Customer Reviews

Journey Into the Past

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A quick note about the edition and translation: It seem Mr. Blumenau (above) refers to a slightly different edition by Pushkin Press, with another introduction.

This is of some importance because André Aciman's introduction here in the NYRB edition, although enthusiastic and insightful, reveals far too much of the plot, and would have best been switched with translator Anthea Bell's afterword. First time readers are hereby cautioned. Indeed, it would be best to read the novella first, and the supplementary material after.

That said, Mr. Blumenau (and others) are quite right: Zweig is an important writer of the first rank. On par with close contemporaries Arthur Schnitzler and Joseph Roth, Zweig is a product of that enormously rich and fertile time/place of Vienna in the years just before World War I. And even if `Journey Into The Past' is firmly set in the German speaking world, its vision is much broader.

For the twenty or so years preceding the Great War, there was an enormous confluence (with significant parallels) in the music, painting, and literature of Vienna. So much so that its clear to even a casual observer that Egon Scheile, Arthur Schnitzler, and Gustav Mahler all arose from the same milieu, that heady time of Freud and Schoenberg, the growth of socialist movements, and the nationalist intrigues which inevitably lead to war.

Zweig's posthumously published `Journey Into The Past' concerns the return of a young man to the home of a woman he loved many years before. She is older, and is now widowed. Circumstance heightened the intensity of their passion then while keeping them from consummating their relationship. Yet the memory of each other and that time has not dimmed in either.

The novella concerns feelings and self-awareness (admittedly largely his), and the inevitable disparity between one's inner world and outer life: the difference between what one knows about oneself (or suspects), and what one says and does in the larger world.

Zweig is a keen observer and an astute psychologist, and although there is an emotional telling in this tale, (perhaps even a dollop of `schlag') it is not overwrought and never treacley. In fact, oddly enough, it reminds me a bit of Yasunari Kawabata's story, `First Snow on Fuji', which concerns a somewhat similar reunion of two lovers.

Comprised of 84 short pages in this edition, its a very quick read. And although Bell's translation is graceful and light, and the novella itself provides a sense of Zweig's sweep and power as an author, it may not be the best place for someone new to start. For that, I'd recommend `Beware of Pity', a longer and more substantial book, where Zweig's insight and mastery are on full display.

This is the latest volume in the Pushkin Press' admirable undertaking to make more of the brilliant works of Stefan Zweig available in English. The novella of just 81 pages is flanked by a Foreword by Paul Bailey and an Afterword by the superb translator Anthea Bell.

Ludwig, a young German of humble social origins, had fallen passionately in love with the wife of his wealthy industrialist employer, and she with him. Zweig - and his translators - have always excelled in descriptions of tempestuous emotions which sweep the reader along. Ludwig was sent on what was intended to be a two-year business mission to Mexico, but before the end of those two years the First World War had broken out, and it would be nine years before he returned to Germany and met her again, and the journey of the title is in part a train journey they take together from Frankfurt to Heidelberg. He was now married, and the industrialist had died. On the train he recalls the history of their relationship in the past. And now? And in the future?

One part of what lies ahead is when they came across a massive Nazi parade - just three years after the end of the First World War and twelve years before the Nazis came to power - as they left the station at Heidelberg. The novella itself was started in 1924, and Zweig probably worked on it as late as the 1930s. As the complete typescript was not found and then published (in a French translation) until 2008, it is impossible to know whether this episode, laden with menace, was part of the original draft. Zweig had always loathed war and the nationalism that gave rise to it, so it may well have been an example of his highly-strung prescience.

Ludwig is a self-made man, who was born in poverty, put himself through university at night while working during the day, and rose to become the trusted right-hand man of a wealthy German industrialist in the years before the Great War. The industrialist is in failing health, and asks Ludwig to move into his vast estate. He initially refuses, but finally agrees. Upon his arrival, he meets the industrialist's beautiful young wife, who makes him feel immediately at home, and he soon falls madly in love with her.

