I spent one of these cold Sundays glued to my heater, reading Stefan Zweig. He was an Austrian Jewish writer celebrated in the literary salons of early 20th-century Europe. He wrote novellas, which he described as his “beloved but unfortunate format, too long for a newspaper... too short for a book” — worthwhile for their own ineffable sake. Zweig left Austria at Adolf Hitler’s ascent, and ended his life in exile, with suicide. The day before he killed himself, he sent a manuscript to his publisher: It would become one of his best known works — Chess Story .
Chess Story is remarkable for its craft — how it infuses a board-game with knuckle-biting suspense — and for its story, an arrogant Grandmaster who finds an unexpected challenger in the diminutive Dr B who, it turns out, honed his chess skills not in tournaments but while incarcerated by the Nazis. For months, Dr B was kept in solitary confinement — “it corrodes and consumes you, this nothing and nothing and nothing around you” — until he found a reprieve for his sanity through chess games in his head. It is an odd thing that, the day after reading about Dr B’s imprisonment, I was detained myself. I don’t mean to compare four hours in the courtyard of Mandir Marg police station with imprisonment by the Nazis — nor, in fact, with four hours in a police station if I were Muslim and male in Uttar Pradesh. It was against news of police brutality in that state, in fact — of old men and children detained and tortured to stifle demonstrations against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act — that I had gone to protest. When I reached UP Bhavan, where the protest was scheduled, a policeman asked for my ID; when I asked him why, two women officers emerged by my side and took me off to a waiting bus.
The detention was as convivial as it was nerve-wracking. I met old friends and made new ones. Students kept up a near-constant score of slogans:
I came home and looked up Stefan Zweig. The story of his suicide in 1942 has such emotional force: He fled all the way to Brazil and still the thud of Nazi boots stomping on Europe haunted him. One day, in despair, Zweig and his wife took an overdose of pills and lay down in bed, formally dressed, to die. A man who killed himself in protest must surely have lived in protest too? In fact, he did not. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt puts it in a biting essay, politics had overturned his life and yet Zweig “continued to boast of his unpolitical point of view: It never occurred to him that, politically speaking, it might be an honour for him to stand outside the law when all men were no longer equal before it”. Arendt was not alone in her contempt. Zweig had dominated literary headlines before the war; he was almost entirely ignored after it. Arendt is, of course, the author, famously, of
Enjoyment would strip the game of its ideological value; a man who played chess for its own sake wouldn’t be playing it for the fascist endgame: Victory above and over everything. Aptly, notes Arendt, Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler’s most powerful deputies, “defined the SS member as the new type of man who... [would never] do ‘a thing for its own sake’”. Zweig was not this type of man. He was a type who chose to write novellas. A type so lacking in political spirit that he wouldn’t even speak against the Nazis when they burned his own books. But was he also, perhaps, an embodiment of what threatens the idea of a totalitarian state the most, the nothing and nothing and nothing that is its goal? Was the extinguishing of his own life the ultimate political act, an instinctive demand for freedom?
Parvati Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and the author, most recently, of Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal