Huebsch, Ben W., Stefan Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel,and the Viking Press Imprint

Ben W. Huebsch (1876—1964) eagerly and generously supported European emigres who sought and/or found entry to the United States during the critical years of 1933 to 1945. Among other measures, he especially provided many German and Austrian emigres with an opportunity to publish their works in the United States in translation.

After a short career as an apprentice for a lithographer and some work in the print­ing trade, Huebsch met the popular lec­turer Edward Howard Griggs, who influ­enced him to enter the publishing field. Between 1902 and 1925, the B. W. Huebsch firm published hundreds of books under its own imprint, rapidly culti­vating an impressive roster of about fifteen new titles each year. Even early in his pub­lishing career, Huebsch could recognize tal­ent, publishing the first works of numerous authors who rapidly rose to fame there­after. In so doing, he introduced the Amer­ican public to a wealth of new American and European authors, such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Sherwood Ander­son, H. G. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Stephen Wise, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Thorstein Veblen, Maxim Gorky, August Strindberg, Frances Hackett, Ellen Key, Sigurd Ibsen, David Pinski, Jean Starr Un- termeyer, and Gerhart Hauptmann.

Despite such success, Huebsch’s youth­ful days had been marked with supreme tragedy. When Huebsch was eight years old, his father Adolph Huebsch (1830— 1884) suddenly passed away.

In midsummer 1925, when Huebsch was forty-nine, he learned that two twenty-five-year-old colleagues, also situ­ated in New York, had just founded (in March of this same year) the Viking Press publishing house and desired to expand it. The Viking Press founders were Harold Guinzburg, who had graduated from Har-

Stefan Zweig (left) and Ben W Huebsch (right, with the pipe) in an undated photo. (Photo Courtesy of Jeffrey B. Berlin)

vard in 1921, and George Oppenheimer, who had graduated from Williams College and, after that, from Harvard. Huebsch considered the prospect of a merger with Viking a good opportunity. Although Huebsch’s own publishing house contin­ued to be successful, its operation became ever more complex. Also, even though books with the Huebsch imprint brought profit, after deducting expenses, the actual income received usually was insufficient to allow speculation on certain advantageous opportunities.

In regard to the above, in 1914, for ex­ample, Huebsch had begun to make an­nual summer trips to Europe so that he could vacation and personally interact with potential authors. Huebsch’s 1937 ar­ticle “Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life,” which appeared in the most distinguished, bibliophile quarterly that Elmer Adler Pynson printed, reported about the supreme significance of such visits. And in this article Huebsch observed that, in short, his European visit of “1914 resulted in such a net-gain in friends and experi­ence as to effect [his] subsequent course considerably” (Huebsch 1937, 424). Of course, his opportunities, impressions, and pleasures were enhanced by his fluency in German and French. Personal meetings with European writers account for many of his book contracts, and he also posi­tioned himself in an excellent manner to evaluate manuscripts himself. However, during Huebsch’s yearly three- to four- month summer journeys to Europe and during his lengthy trip from December 4, 1915, to March 7, 1916, when he was in Europe with the Henry Ford Peace Plan Commission, for example, he had no one to whom he could delegate responsibilities in his publishing firm. Such a dilemma represented a major problem.

Accordingly, a merger with the Viking Press represented an excellent means to re­solve his business predicament. In short, the merger proceeded without complica­tions, and in August 1925, Huebsch bought stock in the Viking Press, and the Viking Press owners bought stock in B. W. Huebsch, Inc. In this same month the two companies formally merged. Interestingly, the B. W. Huebsch, Inc./Viking Press union was completed even before the Viking Press had published any books under its own name. Noteworty, too, is that the seven-branched candelabra that Huebsch had used as a logo for his own im­print (which had been designed by his tal­ented, artistic sister and was meant to sym­bolize Huebsch’s religious origins) was immediately replaced by the new Viking­ship logo, which the famous American painter, printmaker, engraver, lithographer, and illustrator Rockwell Kent (1882— 1971) had drawn.

