The Grand Budapest Hotel and Stefan Zweig

Although I enjoyed the Grand Hotel Budapest (nothing to do with the city of Budapest) and was amused by it, I found it somewhat weird. It was inspired by Stefan Zweig, it said in the credits at the end. I knew that because I cheated and read some of the reviews, but I failed to see any connection with Stefan Zweig. I had read Stefanz Zweig many years ago. He was the great popular writer of Europe for my parents' generation. I recognized Zweig at the beginning of the film as the 'author', but more in particular, Zweig's way of telling a story. The film quotes Zweig I believe, when the author says that he doesn't make up stories, stories come to him. The author talks about his book, which is about a story he had heard in an old hotel in a remote corner of the world, and then we meet the author as a much younger man having dinner with the narrator of the story. So we are two steps removed from the actual story. This is genuine Zweig. Wes Anderson says that he lifted bits of the film from stories by Zweig, but the stories are not really recognizable. What he took from Zweig is a sense of nostalgia for a vanished world of the past. What Anderson adds to this is that the vanished world was itself a fantasy and unreal.  The hotel itself is a monument to the past, but it is empty and was perhaps never quite what was remembered about it. Truly the past was a borderless world, it was the break up of empires that created artificial borders, but the life in the hotel and the life in the schloss, the castle, and the surrounding countryside, depicted as rugged mountains, were worlds apart. The elderly dowager, the owner of the castle, soft on the debonair concierge, M. Gustave, is the representative of the past, her son, unscrupulous, ruthless, with his tough, threatening bodyguard is the present, in 1932. But the story of the relationship between the concierge, M. Gustave, with his charming and impeccable manners, and Zero, the lobby boy he befriended and took under his wing is more like a Stefan Zweig,  remains largely unexplored. Both of them are rootless. We don't find out anything about M. Gustave's origins. We know that Zero Moustafa is a refugee from some Middle Eastern war and massacre. Zero, who is M. Gustave's acolyte, ends up being his saviour. Finally Zero inherits the hotel, by then largely empty and decayed, and assumes the role of the keepr of the memory of the past. This is a film that requires reflection. It has much more depth once you think about it than is evident when you first see it.