Zweig on Film

Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel is released in cinemas today, with a cast that reads like a Hollywood's Who's Who and a production design that would make an average edition of The World of Interiors look like the MFI catalogue. Sadly, Bedford won't stretch to screening the film until next week. By then, the Stefan Zweig debate will be in full tilt again, for many of the ideas behind Anderson's new film were, he admits, stolen from Zweig.

In one corner of the intellectual powwow will be The Guardian's Nicholas Lezard, whose is seemingly given as many column inches as he likes to defend his great discovery. In the other corner will appear Michael Hofmann, whose damning critique of Zweig appeared in the LRB when Pushkin Press published Anthea Bell's spanking translation of Die Welt von Gestern. Hofmann later repeated his stance to superb ends in his collection of Joseph Roth's letters.

Anderson is, of course, on Zweig and Lezard's side. 'I had never heard of Zweig until six or even years ago', he said in conversation with George Prochnik. 'I immediately loved [...] his one, big, great novel – and suddenly there were dozens more in front of me.' Beware of Pity and The Post Office Girl are just two of the stories that make their way into The Grand Budapest Hotel, which features not only but three characters 'modelled significantly on Zweig'.

Looking at the trailer for Anderson's multicoloured romp, I only hope that he manages to achieve some of the melancholy, the von Gestern quality, that Max Ophüls did so brilliantly in his 1948 nostalgic masterpiece Letter from an Unknown Woman. Otherwise Zweig may indeed appear, as Hofmann described him, as 'the Pepsi of Austrian writing'. Click here to order a copy of The Society of the Crossed Keys, Pushkin Press's film tie-in selections from Zweig, prefaced by Prochnik's interview with Anderson.

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