The Society of the Crossed Keys

A CONVERSATION WITH WES ANDERSON

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.

ANDERSON: There are other stories by Zweig I think of that might relate to this as well. There’s the story where a guy starts going to red light districts in a Kasbah-type place each night—Moonbeam Alley. And that’s very similar to what he describes the student in Confusion doing when he arrives in Berlin. And I think these experiences in his fiction relate for me to that chapter of The World of Yesterday where Zweig describes how totally repressed they were as students in Vienna, and how as a result of that everything was secret. There was so much going on that was secretive. Everything sexual was illicit—and so there were loads of whorehouses and things, and it was all on that hidden level.

PROCHNIK: Secret chambers in restaurants, and so on. You know, that chapter in The World of Yesterday, “Eros Matutinus,” which I was very happy to see you’ve made one of the selections for this book, is considered by some scholars to be the most historically original part of what he wrote. The kind of taxonomy of the sexual underworld of fin de siècle Vienna Zweig creates there is almost without parallel. There’s an amazing letter that Zweig wrote near the end of his life, just after he’d finished revising The World of Yesterday in Brazil, where he describes the entire book to a friend as “a hard and realistic image of sexuality in our youth.” He ends up converging everything on that one chapter, which was only added when he was in Brazil. It was an afterthought. He had written a whole draft of the memoir while he was living in Ossining, up the river from New York City, and then he adds that one chapter, almost like his own secret, that he couldn’t divulge until the very end.

ANDERSON: Very interesting. It makes sense that he would see it that way afterwards. My experience of reading the book was full of that sense of surprising realities being disclosed. It was the thing that struck me the most. There were so many descriptions of parts of life, which—as much as we may have read or seen something of them in movies—we didn’t really know about from his time, before reading Zweig’s memoir. In particular I don’t think I ever thought about the moment when it became necessary to have a passport, which is hugely meaningful when you see it through his eyes. You suddenly see this control that comes in.

PROCHNIK: I think it was absolutely devastating for him—that loss of geographical freedom, the ability to just cross borders without thinking about it. Zweig was addicted to that sense of access to novelty and heterogeneity in culture and individuals. He was so deeply invested in idiosyncrasy of every sort and there’s just a sense of everything gradually becoming more monotone and congealed. I thought you also did a lovely job of depicting this transformation in the film, near the end, where you have the extraordinary scene in which your protagonists are stopped a final time on the train for their papers and it’s clear just how vital these documents have become—a matter of life and death.

ANDERSON: You can see why for Zweig this turn of events would be the beginning of everything that became too much to bear. Not only because he was someone who had friends all over Europe and collected people actively—made friendships and made these connections and so on. He also collected manuscripts and books and musical scores, and he was gathering things from all over—among artists he admired. And eventually all this, plus his own work, was taken away, destroyed, made impossible for him to continue pursuing in that way. And when you read The World of Yesterday you just see how all the things he invested his life in, this world that he prefers to call the world of security, this life that had been growing more and more refined and free that’s so meaningful to him, is just obliterated.

PROCHNIK: There were friends of Zweig who saw him as invested before the war in creating almost a cabinet of curiosities, a museum of Europe—one person described it as a garden—that would serve as a microcosm of the whole vast continent before it all got blown asunder.

ANDERSON: Vienna—the environment he grew up in was so—I guess, art was the centre of his own activity, and it was also the popular thing. One detail that I remember from The World of Yesterday is that the daily newspapers they got each morning had poetry and philosophical writings. He and his friends went to meet in cafés regularly in groups. And there were new plays continuously being produced, and they were all following these playwrights. Vienna was a place where there was this great deep culture, but it was the equivalent of rock stars—it was the coolest thing of the moment. It was completely popular, and that was Vienna. Zweig was living in the dead centre, ground zero place for this. And he was living there up to the point that it came to an end.

PROCHNIK: One passage that always strikes me in The World of Yesterday is when he begins to talk about what’s happened to the news, and how it’s suddenly just become—in a way this seems to foreshadow our own world—a kind of nonstop disaster feed. Zweig talks about that moment when suddenly the wireless is working, and you’re getting reports of catastrophes in China, and wars in countries that you don’t know anything about. You’re enveloped in a present-ness that is all about the most sensational, most dispiriting acts of bloodthirstiness and natural catastrophe that really seem to suck away the reflective element that had been part of newspapers when he was young.

