PN Review 289: Horatio Morpurgo

Stefan Zweig and the Mad King

Two copies of the Sonderfahndungsliste GB – the only two – were retrieved in September 1945 from a wrecked government building in central Berlin. Dated 1940, this ‘Special Search List’ named individuals to be arrested should the invasion of Britain succeed. It is a draft plan for cultural and political decapitation: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winston Churchill, E.M. Forster. Penguin’s recent title Germany: What Next? is cited and the company marked down for a visit. After its publication in the Guardian, Rebecca West described the list to Noel Coward as ‘the people we would have been seen dead with’.

what was, to some, an occasion for the exercise of sparkling wits, was for others too late. The prospect of Nazi victory had plunged both Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig into depression from which they saw no way out. They had not known each other, though briefly corresponded about a petition to nominate Sigmund Freud for the Nobel Prize (Freud was also on the list).

Competence and bungling are curiously blended in this catalogue of those who were to expect trouble. How would John Lane, one wonders, founder of the Bodley Head and publisher of ‘The Yellow Book’, a bon vivant who died in 1925, have answered the charge in 1940 that he was a ‘Marxist’? Its compilers appear unaware that Freud, too, was already dead, but they did at least know their alphabet: Zweig’s entry comes second to last. He is summarised as: ‘(Jew), writer, emigrant’. There is also, unusually, an exact address given – 49 Hallam Street. In London from 1933, Zweig was at that address from 1936 until 1939, when he moved to Bath. By 1940 the Gestapo would not have found him in.

His association with the street, though, remained strong enough that his English publisher, who had become a close friend, issued a post-war ‘Hallam Edition’ of his works. A campaign in 2012 to commemorate his London years with a plaque at that address had failed a few years earlier when I began, in the autumn of 2016, to cast around for some way to respond to Brexit (PNR 240, 259). Ten years on, after an effort which has drawn support from Zweig’s many admirers (and some of his critics), a plaque will finally be unveiled at No. 49 this July.

Over the years he met W.B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw and Aldous Huxley. One thing the last decade has taught me, though, is that Zweig’s relationship with Britain was a subtler, stranger affair than any names of famous acquaintances can convey. It began early, too: a character sketch of Hyde Park, written on a first visit in 1906, appeared when he was still in his twenties. A description of Oxford during the vacation likewise. Through his account of how Handel wrote The Messiah, he described the creative process as a form of redemption – a theme to which he would return. The interweaving of English and German in that text is suggestive.

So when in 1933 he chose England for its relative calm, his choice was also part of an effort, as he entered his fifties, to revisit and revive an earlier self. Over an essay on Tolstoy, written in his mid-forties, the prospect of turning fifty already casts a heavy shadow. His output from the London years that followed that milestone were more novellas, a full-length novel and historical portraits, as well as further reflections upon British mores…

This excerpt by Horatio Morpurgo is taken from PN Review 289, our latest issue. To continue reading this article consider subscribing to PN Review, and gain access to over 50 years of archival material. Explore subscription options, including our new One-Day Access subscription here.