In the new Viking Press structure, Huebsch’s official title was vice president and director, which meant that he func­tioned as the firm’s senior editor. He as­sumed this role from August 1925 until his retirement in May 1956, after which he remained as a literary adviser until his death on August 8, 1964, at the London Athenaeum Hotel. At the time of the merger, Huebsch’s financial stability dra­matically increased, but of more impor­tance to him was the fact that he no longer would be accountable for the firm’s day-to-day operations, which were as­sumed by Harold Guinzburg, who con­tinued as Viking Press president. Guinzburg was “captain of the Viking crew” and “set the course and made the tough decisions,” as Malcolm Cowley, who in 1949 became a part-time literary consultant at the Viking Press, has stated in his commentary about Marshall A. Best (p. 9). Oppenheimer became corporate secretary and a director, with primary re­sponsibility for the firm’s publicity and advertising. The attorney Wolfgang S. Schwabacher of a major law firm was a silent partner and represented the pub­lishing house in legal matters. Charles Margolin became the firm’s treasurer.

In the early 1920s there existed a wealth of successful American publishing houses, yet only two publishers—the newly established Viking Press, co­founded, as noted, by Guinzburg and Op­penheimer in March 1925, and the Alfred A. Knopf Publishing Company, which Knopf had founded in May of 1915. Espe­cially the Viking Press and the Knopf firm recognized the potential cultural and eco­nomic value that the publication and sale of translated European writers’ works in America could provide. In fact, even before Huebsch’s association with the Viking Press, he understood well the European writers’ market.

In 1926, at the Viking Press, Huebsch gained a unique advantage over other pub­lishing houses: one of Huebsch’s new Viking authors was Stefan Zweig. Like Huebsch, all of his life Zweig professed goodwill, tolerance, and understanding to­ward all peoples.

The immediate and phenomenal pop­ularity of writers like Werfel, Feucht­wanger, and Zweig in the United States un­doubtedly resulted largely from their individual artistic talent and capabilities. Yet without the support and guidance of Huebsch, such acclaim would not have been achieved. Even though some emigre writers were productive in the United States, the number was minimal, exempli­fied well by the Jewish German emigre fig­ure Heinrich Eduard Jacob (1889—1967). Unlike the literary works of Werfel, Feuchtwanger, or Zweig, Jacob’s writings only recently had been introduced to the American public, whereas the others had had their writings published in English translation since the mid-1920s. Yet in Eu­rope Jacob was known as a prolific, pro­found, and internationally respected cul­tural historian, biographer of great musicians, novelist, dramatist, essayist, and translator. Furthermore, during Jacob’s life­time he would publish thirty-six acclaimed books with Europe’s most prestigious pub­lishers. With one exception—Jacob’s Cof­fee: The Epic of a Commodity, which the Viking Press published in 1935—Jacob’s submissions to the Viking Press were de­clined. Jacob did successfully locate other American publishers to issue some of his books, but they did not sell well. Like many other emigre figures, Jacob be­moaned having been severed from his birth country of Germany, mother tongue, and culture, as well as German publishers, readers, critics, and colleagues. In fact, a comparison of Thomas Mann’s exile years with those of Heinrich Eduard Jacob un­derscores the difficulties less famous emigre writers encountered in America (Berlin, “In Exile”) and, at the same time, permits us to recognize the similarities and differ­ences between American publishers such as Huebsch, who may be compared with Mann’s publisher, namely, Alfred A.

Clearly, Jacob’s dilemma dramatically contrasted with the experiences of Mann,Werfel, Feuchtwanger, and Zweig in the United States. Werfel’s voluminous works consisted mainly of short stories, novellas, sketches, poems, essays, lectures, plays, and ten novels. Indeed, the publica­tion of Werfel’s first volume of poems Der Welfreund (Friend of Mankind) in 1911 had made him famous overnight, with crit­ics correctly comparing Werfel to Walt Whitman. But Werfel’s American successes were due more to his works such as The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), Eternal Road (1936), Jeremias—Hearken unto the Voice (1938), Embezzled Heaven (1940), The Song of Bernadette (1942), Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), Between Heaven and Earth (1944), and Star of the Unborn (1946).

