Journeys

"And if the meaning of life consists in relentlessly discovering in the temporal and intellectual new forms of freedom, it is better perhaps to live with the least possible constraints, the art of leaving behind oneself, without sentimentality, a good portion of one's past."

Unlike typical travel writings, Zweig produces short and poignant essays, all set in Europe, that not only focus on specific places and topics, but also move through historical periods to observe and record significant points.

Stefan Zweig takes the reader on a tour of the pre-WWII Europe that he loved. A very good companion piece to "The World of Yesterday." A brilliant mind taken from a world that needed him by terrible events of his time.

A personal intimate look through the authors eyes of Europe before ww11 a book to saver dip in and out of .His books always draw me in and I highly recommend. #netgalley #Pushkinpress.

I must admit that prior to reading this book, I’d only known Stefan Zweig’s work through its influence on <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i> - which is a fairly enormous watering-down of his importance on my part.

Turns out Zweig’s writing is much more than just the inspiration for some lovely cinema. <i>Journeys</i> is a collection of the writer’s work, translated by Will Stone, spanning four decades, all of which specifically relate to travel.

Wait, I’m selling things short again. To view these essays as mere travelogues - though you can certainly do so, and they function well as same - is to ignore the amount of portraiture that’s expressed in each essay. We learn just as much about the inveterate traveller penning the pieces as we do about the locales he’s considering.

The youthful essays are not as accomplished as the later selections, but there exists in Zweig’s portraits of Ostende and Bruges a sense of longing; of wishing. He’s keen, here, to express something other than just a recitation of place: he’s grasping for the fabric beneath the streets. This desire can be seen, much later, in his post-war account of an Italian visit: behind the walls, beneath the cobbles is a vitality, a force that entrances the author - one he exhorts his reader to experience, even if you have to give up cigarettes to do so.

Elsewhere, Zweig touches on the mystery of Hyde Park, on the necessity for shelter for the stateless, and on the transformational role of gardens. He charts the nervousness of post-war travellers, and the lack of certainty that came with the transition from his youth to the aftermath of two meat-grinder wars. And most importantly, he focuses on things lost: nowhere is the author more beguiling than in his description of the Hotel Schwert, or more forceful in his condemnation of the short-sightedness of decision-makers.

(It’s not his generation that’ll suffer, after all: it’s those who come after. )

This limited view is something returned to. Visiting Chartres cathedral, Zweig frames his lament in an uncomfortably familiar way:

“We who thanks to a spark are capable of communicating with another continent in a second, we no longer know how to articulate our being across the slowness of stones, the infinitude of years. Our miracles are manageable and intellectual, our dreams more compact.”

Imagine if he’d seen the Internet.

Increasingly, there’s a grim tone to the pieces dating from after WWI. But they’re not filled with a feeling of hopeless pessimism. Rather, Zweig focuses on the role remembrance places in positioning us in life, and in (hopefully) ensuring that horror doesn’t repeat itself. He is - as a beleaguered Jew and survivor of two wars - of course aware that repetition is what humans <i>do</i>. But he does express hope, however dark: that we can do better than war. Hell, that we can do better than guided tours, even.

It could well be that, knowing the endpoint of Zweig’s life - spoiler: he and his wife committed suicide in the early 1940s - I’m more likely to seek out moments of tragedy, or shadows of darkness in the text. It’s undeniable that his later writing takes a more darkly pensive turn, and understandable when it’s considered that the man lived through two world wars and was forced from countries as a result of them.

(Sure, it’s bad enough to have to flee the Nazis, but to then be moved on from your new home because you’re now considered an enemy alien? How much can someone take?)

Again, it’s natural, given Zweig’s biography, to focus on the darkness of both the period and his life. But this is something I’d caution against, because to do so would be to miss the joy of his turn of phrase. And, more importantly, his belief in the importance of individual experience at the hands of coincidence.