ANDERSON: Ideas and thoughts. Not just accounts of terrible events. I think one thing that Zweig does very simply, that just seems so clear to him, is that he attributes everything that’s gone wrong to nationalism, and the two ideologies of socialism slash communism and fascism. These two movements might be conflicting, but to him they were just equally disastrous—

PROCHNIK: To the individual.

ANDERSON: Yes, these dogmas take hold so forcefully or forcibly that it’s just the beginning of the end, and he sees it happen right in front of him. Because of the monolithic nature of them. I think there were all kinds of aspects of socialism he would have embraced. But the problem for him was that people began to identify themselves with these dogmas, and then people began to oppose each other on the basis of these causes or dogmatic kind of movements.

PROCHNIK: After the First World War Vienna had arguably the most progressive government in Europe—a socialist government, and people came from everywhere to study the model. Zweig was certainly sympathetic to that. It wasn’t something that he advertised about himself, but I’m sure he would have considered his politics from an economic perspective to be in accord with socialism.

I want to cycle back to his fictions. When you said that Beware of Pity was really your introduction to Zweig—why did you find this work to be so compelling?

ANDERSON: As we discussed, the book takes a form that we sort of overtly lifted for our movie, and I particularly loved the opening scene. There’s a wonderful brief introduction from the author, and then it goes back some years, and we see the author who’s visiting a restaurant that he thought would have fallen out of fashion a long time ago, outside Vienna. But then he’s sort of surprised that he’s still seeing people he knows there and this figure—this guy comes over to him, a guy he knows vaguely. (This author character is well-known, he’s famous like Zweig.) And the guy who comes over to him he describes as the sort of person who knows everybody, at least a bit, and bounces around among people and table hops and name drops. It’s a very familiar sort of person today. You know immediately you can connect him to a few people who you might know and even like, but who do this.

PROCHNIK: I love the phrase that Zweig has for this type—which translates literally from the German as “Also-present” (“hanger-on” in translation).

ANDERSON: And the author character has this moment with him. He’s a little unhappy to see him—he wanted to be alone—but at the same time it’s not so bad, and now he has somebody to talk to. And then that “Also-present” figure sees a man across the room our author does not recognise, but then he tell him the man’s name, and the author knows exactly who he’s talking about: he’s a war hero. And then the author and the war hero reconnect by chance at a party the next day, and this time they actually meet. They talk about that guy who was bouncing around the restaurant, and they click. That whole set up to me is the best. First, it’s happening in a setting that is very interesting to me—this Vienna that is unfamiliar and exotic, and at the same time there’s so much that I do feel connected to: that it could be happening in some place like Manhattan today. There are the same kinds of people and dynamics we know from our world. But also details of a universe most of us have no experience of, and that’s great to discover. I remember being gripped by Zweig’s description of the cavalry unit that the lead character is a part of. There’s great detail about that whole way of life. But then we’re pulled into this story very, very quickly. We plunge into an account of what happens to him with a family that he makes a kind of social success with, and who he then gets drawn into a strange, complicated, disastrous relationship with.

PROCHNIK: A relationship centred around a sort of warped pity—this whole fascinating double definition of pity that Zweig gives at the outset, that’s really at the core of what the book is trying to explore. There’s pity that’s meant just to exonerate the person expressing it from actually having to deal with the object of their pity—and then there’s another kind of pity, that consumes the whole being of the compassionate person as he or she tries to merge in solidarity with the object of pity right to the end, and beyond.

ANDERSON: Yes, and at each step the novel’s protagonist tries to do the right thing, and at the same time his motivations are a little bit complicated; but everything he does, even while it may rescue the situation for a moment, actually ends by digging him in deeper and deeper and deeper. And the other thing that happens is that this book leads up to the war. It was shortly after finishing Beware of Pity that I started reading The World of Yesterday. You see how this moment is reflected over and over again in his work.