As an examination of Huebsch’s pub­lished and still-unpublished correspon­dence with Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel reveals, of all Werfel’s works, the most successful in the United States was his historical epic narrative entitled The Song of Bernadette, which the Viking Press pub­lished, in the translation by Ludwig Lewisohn, on May 11, 1942. The first edi­tion of Bernadette appeared in 200,000 copies. Sales were astonishing, and only a few weeks later the Viking Press printed another 100,000 copies. By the end of July 1942 the Viking Press had printed a total of 400,000 copies of Bernadette. In fact, between June 1942 and June 1943 there were eleven large printings of it. Remark­ably, too, shortly after Bernadette’s appear­ance, Werfel’s work also became—in June 1942—the top best-selling book in the United States, having overtaken John Steinbeck’s war novel Bombs Away. And just prior to the 1943 Christmas sales sea­son, Huebsch reported that, during this early preholiday period, at least another 802,000 copies had been sold (Berlin, Daviau, and Johns 1991).

The Song of Bernadette became the Book-of-the-Month Club selection for July 1942 and, at the time, as the Ben Huebsch/ Franz Werfel/Alma Mahler Werfel corre­spondence in addition to Viking Press business records contained in the Huebsch archive at the Library of Congress reveal, it distributed approximately 355,800 copies of the volume. Also, Literary Guild Special Sales amounted to additional sales of about 287,000 copies (see especially Huebsch’s letter of November 29, 1943, to Alma Mahler Werfel in Berlin, Daviau, and Johns 1991, 168). In approximately the first four months of the Viking Press sales proper, the publishing firm sold 93,750 copies of Bernadette. Then, in the one-year period from July 1942 until July 1943 the Viking Press sold another 300,000 copies of Bernadette. In November 1943 Huebsch could report that an additional 802,800 copies were sold. Furthermore, Werfel re­ceived $125,000 from the Twentieth Century-Fox studio for the film rights, and Bernadette even became an Academy Award-winning movie in 1943.

In 1944 The Song of Bernadette contin­ued to sell at a rate of approximately 10,000 copies per month. As Huebsch ex­plains in his letter of May 25, 1943, to Franz Werfel, he also had “arranged with Omnibook [the monthly magazine com­posed of condensed novels] for the publi­cation of Bernadette in their July issue [which did] not use the Ladies’ Home Journal condensation but [made] their own” (Berlin, Daviau, and Johns 1991, 153). From this Werfel earned another $1,000. Among other successes, Bernadette also was chosen by “the Government for distribution to the Services [and] the min­imum first edition [was] 50,000 [copies].” Also, in the spring of 1944 The Song of Bernadette was offered in a cheap edition at $1.49, which after only nine months had sold 800,000 copies. From this brief sketch of but a few activities concerning sales of the Bernadette book, we gain an instructive lesson about some of Huebsch’s talents and responses, particularly when the potential to profit appeared to be close at hand.

