Zweig, Roth and Benjamin: A Reflective Overview
How does anyone cope with displacement from their homeland or permanent exile through war? Roth describes in his own words the emotions of despair for those displaced in his preface to the 1937 edition of his work ‘The Wandering Jews’:
“In such a world, not only is it out of the question that émigrés should be offered bread and work but it is taken for granted. It has also become out of the question for them to be issued so-called papers. What is a man without papers? Rather less, let me tell you, than papers without a man!”
In Hannah Arendt’s seminal essay ‘We Refugees’ she writes:
“Our optimism, indeed, is admirable, even if we say so our selves. The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.’’
Whatever the terminology- refugee, immigrant, asylum seeker, wherever in the world the escape is from—the dilemma for the person seeking refuge and safety, to use Arendt’s words, is ‘If I am saved, I feel humiliated, and if I am helped, I feel degraded.’ It was not just Zweig, Roth and Benjamin as Jewish intellectuals- Bertholt Brecht and Thomas Mann, as examples only, were not Jews, and they too were intellectuals displaced into forced exile in 1933 assisted by the writer Hermann Hesse, whose third wife was Jewish. In the late 1930s, German journals stopped publishing Hesse’s works, and the Nazis eventually banned them. Hesse, Brecht, Arendt, Adorno, Scholem, Schoenberg and others managed to survive the inferno and go on to live fruitful lives. Zweig, Roth and Benjamin did not. Nor did Ernst Toller, whose suicide occurred shortly before Roth’s death. Koestler appeared to have overcome the inferno, only to become lost to suicide later on, in 1983. Immediate relatives perished, too: Walter Benjamin’s brother Georg perished in the Mauthausen concentration camp, and Joseph Roth’s wife died under the Nazi euthanasia programme for the mentally ill. Imagine for a moment Marseilles in September 1940, the chaos, the panic, with thousands upon thousands of persons trying to flee—amongst the throngs were Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Arthur Koestler. Koestler is the one discernible literary figure to meet all three of the subjects of this book: Zweig, Roth and Benjamin. He spoke to Benjamin in Marseille in September 1940. He met Zweig and Roth in Ostend in 1936. Zweig, Benjamin and Roth were brilliant men of letters. The three of them were excellent writers, intellectuals and secular Jews. They were restless and anxious men. They were peripatetic travellers. Roth’s child hood was marred by his never having known his father, who had a mental illness, as was also the case with Roth’s wife. Her mental illness was severe and long-standing. Benjamin, too, wrote about an unhappy childhood. In his book ‘A Berlin Childhood Around 1900’ Benjamin describes the house from which he came as a ‘mausoleum long intended for me.’ There is no suggestion in Zweig’s case of an unhappy child hood, yet he and Benjamin both suffered from mental health vulnerabilities throughout their lives. Thoughts of suicide were present at varying points in their lives. The reasons for Roth’s severe alcohol abuse lay rooted in the unhappiness of his childhood. All three men died by suicide, and included here is Roth—whilst he technically died of pneumonia, it is generally accepted that he willed himself to death through his severe abuse of alcohol and personal self-neglect. The above said, it must be noted that all three (Zweig, Roth and Benjamin) valued their lives very much, as reflected by the steps they took to avoid serving on the front line in World War I. They wished to stay alive. Roth and Zweig served in military capacities that avoided them being in danger of death or serious injury. Benjamin avoided military service altogether. Fast forward to 1939/40, both Roth and Benjamin obtained papers authorising their emigration to America, indicating they had still not completely lost the will to survive. Benjamin was still trying to escape to safety on his journey across the Pyrenees. Zweig was able to reside in Brazil, a country of safety. No one can ever fully know why a person dies by suicide. Yet, it would not be remarkable to consider the depth, breadth and severity of the personal, psycho logical, political and economic pressures that must have borne down on all three men. Each and all of them lived through and experienced the totemic changes brought about by the disaster of the First World War. Roth and Zweig lamented the loss of their homeland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As was the case for millions of others, Zweig, Roth and Benjamin had to rebuild their lives from the debris of that conflagration. It would not be uncommon at any time for writers to sustain financial uncertainty. Roth and Benjamin suffered financial difficulties throughout their careers. Zweig not so because of his wealthy background. Zweig, in particular, became known between the two world wars as a highly successful writer, both nationally and internationally. Yet all three men had, in addition, unjustly foisted upon them virulent hatred because of two factors: they were Jews, and they were intellectuals. The flavour of the intensity of the increasing instability of the Weimar Republic is evidenced by the assassination in 1922 of Walter Rathenau, the Jewish foreign minister of Germany, and by Joseph Roth’s direct observations in his essays ‘What I Saw Reports from Berlin 1920-33.’ Hunger, chaos, economic and political instability, inflation, and increasingly nationalistic far-right activity and anti- Semitism were all prevalent. Zweig was somewhat insulated from all of this, living as he did in his comfortable home in Salzburg, seemingly protected by his worldwide reputation. He, too, however, was not able to escape the consequences of being a Jew and an intellectual. His literature was banned and burned by the Nazi regime, as was the case with the works of Roth and Benjamin. Alongside this, Zweig, Roth and Benjamin could not sustain anything but fragmented and insecure relationships with partners. Zweig was married to his first wife for a lengthy period that endured while they lived in Salzburg, but the marriage deteriorated and broke down irretrievably. Zweig fled to London in 1934 and remarried whilst in England. Roth’s wife remained in a sanatorium, suffering from severe mental illness, and he thereafter had several relationships with other women. Benjamin became estranged from his wife and son, and he and his wife divorced. The point is not to seek to untangle precise reasons for their lives coming to a premature end but to try to understand all the displacements Zweig, Roth, and