I admit I came to survey the work of Stefan Zweig after viewing that Wes Anderson movie that aped the old master. Or rather, the movie flattened him and exaggerated him and festooned him with amusing decoration. These stylizations can be enjoyable but it’s little wonder Wes A. comes in for criticism over racial stereotyping. In my view he treats white people the same way.
Anyway, Stefan Zweig was an immensely popular writer of fiction and criticism who wrote a biography of a titan of Belgian literature, Emile Verhaeren. My French poetry anthology calls Verhaeren the Belgian Whitman, and Zweig also makes this comparison. Verhaeren’s corpus both describes and embodies the tremendous energy of nineteenth century nation-building. Verhaeren’s enthusiasm for urban labor (see generally “La Multiple Splendeur”) also leads Zweig to see a connection to Nietzsche’s Superman.
Verhaeren wagered that a new form of metropolitan intelligence was overtaking and cleansing Europe. He was too much of a joiner I think to be remembered alongside the “bad boys” of symbolism/modernism like Rimbaud, Valéry or Mallarmé. In any case, World War I devastated his boosterish feelings, and then Verhaeren was crushed by a train in 1916, decisively ending his appetite for modernity.
In a prefatory chapter to his Verhaeren biography, Zweig rhapsodizes over Verhaeren’s homeland. Baudelaire showed Belgium nothing but contempt, but a few decades later Zweig saw the country as the site of all that was admirable in Europe. Zweig’s hyping of Belgium and its greatest son is frankly hysterical, and occasionally defensive, such as when Zweig points out that no longer does “Belgian” signify “provincial” when mentioned in Paris.
For Zweig the special magic of Belgium has to do with its geographic position, and its specific union of Flanders and Wallonia:
Contact with so many foreign cultures, the vicinity of such contradictory nations, has fertilised them; healthy rural labour has steeled their limbs; the near sea has opened their eyes to the great distances. Their consciousness of themselves is of no long date: it can only be reckoned from the time when their country became independent, hardly a hundred years ago. A nation younger than America, they are in their adolescence now, and rejoicing in their new, unsought strength…So strong, so persistent is the inexorable pressure of the two neighbouring races, that this blend has already become a new ferment, a new race. Elements once contrary are now unrecognisably mixed in a new and growing product. Teutons speak French, people of Romance stock are Flemish in feeling.
Baudelaire’s “diplomatic harlequin” is, for Zweig, the portent of a “new race,” a realigned humanity for which Zweig can barely keep his trousers on:
Just as Walt Whitman was the exultation of America in its new strength, Verhaeren is the triumph of the Belgian race, and of the European race too. For this glad confession of life is so strong, so glowing, so virile that it cannot be thought of as breaking forth from the heart of one individual, but is evidently the delight of a fresh young nation in its beautiful and yet unfathomed power.
This awesome new country leaps forth after gloriously vanquishing the Habsburgs. Evidently 1830 was not a sectarian religious conflict or a labor/economic issue, it was instead the birth of a vibe:
Their most heroic exploit, their great war with the Spaniards, was only a struggle not so much for religion as for sensual freedom. These desperate revolts, this immense effort was in reality not directed against Roman Catholicism, but against the morality, the asceticism it enforced; not so much against Spain as against the sinister malignity of the Inquisition; against the taciturn, bitter, and insidious Puritanism which sought to curtail enjoyment; against the morose reserve of Philip II. All that they wanted at that time was to preserve their bright and laughing life, their free, dionysiac enjoyment, the imperious avidity of their senses; they were determined not to be limited by any measure short of excess. And with them life conquered. Health, strength, and fecundity is to this very day the mark of the Belgian people in town and country.
Zweig mentions non-judgmentally that the greatness of Belgium is due not only to “virility” but also to virility’s just reward: wealth taken from the Congo. He does not dwell much on colonialism or on the human costs of resource extraction, domestically or abroad. A fairer description of Belgium’s rise would focus not on demographic characteristics and “unsought strength,” but on the rapacious misdeeds of King Leopold II in central Africa.
Neither Verhaeren nor Zweig have the hindsight that we do, but if greatness can be located in a revolutionary defeat of the Habsburgs, or in the vigorous consumption of beer, then there’s no excuse to be blind to the mines, the child labor, the anti-humanist religious doctrines and most of all the terrifying violence of the colonies. The Belgians must own all of this.
Zweig’s view of Belgium as representing a human pinnacle feels dated, or delusional. And it reminds me of another unconvincing stab at a celebration of national greatness: The arch at Le Cinquantenaire, a park in Brussels. Any nation worth its salt has a big sensual copper sculpture representing its glory. But none are as ironic as the triple arch out in the European Quarter, with the charging horsemen and the seated dignitaries, each representing a Belgian province.
The name of the display, Cinquantenaire, is due to the date of scheduled completion: 1880, the fiftieth anniversary of Belgian independence. But the archway was not finished in time for the anniversary celebration, due to the indifference of the public and their representatives in the Belgian government. There were not enough taxpayer funds allocated for the nationalistic project. King Leopold II imagined a great tribute to his glorious nation, but Belgian ambivalence conspired to postpone the parade. On the day of the nation’s fiftieth birthday, the incomplete archway had to be filled in with temporary wooden paneling.
But the monument was completed (permanently) by 1905, the 75th anniversary of independence. Classical and muscular and militaristic, it announces Belgian triumphalism, but the truth is that the monument exists despite the wishes of the people of Belgium. The Cinquantenaire declares, in a visual cymbal-crash: “Here is the triumphant moment of a glorious nation that might have been grandly celebrated, but in fact was not.”
Further Reading:
Will Stone, “Encounter at the Crossroads of Europe,” Public Domain Review, Dec. 2013.
Stefan Zweig, Émile Verhaeren, 1914.