My only big trips this year were armchair travel. Nice to be transported by good books—in time as well as space.

Related travel tips:

If you're in the Rio area, see Zweig's last residence.

In Salzburg, you can visit the Stefan Zweig Center.


​The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

This autobiography chronicles the author’s experience of the death of an “old Europe,” really a continent that had just enjoyed 100 years of progress and relative peace, but one that began imploding with the outbreak of WWI.

Zweig traces his youth and childhood as the son of a Jewish industrialist, one of many such families that had achieved prosperity in an Austria-Hungary that, despite its often authoritarian nature, had recently developed more enlightened policies. Many readers will find it surprising, but he insists that the highest dream for Jewish parents is not for their son to become a doctor or lawyer, but rather an intellectual or artist. “I had [to complete]  my university career and to bring home the doctor’s hood.”

He takes advantage of the leisure time that his father’s capitalistic pursuits had made possible, living in Paris and London, travelling extensively through Europe. In Europe, his most important encounters are with the artists and thinkers of his day: writers Romain Rolland, Maksim Gorky and James Joyce; composers Maurice Ravel and Arturo Toscanini; Sigmund Freud and a host of others. (His diligence about making such connections also leads to a major autograph collection, one that was, at best, dispersed after the Nazi occupation of Austria.) He continues these travels right up until the continent’s extraordinarily mild, pleasant summer of 1914. Even the news of the assassination in Sarajevo doesn’t unsettle him. The beautiful weather and his constant meetings with fellow artists and thinkers produce in him such euphoria and sensations of universal brotherhood that he can’t fathom the tragedy ahead.

I have a personal fondness for the Archabbey at Pannonhalma, Hungary, which I first visited in 1995. As the property had been confiscated in the early 1950s and only recently restored to the Benedictine Order, it had clearly suffered material neglect, even though the old communist government had allowed monks to continue living there.

I returned in 2011 to find it in much better condition: the winery was in full swing, lavender fields were rendering bath and beauty products, its chapels and main church had been restored. And it had received a new addition: Otto von Habsburg, the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary. Part of him, that is. Following centuries-old Habsburg tradition of burying the heart separate from the rest of the body, he had willed to have his buried here (the rest of his body lies in Vienna’s Capuchin Crypt). Mainly because monks from the abbey followed his family into exile at the end of WWI to educate the young heir apparent. Another reason was to show that Austria and Hungary both belong to a united Europe.

Indeed, the abbey, founded in 996, is an integral part of European civilization, having run a boarding school almost continually since that date. Despite several temporary closings over the centuries, and one in 1948-1950, it even became a rare example of a Catholic school allowed to operate in the former East Bloc.

Now, the monastery has shown the charitable side of its Christian mission. Last Saturday, September 5, Pannonhalma took in an as-yet undisclosed number of Syrian families, along with two unaccompanied minors. Volunteers escorting the group along the highway had brought them there, where they were sheltered in the gym.

This action was in apparent contradiction to a widely publicized, and criticized, suggestion by Hungary’s Cardinal Péter Erdő that housing undocumented refugees could be a violation of the country’s laws against human trafficking or smuggling (the Hungarian Helsinki Commission denies this claim). Vienna’s Catholic archdiocese, by contrast, is preparing to take in 1000 refugees.

Although the Benedictines of Pannonhalma were approached rather than making an offer, they performed this charitable work before Pope Benedict’s call on Sunday for all European Catholic parishes to take in at least one family. “We cannot leave anyone outside because doing so would contradict the Gospel,” Archabbot Asztrik Várszegi has been quoted as saying. The monastery also protected a considerable number of Jews during WWII.

Click here for the news story.

 

And they were nothing like the suffering of Syrians, Yazidi and others fleeing civil war and ISIS, who have landed in Keleti as a way station on their trek to Austria, Germany or any other country that will take them. Many of them have travelled five weeks or more without so much as a shower or a cot. With injuries from shrapnel, widowed with children. (Please see this Guardian portrait of eight such cases). Refugees camped out in Budapest-Keleti Station’s lower level.

But even more distressing to me are the responses of the Slovak and Hungarian governments, namely that their countries have homogenous Christian populations that would not absorb these predominantly Muslim immigrants. There may be some truth to that, but it seems a cop-out. There also may be truth to the argument that prosperous Gulf states would be better suited to handle them, but there may be valid counter-arguments that the cultural similarities among these Middle Eastern countries are deceptively similar.

In either event, it seems ironic that Hungary would be so reluctant to assist, even going to the extent of closing down Keleti for two days, in addition to fencing off its border with Serbia. Because the Hungarian nation itself suffered a refugee crisis in the aftermath of the failed Revolution of 1956, which was crushed by the Soviet military. As this very insightful CNN article points out, it was precisely the route from Budapest through western Hungary to the Austrian border that those refugees fled.

And that is another route I have traveled many times myself. Always, of course, in relative comfort, but it makes me feel more connected to today’s situation.

As bleak as the situation may seem, we can take heart in images of Austrians and German welcoming these Syrians and others into their countries, into their homes, and into their cars for rides from Budapest to Austria and beyond. And by German chancellor Angela Merkel’s generous response, even in the face of criticism by her own coalition members. And by Pope Francis, who on Sunday called on every Catholic parish and convent in Europe to shelter one refugee family. I hope and pray these churches will follow suit.