Moriz Scheyer (27 December 1886 in Focșani, Romania – 29 March 1949 in Belvès, France) was an Austrian author.'Scheyer, Moriz', by M. Grill, in Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950, vol. 10, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1991, p. 102, http://www.biographien.ac.at/oebl?frames=yes In his lifetime best known for his literary essays and reviews, he is the author of Asylum, a vivid account of his experiences as a Jewish refugee in France during the Second World War, first discovered and published more than sixty-five years after his death.Moriz Scheyer, Asylum, Profile Books, 2016, vii-viii; 274-7
Biography
Moriz Scheyer was born in Focșani in Romania on 27 December 1886, the son of Wilhelm Scheyer, a businessman, and Josefine (née Krasnopolsky). By the time of his secondary education the family had moved to Vienna, where they lived in the pleasant suburb of Hietzing.His childhood and school career are recalled in 'Encounter with my Own Youth' ('Begegnung mit der eigenen Jugend'), in Moriz Scheyer, Genius and Its Life on Earth (Erdentage des Genies, Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1938), pp. 153-65. After high school (Gymnasium), where he excelled in humanities and languages,Genius and Its Life on Earth, pp. 157-8. Scheyer studied at the University of Vienna, from which he graduated with a law degree in 1911.Degree certificate 'Doctor Juris', University of Vienna, November 1911. He began his career as a writer with short pieces for newspapers, joining the staff of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt (NWT; one of Vienna's two 'quality' dailies) in 1914.Moriz Scheyer, Asylum, p. 12
A committed 'good European' and devotee of the internationalist and pacifist Romain Rolland,Moriz Scheyer, Europeans and Exotics (Europäer und Exoten, Strache, 1919), p. 12; Asylum, pp. 279-80; 285; 288. he expressed his horror at the atrocities of the First World War;Poem by Scheyer, 'Lonely Battlefield' ('Einsames Schlachtfeld'), in Arbeiterzeitung, 17 November 1914: 'Under the pale first snow / Many a sorrow lies buried. // The late moon, indifferent and cold, / Shines down like a funeral torch. // The night utters prayers for the dead. / In the east there glimmers a distant light.' a chronic health condition may in any case have exempted him from active service.M. Grill in Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950 (n. 1 above) describes Scheyer as 'unfit for military service' ('kriegsdienstuntauglich') and as a committed opponent of the War ('überzeugter Kriegsgegner'). He also wrote bitterly of the devastating aftermath of the conflict, the Great Depression, in Austria.Moriz Scheyer, Escape to Yesterday (Flucht ins Gestern, Georg Müller, Berlin 1927), pp. 10-11, quoted in Asylum, p. 288: 'They have disappeared without trace ... those ... bright Palaces of the Grail that were pointed out to us by cunning deceivers on the Horizon of Peace ... Dynasties were overthrown; oppressors put aside; but in their place came a thousand other dynasties, a thousand other oppressors ...'
He travelled extensively – making a sea voyage via Egypt to South America before 1919 – and these travels inspired much of his early writing.Europeans and Exotics, Tralosmontes, Amalthea-Verlag, 1921 and Cry from the Tropical Night (Schrei aus der Tropennacht, Georg Müller, Munich, 1926).
A lover of French culture and literature, Scheyer had lived in Paris in the period before 1924, as a cultural correspondent for the NWT, and continued to visit regularly after his return to Vienna.Asylum, p. 12 He also seems to have spent some time as a correspondent in Switzerland.'Campione', Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 25 April 1919, written from Lugano, with the byline 'von unserem Schweizer Sonderberichterstatter' ('by our special Swiss reporter').
From 1924, in Vienna, until his dismissal at the Anschluss, Scheyer was arts editor of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt.After 1938, and its ‘Aryanization’ by the Nazis, the NWT was amalgamated with other titles; it appeared for the last time in 1945 He was in charge of the review section (‘Theater und Kunst’) and thus held a position of significant cultural influence. Acquainted with many of Vienna's prominent literary and musical figures, such as Arthur Schnitzler,Moriz Scheyer, 'Arthur Schnitzler', in Escape to Yesterday, pp. 170-6 Joseph RothAsylum, p. 286 and Bruno Walter, he was a personal friend of Stefan Zweig,Asylum, pp. 107; 260-2; 285-6. Zweig mentions Scheyer in letters to the French author Georges Duhamel in 1922 and 1923: Duhamel, Correspondance: l'anthologie publiée de Leipzig, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001, pp. 114, 124; F. Zweig, Stefan Zweig, p. 205, lists Scheyer amongst friends visiting the author at Salzburg. with whom his work has some strong affinities (see 2.4 below).
In October 1927 he married Margarethe Schwarzwald (née Singer), the daughter of a successful Czech-Jewish industrialist and widow of Dr Bernhard Schwarzwald, and through the marriage acquired two adoptive sons, Stefan and Konrad (after emigration to UK: Stephen Sherwood and Konrad Singer).
With the advent of the National Socialist regime in Austria in March 1938 (the Anschluss), Scheyer, at the height of his career, lost his position on the NWT, as well as any possibility of further employment in Austria. He escaped via Switzerland to Paris, accompanied by his wife and their long-term housekeeper and companion, Sláva Kolářová. This experience, as well as that of life in Paris both immediately before and after German occupation, the flight south in the 'Exodus', a period of incarceration in the French camp of Beaune-la-Rolande, life in the 'free zone', a series of extraordinarily narrow escapes from deportation to a death camp, and a final rescue by the Rispals,Gabriel Rispal (1875–1970), Hélène Rispal (1903–79) and Jacques Rispal (1923–86), who became a successful stage and film actor. On the Rispal family and Resistance in Belvès, see Georges Rebière, Aimez-vous cueillir les noisettes: message personnel, PLB éditions, 2012 and Asylum, pp. 265-72. a family involved in the Resistance, followed by life in hiding in a Franciscan Convent in the Dordogne, are recounted in vivid detail in Asylum.
