Discovering Stefan Zweig
I first came across the author Stefan Zweig through his book The World of Yesterday: Confusion of the Senses (published in Korean as A History of Madness and Chance). I set that book aside partway through without finishing it, and it was only later, after I had bought his book The Charm of Travel, that I finally read one of his works from cover to cover.
Stefan Zweig
was a Jewish writer born in Austria. His father ran a Jewish-owned textile
factory, and his mother came from a Jewish banking family, so it is fair to say
he was born into considerable wealth. Living through both the First and Second
World Wars, he left his homeland and moved from country to country, continuing
to write throughout, and ultimately ended his life together with his wife in
Brazil.
His suicide
note is said to have included words to the following effect:
In it, he wrote that the strength he
had built over a lifetime had been entirely worn down by years of wandering
without a homeland, and that he believed it better to end his life at the right
time and in the right manner. He added that intellectual work had always been
his purest joy, and that personal freedom had been the most precious thing on
earth to him.
Reading this,
I came to appreciate just how profoundly one's homeland shapes a person's life,
even though its influence usually goes unnoticed in everyday circumstances. Had
Zweig been born in today's Austria, or in the United States, currently the
world's foremost power, rather than in the era he actually lived through, I
suspect his life would have unfolded very differently. He might have become an
even more celebrated writer than he already was, and he may never have felt
compelled to take his own life out of despair over his homeland's future.
Zweig on the True Secret of Travel
This
particular book compiles portions of the travel writings Zweig left behind from
his journeys through countries such as Germany, France, Belgium, Italy,
Portugal, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, and Brazil, though it does
not cover every country he visited. I must admit I feel a certain envy toward
him. At the time, there could hardly have been a single Korean able to travel
the world so freely. Of course, I too may one day be an object of envy to some
future Korean reader — provided, that is, that the present era turns out to be
the peak of Korea's national strength.
What struck me
most in the book was the observation that even Americans and Britons — who
today travel the world independently and freely — were, in Zweig's time,
traveling in the very style of guided “package tours” now favored in Korea and
Southeast Asia. On this point, the book offers reflections along the following
lines.
Zweig worried that the
commercialization of travel was destroying its true secret. He recalled that,
since ancient times, the very word “travel” had carried a faint scent of
adventure, danger, capricious chance, and alluring uncertainty. Travelers who
move passively through packaged itineraries, he observed, will never come to
know this, because unless the true god of the wanderer — namely, chance —
guides their steps, they will pass by a great many things without ever entering
a genuinely new world.
He also observed that such American and
British tourists effectively never leave the enclosed bubble of their own
domestic bus or car. Because they make no real encounters, they never hear the
local language spoken and never truly sense a people's character or customs.
They see the sights, to be sure, but no one comes to know anything new at a
deeper level, since comfort and convenience stand in inherent tension with
authentic experience. All the fundamental things in life — everything we would
call true gain — grow out of effort and resistance, not ease.
Curiously, he added, the very
inconveniences and losses one suffers while traveling are often repaid many
times over in the end. Only the impressions bought through discomfort,
inconvenience, and mistakes remain vivid and sharp in memory, and eventually nothing
of a trip stays with us except its small hardships, difficulties, and moments
of confusion.
From Zweig's Travels to My Own Outside Directorship
Reading this
travel writing, I found myself thinking that my own experience serving as an
outside director had been quite similar. Serving in that role felt, in many
ways, like setting out on a journey into an entirely new world. I stepped down
from that position, upon expiry of my term, right around the time the
Commercial Act was amended to expressly codify directors' duty of loyalty to
shareholders. Over the years, I have heard a range of opinions on this subject
at various seminars: that the term of outside directors should be extended;
that three years is not enough time to truly come to understand a company; that
it takes roughly six years before a director genuinely grasps how a company
operates; and that, as in Japan, the term of outside directors should run for
about nine years.
Setting the
intensity of travel experience described in this book alongside these various
opinions, I arrive at the following thought. If the role of outside director is
carried out too comfortably, perhaps even six years of service is not enough to
truly come to understand a company — simply because the experience itself lacks
intensity. If one rarely encounters the inconveniences and trial-and-error
inherent in the role, the experience itself remains shallow, and it is
precisely for that reason that it may take a full six years before one truly
comes to understand the company. Conversely, if a director were to compress a
genuinely challenging outside-director experience into a shorter span, it seems
plausible that two or three years might be enough to gain a thorough
understanding of the company, without needing the full six years.
In the end, I
have come to feel that Zweig's view holds true. I myself lived abroad for about
two years, and looking back now, I find that I barely remember the ordinary,
day-to-day moments of that time — what stays with me are mostly the memories of
hardship. So whenever someone asks me about my life abroad, I tend to end up
talking mostly about the difficult experiences. The pleasant memories, free of
particular hardship, may have lingered for two or three years afterward, but
now, some nine years on, they have almost entirely faded. This is not to say
that I dislike the memories of hardship even now — quite the opposite: those
hardships became the nourishment that made me who I am today.
Copyright ⓒ 2026 Mecklin Kim. All rights reserved.