PROCHNIK: Yes, and it’s so surprising that the scenes in the introduction you pointed to—in a restaurant and at a party where things feel very civilised and very social—the reader then discovers are happening in 1938. So it’s five years after Hitler has been appointed Chancellor, the same year as the annexation of Austria, and one year before everything goes completely to hell. With this whole book, Zweig manages to take the very personal story of a minor officer’s increasingly engrossing and twisted relationship as a metaphor for our greater human inability to stop digging ourselves deeper into the grave as cultural entities beyond our individual fates.

ANDERSON: Yes, it’s a great book. It’s his biggest fiction work by far. It’s the only real novel, and it’s just a masterpiece. When I read it I thought, how is it that I don’t already know about this—how is it that I seem to be the only person I know who’s read this book? At that time I really had not heard anything about it from anybody.

PROCHNIK: When I was first reading Zweig, I had a similar experience where I would ask very educated friends of mine in the United States about him, and none of them knew who he was. Part of what really got me also to write a book about him was the sense that his erasure was so violent. I came to know slightly Zweig’s step niece, the niece of Lotte, his second wife, who is a wonderful woman living in London. I remember at one point she told me that he thought he would be completely forgotten. Zweig predicted so many aspects of his own undoing and even disappearance. He was aware of the contingency to his whole project.

ANDERSON: To be erased in his mother tongue…There’s the story of the libretto for the opera he wrote for Richard Strauss after the Nazis had come to power in Germany—The Silent Woman. And the premiere was in Dresden, and then what happened?

PROCHNIK: Strauss kept insisting on Zweig’s participation and the use of his name in the programme, even though Jews weren’t really allowed by this point to be part of cultural productions of any sort, let alone something on this scale. Strauss was the head of music in the Reich. He was an incredibly powerful person within the bureaucracy. And he argued that Zweig’s participation was crucial for the opera’s success. The opera did in fact open and it was enormously successful. Immediately there were bookings in multiple cities around the Reich—and at that point they just shut the whole thing down, they just pulled the cloth off the table.

But it’s not only erasure in the mother tongue. There’s an amazing moment in Zweig’s life in the spring of 1941 when he was in New York City. PEN in Exile was just in formation at time, and there was an enormous launch banquet given at the Biltmore Hotel. Something like a thousand writers were supposed to be there. Many people gave speeches, and Zweig’s proved to be the one that got the most attention. In a completely counterintuitive move, Zweig came out and said, I’m here to apologise before you all. I’m here in a state of shame because my language is the language in which the world is being destroyed. My mother tongue, the very words that I speak, are the ones being twisted and perverted by this machine that is undoing humanity.

ANDERSON: He thought his language itself had been permanently distorted.

PROCHNIK: And felt a personal responsibility for this as a German-writing, -speaking man of letters.

ANDERSON: One thing I thought of along the way—just in how his own psychology is revealed through is work—one thing you do see all along with Zweig is these suicides. People commit suicide, people talk about suicide regularly all through his body of work, and it’s a bit eerie for us now. Whatever you read first, the one thing you do know—even the shortest bio on a dust jacket of Zweig tells you how it ends. And it’s something that really jumps out at you when you come across it, which isn’t so infrequent.

PROCHNIK: It’s there in so many of his works, and the larger culture had a frighteningly high suicide rate as well. There seems to have been some kind of psychological, sociocultural implosion that people were sensitive to. In his last years, Zweig was strikingly given to repeatedly saying, Europe is committing suicide—actually using these words. The whole continent is committing suicide.

ANDERSON: At one point he also refers to the suicide of our independence: the choice people are making, without realising it, to destroy their own freedom.

PROCHNIK: There’s an amazing essay Zweig wrote in the 1920s called ‘The Monotonisation of the World’. It’s essentially a critique of the global exporting of American mass culture. He writes how Europe took the first step toward destroying itself in the First World War. And the second stage is Americanisation, whereby everyone everywhere takes up mass fashion, mass sport, mass dance crazes, mass cinema. This homogenisation he equated with the destruction of independence you mentioned—people fighting to destroy their own individuality, really, out of a desire to be part of these different collective crazes of which he saw America as the wellspring.

