4 дек. 2019 г.

Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (2016)

Stefan Zweig: I will not speak out against Germany. I would never speak out against any country. And I'll make no exceptions.

Stefan Zweig: The intellectual should devote himself to his works. That is his most powerful tool. I'm starting to hate politics, because it's becoming the opposite of justice, because it betrays the word with the slogan. To be an intellectual means to be just, to summon up an understanding for one's counterpart and adversaries. An artist can create works with political dimensions, but cannot supply the masses with political slogans.

Stefan Zweig: My personal artistic strength derives from the positive. I can only write for something. I cannot attack. I cannot write out of hatred. And if... If my silence is a sign of weakness, I'm afraid I must live with that stigma.

Stefan Zweig: I believe in a free Europe. I believe that borders and passports will one day be history. But I doubt we'll live to experience it. My pessimism regarding the immediate future was unfortunately always justified. I can only invest my hope in the larger movements that span centuries. But for me, and thus unfortunately for you, too, they will come too late.

Joseph Brainin: Dr. Zweig. I see it as my duty to pressure you. I am determined not to let you go before I get a printable condemnation of the Hitler regime.

Stefan Zweig: I will not pass judgment on the other side of the world in a room full of like-minded people. It would be obscene and meaninglessly fade away. Every gesture of resistance which is void of either risk or impact is nothing but a cry for recognition.

Stefan Zweig: I'm still considering that magazine I told you about in New York. The best works by contemporary Jews, scientists, writers... No polemics, just intellectual quality. That could be an answer to the alleged "Aryan superiority".
Joseph Brainin: You think you could fight a dictatorship like that?..

Stefan Zweig: Brazil is the most beautiful experience I can imagine. We have already seen and experienced such wonderful things here... Europe may be rich in history, but Brazil is the land of the future.


Major Dos Santos: ....Until peace returns to your country and enables you and your honorable wife to return safely to Austria. Because, as an old Brazilian saying goes: "He who has no country shall have no future."

Stefan Zweig: "Pure necessity seizes us by the collar. And now that it's tugging at that notorious last shirt on my back, I catch myself thinking that there might be a reason for all that has happened to us. Then we could call it fate and surrender to it, we could place our hands on our laps or above our heads, and accept what comes, and the whole struggle would come to an end. Even if I try I am unable to recognize the slightest reason for any of this on the political horizon. So I must continue the unequal battle against our persecutors, against poverty, neglect and, most difficult of all, against my pride and my self-esteem. Thus, I stand before you as a beggar, asking for help. Ehrenstein."... You're right, Fritzi. What is my work, what is anything compared to this reality?

Stefan Zweig: Tolstoy said: "Every 60-year-old man should hide in the thicket like aging animals."
Ernst Feder: Tolstoy, of all people? He lived to be ancient. Over 80.
Stefan Zweig: Perhaps he liked the thicket.

Stefan Zweig: How can one bear this? And I can't join in when someone says, "Berlin took a jolly good beating." I can't stand the way people talk about it. Or write about it. Those big-mouth optimists... The war at sea is lost. We're at the start of the war, middle at best, but nobody says it aloud. And the worst part of it is: There's no opposition to the war as such, not in one single country.

"...at the age of sixty, one would need to have unique strengths to start again from scratch. And mine have been exhausted by the many years of wandering. So I think it is better to bring my life to a close at the right time, with my head held high, a life in which intellectual work has always been the purest joy and personal freedom, the greatest commodity in this world.
     I give my regards to all my friends. May they live to see the dawn after the long night.
     I am too impatient, I go before them.
     Stefan Zweig."


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On the IMDb

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