a total breakdown.

     In “The Man who Ran Amok” (“Amoklaufer”) a doctor already strained by long service in a tropical colony hesitates to perform an illegal abortion for a respectable lady who consults him.  When she then dies after resorting to a back-alley practitioner, he is overcome with regret and himself commits suicide.  Doubtless his reaction would have been milder had his sensitive nerves not been affected by long colonial service, but he is also aware that his initial rejection of her request was in part due to his resentment of her position among the elite.  Thus it is his own inhumanity rather than her suffering that disturbs him.  The use of the Malay term amok highlights the fact that the cultivated European is every bit as capable of mad behavior as the Asian tribesman.

     In both these stories there is a narrative frame; the story is told to another character as though to hear it directly from the mouth of the neurotic would be too agonizing.  The frame stories insulate the reader from too hot a point of passion, placing the reader at a safe remove from the mental maelstrom of the protagonists.

     “The Burning Secret” (“Brennendes Geheimnis”) has a simple third person omniscient narrator.  The main character is a baron identified as a “ladykiller” (“Frauenjäger”) who pursues liaisons as a sort of sport.  Cynically cultivating a relationship with the son of a lady in whom he is interested, he offends the child who, realizing he is simply being used, resolves to frustrate the would-be lover.  Here the main character experiences only frustration from his compulsive and selfish romancing.  Though powered by the dynamo of erotic desire, the baron’s game is in fact altogether ego-centered.  Such men as he “are always burdened with passion, but not that of a lover, rather that of a player, cold, calculating, and dangerous.” [2]  With his thoughtless attempt to use the child Edgar, the baron condemns his own project.  If he cannot bear to be alone [3], it is perhaps because he feels so strongly the ugliness of his own soul.

    “Angst” (“Fear” or “Anxiety), the single word that best defines the Zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century, is the title of a Novelle with a typical bourgeoise as protagonist.  She resembles a case study by Freud with her comfortable, respectable home and social standing.  Yet her sexual desire leads her to an affair that she might have initially considered a mere peccadillo but which comes to occupy her constantly, bringing ceaseless anxiety.  A surprise twist in the end produces what might seem even more surprising: a somewhat optimistic ending. 

 

She distinctly recognized the boy’s voice and felt surprised how much it was like his father’s.  A gentle smile came to her lips and rested there quietly.  With eyes closed she lay that she might all the more deeply enjoy the thought of what her life was and her happiness as well.  There remained a bit of pain within but it was a promising one, glowing and yet mild, just as wounds burn before they scar over for good. 

 

     The first-person narrator of “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (“Brief einer Unbekannten”) has dedicated her entire life since the age of thirteen to her passion for a writer, though he is never really aware of her existence.  She says “I will tell you my whole life, that truly began only on the day that I came to know you.” [5]  She even bears him a child that dies as she does as well, without his ever recognizing her.  She describes her passion as dominating her entirely, “hopeless, servile, submissive,” and as “slavish, dog-like, and devoted.” [6]  Clearly she suffers from what an observer would call an obsessive, abnormal fixation, yet to her it is altogether inevitable and even the writer, for whom she has not existed until she had died, seems in the end to accept the love-offering. 

 

He could feel a death and an immortal love.  Something broke internally in his soul and he thought of that invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate like music in the distance. [7]

 

     In each of these stories someone is driven by overpowering emotion to a desperate state of mind.  In most cases the impetus is sexual, though the chess player responding to unjust imprisonment is an exception. [8]  For Zweig civilization and rationality are shallow and deceptive and the ego is in the last analysis impotent, unable to control the passions.  In the past Zweig was once very highly thought of, particularly toward the end of his lifetime (though a rediscovery has occurred in recent years on a small scale), but he has always had his critics.  A reviewer finds him “fake” and “stiltedly extreme,” a “schematic grand guignol.”  The author himself admits to a “preference . . . for intense, intemperate characters.” [9]  Perhaps the reader must have at least glimpsed a life out of control to realize that the irrational is as central to our minds’ operation as what we generally consider to be logic, and for the most part more so.  Zweig’s artful prose describes the psychic disorder that can an any moment overcome even those who seem the most sensible and proper among us.  The author’s suicide during World War II suggests that the danger of such mental storms does not belong to fiction alone.

 

 

1.  “In Alles was ich schreibe ist von Ihnen beeindruckt und vielleicht spȗren Sie, dass der Mut zur Wahrhaftigkeit, der möglicherweise das Wesentliche meiner Bücher ist, von  Ihnen stammt: Sie haben ein ganzen Generation ein Vorbild gegeben.”

2.  “Sie sind immer geladen mit Leidenschaft, aber nicht der des Liebenden, sondern der des Spielers, der kalten, berechnenden und gefährlichen.”

3.  “Although he was not lacking in inner resources, he had an entirely sociable nature, and his nature was entirely sociable for which he was well-liked and his inability to be alone was well-known.”  (“Er war, obwohl innerer Befähigung nicht entbehrend, eine durchaus gesellschaftliche Natur, als solche beliebt, in allen Kreisen gern gesehen und sich seiner Unfähigkeit zur Einsamkeit voll bewußt.”)

4.  “Deutlich erkannte sie die Stimme des Knaben und spürte erstaunt zum erstenmal, wie sehr sie der seines Vaters glich. Leise flog ein Lächeln auf ihre Lippen und rastete dort still. Mit geschlossenen Augen lag sie, um all dies tiefer zu genießen, was ihr Leben war und nun auch ihr Glück. Innen tat noch leise etwas weh, aber es war ein verheißender Schmerz, glühend und doch lind, so wie Wunden brennen, ehe sie für immer vernarben wollen.”

 5.  “Mein ganzes Leben will ich Dir verraten, dies Leben, das wahrhaft erst begann mit dem Tage, da ich Dich kannte.”

 6.  “Hoffnungslos, so dienend, so unterwürfig,” and “sklavisch, so hündisch, so hingebungsvoll geliebt.”

 7.  “Er spürte einen Tod und spürte unsterbliche Liebe: innen brach etwas auf in seiner Seele, und er dachte an die Unsichtbare körperlos und leidenschaftlich wie an eine ferne Musik.”

8.  The doctor in “The Man who Ran Amok” originally acts out of pride, but many readers, especially those inclined toward Freud, will see eros in the immediate background.

9.  Michael Hofmann “Vermicular Dither,” London Review of Books XXXII:2  (28 January, 2010).