More reading

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Austria, Empire, Europe, Guapa, Middle East, Saleem Haddad, Stefan Zweig, Vienna

I have this old habit, in the evening before going to sleep I like to read a little. Most of my reading is done in bed at night, I find this soothing and it helps me to fall asleep. In the last few weeks I have read two books by Stefan Zweig, (1881-1942), born in Vienna in a wealthy privilege family and died in Petropolis, Brazil in a suicide pact with his second wife Lotte Altmann. He was a famous writer, journalist, biographer of the first part of the 20th century and his books remain to this day great to read and give the reader wonderful insight. He also knew and was friends with all the great intellectuals of that time and do not be surprise to see him associated with so many famous people it is head spinning, Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland, Richard Strauss, Rainer Maria Rilke and many others.

The first book was the celebrated biography of Marie-Antoinette the ill-fated Queen of France. I have already written on it in a previous post and I recommend it if you want to go beyond the fiction and the Hollywood version of her life.

The other book is the last one ever written by Zweig, The World of Yesterday. He mailed the manuscript to his editor the day he and his second wife committed suicide in Brazil.

Zweig describes himself as a European in the old world sense and at the same time a European of what we know today as the European Union. He is also an enigma for us who live at the end of the 20th and now in the 21 century. He was married for many years to Frederike Maria Von Winternitz but never mentions her in this book which covers the period from his birth in 1881 to 1925. The reader could be excused for thinking that Zweig was single, he divorced her in 1938 and she lived on until 1971.  Was he a very private man? I do not know, in The World of Yesterday he certainly speaks volume about himself and his famous friends, his work, the people he knew and frequented, his travels, about being an assimilated and integrated Jew in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he describes and analyses in minute detail the society of the time, a society which has totally disappeared now and lives on in print. You have to imagine a world, Europe, the old Empires ruled for hundreds of years by Princes and Sovereigns and then the total collapse in 1919, everything changing forever in a radical  manner with the rise in Europe of Fascism and Bolchevism in Russia.

Zweig misses the old world, what he calls the Age of Golden Security assured by an aged Emperor (Franz-Joseph) over a vast Empire comprising dozen nationalities, languages and various religions. He explains the commercial reasons for the First World War, a war promoted by French and German Armament dealers and British and German competing merchant marine. Decades of Peace in Europe, the last war was in 1870 and lasted just over 3 weeks had lulled people into believing that not much would happen in 1914. No one could imagine that by November 1918 their world would no longer exist.

Zweig did spend part of the war in Zurich in neutral Switzerland, a land of plenty in a sea of wont. He describes a scene at the end of the war in 1918, the Kaiser in Germany has already gone into exile in Holland. Zweig stands on the platform of the Train Station at the Border with Switzerland on the Austrian side, everything around him is tattered and the people look tired and sad, the defeat and fall of the Austrian Empire is dawning on them. Zweig notices how the Station is becoming crowded with people, officials and Austrian soldiers though no trains is expected, he notices a beautiful black train of highly polished cars pulling slowly into the station, it’s the Imperial train, at the window stands Emperor Karl and his wife Empress Zita who are leaving Austria and going into exile, He refused to abdicate and simply left quietly, ending the 900 year rule of the Hapsburg dynasty, Zweig notices how everyone is silent and looks embarrassed, Zweig felt at that moment that this was truly the end. The end of it for him, for the world he had known, yes and how he then maybe went into a state of deep melancholy. The years that followed will see the rise of economic difficulties, Fascism in many European countries, the great depression, anti-semitism, nazism, the rise of Communism and then the Second World War. Of course for Zweig life goes on but on a different track, having the financial means he then travels abroad fleeing the chaos of the new and territorially small Republic of Austria, he will go to England as Freud did, to North America and finally to Brazil. Despite having a new young wife Lotte Altmann, he feels he cannot re-invent himself and fears aging, the past of Old Europe haunt him.

Zweig’s Villa in Salzburg on Kapuzinerberg 5, it is a private house today.

I find Zweig to be a complex person, a highly educated, refined person, he seems to be several people at once, the great writer, the friend of the cognoscenti, living in a world at the top of the social pyramid but then the other person appears emotional, overly sentimental, detached, revealing little of his personal life, this may be simply his 19th century sensibilities, gentile upbringing of not burdening people with personal details, something unknown to us in our world of the selfie.

The other book I read was just published by a first time author Saleem Haddad, a young thirty something man. Saleem Haddad is a writer and aid worker. He was born in Kuwait City to an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father, and has lived in Jordan, Cyprus, Canada and the U.K. He has worked with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and other international organizations in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, and Egypt. He and his partner have a greyhound, Jack and live in London.

His book published in March is entitled Guapa, the name of a Gay underground bar. I found this novel after a friend of mine who owns a bookstore café in Jordan recommended it to me. I liked the book instantly, the story is fast moving and happens in an unnamed Arab country, I was convinced it was Damascus the Capital of Syria but the author Haddad based the city where the protagonist lives on several cities, Amman, Beirut, Cairo. He does this on purpose and it works very well, though the President Dictator reminded me of Bashar Al-Assad and his wife Asma in their description in this book, this is why I thought it might be Syria.

Guapa gives a very accurate portrait of Arab life, family and society, I recognized it instantly, I came to care about Rasa and the people around him.  Haddad says; Not naming the country also allows the story to take on a metaphorical nature: I really didn’t want to write a book that would be sold as an anthropological or political ‘study’ of one country. Instead I wanted to draw on common themes young Arabs across the region could relate to, regardless of their background. The book also shows in the narrative of the story that Arabs are not a monolithic group and the region is populated by many other people who are not Arabs.

