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“A touch of eternity”

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 2; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s2215-0366(15)00462-9

2215-0374

George Prochnik,

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

When Stefan Zweig's exile began in London in 1934, he was hounded by thoughts of transience and eternity. His books had been burned in the German and Austrian markets for which they'd been written. He himself had kept a bonfire flaming for days behind his Salzburg home, in which he immolated God knows how many sheets of personal papers. In fact, he'd meticulously liquidated all his affairs in Austria, he told friends—a self-erasure that followed a period in which he'd felt himself being wilfully expunged from the consciousness of even long-time acquaintances in the small city where he'd lived for fifteen years. Fellow residents he'd considered friends began avoiding him—abruptly turning their backs to peer into shop-front display windows when he approached, failing to show up at his house for their customary visits. As a Jew associated with humanist causes Zweig had become a dangerous person to fraternise with, notwithstanding his fastidious aversion to overt political stances. For all that Zweig's move from Austria was pre-emptory and careful, fresh to England, Zweig was disoriented. He didn't know just what he would do next, or exactly who he'd become in his new stateless capacity. The possibility that he might vanish altogether became a fixation. In the midst of so much loss, London's cosmopolitanism gave some solace. Strolling in Piccadilly Circus with his old friend, French writer and former PEN president Jules Romains, Zweig indicated the bowl of lights spinning with motorcars and announced, “There is the centre of the world!” On other occasions, he excitedly pointed out the blue plaques memorialising earlier exiles—Marx, Lenin and Sun-Yat-Sen among them—taking these markers as proof that in his new environs he was still part of an elite global community, even if these particular progressives were dead. He tried to take comfort in British indifference, praising the English to Romains for being “an extremely accommodating people”, in so far as “they knew how to leave a man absolutely to himself—though he be a famous one—to the point of not even knowing he's there”. Sometimes conversation with Romains would turn to Zweig's disposal of his material effects—the elegant, even aesthetic thoroughness of his plans for departure, which he sought to replicate in his preparations for taking leave of the world altogether seven years later. Among the divestments he was most proud of was his relinquishment of several hundred works from his enormous, valuable collection of letters, literary manuscripts and musical scores. Part of this archive he donated to the Viennese National Library; most of it he sold off at auction through a trusted bookseller. But he didn't mourn the loss, he insisted, since he'd enjoyed creating the collection more than he'd enjoyed actual possession of it. And if there was one bitter lesson the times had taught all those “hunted down and forced into exile at a time hostile to all art and all collections, then it is the art of saying goodbye to everything that was once our pride and joy”, he wrote in his memoir. Talk between Zweig and Romains drifted one day from Zweig's collection to the widely varying psychologies of Europe's current dictators. “Whenever you like, I can get you specimens of Mussolini's, Lenin's, or Stalin's handwriting at different periods of their lives, throwing light on each stage, on their thoughts and actions; thus one can really track them down”, Zweig remarked. “But Hitler, at least for a long period—impossible.” After a moment's pause, he added, “It looks as though during all these years he did not want to leave any tracks at all.” Zweig's passion for autograph collecting was bound up with his search for the tracks of the soul. “Only when we have felt with a kind of religious sensation the poets, composers, and other heroes…only then can the train of writing from their hand reveal its meaning and its beauty”, he declared in a lecture delivered at the 1934 Sunday Times book exhibition, which proved to be Zweig's most extensive analysis of the allure of collecting. He believed the activity kindled a dialogue between the living and the dead that converged on some primal secret of creation. In this sense, Zweig's notion of collecting was frankly mystical. But even resisting that final leap, it's possible to find in his thinking on the subject a poignant rumination on the role of empathetic imagination in the transmission of culture—and, conversely, an insight into Zweig's still resonant concern with how evil aborts this exchange, denying legitimacy to individual experience and consciousness. In Zweig's schema, the absence of handwriting samples for Hitler's formative years reveals that the “modern devil” (as Zweig labelled him) claims an immaculate conception. Zweig was all of twelve years old when he began chasing autographs from actors, musicians and Vienna's celebrated authors. The activity