ANDERSON: Zweig saw this as a kind of American invention. Making popular movements so successful, sweeping up so many people in them—I mean, I guess America is just that way.

PROCHNIK: The whole essay feels weirdly prescient of the critiques we see today. I do want to ask you also about the choice of including the whole of that extraordinary novella Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, which has its own suicide. What was it that drew you to that work in particular?

ANDERSON: Well it was also one of the first ones I read. One of the first of his short stories I came upon. Zweig conjures up the experience of this French resort of the past so vividly there, and this woman. He uses the same storytelling technique again. He sets the stage with a whole circle of people who are responding to something happening among them, a sort of scandal happening among them, but eventually that’s not what this story is about. That’s just a sort of prelude. And I loved that form. And then I was also taken with how this person who you get to know on the surface as an older person is so clearly drawn. And when she finally tells her own story that image is completely broken, and you realise how thoroughly you did not know her and her history. Some of Zweig’s short stories have been done as whole films, and I think that this one—you could see Max Ophüls doing Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman and making a masterpiece.

PROCHNIK: With all of the despair in Zweig’s stories and life, he shows us again and again that there were just a hell of a lot of splendid spots around Europe to go to and to spend time in. Even in the little sketches he gives, there’s something so visually charismatic in just the suggestion of what these places were. We somehow feel an aura of that luminous life—

ANDERSON: That luxury.

PROCHNIK: You really show that compellingly. You did an amazing job of revealing how parts of the fairy tale were real in the landscapes—and the hotels of course.

ANDERSON: One thing we came across as we were trying to figure where to do this movie was a collection of images on the US Library of Congress website. There’s this thing, the Photochrom Collection. Two different companies—one Swiss and one American—had a sort of joint venture, where they took black-and-white photographs all over the world, and then they colourised them and mass-produced them. And there are thousands of them. They’re from maybe 1895 to 1910, something like that, all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Prussia, and all over the world. I compare it to the Google Earth of the turn of the century. These are almost all landscapes and cityscapes. There are places that are just known as views. There are many, many of these spots where you can see a little terrace that’s been created, just because people would walk to this place and look out. It’s wonderful, and it really influenced our movie. There’s a wonderful photochrom of the hotel that I always thought of as sort of the model for our hotel, which is the Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary, which was Carlsbad. The thing we learned when we visited all sorts of places that we found on this collection of pictures was that none of them were enough like what they once were to work for us. But the photochrom images seemed to tap into a truth about Zweig’s vision of the world that I was able to draw on in developing a visual aura for the film.

In The Post Office Girl, Zweig’s description of the grand hotel in Switzerland is so evocative. The protagonist is a girl who works in the post office. She’s invited to stay in this hotel as a gift from her rich aunt, and when she arrives in this place, the management thinks she’s there to make a delivery. Her suitcase is a basket. Finally they realise she’s actually going to be a guest in the hotel, which is unlike anywhere she’s ever been. Her point of view about this treatment she receives, and her experience of walking in and realising, “This is where I’m going to sleep”, is so powerful. But also that by the time her holiday abruptly ends, she is already addicted to this other way of life, and her existence is so dramatically changed, and a sort of desperation comes over her—and then a connection she makes with someone who is in his own desperate state. The idea of that work being something that had been out of print for that long is sort of surreal.

PROCHNIK: I agree. This idea—that a brief exposure to how good life can be was a fatal infection, in terms of the social order of that time—is rendered so powerfully. The notion that really, when life was good in pre-War Europe, it could be awfully sweet. But it’s interesting—when you described going around looking for a place in the real world to film, and not finding one, I thought also of the sentiment expressed near the end of your film, when the possibility is raised that the world M. Gustave inhabits may really have ceased to exist even before he entered it. There is the suggestion that the whole thing is a feat of imagination. I think this resonates with the embrace of illusion in The World of Yesterday. It gets away from the idea that Zweig was just unable to see reality, and moves more towards the notion that he just had a huge desire to live in the imagination so fully that it would diminish the impact of the real.

ANDERSON: That’s a good one! That might be a good ending.