Another factor becomes evident from the above comments; namely, the value of letters. To be sure, throughout his career, Huebsch was an excellent and avid letter writer and often engaged in “literary exer­cises” through this medium, for it is not an exaggeration to say that to him letters rep­resented another form of art. In fact, throughout his lifetime Huebsch kept car­bon copies of almost all his letters, almost all of which he donated to the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. As an in-house Library of Congress guide about the contents of the Ben Huebsch archive (and especially the extensive amount of epistolary documents that are part of it) states: “[These] letters reflect the man. Huebsch’s pithiness and compression, in turn, affected many of his correspondents” (p. 1). Furthermore, John Broderick, then at the Library of Congress, observes: “An impressive feature of the correspondence is its evidence that Mr. Huebsch was able to sustain simultaneously a large number of close and perhaps emotionally taxing friendships” (Broderick 1965, 24). Of all the correspondence that Huebsch main­tained, his many still-unpublished ex­changes with Werfel, Feuchtwanger, and Zweig remain the most revealing. In these epistolary documents, one vividly observes Huebsch’s attitude toward his profession and society, his likes and dislikes, his man­ner of association with various authors, his literary imagination, and his unique apti­tude in his multiple roles as publisher, edi­tor, critic, and friend. Huebsch’s exchanges with these three writers, with few excep­tions, always extended beyond business matters. Among the topics discussed are the genesis of their respective works, self­criticism, publisher interactions, transla­tion issues, political viewpoints, or the publisher’s and author’s concept of the Umwelt (environment) and Zeitgeist (spirit of the times). Concerning the current liter­ary situation: “[N]ever,” says Huebsch in his essay “What Has Become of German Literature” (p. 629), “has there been so rapid a flowering as of the German (and Austrian) literature that marked the fifteen years between 1918 and 1933,” adding in this same commentary (pp. 633—634), “great [...] has been their fall: once the confidants and advisers of creative writers, purveyors to the intellectual appetite of a nation of educated folk, producers of the best in printing, today they have as little to say about what they may publish as a Ger­man author has about what he may write.” As Huebsch also observed in this same 1938 analysis, this created the following re­sults; namely, that “the number of books translated from German (except by those exiled from Germany and Austria) is de­creasing perceptibly. This is partly a reflec­tion of the American unwillingness to sup­port German exports, but more considerably because of the thin stuff that is offered” (p. 634).

As Huebsch repeatedly made clear in his letters to various individuals, before the Viking Press published a work in transla­tion, the text needed to demonstrate that the flavor of the book would not vanish in translation. That is, an American audience generally unacquainted with German cul­ture and its milieu had to be capable of eas­ily developing the associational ties or ob­servations necessary to comprehend the finer points of a particular book. If this were not to occur, Huebsch felt the trans­lated book would remain merely a curious novelty. On the other hand, Huebsch al­ways remained a remarkably humane indi­vidual. Even though numerous emigres could not produce manuscripts that matched Viking’s standards, Huebsch still supported such figures—either with mone­tary advances that he never expected would be repaid or by other forms of assistance. The same is true, too, with Werfel, Feucht­wanger, and Zweig, all of whom also always willingly looked out for their fellow col­leagues, both financially and with any other means of support that they could offer.

Feuchtwanger found exile in the United States, arriving on October 5, 1940. As he exited the ship, Huebsch not only was there to greet and welcome him as a personal friend, but also appeared at the request of the State Department, which wanted to be certain Feuchtwanger re­vealed little about his May 21, 1940, in­ternment at the French camp Les Milles (Bouches-du-Rhone) from which his wife successfully obtained his release on Sep­tember 29, 1940. Immediately after learn­ing about Feuchtwanger’s imprisonment, Huebsch had saved his friend’s life by using his connections with Eleanor Roosevelt and the White House to arrange for Feuchtwanger’s escape to the United States. Before coming to the United States, from 1933 to 1940 Feuchtwanger and his wife had found asylum in Sanary, in the south of France. They had not left Europe be­cause Feuchtwanger felt he best could fight against Hitler if, in this hateful climate, he wrote against National Socialism. In Amer­ica, Feuchtwanger was recognized as an au­thor of great books. Indeed, in 1927, as we learn from the Feuchtwanger correspon­dences, the Viking Press had published Feuchtwanger’s Jud Suss under the title Power. Huebsch must have been proud to write his friend Feuchtwanger that more than 3 million copies were sold, and it im­mediately established his popularity and generally became the book for which he is most known. Feuchtwanger’s other works published by the Viking Press are too nu­merous to cite, but among the most popu­lar titles in America were The Ugly Duchess (1928), Success (1930), The Oppermanns (1934), Moscow—1937 (1937), Paris Gazette (1940), The Devil in France (1941), Double, Double, Toil and Trouble (1943), Simone (1944), Proud Destiny (1947), and The Devil in Boston (1948).