“We want to interrupt a life where we merely exist, in order to live more. So, to be ‘travelled’ in this manner, one must be content to pass before numerous novelties without actually experiencing them at all; all the strangeness, the distinctiveness of a country will utterly escape you as soon as you are led and your steps are no longer guided by the real god of travellers, chance.”

I’m not a German speaker, so I can’t rate the accuracy of Stone’s translation. But it flows nicely and doesn’t seem overly stilted, so it’s a good result for a neophyte reader. The introduction is fine - it’s general, and given the overall length of the work, is short enough to convey the necessary information without wearing out its welcome - but Stone’s included photos of a selection of some of Zweig’s subjects seem an afterthought. (And poorly executed: what’s the point of including <i>some</i> places but not all? C’mon.)

<i>Journeys</i> is a brief book, and it’s the sort of thing that can be inhaled in an afternoon. It’s not a fun read, by any means, but it does contain important moments of joy, even amid the ruins of war. It’s a book that’s suffused with a humanity that surpasses many: it’s testament to Zweig’s inherent inquisitiveness, and to the transforming power of observation and travel. It’s a book that will make you look for a valise and a long weekend, assuming you can stop thinking about our penchant for destruction.

Beautifully captured moments in time from Zweig, as he travelled around Europe before the Second War. There is a vibrancy to his prose that brings the places very much to life, his descriptions are detailed, and his moods throughout the writing are incredibly infectious.

A genuinely wonderful book to explore lost worlds.

Highly recommended.

With thanks to Netgalley and Pushkin for the ARC.

There are few books that can totally answer and almost annul the problems and pressures of life in the Twenty-First century. But Zweig comes across to us in this book "Journeys" from a time where life was degenerating into a political world of lies where millions were thrown out of their homes to wander as refugees. The drum beats of global aggression were everywhere.And yet in this journey of a man to find the stillness of quiet and sanity gives a paradise where the reader may gently rest and renew themselves.

In the places he visits in Europe it is a journey of time and space to the heart of what is good in Civilization. This despised refugee hounded to his death by the populist rhetoric of Fascists, still speaks to us here as a clarion of sanity and comfort.

Zweig is the master of literary technique. His subtle observation, his disconnected sense of tragedy and hope and his remarkable description of visual detail all pile together to give you one of the best books you will read this year.

The man was fleeing in exile and yet you get a sense of a still quiet conscience that wills itself into being as a fortress of sanity. You seriously can't ask for better than this from any book. Its entertaining, informative and even heroic. To produce this book was a triumph, a triumph we all may share in.

This is a selection of pieces from Zweig’s collection “Auf Reisen” selected by poet, and translator, Will Stone. The original publication dates of the chapters run from 1902 to 1940 and his “journeys” – by train – covered cities and towns across Europe. Some you might have visited in their current transformation possibly many not. A few seem slightly rushed travel pieces, others – see Hyde Park” (1906) – are deeply analytical at both an historical and spiritual level. All reflect on Zweig as the man - humanist, pacifist, deeply aware of European history, culture and literature – through the first World War and towards the Nazification of Europe and the second World War. The reader of Zweig will know that leaving Salzburg in 1934 to avoid political arrest he will become a “traveller” that will lead to his eventual exile, depression and death.
These texts while about individual places – presented as distinct, historic communities of people – together reflect a broader Europe and its culture. But some places are reported before the damage of the First War and others the further attritional damage of the Second. But they also show an earlier time and character – smaller (although some – Antwerp for instance - are recognised for their international links) and lacking the massive attritional changes of resident numbers, technological and transport developments and the impact of global consumerism. Behind that the pace was undoubtedly different and thought tells you the tenor of the places, particularly the aural experience too.
The importance of the pieces is the dialogue between the author and the reader; the requirement to read them quietly and slowly and measure them against what you know. Zweig values a city against its capacity to meld the natural landscape elements against its built environment – often languishing back over centuries. A city is not just buildings but its people and culture so he will link places to their writers and composers. But among the broader text he will drop sentences that quietly skewer the essence, or failures, of a place.
Too many cities to list individually – but two remain in memory – Ypres (yes, very “current”) identified as the “Ville Martyre” of Europe but with a text that reflects on the nature of the tourism of death and grief. Both of course different, but his response to the mass tourism marketing he details allows one to recognise what horrors Zweig would find in our modern cities now. Look, too, to Hyde Park (1906) – a deep analysis of place. A place that was used, a sanctuary from the “commercial streets” – another place. You will never see the Park in quite the same way again after reading this.
This book is one of the reasons why people read for pleasure and have book shelves to return to. This is not just about journeys to places, but to the past, to European culture to analysis of what is important in our communities and places around us, setting a marker of values.

