Viena, 1907 — Stamford, Connecticut, EUA, 1986 (Alix)
Viena, 1910 — Marathon, Florida, EUA,1998 (Susi)

 

Stefan Zweig’s stepdaughters

 

The daughters of Felix von Winternitz (Vienna, 1877- ???, 1950) and Friderike Maria von Winternitz (née Burger, later Zweig). They met when still students, married in 1906 and the following year their first daughter, Alexia (Alix), was born. Their marital difficulties didn’t stop them from having a second daughter two years later, Susanna (Susi), the victim of dysentery with respiratory problems which demanded the constant care and attention of her mother, right into adulthood.

 

At the time of the first formal meeting with Stefan, in 1912, Friderike and the daughters spent the summers at an old mill in the forest near Vienna (because of Susi, see Friderike’s entry)

 

Up until the First World War, in 1914, while Stefan was on the lecture circuit, accompanying productions of his plays, travelling to Paris or Belgium and weaving his network of friends, Friderike was chasing up sanatoriums, doctors and treatments, according to Susi’s health crises or states of recovery. When she decided to leave Felix and live alone in Baden, near the Austrian capital, she asked Stefan to come and visit him at times when the girls were awake. She wanted them to get used to his presence, although he continued to live at his bachelor’s apartment on Kochgasse,Vienna.

 

Lacking in experience in dealing with children, being the youngest of his family, without small nephews or cousins, Stefan was easy to get on with and Friderike ever-attentive. Free of financial troubles life flowed easily with little of the harshness of everyday life

 

They were adolescents when they moved to the mansion on Kapuzinerberg in Salzburg and adapted themselves to the rapid success of their stepfather and the resulting stresses. Friderike learned to handle her husband’s explosions and depression and must certainly have helped her daughters to bear them.

 

However, in the diary entries from October 1931 the first signs of unpleasantness appear between the writer, now in his fifties, endlessly dissatisfied with his success and concerned about the prevailing political radicalism, and the stepdaughters, by now grown women (aged 21 and 24). Stefan tried in vain to interest them in cataloguing his famous collection of manuscripts and autographs – a project he’d been entertaining for years but was never able to accomplish. Friderike in turn was reluctant to impose his will on her daughters.

 

As he describes the frenzied work to complete the biography of Marie Antoinette and the sombre political mood in Austria, Stefan cannot hide his dislike of his stepdaughters’ lack of ambition and apathy regarding work and the future. The cracks in the family atmosphere – up to now apparently harmonious – begin to appear when he reveals that he is thinking of seeking refuge. “Uncertainties regarding the house will persist while uncertainties about A. & S. persist” (he generally referred to people in his diaries by their initials). A quarrel lead him to note: “It is impossible to live in an atmosphere of such stupidity and apathy. I suffocate, as does my energy. I need to catch my breath...” A few days later: “our married life is heading towards a catastrophe. Better that than a marasmus.”

 

When in 1934 he decided to rent a pied-à-terre in London, Friderike accompanied him, but the planned “script” took on a life of its own: it was the dreamed-of refuge, the rest would collapse in its own time. The involvement with the new secretary – chosen by Friderike herself – deepened the resentment with the stepdaughters: she was practically the same age (Lotte Altmann was born in 1908), mature, professionally qualified (shorthand in German and English), independent, able to support herself (later he was to discover Lotte’s total subjection to her older brother Manfred’s whims).

 

Stefan’s impatience with the supposed idleness of his stepdaughters might have been legitimate in 1931, but as far as Susi is concerned, from 1934 his complaints are unfounded and unjust: the youngest daughter had learned to photograph (she had even assembled a darkroom in her bathroom). She wanted to become a photojournalist but the local union wouldn’t give her permission. She insisted, the case went to court, Friderike interfered using her connections, and in 1936, there she is appearing in the Salzburger Illustrierte in reports with captions in French and English (both were tri-lingual). Susi’s work stood out at the prestigious summer festival, since many famous people were friends of her parents and visited the house. The following year, she published a photo-biography of Arturo Toscanini with her stepfather’s new publishers,  Reichner Verlag.

 

During three years of disagreements about the sale of the mansion and the divorce, Alix and Susi became involuntary protagonists in the bitter denouement of their mother’s second marriage. The obsessive complaints in letters to Friderike about the easy life of her daughters were later responsible for her only slip as a dedicated memorialist, biographer and keeper of her ex-husband’s work: she omitted from collections of letters any which might discredit her by then married daughters, with their own families and lives. She didn’t want them to carry any guilt which was not essentially theirs.

When they did finally separate and sold the magnificent mansion for a trifle, Friderike decided to invest in an inn of writers in Nonntal (Hauptstrasse, 49), a delightful district of Salzburg, and Alix, the older girl, now working at a travel agency, stayed to help. They enjoyed a full house thanks to their contacts in the artistic milieu and with foreign visitors during the Summer Festival.

 

Susi preferred Paris, where she tried to live as a professional photographer. The “supermum” went to supervise her younger daughter’s move. And luckily so: in March 1938, Austria was annexed by Germany and Friderike was prevented from returning. Before joining her mother in France, Alix tried sending to Paris everything which was kept in storage in Nonntal, but the Gestapo was too quick and confiscated everything.