at first seems to have been just a natural outgrowth of that larger intoxication with the arts—theatre in particular—which he describes in his memoir, The World of Yesterday, as quintessentially Viennese. The city was united, he wrote, in its “sensitivity to everything colourful, musical and festive, in this delight in theatrical spectacle as a playful reflection of life, whether on the stage or in real space and time”. While it was easy to make fun of Vienna's “theatrical mania,” epitomised in the citizenry's “delight in tracking down the tiniest details of the lives of their favourites”, the value placed on the arts led, Zweig contended, to an intense “veneration for all forms of artistic achievement”, which produced an expertise that in turn created “outstandingly high standards in all cultural fields”. Indeed, Zweig maintained, the trademark Viennese fanaticism for art not only qualified as benign, but gave the city its global raison d'être. Soon Zweig graduated from the pursuit of signatures to handwritten manuscripts and musical scores, finding his particular vocation as a collector of drafts scored with emendations. Though he quickly began to amass treasures by some of the world's most renowned composers and authors, he claimed to have no interest in the fame of his autograph subjects. What interested him rather was “the biographical and psychological aspects of the creation of a work of art”. Thus he later went into raptures when he acquired the complete proof copy of a Balzac novel, every sheet of which constituted “a battlefield of corrections, illustrating with extraordinary clarity his titanic struggle for perfection from change to change”. As Zweig observed in his 1934 London speech, the deepest and most unsolvable riddle of all is the mystery of creation. Nature “does not allow this last trick to be examined—how the world came to be, how a little flower springs up, how a poem, how a person”. Even the creator himself will almost never “be able to explain how, in his exalted state, the magic of a verse, or how out of single sounds, a melody, is pieced together which then rings for centuries through the times”. The exception to this rule, Zweig wrote, lay in draft manuscripts, “Just as hunters know the path of their game by the most transitory of tracks, so can we, thanks to autographs which are signs of life and creativity, sometimes follow the process of formation.” He described a notebook that Beethoven carried around with him while wandering through Vienna, talking to himself and gesticulating wildly. Sometimes the composer would stop abruptly to scribble something down in its pages: “With these hasty lines the original idea was, in a way, crystallised, lightning-like and hot”, Zweig wrote. Beethoven's scrawl revealed the moment of inspiration, like “the suddenly exposed x-ray of a person's otherwise invisible skeleton”. The references to animal tracks and x-rayed bones reveal another aspect of the collector's motivation: handwriting contains involuntary traces of life's fluctuating progress. Every autograph in Zweig's analysis becomes akin to the read-out of a hospital monitor. In this form of expression alone, “man is insolubly bound to the innermost truth of his being”, Zweig asserted. “Whether he wants it to or not, handwriting betrays the person.” (By way of example, he compares a letter from the end of Beethoven's life in which the “shaking, agonized signature” resembles a “petrified scream” to Mozart's marriage contract in which the letters themselves “dance, as in a bridal dance”.) Zweig's interest in these specimens is thus two-fold: they contain the seminal print of the artists' divine conception, and, in their blots and flourishes, serve as evidence for their authors' earth-bound humanity. Indeed, Zweig's fascination with the instant when inspiration takes material form is dictated by the idiosyncratic, contextual stains of mortal being on that transformative event. Because of all the different ways autographs preserve a residue of nature's greatest secret, artists themselves have been among their most devoted collectors, Zweig contended: “Johann Sebastian Bach kept pages of Händel, Beethoven pages of Mozart, Schumann pages of Beethoven, and Johannes Brahms musical autographs of them all.” This mutual conservation stretches a miraculous “chain through the times”. But the wresting of the artist's shade back from death is not merely a factor of possession; nor is the capacity to perform this spiritual resurrection confined to artists. Unlike collections of items such as glass, coins, or jewels, autographs present no immediate visceral charm, Zweig observed. To the casual eye, the image offered up by autographs is nothing more than “a piled up mass of dusty, half-falling-apart, soiled pieces of paper”. The distinguishing feature of the autograph collection is the contract it presupposes between possessor and object: only the memory, education and imagination of the collector can elicit the thing's sublime worth. Indeed, the true collector must already be possessed by the spirit of the work before coming into literal possession of its formal contents. A page of Keats' writing remains nothing