Zweig’s compositions were of a com­pletely different style from those of the his­torical novel writer Lion Feuchtwanger. First, Zweig continued to be recognized as a multitalented, cosmopolitan, nonpoliti­cal writer, and his wide-ranging, volumi­nous, and versatile works earned him a per­manent, undeniable place in the canon of world literature and modern intellectual history. And even though Zweig’s literary writings have remained of supreme impor­tance, his self-appointed role as an inter­mediary always merited, on a different scale, equal significance. In this intermedi­ary role he achieved much that otherwise would not have been undertaken. Addi­tionally, in the bleak period of Nazism, Zweig bravely supported oppressed people to the best of his capabilities. Not only did Zweig thereby save lives, but he also pro-

vided a spiritual refuge for those who were torn and suffering, even at a time when he, too, was in exile and tormented. As Zweig’s contemporaries and correspondence ac­knowledged, his interest, generosity, and connections were invaluable.

Stefan Zweig fought against National Socialism symbolically in his literary works. In so doing, he employed the writ­ten word as a force against the sword of the Third Reich. For example, Zweig’s The Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus (1934) represented his “tract against the party spirit, against fanaticism both of right and left,” “fanaticism [...] the counterpart of world reason,” as Zweig characterized it in his December 30, 1933, letters to Huebsch (Berlin, “The Struggle for Survival,” p. 387; see also Zweig, Briefe 1932—1942, vol. IV). In a theoretical sense, the moralist Zweig remained an exemplary representa­tive of an individual who advanced the doctrine of humanitarianism. Zweig’s Eras- musian vision articulated well its author’s loathing of politics. Remarkably symbolic, Erasmus, however, yielded nothing practi­cal—nothing substantive—just as we find in so many of Zweig’s other works such as Jeremiah: A Drama in Nine Scenes (1917), in which the concluding line reads: “A peo­ple can be put in chains—its spirit, never” (Zweig 1982, 327). Yet, if at the end of Zweig’s Jeremiah, it is the spirit that is vic­torious, then does not the victory come too late?

As the times altered, Zweig realized that his present response to war could not be fought with the symbolic expressions previously presented in works such as Eras­mus and Jeremiah. Zweig understood that his responses were not functional and did not protect anyone against the abnormal Zeitgeist that Hitler had created. The medium of symbolic language—defense by a symbolic shield—no longer could func­tion as an adequate guard against the dia­bolical Hitler. Zweig changed and began to pen articles that directly—not symboli- cally—spoke against National Socialism. Like Werfel and Feuchtwanger, then, Zweig, too, maintained that all writers have a duty to give evidence of what hap­pened in their time, which represented the purpose for which Zweig wrote his posthu­mously published intellectual autobiogra­phy The World of Yesterday (1943), which, although not acknowledged in the book, Huebsch cotranslated.

Even though Huebsch offered sugges­tions to correct certain sentences or expres­sions in an author’s manuscript, the pub­lisher never translated complete works. Hence, it is very significant that Huebsch cotranslated The World of Yesterday and, furthermore, that Huebsch himself trans­lated Zweig’s last work The Royal Game (1944), Zweig’s only work that focused on the brutality and abuse of power by the Nazis. In The World of Yesterday, Zweig claimed that the destiny of his generation was “loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of his­tory” (p. xvii). And The Royal Game—gen­erally regarded as Zweig’s best work—pow- erfully illustrates the above-noted idea. Immensely haunting in the way it conveys the impact of psychological terror and dic­tatorial rule, the story captured a particular aspect of the Zeitgeist during the Holocaust in Europe as perhaps no other author be­fore or after Zweig.

Only speculation may be offered about why this citizen of the world Stefan Zweig committed suicide. Even though he had just cause to feel depressed and de­spondent, the fact that only hours before his self-inflicted death he mailed off the manuscripts of his autobiography and The Royal Game to his American, German, and Spanish publishers suggests clearly that he cared, if not for himself, then at least with the plight of his fellow Jews and others who fell victim to Hitler’s inhumanity. Zweig’s action reveals concern about the future of humanity and, again and again, he advocated that individuals jot down their reminiscences on paper. Only such documentation, as Zweig maintained, would provide witness for future genera­tions as to what had happened during the period when National Socialism swept crazily through Europe. Huebsch was of a similar mindset. Even though the Viking Press publisher never printed his thoughts and recollections, he dictated, at times in much detail, invaluable information about his life, work, and the Zeitgeist. This un­published, typewritten oral history manu­script that consists of several hundred pages is archived at the Oral History Col­lection of Columbia University in New York City.

