Stefan Zweig: The Man Behind The Grand Budapest Hotel

Last March marked ten years since Wes Anderson introduced the world to the eccentric hospitality of The Grand Budapest Hotel. The film follows a refugee named Zero who undergoes the tutelage of concierge M. Gustave as they fight for a priceless painting and against murder accusations amid political upheaval in interwar Europe. Whilst the film is already iconic for its extraordinary colour and design, its inspiration remains less well-known: the works of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, whose autobiography reveals much of the intent behind Anderson’s film.

Stefan Zweig, born in Vienna in 1881, was a highly celebrated literary figure of his period. Whilst in exile during World War II, he wrote his autobiography The World of Yesterday to serve as a document of the life and promise of Europe prior to the events of 1914. Ignorant to if or when the war would resolve, Zweig committed suicide upon the book’s completion in 1942. He writes of a world that may never return, and which he sees as his duty to record for posterity.

Zweig begins by describing the Vienna of his childhood: a charming, cosmopolitan city with citizens marked by a “receptivity for all that was colourful, festive and resounding.” He proclaims that “one was not a real Viennese without this love for culture, without this sense, aesthetic and critical at once, of the holiest exuberance of life.” Zweig moved on to his early adult years travelling throughout Europe amid a cultural renaissance, where great individual freedom offered a “kaleidoscopic play of colour,” back when he said a man needed only a body and soul, and not a passport, as well.

With the outbreak of World War I, Zweig watches many of his German colleagues become intoxicated by widespread hatred and nationalism, poets who wrote vehemently of the enemy’s swift destruction, and forget their duty as “the preserver and defender of the universal humanity of mankind.” He advocates for international fraternity by trying to organise a conference of intellectuals — not dissimilar to Anderson’s “Society of Crossed Keys” — in a united appeal for peace but which is unable to gain widespread support. He pursues other endeavours, but all are washed away amid the tidal waves of nationalism as he describes the war’s brutality, the ensuing poverty in Austria in its wake, and the rise of Hitler leading to Zweig’s exile.

This nostalgia for a lost optimism and humanity becomes the shared foundation of book and film. The artistic cultivation of Zweig’s Vienna and pre-war Europe, continuously characterised by its colour, not only fits Anderson’s idiosyncratic aesthetic but gives that style a purpose beyond its own sake — form serves function. The hotel’s ornamented red carpets, royal purple uniforms, and especially M. Gustave’s beloved perfume represent more than simply Anderson’s own big-budget frivolity: they embody the optimism towards humanity — that all can and should be beautiful — demolished in time. M. Gustave’s own fierce eloquence and civility in the face of constant degradation mirrors Zweig’s clinging to fraternity amid unimaginable hatred and bloodshed. As the character memorably proclaims: “There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.”

Of course, this can sound like Golden Age Thinking, and Anderson is aware of that. At the film’s close, when asked if he keeps the hotel as a last connection to M. Gustave’s world, Zero declines, adding, “I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it, but I will say, he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvellous grace.” In many ways, that world of refinement, freedom, and humanity which M. Gustave and Zweig believed in never existed; innumerable injustices and cruelties existed then, as they do now.

Nor are Zweig’s lenses entirely rose-tinted; he takes whole chapters discussing his archaic schooling and the backwards morality towards youth and sexuality in his day, even acknowledging the “rash optimism” of his forefathers towards the unceasing, continual ascent of humanity. “[E]ven though it was a delusion our fathers served,” he states, “it was a wonderful and noble delusion.” The same can be said of Zweig’s vision of a free, dignified world beyond borders and passports. Whilst that world did not truly exist, it is nevertheless a noble delusion, one worth remembering and striving for in all its marvellous grace, illusory or not.

Image from Wikimedia Commons