but a scrap of paper so long as the invocation of Keats' name fails to conjure memories of his verses as real and present to our souls “as every house in this city and the sky above and the clouds and the sea”, Zweig maintained. Similarly, the sight of a sketch from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata can thrill us only if we carry inside the sound of that silvery melody. An attitude of reverence, Zweig writes, is obligatory for autograph collectors, who must exert their painstakingly acquired knowledge creatively to discern in these smudged, crumbling fragments a vibrant human sensibility. Reverence, he concludes, is “the most beautiful and powerful” emotional force on earth. The real chain of transmission is established by a kind of concentrated attention on the achievements of the dead that revives their maker in the collector's imagination. “To love and understand manuscripts, to admire, be aroused and moved by them, we must first have learned to love the human being whose characteristics are immortalised in them”, Zweig wrote. At the end of his lecture, Zweig cited Keats' Endymion, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”. In bald isolation, the quote is deceptive, however, since in fact Zweig demonstrated that the eternity of the artist's beautiful creation is contingent on a highly strenuous form of appreciation. The challenge of engaging the individual manuscript with the requisite level of reverence necessary to become enthralled by the individual vision, character and fate it contains is compounded when it comes to the creation of a whole collection of manuscripts—but the potential rewards are commensurately greater. In his final phase of collecting, Zweig was continually selling off lesser pieces and adding new purchases in the effort to fill his cases with the most significant and characteristic work of each represented figure. He sought, as he wrote, just those manuscripts which illustrated the reason why “the immortals” were considered immortal—relics with “a touch of eternity” about them. And because his collection was in constant flux, it became, he wrote, “a living organism” in its own right, to which he assigned greater value than anything he himself had written. In truth, Zweig's manuscript collection became for him a kind of breathing, singing ink-and-paper model of that ideal human community he'd struggled to assemble on the famous terrace of his Salzburg home. There, on the little mountain overlooking the town where he occupied a seventeenth century archbishop's hunting lodge, Zweig had gathered many of the humanist, intellectual, artistic luminaries of the age in a kind of Austrian riff on Plato's Symposium. But even when his house was empty of guests, Zweig wrote, by contemplating his collection he'd been able to surround himself in “a magic circle of distinguished figures from the past whose shades and whose traces I had gradually managed to summon”. Moreover, he could perform a bit of Prospero-like magic on the members of this community by bringing together “the writings of artists who in life were enemies, or were separated from each other by space and time”, creating a fellowship that overcame the unjust divisions to which earthly personalities were subject, reversing the diaspora of the dead. Five years after he arrived in England, Zweig's voluntary exile became compulsory, and in his new, stateless condition, the horror he'd always felt at bureaucracies and official documentation became a consuming obsession. Indeed, the increasing volume of identity papers he had to assemble now that he was no longer considered Austrian in order to live anywhere—let alone to cross borders—might be accounted the malevolent double of his autograph collection. If the latter was intended to memorialise moments in which humanity's most creative spirits struggled to transcend the conditions of their physical, material circumstances, these papers reduced the bearer to the crudest amalgam of exactly those qualities. “Since the day when I had to depend upon identity papers or passports that were indeed alien, I ceased to feel as if I quite belonged to myself”, he wrote in his memoir. “A part of the natural identity with my original and essential ego was destroyed forever.” In one of his final letters to Jules Romains, composed shortly before his death by suicide, Zweig put the matter even more starkly: “My inner crisis consists in that I am not able to identify myself with the me of my passport, the self of exile.” Instead of the autographs that Zweig had collected in the hopes of devoutly studying the essence of humanity's supernal creative spirits, he himself had been reduced to vacuous data, and then “collected” into state files by those who sought to deny his very right to exist on the basis of that alien identity. Paradoxically, Zweig saw the tracks of mortality preserved in his handwriting collection as proof of their authors' eternal souls, while the cold officialese enshrined in his passports and visas like our own arbitrarily surveilled and circumscribed internet profiles, contravened the notion of an irreducible self—negating the premise for a psychological afterlife.