Hence, Zweig’s dispatching of the au­tobiography manuscript as well as The Royal Game materials must be considered a constructive and positive undertaking. Even though some colleagues and others viewed his suicide as a purely emotional, thoughtless display of weakness and ex­haustion, which as Zweig’s letters indi­cate, is partially correct, nevertheless else­where Stefan expressed that he knew precisely what suicide meant, at least for himself (Berlin 1982). One additional ex­planation suffices here: two days after his suicide Zweig’s German friend and col­league, Rene Fulop-Miller, also a litera­ture writer, received a last letter from his friend whom he had known since 1905.

Zweig, who had been preparing a book on Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533—1592), told Fulop-Miller to read Montaigne’s remarks about suicide. In fact, in this letter Zweig even quoted the following from Book 2, Section 3 of Montaigne’s essay entitled “Coustume de l’Isle de Cea” (“A Custom of the Island of Cea”): “‘In life we are dependent on the will of others, but our death is our own af­fair. Reputation has nothing to do with it. It is nonsense to take it into considera­tion. Life means service on condition that we are free to die [Zweig’s italics] [...] Death is the great home-coming’” (Fulop- Miller 1951, 134). Incidentally, for Zweig, Montaigne’s “Coustume de l’Isle de Cea” in its entirety represented an es­pecially special commentary that through­out his lifetime the Austrain writer very frequently reread.

Excluding various research and lecture trips, since October 1933 Zweig had been living in British exile, which offered him an environment of freedom and peace. He posed no British security risks but, as an Austrian citizen, was considered an alien. However, after Great Britain declared war on Germany, Zweig, like others in his alien category, was converted into a new category: the enemy alien. The stipula­tions that Great Britain attached to such “enemy alien” individuals infuriated Zweig to such a degree that, along with other fac­tors, he felt that his attempts at writing were hindered as well (cf. the last chapter in Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, esp. 396 ff. and 427 ff.; for other aspects, see Zweig, Briefe, vol. IV, 668). When, in March 1940, he finally received the British Cer­tificate of Naturalization, he could have remained there (Berlin 1998, 286—301). However, among many factors, such as the Nazi occupation of three-fifths of France in May—June of 1940, the closeness of war in Great Britain, and the offer in Novem­ber 1940 by Brazil’s General Consulate of a permanent visa convinced him to once again continue his tour of emigration into what was considered the New World. De­scribing Brazil—the New World—Zweig explained in his autobiography that “[h]ere there was an even more tender feel­ing for the past than in Europe itself, the brutality that came in the wake of the First World War had not penetrated the cus­toms or the spirit of the nation....Here man was not separated from man by ab­surd theories of blood, race, and ori­gin...Here the land, ready for the future, still waited for man so that he might use it and fill it with his presence. Europe’s con­tribution to civilization could be extended and developed...My vision blessed by the manifold beauty of this beautiful new Na­ture, I had a glimpse into the future” (Zweig 1943, 399—400). However, escape to Brazil from the war front as well as other serious factors gave the Austrian Jew­ish refugee little reprieve, except that he still felt he could exercise his individual freedom. Unlike the positive recognition accorded by critics in the United States to­ward Zweig’s latest book entitled Brazil: Land of the Future, which the Viking Press published in 1941 in the translation by Andrew St. James, its unexpectedly di­vided reception in Brazil, where it also ap­peared in translation in 1941, especially surprised, disappointed, and very much disturbed him, particularly at a time in his life when he desperately needed positive encouragement. After all, as Zweig felt, of all his writings, Brazil should have elated the country’s population even more than his twenty-five other books, which were available, in translation, in Brazil and all of which had become a literary sensation. Yet Brazil’s intellectual population remained divided, and even though more than 100,000 copies of the Brazil book were immediately sold to most satisfied readers, there remained another group that felt Zweig had been paid to write a book about Brazil that presented the country in its best way. The latter rumor, of course, was sheer nonsense. Of course, Zweig had not always accurately depicted the political Zeitgeist in present-day Brazil, and discord could have been predicted, at least by those individuals who represented the country’s more radical population. After all, in various ways Zweig’s “Land of the Future” was unlike the reality of the coun­try that actually existed, but which, never­theless, Zweig skillfully had styled, owing to his practiced fin de siecle approach and his talent to capture values of universal hu­manism. Lacking in particular, too, re­mained commentary about nationalism and totalitarianism, which daily had been gaining more and more followers in this “Land of the Future.” That disagreement ensued, then, was not unusual.

