If you want my honest opinion, I’ve got to tell you that I don’t think I’m the kind of person who’s ever completely happy; maybe it doesn’t even suit me. I’ll be satisfied with a month, maybe, or one, two years. If we have the guts to go through with it, I won’t be thinking of living happily ever after with white hair and a cozy little house in the

I don’t know who I am, still less who I’ll be once I’ve tasted freedom. The agitation in me today might just be something inside that wants to come out, but maybe it’ll stay there, or even grow.

Zweig’s own death involved a suicide pact—he was found lying hand-in-hand with his second wife—and perhaps he simply never succeeded in imagining what a different ending could have looked like. On the other hand, by 1942, Christine and Ferdinand’s future would have been all too clear. The rage, the feelings of betrayal, the sense of wasted talent:

Why are we always the ones who suffer? We didn’t do anything, we didn’t do anything to anyone, but every step we take is a trap. I’ve never asked for much, once I went on vacation, and I wanted to be like the others, free and easy, eight days, two weeks, and then all that with my mother happened …

Something was beginning to go dead between them, she felt. Not the friendship, the fellow feeling, but both of them were losing heart somehow. They no longer had the strength to go on lying to each other. Once they’d imagined they could help each other, make each other believe there was a way out of this impasse of poverty, but they no longer

And if we believe in something—you do understand me?—then our ‘no’ to life isn’t completely true, and we’d be destroying something we have no right to destroy, the unlived life in us, the chance for something new, maybe something magnificent.

I put up with it all because I believed that eventually it would be over, eventually I’d get a job, climb the first rung and the second. But I always got knocked back down. I’ve gotten to the point now that I’d rather kill someone, gun him down, than beg from him. I can’t go on now. I can’t go on lingering in outer offices and standing around

With a little money, two or three banknotes, I could have been among the blessed, I could have left, driven somewhere in a car … somewhere where no one could come after me, where I was alone and free … Oh, how wonderful it would have been just to relax, for you too … It would have made all the difference for you, you wouldn’t be so glum and

People looked after him in astonishment, and at the construction site people noticed how furious he was, how unpleasant and dismissive, though before he’d always been so unassuming. Christine sat in the post office as always, depressed, silent, watchful. And when they thought of each other, it wasn’t with feelings of passion or love, but with