Benjamin suffered. Having lived through and survived World War I, all three must have pinched themselves in disbelief and despair at the thought that there would likely be a Second World War conflagration. Regarding displacement, Roth and Zweig had already lamented the loss of their beloved homeland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, the three of them were forced to flee in the knowledge that they were likely otherwise to be captured, imprisoned and killed. Apart from his frequent travelling in order both to write and to lessen his depressive moods, Zweig had spent the whole of his life in Austria and, for many years, was settled in Salzburg. He had to leave this all behind in 1934 after fascists searched his property. Even in exile in England, he knew he was not safe. He was on a list of exiles who would be arrested upon the Gestapo reaching London. This culminated in his further unhappy exile to Brazil. Both Roth and Benjamin had had to flee Berlin in 1933 for Paris. Benjamin undoubtedly loved Paris and its Arcades, which became his real home. Yet again, he had to flee his apartment in Paris in 1939, shortly before fascists raided it. One can only imagine Benjamin’s exquisite collection of artefacts and furniture in his apartment. This had to be abandoned at short notice, and his life and home were gone. Roth never really had a residence of his own, living as he did in Paris, mostly in a hotel, and he too would likely have been arrested, imprisoned and killed had he not died in Paris in the way he did. For him, the loss of his friend Ernst Toller by suicide was too much. What is striking is that whilst, on the one hand, throughout the 1920s, the Weimar Republic was tottering and crumbling, on the other hand, there was a positive flood of intellectual and artistic creativity. There was the legacy of the works of Proust and Kafka, who died in the early 1920s. Alongside Roth, Zweig and Benjamin, there was a rich tapestry of other writers: Sigmund Freud, Arthur Koestler, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno and Rainer Maria Rilke. Another positive feature in an otherwise bleak background was how friendships proved important to the three men. Zweig and Roth sought to support each other as long-standing friends, particularly in the tortuous 1930s. Benjamin was closeted in close friendships with Scholem, Adorno, Arendt, and Brecht. Zweig and Roth both enjoyed the warmth of the group of their friends who assembled in Ostend in 1936, including Ernst Toller and Arthur Koestler.
Zweig, Roth, and Benjamin should not be grouped together as one entity. They were very different and distinct individuals who had much in common. The three men never met in person, and accordingly, there is no photograph of them together. What were they like as individual characters?
Zweig was a reserved and refined man of letters, accustomed to a bourgeois lifestyle and with no money worries. He was a polymathic intellectual who was restless and travelled frequently to both write and ease his depressive moods. He may be described euphemistically as ‘the peripatetic traveller.’ He could, at times, be viewed as somewhat flamboyant. Yet, besides being an excellent writer and collector, Zweig was a brilliant self-publicist who managed to network with ‘the great and the good’ and establish himself as a nationally and internationally known writer. He maintained friendships with Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl and Joseph Roth. He was present at Herzl’s funeral. He was the principal speaker at Freud’s funeral and Roth’s memorial in London in 1939. Recently, there has been a marked and deserved renaissance of appreciation for the breadth and depth of Zweig’s excellent writing.
Roth came to sadly live a spartan, rootless and dissolute life overborne by alcohol, rooted, as indicated, in his unhappy childhood but also exacerbated by the persecution and displacement he had to endure. Nor was he able to achieve any long-lasting and secure personal relationships. Although Roth never divorced his wife, it was never a substantive relationship because of her longstanding severe mental illness. Roth‘s positive characteristics are manifest. He was raw, straightforward and blunt with others, sometimes offensive, but he always sought to say it as it was. He wore his heart on his sleeves. Despite his other negative characteristics, his biting wit and humour enabled him to endear himself to others. Financial difficulties consistently burdened him, and he frequently travelled too, which arose from his journalism career. Roth may be described euphemistically as ‘the peripatetic correspondent.’ Beyond all of the above, Roth was not only a brilliant and acclaimed writer, including classic novels, but he was also insightful, prophetic, and politically attuned, warning from early on of the dangers to come. Roth understood at an early stage the seismic changes yet to be unleashed on the world and the likely outcome for the Jews.
Benjamin was a highly academic and polymathic intellectual. He was also a solitary, reserved, and restless man. He, too, was a frequent traveller for the same reasons as Zweig. He suffered bouts of severe anxiety. He was beset by financial difficulties throughout his life. His ideas, interests and writing were eclectic and wide-ranging, and his quest for knowledge was relentless and unceasing. He may be described euphemistically as ‘the peripatetic student’. Benjamin could, at times, be highly polemic and critical of the works of other writers, and many in the academic and literary establishment found his writing and views too challenging and unsettling. This is likely why Benjamin could not achieve the academic university professorship that might have been ideal for him. Benjamin was ‘one of a kind’ or, as Hannah Arendt deftly put it, he was ‘sui generis.’ Since his death, Benjamin has become increasingly acclaimed as somewhat of an intellectual cult figure- a writer, thinker and philosopher ahead of his time in the disparate subjects he wrote about, including the dimensions of nascent modern media and culture.
The lives of displacement suffered by Zweig, Roth and Benjamin and their tragic demise speak to millions of other innocent victims who were not eminent writers and who, in differing ways, suffered the same fate as them.
The material above, from Chapter 16 of the book, Displacement: Zweig, Roth and Benjamin; three eminent writers hunted to death by fascism, is included here by the author’s permission.
The book is published by Arrow Gate Publishing, of London, UK. To order the book, please click this link:
https://arrowgatepublishing.com/2025/03/11/publication-day-displacement-by-richard-harper/