Of course, other events also upset him, culminating in horror when he learned about the 1942 fall of Singapore. Together with Charlotte Elisabeth (Lotte) Altmann (1908—1942), his faithful, longtime secre­tary since 1934 and the individual (after his December 1938 formal divorce from Friderike) who became his second wife on September 6, 1939 (Zweig 1995, vol. IV, p. 258), suicide was chosen as the means to escape from his Angst. In the early after­noon of Monday, February 23, when their bodies were found, many empty bottles of the sleeping tablet Veronal were also dis­covered by their bedside.

Although recently Zweig had been asked to write a biography focused on Brazil’s president Getulio Vargas, the Aus­trian writer also had made it known that he considered Vargas an unimpressive person­ality, even though his fifteen-year reign as Brazil’s president had resulted in much progress for his country. Nevertheless, many commentaries about Vargas justifi­ably refer to him as a “benevolent dictator” and/or a “reluctant revolutionary.” Never­theless, upon Zweig’s death, President Var­gas, who immediately had been informed of the suicide, requested that a state funeral should take place. Thousands of thousands of people crowded the street and followed the procession. Even though suicide had been the cause of death, the chief rabbi in Brazil still permitted burial at the Jewish cemetery in Petropolis. A non-ostentatious black marble stone, with their names in En­glish and Hebrew, identifies their grave site.

About Zweig’s suicide, Huebsch sum­marized his viewpoint in a lengthy letter to another Viking Press German writer and one of their mutual friends, Carl Zuck- mayer (Berlin, “Carl Zuckmayer,” 197). Essentially, however, Huebsch did not wish to discuss the matter, expressing in another unpublished letter of February 27, 1942, to still another Viking Press writer, the 1937 French Nobel Prize laureate for liter­ature Roger Martin du Gard (who had been introduced to Huebsch by Zweig) that “it is too painful and I know that your own clear mind will supply the necessary explanations. I don’t think it was a lack of courage that prompted his deed; his world had ceased to exist and he probably felt himself unsuited to the era to come” (Berlin, “Carl Zuckmayer,” p. 199).

Finally, as commentators have said, of all the translated works of Zweig, the two that Huebsch prepared represent the best translations of any ever made and demon­strate, too, that the translator—that is, Huebsch—irrefutably understood the most minute of Zweig’s convictions and inner dynamics. Privately, Huebsch’s trans­lations may represent his own manner of memorializing his lifelong friend with whom he had shared most private thoughts and experiences. Huebsch and Zweig im­plicitly trusted each other since they had first met in 1925. The fact that Huebsch’s translation is considered so well done is not unusual because Huebsch’s profound sense of understanding represented an important characteristic that was with him as he ex­celled in whatever he undertook. Impor­tant, too, as the no less equally distin­guished New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who had known Huebsch since 1912, expressed at a meeting with several of Huebsch’s friends when they gathered to offer tribute to their publisher friend after his unexpected death: “[...] he was ever­lastingly consistent,” as Knopf related, “and never gave up any convictions that he once strongly held” (Knopf 1965, 12). In so many ways, then, Huebsch has become a distinct historical individual who left his mark on twentieth-century civilization and American society.