Zweig, as always, is masterful. I’ll be beside myself the day I finish plowing through his works.
Journeys is a sort of travelogue if his trips through Europe. His musings are insightful both into his own character and the world around him. He could have put together a collection on taking out the trash or having bowel movements and I’d read it. Zweig was a treasure.

Stefan Zweig was a great writer and this book is no exception.
I loved this book and it gave tons of food for thought. The style of writing is brilliant as usual and his reflections are interesting and poignant.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I was really pleased to have the opportunity to read and review this book, as I am a big fan of German Literature (especially Exilliteratur), but had never read anything before by Stefan Zweig. The book is a collection of his essays on his trips around Europe from 1902 to 1940, when he left Europe forever.
It took me a while to get into this book. I have visited most of the places Zweig writes about here, and initially I spent more time comparing my impressions of the places, than concentrating on what and how he was portraying them. I had loved Bruges – but found his depiction of the city (from about 100 years earlier) quite sombre and dismal:
“I was seized with a faint anguish about the notion of returning to this sepulchral town whose symbols embraced me with such power that I felt an infinite pity for these people who lived here in the shadows, inexorably on the path towards death, towards the incomprehensible.
It wasn’t until the more upbeat essay ‘Springtime in Seville’, which chimed with my experiences, that I began to pay attention to his writing, and enjoying both the excellent prose and the observations that he made.
“‘Quien no ha vista Seville, no ha visto maravilla’ – this proud aristocratic saying one hears until it becomes unbearable; and yet such vanity one can scarcely reproach. For is it not a miracle, when men and so many years of destiny reckon to build a town, and ultimately leave a smile drawn on the face of life?”
I found the imagery particularly beautiful in ‘Antwerp’.
There, they deposit from their wings the precious nectar, the goods. The cranes moan with pleasure when their fingers plunge into ships and exhume from the darkness objects of value drawn from distant lands. Now and then the wharves ring out with signals, great clocks hammer out an exhortation to the emigrants to exchange a last greeting, all languages of the earth resound together here. And at once you understand the sense of this town, too great for this small country: for it must be at the service of all Europe, of an entire continent
And in ‘Salzburg – The Framed Town’ the anthropomorphic description of the Salzach:
It’s an alpine river, small but rebellious, which in a mean mood can boil up during the melting period, impetuously crashing into the bridges and dragging along with it, by way of plunder, innumerable trees
I had spent a week in Chartres nine years ago, and every day went in the cathedral, each day finding something new and marvellous. I felt that Zweig perfectly captured the atmosphere of that amazing place.
“For one person or isolated individuals cannot create such marvels, which require whole centuries in order to exist properly, and for their immortality to ripen fully.”
“in answer they installed coloured panes in the caverns of the windows to lessen the burden of that grey light, allowing the sun to filter through all their colours, and so here too the myriad colourations of life made one sense even in this darkness a certain ecstatic bliss. These stained glass windows of Chartres are of a splendour without rival.”
“For this church had room for an entire generation and that is its heroic lesson, eternally big enough for all earthly aspirations, eternally able to exceed all possibilities and now forever a symbol of infinity”
There are three essays about places in England, and clearly Zweig was a fan of England and the English (at least until they locked him up as an ‘enemy alien’ at the outbreak of WWII). The first is ‘Hyde Park’:
“No – Hyde Park does not inspire dream, it inspires life, sport, elegance, liberty of movement.”
The book finishes with ‘House of a thousand Fortunes’ – a shelter for the dispossessed in London, which took care of hundreds of Jews fleeing the Nazis, among others:
“Adrift in the terrifying insecurity that has enveloped the lives of thousands like a glacial mist, at least for a few days he may feel the warmth and light of humanity – truly consoled at the heart of all this hopelessness he sees, he experiences it: that he is not alone and abandoned in this foreign country, no, rather he is linked to a community of his people and to the still higher community of mankind in general.
and ‘Wartime gardens’ that contrasts the ‘keep calm and carry on’ attitude of the English when war was declared in 1939, and the excited, holiday atmosphere in Vienna on the outbreak of WWI.
Zweig obviously loved travelling, but hated the new fashion of mass tourism, which he discussed in ‘Return to Italy’ (“more and more an invasion that washed ashore en masse the whole family of the provincial petit bourgeois”) and in ‘To Travel or be Travelled’:
“travel must be an extravagance, a sacrifice to the rules of chance, of daily life to the extraordinary; it must represent the most intimate and original form of our taste”
Zweig committed suicide in 1942, so he never got to see the horror of Ypres visited on Germany:
“Imagine if you will, to give comparison, a Berlin where the castles and the Linden were reduced to nothing but a smoking heap of debris”
But he also never got to see the European Union in all its glory, as “a new world that knows no national boundaries”.
This collection of essays gives a glimpse into the past – but is also a reminder of what we have now in the present, what we have lost and what we have gained, what has changed, and what still endures. Some of the essays I found very emotional – such ‘Ypres’ and ‘House of a thousand Fortunes’. Most of them, I really enjoyed.
I would like to read more by Stefan Zweig – perhaps even in German. But that is for another time.