The story of the book is about Rasa, a twenty-something-year-old gay man living in an unnamed Arab country, as he negotiates family, societal expectations, queerness, love, police brutality, authoritarianism, decorum, revolution, imperialist narratives, and Islamist extremism—all in the space of twenty-four hours. Throughout Rasa’s journey, the reader is thrown back into the losses, definitions, redefinitions, and rebellions that orbit his life. I would recommend reading this book for anyone who wishes to understand this part of the World and the people living in it. As they say, We are not in Kansas anymore.

 

 

 

Books I am reading

Tags

Beria, France, Louis XVI, Russia, Stalin, Stefan Zweig, USSR

Well I am finishing the great big book on Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a lesson on why the Soviet Union collapse, it was doomed from the beginning. I remember a professor in one of my Political Science classes in University telling us that when Karl Marx wrote his book Das Kapital, he was thinking of industrial Germany not agricultural Russia. What has been depicted in movies and books as a glorious revolution by the people was in fact what we see today in Syria with ISIS. The government of the Tsar collapsed in 1917 when Nicholas II abdicates, the country is at war with Germany and all authority disappears. A group of adventurers styling themselves as revolutionaries “Bolsheviks” take over by simply killing anyone who might have been connected with the Tsarists regime. Russia then falls into a long 10 year Civil War which ends in 1928, after all opponents have been summarily shot, Lenin has died of cancer and Stalin grabs all the power for himself by shooting is old comrades and will launch purges against all manner of imaginary enemies, no one is safe, including his own family and the family of those comrades who managed not to be purged. Stalin’s wife who suffers from mental illness, shoots herself because she cannot live with this monster,  his reaction is How could she do this to me, he then proceeds to kill family members who he thinks conspired against him. Millions will die this way in an unending blood bath which will last until 1939.

So how or who is running the country, the industries, the army etc. well no one really, Stalin appoints incompetent people most of whom cannot read nor write but are Commissars in charge of everything and their first job is to shoot any worker or manager who does not produce ridiculous quotas of goods no one wants nor could use because the production is so shoddy. Famine ensues and millions die in vast areas of Russia.

As the war in Europe approaches, Stalin makes a secret pact with Hitler to divide Europe and the World. Stalin is secretly hoping that the Nazis will destroy the capitalists in France and England and will not attack Russia. He will make a more public pact to divide the world in 1945 in Yalta with Truman and Churchill, the beginning of the Cold War. Poland is sacrificed in the deal and 10% of its population will be killed, the country divided and disappear, the ultimate plan was to kill all the Poles, Stalin and Hitler hated them.

The same applies for Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.   Finland manages to save parts of its territory after a ferocious battle against the Soviets. Because of the purges of Stalin, the Soviet Army has no Senior officers in command, no modern armament, Stalin is still in favour of a 19th century style army with horses and old cannons, unable to understand that Germany has modern weapons and no one uses cavalry anymore and certainly not against tanks and machine guns. The Soviets have no planes, while Germany has a modern air fleet. The few planes Russia has are so poorly built that they are described as flying coffins. Again Stalin does not want to hear about it, his battle is against his own family, relatives and anyone he thinks might oppose him, a death sentence for many. When Hitler finally attacks Russia in 1941, in the first 48 hours despite the quickly advancing German army and aerial bombardments of cities, pleading by army officers like Zhukov to do something, Stalin refuses to believe the war is on, he thinks it is only a provocation by a lone German General, Hitler his friend would never do that to him. It is all conspirators around him who created this mess, he cannot be responsible for this disaster.

At the time of the pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin to please Hitler and later after 1945 for various reasons will purge (kill) all the Jews from the Soviet government, all of whom are committed Bolsheviks from 1905. They form a majority of all senior comrades in most government departments and in diplomacy. His henchmen is Lavrenti Beria who will outlive Stalin by one year and he himself will be arrested and shot by the new Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev in 1953. The master executioner was the peasant Vasily Blokhin who was in charge of all high profile execution and torture, he killed thousands and had a special squad to ensure efficiency in mass murders, he will commit suicide in 1955 after being disgraced by the new Soviet Leader.

So this is Josef V.Stalin, a Georgian peasant, who came from a dysfunctional family, poorly educated, suffering from various mental problems, his a reign of crimes, depravity and massacres against his own people, there was no communist ideal, no program, no policies, just a lot of purges of people to ensure that no one would ever topple him. Millions died at the hands of his secret police. If the purges stopped once Stalin died, the idea of a Soviet Union was forever doomed, no one, not Khrushchev, not Leonid Bhreznev, no one was able to reform the government and make social progress. Until it finally collapsed in 1989. In other words 72 years of utter misery and mismanagement, so much for the glorious revolution of the people. Problem is no one bothered to invite the people to their own revolution.

The book is well researched but after a while the reader is nauseated with the utter cruelty and nonsense of such a regime which brought nothing to Russia.

The other book I finished reading was the biography of Queen Marie-Antoinette by Stefan Zweig, a very detailed work, giving us a graphic picture, one I had not encountered before of the last 15 years of the Ancient Regime, the story of a monumental failure of the State, of an incompetent King Louis XVI and a Queen Marie-Antoinette who was unable to understand her role being a selfish, spoiled woman and the dangers around her despite many warnings. Missed opportunities at many crucial moments in history. The old Monarchy is swept away by a Bourgeois uprising again done in the name of the people and arranged or staged managed by the brother of the King, the Duke of Provence and his cousin Duke of Orleans, the problem is they (the people) are not aware of it. Only to be replaced by an Imperial regime under Napoleon I and a restoration of the same old monarchy in 1814. A Republican regime is only born in France in 1871, some 82 years later.

I am now going to read another of Stefan Zweig’s books The World of Yesterday.