Jeffrey B. Berlin

See also Aufbau; Intellectual Exile

References and Further Reading

Berlin, Jeffrey B. “Stefan Zweig and His American Publisher: Notes on an Unpublished Correspondence, with Reference to Schachnovelle [ The Royal Game] and Die Welt von Gestern [ The World of Yesterday].” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 56, no. ii (1982): 259-276.

------. “March 14, 1938: ‘Austria Exists No More.’ Some Unpublished Correspondence between Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler

Werfel, and Ben Huebsch.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 62, no. iv (1988): 741-763.

------. “Carl Zuckmayer and Ben Huebsch: Unpublished Letters about Stefan Zweig’s Suicide.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 38, no. i/ii (1988): 196-199.

------. “In Exile. The Friendship and Unpublished Correspondence between Thomas Mann and Heinrich Eduard Jacob.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschriftfur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 64, no. i (1990): 172-187.

------. “The Struggle for Survival—From Hitler’s Appointment to the Nazi Book­Burnings: Some Unpublished Stefan Zweig Letters with Ben Huebsch, and an Unpublished [Stefan Zweig] Manifesto.” In Turn-of-the-Century Vienna and Its Legacy: Essays in Honor of Donald G. Daviau. Eds. J. B. Berlin, J. Johns, and R. Lawson. Wien: Edition Atelier, 1993, pp. 361-387.

------. “Exile Experiences in Great Britain: The Unpublished Correspondence between Stefan Zweig and Sir Siegmund Warburg.” In Keine Klage uber England? Deutsche und osterreichische Exilerfahrungen in Groβbritannien 1933—1945. Eds. Charmian Brinson et al. Munchen: Iudicium Verlag, 1998, pp. 286-301.

———. “Introduction.” In Stefan Zweig, “The Royal Game”and Other Stories. Tr. Jill Sutcliffe. New York: Holmes & Meier, 2001. v-xii.

------. “ ‘[...] permit me to say that you are an ideal publisher. ’ Ben W. Huebsch of the Viking Press (New York)—Unpublished Correspondence with European Authors in Exile, with Special Attention to Lion Feuchtwanger.” In Refuge and Reality: Feuchtwanger and the European Emigres in California: Proceedings of the International Feuchtwanger Society 2003. Eds. Pol 6. Dochartaigh and Alexander Stephan. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V., 2005, pp. 109-129.

------. “On the Nature of Letters—Thomas Mann’s unpublished correspondence with his American publisher and translator, and unpublished letters about the writing of Doctor Faustus.” European Journal of English Studies 9, no. i (April 2005): 61-73.

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Cowley, Malcolm. Marshall A. Best 1901—1982: Remarks by Malcolm Cowley on the Occasion of a Gathering in Remembrance on April 14, 1982, at The Century Association. Special Memorial Edition. Press of A. Colish, 1982.

Fulop-Miller, Rene. “Memorial for Stefan Zweig.” In Stefan Zweig: A Tribute to His Life and Work. Tr. Christobel Fowler. London: W. H. Allen, 1951, pp. 133-134.

Huebsch, Ben W. “Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life.” The Colophon. A Quarterly for Bookmen II, no. 3, new series (summer 1937): 406-426.

———. “What Has Become of German Literature?” The English Journal 27, no. 8 (October 1938): 627-637.

———. “Publishing as a Social Force.” In Publishers on Publishing. Ed. Gerald Gross. London: Secker & Warburg, 1962, pp. 297-307.

Knopf, Alfred A. “Remarks about Ben Huebsch.” In B. W Huebsch 1876—1964. A record of a meeting of his friends at the Grolier Club, New York City, on December 9, 1964. Ed. Marshall A. Best, Private printing, Boston: Meriden Gravure, 1965, pp. 11-12.

Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography. Tr. Benjamin W Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger. New York: The Viking Press, 1943.

------. Tersites—Jeremias: Zwei Dramen. Ed. Knut Beck. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1982.

------. Briefe 1897-1942. Eds. Knut Beck and Jeffrey B. Berlin. 4 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1995-2005.