Stefan Zweig: The Society of the Crossed Keys

Wes Anderson is an American director and screenwriter. His films include Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom . He directed and wrote the screenplay for The Grand Budapest Hotel , his latest film.

George Prochnik is the author of The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World . He is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine.

GEORGE PROCHNIK: I thought your film did a beautiful job of transposing Stefan Zweig’s actual life into the dream life of his stories, and the stories into the fabric of his actual life. You showed how deeply implicated they were in one another—not in the sense that Zweig was necessarily writing directly about his own experiences, but in the way his own experiences had a fairy-tale dimension, confectionary and black by turns. This dream-like aspect of his work and existence seem central to understanding him. I wondered if you could say anything about these qualities and how Zweig became an inspiration for you.

WES ANDERSON: One thing that struck me, after I had read a few of Zweig’s books, is that what I began to learn about him personally was quite different from what I felt I understood about him from his voice as a writer. So much of his work is written from the point of view of someone who’s quite innocent and is entering into kind of darker territories, and I always felt that Zweig himself was a more reserved person who was exploring things in his work that he was drawn to but that weren’t his own experiences. In fact, the truth seems to be completely the opposite. He seems to be somebody who more or less tried everything along the way.

PROCHNIK: I agree, and I’m curious whether this quality of Zweig’s character resonates with the intriguing title you gave this collection, The Society of the Crossed Keys.

ANDERSON: Well, that just refers to a little made-up secret guild of European hotel concierges in our movie. Many of the ideas expressed and/or explored in Grand Budapest we stole directly from Zweig’s own life and work; and then, also, maybe the membership of the Society itself might hint at hidden, secret corners of Zweig’s world which we are only now starting to pull back the curtains on.

I had never heard of Zweig—or, if I had, only in the vaguest ways—until maybe six or seven years ago, something like that, when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity . I loved this first book, and immediately there were dozens more in front of me that hadn’t been there before. They were all suddenly back in print. I also read the The Post Office Girl , which had been only published for the first time recently. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself—our “Author” character, played by Tom Wilkinson, and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law. But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes, is modelled significantly on Zweig as well.

PROCHNIK: Zweig’s stories are always nesting stories within stories and confessional revelations of deep secrets within secrets. The action of observing other people’s secrets becomes the occasion for personal disclosures by the observer. The way that your film seems to work on that grid of multiple overlapping and proliferating story lines was very striking.

ANDERSON: We see this over and over again in Zweig’s short stories. It’s a device that maybe is a bit old-fashioned—I feel it’s the kind of thing we might expect to find in something by Conrad or Melville—where somebody meets an interesting, mysterious person and there’s a bit of scene that unfolds with them before they eventually settle down to tell their whole tale, which then becomes the larger book or story we’re reading. I love that in Zweig—you describe it as confessional, and they do have that feeling, and they’re usually secret. One of his novellas is even called Burning Secret. Anyway, that sort of technique is such an effective way to set the stage, to set a mood. It draws you in before you say, “Now I will tell you my story.” It creates this kind of a “gather around” feeling.

PROCHNIK: When you were speaking about the device as a convention, I was thinking also about Freud. You probably know that Zweig was a good friend of Freud’s—and a huge admirer of his theories. There’s one letter Freud wrote Zweig in which he praises Zweig’s work and remarks that there’s an astonishing quality to his novellas whereby they seem to grope closer and closer to the most intimate inner core of their subject matter, the way that symbols accumulate in a dream. This idea calls to mind as well what you did with Zweig and his work. Reading his fictions I often feel that while on the one hand they’re formalised and traditional, there’s also something so peculiar and subverted.

ANDERSON: I agree. There’s a word I use to describe it, which is “psychological”. When I’ve occasionally said that to describe Zweig I always want to say, Now, what do you mean by that? Because I don’t really know what I mean by this. But the stories feel psychological. It feels like there are contradictions within the characters that are being explored and there’s something unconscious that’s always brewing, and the behaviour that people don’t really want anyone to know about is kind of forcing its way into view.

PROCHNIK: I think that’s exactly right. There’s a strange, compulsive quality to that process of revelation. And whatever the psychological quality to his fiction is, it definitely has something to do with the unconscious. He was so concerned with states of complete immersion and concentration, like the powerful moment in his memoir when he describes watching Rodin begin to touch up a sculpture he’s working on and forgetting that Zweig is even there in the studio with him. Zweig was fascinated by fascination—losing yourself in that way. I think when his fictions work you can feel him going after some kindred process.

ANDERSON: Like the state in which he worked. He liked absolute quiet and seclusion in his work—this was a particular issue for him—and I could see that need for silence tying into this. Think about the novella Confusion . Zweig is both of the main characters there. Because I can see the student who kind of goes off the rails in Berlin and enters into this wild life as one aspect of Zweig’s experience; and then there’s the academic, who’s sort of distant, and whose relationship with his wife is full of secrets. I feel he’s represented in both these characters. I mean I guess that’s probably normal. Writers are inside all kinds of characters.

PROCHNIK: But I think the split is particularly true to his nature. Many of Zweig’s friends characterised his social persona as that of the voyeur who would never quite take part in the dance-hall action—he would sit there and watch. But then at the same time there are odd stories about him—for example of his possibly having been a flasher when he was a young man. There were rumours that Zweig used to go to a park in Vienna and expose himself. And Freud of course saw these kinds of desires on the same axis—that need to expose oneself and to be hidden he saw as very linked.