In the twenties of the last century, a rumor spread in literary circles that the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal mocked Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), whom he always despised, calling him
erwerbszweig
(a word that means "commercial branch" and is also a game with the author's last name).
Not everyone liked the sudden success of the creator of romantic novels like
Letter from a stranger
.
In the interwar period, Zweig was the most translated in the world, his works topped the best-seller lists, and until he was banned by the Nazis he circulated more than a million books.
The mockery of Hofmannsthal, who died in 1929, came before he could even see something that is now finally available to us.
In 1932, Zweig began to write a notebook that he baptized as
Hauptbuch
(ledger) and that inaugurated a new model of writer, the total writer.
It is a large-format black leatherette notebook, 54 by 38 centimeters, 119 pages with a sewn spine, where he annotated with industrial precision the inventory of his literary production.
This is how it controlled its international publishers, the different translations, the distribution, the film rights, the theatrical adaptations, the income... It detailed the conclusion of the contracts and the payments, these in turn divided into three columns (“declaration”, “expiration date”, “final”).
In one of his entries, for example, he records that a pirated edition of
Marie Antoinette
was circulating in Latvia .
It was not a
samizdat
(clandestine copy of prohibited works), since his work did not suffer Stalinist censorship since it was well received in the USSR, where Zweig traveled as a lecturer, so much so that the publisher in Riga was publishing it without paying royalties.
The
Hauptbuch
can be browsed at the headquarters of the Literaturarchiv Salzburg (Salzburg Literary Archive) on Residenzplatz —the same square where the Nazis burned Zweig's books on April 30, 1938—, but now also on the writer's website (stefanzweig. digital).
For several years now, the archive has been working on digitizing Zweig's personal collection so that it can be consulted in facsimile format.
“The
Hauptbuch
it shows that Zweig's office was more like a company than the classic idea of the lonely author at his desk,” says archivist Lina Maria Zangerl.
“There were many people involved in the management and dissemination of his work, not just editors and translators, but also his two wives and his secretary, Anna Meingast.
It also serves as a symbol of the time, in which literary
marketing
played an increasingly important role.
The book 'Hauptbuch' by Stefan Zweig.Literaturarchiv Salzburg
The writer made the most of the advances in communication at the beginning of the 20th century.
He cared about the impact of marketing and promotion, and tried to get the different translations released simultaneously.
Oliver Matuschek, author of
The Three Lives of Stefan Zweig
and who is preparing a book on the Austrian writer, says from Berlin: “I don't know of any other author from that period who carried a similar book.
But who had as many different translations and editions of his works as he?
Many authors left the management of their rights abroad to the publishers.
Also his editor, Anton Kippenberg of Insel Verlag, insisted on it and did not understand why Zweig did not change his mind ”.
Zweig even commissioned the design of the
Hauptbuch
from a local printer.
“I am sure that Zweig,” Matuschek continues, “as the son of a textile merchant, knew something similar to the
Hauptbuch
.
The term originally belongs to the specialized vocabulary of accounting and leads us to the banking and merchant roots of the Zweig family.
Celebration
Zweig's birthday is celebrated every November 28 and the Literaturarchiv Salzburg has done so by uploading 100 new documents along with the
Hauptbuch
, plus 2,300 images (one third of the total).
Among the novelties, you can read the pages of his travel diary in Vigo in 1936, during a stopover on his boat trip to Rio de Janeiro, when the Civil War had already begun.
Also the research material to write a novel in his British exile that he never faced (
Bau der Wiener Oper
) or the preface to
Clarissa
, which he wrote in the prelude to his suicide and which, despite its interest and brevity, has never been published with this novel: ”Novel started in a first draft, the world between 1902 and the outbreak of war seen from the experience of a woman.
Only the first part is outlined, the beginning of the tragedy, then it was interrupted to work on
Montaigne,
disturbed by the events and the lack of freedom of my existence”, Stefan Zweig, November 41 to February 42″.
Plus there's Anna Meingast's encrypted journal.
She was such an efficient secretary that she wrote down confidential information about Zweig's life and work in an indecipherable variant of the Gabelsberger shorthand.
Even today the experts who have gone to the archive are unable to read it.
Her role was that of the brave: at Zweig's request, she guarded the
Hauptbuch
in her Salzburg home despite the risk involved in hiding a Jewish account book during Nazism.
The volume was kept by her son Wilhelm until his donation to the Literaturarchiv in December 2000.
The encrypted diary of Anna Meingast, Zweig's secretary.
Zweig settled in Salzburg at the age of 38.
His previous literary work—poetry, drama, war propaganda articles in the War Archive Literary Group to get rid of the trenches of World War I—remains in the deep background today.
He wrote the fictions, fictionalized biographies, and essays that made him so popular—so unpopular for Hofmannsthal—in a villa on the Kapuzinerberg.
The car magnate Wolfgang Porsche bought it last year for a figure that exceeds eight million euros.
The villa of the Jewish author who committed suicide in exile, in Petrópolis (Brazil), on February 23, 1942, is now owned by an heir to the Porsche clan, a collaborator with Nazism.
On this matter, at the Stefan Zweig Zentrum, inaugurated in 2008 in a Salzburg mansion to spread the legacy of the writer, they are not optimistic.
As in the Woody Allen film
Match Point
, the ball is in the air.
When it falls, we will know if there will be a memorial on the spot where Zweig wrote his great work or if it will continue as a private residence.
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