09 Aug 2012 08:38:17
Despite numbering fans from England manager Roy Hodgson to the celebrated authors William Boyd and Antony Beevor, the application to commemorate Stefan Zweig with a blue plaque on the London house in which he lived for five years has been rejected by English Heritage.
Zweig, an Austrian Jew who committed suicide in Brazil 1942, has undergone a resurgence of interest recently, with publisher Pushkin Press revealing that his sales more than doubled in June after Hodgson admitted to being a fan. Hugely popular in the first half of the 20th century for his stories, novellas, biographies and one novel Beware of Pity, Zweig fled Austria in 1934, settling in Hallam Street in London for five years and becoming a British citizen. But English Heritage has turned down the request to place a plaque on his former home, saying that Zweig's "profile has never been as high in Britain as elsewhere", and "it was felt that a critical consensus does not appear to exist at the moment regarding Zweig's reputation as a writer and that, as a consequence, it was not possible to be certain of his lasting contribution".
Professor Rüdiger Görner, head of languages at Queen Mary, University of London, said he was "amazed" to hear from English Heritage that the application had been rejected. "He lived for a very important part of his life in the UK. I think it is important to mark this, and to make it quite clear to the public that he actually lived here," said Görner. "It is absolutely clear where he stands in terms of literary profile – he really stands with the great writers of the 20th century … He was after all a bestselling author at the time – he was envied by Thomas Mann for his sheer prolific output, and there were times he sold more copies."
Zweig's fellow authors were lining up behind Görner to support the plaque for Zweig, with Tibor Fischer, Antonia Fraser, Ali Smith, Boyd and Beevor all throwing their names behind the campaign. Smith said that with Pushkin Press's recent reissuing of much of Zweig's writing, "it's becoming more and more apparent how seminal and original Zweig was and how revelatory of the wheres and whys of the time when fin-de-siecle exploded into Freudianism and empire into full-blown fascism".
"No matter what you've got in your hands by Zweig, he's just a really compelling, surprisingly energetic, often unputdownable writer," she said. "It's something about how he simultaneously understands both the cheap and the philosophical urges of narrative plot, how he combines the smallness of human tawdriness and the epic nature of human reach into something coexistent. Somehow he manages to push all the new and old buttons at once. And his texts are not dusty. They feel very alive, sometimes queasily so."
Fraser, who called Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, an "extraordinary book", said that "one of the things about London is that we welcome refugee writers – it's an honour for London and part of our heritage to have a plaque [commemorating Zweig]".
Beevor is also a fan, describing Zweig as "one of the greatest and most famous writers right across Europe in the 1930s", and saying that "now he's being reissued it certainly shows he hasn't dated", and that he is "still as fresh today". "I think [his time in Hallam Street] should definitely be marked," said Beevor. "He lived here and was read here."
But a spokesperson for English Heritage said it would not be moved by the protests, as it "does not reconsider if there is public pressure", because "if we did then there would be plaques placed for everyone".
"The English Heritage Blue Plaques scheme aims to commemorate all areas of human endeavour and has limited resources. Given that 20th-century writers are already very well represented, the Blue Plaques Panel came to the view that Zweig's current profile – which has never been as high in Britain as elsewhere – and his London connections did not appear strong enough for him to be commemorated at present. Reaction to the recent reissue of his autobiography appeared to show that there is not a modern critical consensus about his work either, and it was thought best to let this debate play out further," it said in a statement.
English Heritage did say that it could revisit its decision in a decade, as "10 years has to pass before the person put forward to a plaque can be looked at again".
