The Story That Found Me Twice: Die Mondscheingasse / Í mánaskímu

I first encountered Stefan Zweig when I was sixteen.

I was growing up in Austria, in the years just before the internet became part of everyday life, a time when not every book was instantly at hand and not every text could be found with a quick search. My boyfriend at the time knew how much I loved literature, and whenever we met, he would hand me another carefully handwritten page of a story he said he was writing.

It was called Die Mondscheingasse.

I was completely captivated. The language was elegant and sensitive, unlike anything I had read before. Every few days, I waited impatiently for the next page, increasingly convinced that I was witnessing the beginnings of a remarkable writer.

At one point, with all the confidence of my sixteen-year-old self, I told him that as soon as he finished it, I was going to take it to a publisher. It was so well written, I wanted to get it out into the world. Strangely, though, the ending of the story never arrived, and whenever I offered suggestions for how it might end, they were politely dismissed. Apparently, none of my ideas quite lived up to the literary standards of the rest of the text. ;-)

Then, by pure coincidence, I was browsing our local library and picked up a large volume of collected works by an Austrian writer whose name I had begun hearing more and more around the schoolyard: Stefan Zweig.

I opened the book and looked through the table of contents.

And there it was.

Die Mondscheingasse.

Even before turning to the page, I knew. Sentence after sentence was familiar. The story I had been receiving, one handwritten page at a time, belonged to Stefan Zweig.

That afternoon, I lost a literary genius (or at least the one I thought I knew ;-)), learned that love letters sometimes come in disguise, discovered that I might have had some potential as a literary scout - though apparently less as a writer of Zweig-worthy endings :-) and, most importantly, found Stefan Zweig, who would become one of my most beloved authors.

Years later, whenever I return to Salzburg, the region of Austria I once called home, I find myself looking for Zweig again. The city is known throughout the world as Mozart’s city, but between 1919 and 1934 it was also home to Zweig, one of the most widely read European writers of his generation.

I especially like to stop at the Café Bazar, one of Salzburg’s old literary cafés, where Zweig was once a regular. Sitting there with a coffee, history still feels wonderfully close.

What draws me back to Zweig is not simply that he was a great Austrian writer, but the way he looked beyond Austria. In many ways, he did not think of himself as merely Austrian at all. He was a European.

His Europe was a shared cultural world, connected through literature, music, art, friendship and ideas. He travelled constantly, corresponded with writers and artists across languages and translated writers himself. For Zweig, translators were cultural bridge-builders: people who allowed a story written in one place to begin another life somewhere else.

His dream was of a Europe in which culture could reach beyond nationalism. History, of course, moved in the opposite direction. The rise of National Socialism forced Zweig into exile. His books were banned and burned in Nazi Germany, and he eventually left Europe altogether.

The world he had believed in was disappearing. It is this lost world that he describes so movingly in Die Welt von Gestern / Veröld sem var / The World of Yesterday.

His books, meanwhile, kept travelling, eventually reaching Iceland, a country that protects its language with great care and gives translators a remarkably visible place in its literary culture.

Coming from the German-speaking world, I am not as used to seeing quite the same attention paid to the person who carries a book from one language into another. In Iceland, translators seem to receive more of the recognition they deserve. Their names are not simply something one skips over on the title page. Readers know them; they are mentioned in reviews and literary conversations, and people will often know who translated a particular book.

Zweig would surely have appreciated that.

His journey into Icelandic began surprisingly early. Lögreglustjóri Napoleons, his biography of Joseph Fouché, appeared in Icelandic in 1944, translated by Magnús Magnússon. Manntafl followed in 1951 in a translation by Þórarinn Guðnason, and Veröld sem var (Die Welt von Gestern) in 1958, translated by Halldór J. Jónsson and Ingólfur Pálmason. And, over the decades, more of Zweig’s stories and biographies found their way into Icelandic.

Whenever I pick up one of his books at Bókin, I feel a small, unexpected sense of home. I can’t really help myself: I tend to give his books a particularly nice place on the shelves, hoping they will catch someone’s eye, and that Zweig might find himself a new reader.

One of those books gave me a surprise of my own while I was writing this article.

Having the 1951 Icelandic edition of Manntafl, translated by Þórarinn Guðnason, in my hands, I began leafing through it more carefully. I had always thought of it simply as the Icelandic translation of the Schachnovelle. But to my surprise I found out, that the little volume actually contains three Zweig stories.

There, among them, was one I knew very well.

Í mánaskímu. Die Mondscheingasse. It had found me again :-)

So, for any Icelandic Zweig readers who might not know: Die Mondscheingasse can be found in Þórarinn Guðnason’s 1951 edition of Manntafl, where it appears as Í mánaskímu, alongside Manntafl and Bréf í stað rósa.

Some stories, it seems, have a way of staying with us.

P.S. To H.: if you ever read this...a very belated thank you. You may not have written Die Mondscheingasse, but you gave me Stefan Zweig :-)