Scheyer remained in France (through the generosity of the Rispals) for the rest of his life, without returning to Austria. He had suffered from a chronic heart condition even before the traumatic experiences of 1938–44, and died in 1949. It seems that he made some effort to have his autobiographical work published, but ultimately despaired of finding anyone interested in what had happened 'only' to Jews.Asylum, pp. vii-viii; 2; 244; 274-7.
Work
Until the posthumous discovery and publication of the autobiographical work Asylum, Moriz Scheyer's main literary output consisted of travel writing, book and theatre reviews (in particular for the Josefstädter Theatre) and, especially, essays in the distinctively European genre of the feuilleton – pieces inspired by a particular event, e.g. a book publication or exhibition, but going beyond mere review in their personal reflection or historical analysis. His first three published books are travel writings; the remaining three published in his lifetime are collections of feuilletons, previously published in the NWT. His autobiographical 'survivor's account', Asylum, was discovered by his step grandson P. N. Singer many years after his death, and first published in English translation in 2016.
Travel writing
Scheyer's early books Europeans and Exotics, Tralosmontes and Cry from the Tropical Night are inspired by his travels, especially in the near East and in South America. Largely factual (although Tralosmontes seems more in the style of a novella), they consist of vivid depictions or vignettes, and are preoccupied with the 'exotic', in terms of both place and character. Examples are Saadi ibn Tarbush, a young Egyptian boy who acts as Scheyer's guide in Cairo, but is seduced by the glamour of the European's life; Mr Dronnink, a Dutch musical genius ruined by a woman and by drink, ‘burnt out’ and reduced to playing the piano on cruise ships; and Gly Cangalho, a morphine-addicted ‘Creole’ character who spends her life travelling on cruises, known to all the captains. There are also parodic Englishmen – themselves exotic in their ability to be at home everywhere and lack any emotional response to the exotic around them. Vivid pictures are painted of the experience of a tropical night on the ship; of storms, of cockfights, of the ‘coffee coast’; Scheyer creates an eerie, exotic world, both through his character portraits and through his evocation of atmosphere and place.P. N. Singer, 'Moriz Scheyer: Writer', in Moriz Scheyer, Asylum, pp. 282-4
Literary and historical essays Scheyer's remaining books of the 1920s and 1930s – Escape to Yesterday, Human Beings Fulfil Their Destiny and Genius and its Life on Earth – are essentially collections of feuilletons; they focus especially on the lives and works of great men or women, especially great artists, of the past, from Balzac to Verlaine, from Mata Hari to Wilde. Although mainly focussed on historical figures and their artistic work, these essays share with the previous writings the atmosphere of nostalgia and the concern with vivid evocation of personality and place.
Asylum
Scheyer's account of persecution by and rescue from the Nazis, Asylum, is utterly different from his previous writing in genre and purpose. As he claims at the outset, 'it has nothing to do with literature';Asylum, p. 1. a work raw with emotion, it is concerned to recount the lived experience of the persecution, the 'mental misery' and 'broken souls'Asylum, pp. 2-3. suffered by Jewish people under the Hitler regime. Nonetheless, it brings the same critical and evocative skills that Scheyer used in his professional life to bear upon these traumatic experiences. One may also – with terrible irony – draw a connection between Scheyer's earlier literary work and that lived reality. In the book published just before his exile, Genius and its Life on Earth, he suggests that men fulfil their destiny or achieve greatness through suffering (examples are Tolstoy, Verlaine, Wilde),Genius and its Life on Earth: 'Verlaine', pp. 90-100; 'Leo Tolstoi', pp. 101-13 and 'Oscar Wilde', pp. 114-22. while Scheyer's own later experience of persecution led to the writing of what is undoubtedly his most significant work. Moroeover, his interest in women in history who sacrifice themselves for the men in their lives (Lady Hamilton, Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevskaya, Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya)Human Beings Fulfil Their Destiny: 'Sophia Andrejewna', pp. 137-50; Escape to Yesterday: 'Anna Grigorjewna', pp. 74-83, 'Die Hamilton', pp. 200-11. finds a real-life echo in the immense debt that he owed to his wife Margarethe and companion Sláva, as well as to the self-sacrifice of the sisters of the Convent at Labarde – which he describes in moving detail.Asylum, pp. 164-9.
Style and literary milieu Scheyer's reviews and essays show a strong engagement with contemporary Viennese writers, such as Hofmannsthal, Roth and Schnitzler. His own literary work, both in its emotive, evocative style and in its characteristic preoccupations, belongs distinctively within the Viennese literary milieu of the early twentieth century,P. N. Singer, 'Moriz Scheyer: Writer', in Moriz Scheyer, Asylum, pp. 282-92. and in particular shares much with his better-known friend and almost exact contemporary, Stefan Zweig (1881–1942). Three tendencies, especially, seem to link Scheyer's writing both with that milieu and with Zweig in particular: nostalgia, an obsession with 'great men', and a reverence for music.