 

Happily, the family was reunited, along with the daughters’ respective boyfriends, childhood friends: the oncologist Herbert Störk and the film photographer and film-maker Carl Höller, who had recently escaped from Austria. Alix and Herbert married in 1939, lived together in the charming village of Croissy not far from the capital.

 

From September 1939 Paris life was no longer easy, France was at war with Germany, alongside England. The in-laws signed up in the French army. In the first six months the conflict appeared to be distant, but suddenly the German Blitzkrieg turned on France, the unassailable Maginot Line was quickly broken, the Allies forced to abandon Dunkirk, and the road to Paris left open to the Panzerdivisionen.

 

Three days before the fall of Paris, Friderike managed to obtain from socialist friends a pass to go to Montauban. They left the house in Croissy, the sky filled with German parachutists descending to occupy Paris. The little spaniel Schuschu, the descendent of old Kaspar who lived in Salzburg, disappeared and the girls cried, unwilling to leave him, knowing he’ll be killed. They are forced to take a taxi (Susi had an attack of rheumatism), Schuschu reappeared and joined her and two of her mother’s friends. The rest of the group took the train, along with thousands of refugees crowding the roads, stations, trains, carts and buses, heading south.

 

Installed in the run-down hotel by the railway of Montauban, they are surprised by a telegram from Stefan (who had meantime left England and arrived in New York, where a nephew has given him his aunt’s address). The surly stepfather, now back in the role of worried parent, has obtained visas for all five to go to the USA, and they must head straight for Marseille and from there reach a neutral port on the Atlantic where they embark for New York. In order to cross the Iberian Peninsular they’ll need transit visas for Spain or Portugal, both Fascist dictatorships sympathetic to the Nazis. Thanks to his biography of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, Stefan obtains authorization from the Oliveira Salazar government for them to reach Lisbon, and then cross the Atlantic.

 

All that is needed is to cross the Pyrenees: instructed by Stefan they get in touch with the American Varian Fry, who has been hired by the American First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to save the intellectuals and artists from Paris fleeing Nazism now gathered in Marseille. Susi marries her boyfriend and their group joins another which is going to cross the Pyrenees on foot and enter Spain: the leftist writer Heinrich Mann (Thomas Mann’s older brother), the nephew Gollo Mann and the famous writer Franz Werfel (who would go on to write The Song of Bernadette) and his wife, Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer.

 

Finally in Lisbon, they are met by Fraga Lamares, Stefan’s Portuguese publisher, who lends them money to buy clothes (they had travelled with backpacks) and stay at a pension. On board a rusty old Greek steamship they land in an icy and joyful New York four months after escaping the sad Paris springtime.

 

The Emergency Rescue Committee, for whom the valiant Varian Fry works in Marseille, and in New York Katia Mann (Thomas Mann’s daughter) and Hermann Kesten (q.v.) take care of the initial arrangements: Friderike goes to live on Sheridan Square, in Greenwich Village; although married, Susi stays only a few doors away, on 11th Street. Alix and her husband prefer a little distance and go to live on 146th Street.

 

From Brazil, Stefan and Lotte write in cordial terms, the Great Torment has made their conjugal differences seem paltry. The ease in tensions facilitates the meeting between them all in early 1941 in New York, when Alix is called upon to replace Lotte (suffering from a long bout of asthma) in typing up the originals of the Brazilian book.

 

With the approach of the trying New York summer and the sudden decision to press on with the autobiography, Stefan decides to rent a house on Ossining, on the banks of the Hudson river. He needs the help of Friderike, with whom he lived for the last thirty years and who spends the summers in that region. Alix helps Lotte with the typing, Susi takes photos of her stepfather - a big family which Lotte accepts without any objection.

 

Back in Brazil, now in Petrópolis, in correspondence with his first wife, the daughters are mentioned with affection. The telegram celebrating his 60th birthday is signed by the three of them, as are the books by and about Montaigne which he receives as a gift. In Friderike’s last letter, the daughters wrote a few words on the back. Hours before killing himself, Stefan affectionately refers to “the children”.

 

Accused of “censorship” by Austrian specialists with ties to the Altmann family, Friderike was rehabilited when it was discovered that the suppressed letters remained intact and were given to the archives of the Daniel A. Reed Library, at the University of  New York in Fredonia. Friderike left the daughters the sealed envelope with unpublished letters, which were then included in the estate.

 

The overprotected younger daughter survived Alix: separated from her husband in 1955 she lived with her mother until her death. Toscanini’s photo-biography was published in the USA in 1943. In 2007 a study was published in Salzburg about the role of “Zweig’s step-daughter” in the creation of photo-journalism in the town. Stefan would have been proud. Some of the portraits of him taken by Susi are now classics.

 

Little is known about the father, Felix von Winternitz: he remarried in 1919 (to the much younger Eleanore Chalup, with whom he had a daughter, Regine von Winternitz, like his mother). In her memoirs, Friderike revealed that her ex-husband was decorated during the Great War and “thanks to his second wife managed to escape the dangers of the Nazi era, an indication that, unlike Felix, Eleanore was not of Jewish origin. She later accompanied his long illness. The daughter Regine was in England at the outbreak of World War II and thanks to Friderike’s help escaped to the United States, along with her future husband, with whom she settled there.

 

Alix and Susi had no children.

 

Addresses listed: Alix Störk: 604 West 147th Street, New York. Tel. Ed 4-1987; Susi Höller: 1 Sheridan Square. Tel. Chelsea 2-7895.