Two years later he is sent to Central America by the company, and the trip is to last two years. He is initially reluctant to leave, due to his previously unexpressed feelings for his unnamed love. Once she finds out he is leaving, she admits that she fell in love with him from the moment she first met him, and they agree to consummate their smoldering love on his return. The meeting is delayed due to the onset of the Great War, but eventually he is able to return to Germany, and the two agree to meet. He feels the same passion for her that he had on his departure, but wonders if she will still agree to her promise.

Journey into the Past is a complex, passionate tale of love and how it can grow or wither with time and hardship. The story had me on edge for its short length, and is one of the best novellas I've ever read.

Stefan Zweig possesses a fluid and elegant voice, which he uses to achieve precise and evolving insight into the state of mind of Ludwig, the protagonist of JOURNEY INTO THE PAST. With this fine instrument, Zweig shows Ludwig become infatuated with his boss's wife, discover she reciprocates, endure a nine-year separation from his beloved, and then reappear in the wife's life, when he attempts to restore their bond and the emotion of their single rapturous no-no-not-here moment. This novella, I suppose, shows how an innocent emotional connection can become a time-locked fixation, as well as a cause of pathetic wistful frustration. Ludwig, my dear fellow, learn to let things go...

In telling this story, the articulate Zweig focuses on Ludwig's obsessive attachment to the wife. The story moves rapidly, with Ludwig's reflections reaching immediate clarity before scooting onto the next point, which usually reads as both brilliantly spot-on and somehow inevitable. Nonetheless, JitP is first and foremost a story of obsessive love, which means Zweig does write toward such passages as:

"He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear of its own fulfillment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart. But he... must simply stay like this, carried on into the unknown as if in a dream, carried on by a strange torrent, without physical sensation and yet still feeling, desiring yet achieving nothing, moving on into his fate..."

In his final few paragraphs, Ludwig (SPOILER ALERT!) acknowledges the difficulty of restoring the past to life and the folly of assuming memory foretells the future. This puts a twist on his story, which, in hindsight, seems more about madness than the empowering force of love.

I'm grateful JitP wasn't longer and I round up to four stars.

BTW: Read Andre Aciman's lazy introduction only after you finish the book.

Ludwig, an impoverished chemist, finds work with the famous industrialist G and quickly works his way into favour and is asked to live at G's home to act as secretary and confidant.There he falls in love with G's young wife,finding out it is reciprocated only after he has accepted G's offer to start a branch of the company in Mexico.He counts off the two years of separation,only to have it cruely extended by the outbreak of the Great War.A decade on he returns to Berlin and seeks out his love. But both she, he and Germany have irrevocably changed...
This is a wonderful story superbly translated and highlights just how far ahead of the pack Zweig was (is) in the short story/novella genre.The story has depth and feeling and historical significance all contained in 80 odd pages that you will read in an evening and return to re read more than once.
The tale reflects Zweig's own sadness in the loss of a flowering enlightened age;swept away by a pointless war then crushed still further by a hopelessly flawed peace treaty that led to a new age of barbarism and an even greater war-as Zweig points to in the closing sequence of the book when Ludwig and his love arrive at Heidelberg.
That Zweig killed himself in 1942 aged 60 makes you grieve for all the lost works he may have given us,but you are eternally grateful works such as this survived and are being actively revived. A great book.

The author has given a wonderful picture of life in Europe between WW1 & WWII. He also gives us a feeling of what it was like for some of the countries that were not involved in the second world war, and there were some. The main characters are well shapd for that time. The ending of this short book is, I think up for interpretation. Granted I was one of three out of twelve that I know who have it that have the book that think so.

Just recently discovered this author, who was a favorite of my aunt's. A beautifuly written small book of tragic proportions. Its main theme is of underlying sadness, of the fact that you truly can't go home again or recover that that once was.