This is a tremendously interesting time capsule for the modern day. Following Zweig on his travels from the early 1900s to the middle of World War II, the reader is catapulted back in time and visualises a world much changed (but also barely changed at all). The back end of the stories here are fraught with the sense of war, which makes for a new and interesting take on the topic- anyone who values travel, global history and non fiction writing will love this.

In more modern times we are used to travel blogs, guide books and celebrities outlining journeys in far off countries as well as familiar places. I have enjoyed many who have shared their experiences and made their journeys my own as I’ve been informed and encouraged to make such trips for myself.
None however has come close, even with the aid of television bringing the train or market produce alive to capturing the essence Zweig conveys.
Through a series of essays about places he visited this erudite and master of language brings place, people and politics into focus. He is outspoken but speaks with insight and the depth of all the arts. His prose is poetic and not a word is wasted.
Having been to Bruges and Ypres I found his words both familiar and illuminating. I wonder at my own poverty to see with such discerning regard. My vision is quite impotent compared to his insight and reflection. Yet through his words I brightened as my own experiences were honed and refocused.

I enjoyed his bemoaning of the loss of a hotel. I felt moved as he recounted the generations of people coming together over decades to build a cathedral - I loved his points about the transience of modern thinking and the witness of history in stone.
I was proud of the hostel providing brief respite in London for homeless Jews in London and the points he makes regarding comfort and reaching out to refugees.

The whole book is worth reading just for his critique of the modern tourist who is part of a coach party and fails to have a true personal experience. It echoed many of my own thoughts about packaged holidays against independent travel.

Here is an author who I hadn’t read. I am grateful to Pushkin Press for making this book available to me as here is a writer I will now seek out for their language and ability to help me realise why I too like to travel to new places and explore by myself.

Journeys is a collection of the author's observations made during his time travelling throughout Europe. The work is very detailed and quite enjoyable.

Thank goodness for Pushkin Press. While interest in Zweig has increased since Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, there was never a guarantee that more of his work would become widely available to English speaking audiences. A indispensable volume for anyone interested in interwar literature.