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Introduction: The Stefan Zweig Conundrum

Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle

in China's Stefan Zweig: The Dynamics of Cross-Cultural Reception

The 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig’s birthday in 2011 triggered the latest “rediscovery” of the Austrian writer in Europe and North America, manifesting itself in various new editions and ... More

The 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig’s birthday in 2011 triggered the latest “rediscovery” of the Austrian writer in Europe and North America, manifesting itself in various new editions and translations, exhibitions, graphic novels, radio plays, and movies inspired by his life and work, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Maria Schrader’s Vor der Morgenröte. At the same heated debates about the writer’s literary merit flared up again. This introduction provides an overview of the international reception history of Zweig, whose works have been translated into more than sixty languages since the 1920s, while causing relentless aversion and controversy among scholars and critics. This chapter also explains why the Chinese reception with its wealth of unexplored material spanning almost the whole twentieth century serves as the ideal case study not only to re-read Zweig’s work but also to rethink our understanding of cross-cultural literary connections as complex “global systems of cultural transfer.”Less

Liberalism

Ritchie Robertson

in The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature 1749–1939: Emancipation and its Discontents

Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews were conspicuously associated with liberalism, the political expression of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. Earlier in the century, liberalism implied the ... More

Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews were conspicuously associated with liberalism, the political expression of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. Earlier in the century, liberalism implied the search for universal human rights. Despite much diversity, liberals broadly agreed in desiring constitutional government with a large measure of popular participation; with freedom of expression, abolition of censorship and national unity as a means of evading the oppressive power of the German princes. This chapter focuses on varieties of nineteenth-century liberalism with which Jews were identified, and examines how three Viennese writers, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Sigmund Freud, exposed the limitations of the enlightened liberalism to which they were vitally attached.Less

Auto/biografiction: Counterfeit Lives: A Taxonomy of Displacements of Fiction towards Life‐Writing

Max Saunders

in Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety ... More

This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.Less

Infectious-Erotic Topographies: Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg and Zweig’s Der Amokläufer

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

in Exotic Spaces in German Modernism

The exoticization of places is no more evident than in the case of European locales symbolically rendered mysterious, desirous, and threatening, as occurs in the case of Venice and the Swiss Alps, ... More

The exoticization of places is no more evident than in the case of European locales symbolically rendered mysterious, desirous, and threatening, as occurs in the case of Venice and the Swiss Alps, respectively, in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg. What these central Mann texts share in common with Zweig’s novella Der Amokläufer is the coupling of the exotic topography with both erotic desire and infection illness. This chapter shows thematically how the infectious-erotic topography, in which protagonists experience a moral downfall or loss of rationality, situates a critique of the self-certain and usually dominant European subject in the face of the foreign other. This chapter further outlines in theoretical terms the ways in which usually familiar or ordinary places can be symbolically exoticized by their association with eros and infection.Less

Life

Marc Crépon and James Martel

in Murderous Consent: On the Accommodation of Violent Death

This chapter discusses not only how the fabric of relations binds people to all others, but also how its fissures are a part of the “nature” or the “essence of life,” at least “human life.” If it is ... More

This chapter discusses not only how the fabric of relations binds people to all others, but also how its fissures are a part of the “nature” or the “essence of life,” at least “human life.” If it is true that all life, however it defines its belonging, is protected by the ideals and the institutions that constitute a common good for humanity, and if it is true, more importantly, that no one can elude murderous consent, then the paradox of murderous consent is that humanity's common good turns against life itself. Rather than merely accept, encourage, and promote the destruction of life, the fabric of relations that should prevent such annihilation assists it. All wars, all acts of violence, whether civil or between states, trample on the ideals of humanity, even as those who are responsible for the abuse proclaim these same ideals as their own. Nothing that safeguards life is immune from being invoked and exploited so as to effect this kind of reversal. This was the bitter conclusion—as expressed in his Reflections on War and Death—that Sigmund Freud reached in 1915 after the first of four long years of mutual devastation by Europe's nations. Stefan Zweig—in The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European, a retrospective on the war—came to this same conclusion regarding literature, though twenty-five years later.Less

Conclusion

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

in Exotic Spaces in German Modernism

The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the ... More

The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the European self and the familiar world which it ordinarily inhabits. The observation, imagination, or appreciation of exotic foreign topographies in works by Hofmannsthal, Hesse, Dauthendey, Mann, Zweig, Kafka, Musil, Benn, Kubin, and Brecht, provokes critical self-reflection about modern European forms of consciousness. The theoretical context for this critical self-reflection includes some of the major thinkers of German modernity, including Simmel, Weber, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Worringer, and Freud. Revealed are radically different possibilities for understanding and for living life, recognition of the precariousness of the familiar world. These works testify to the power and relevance of imagination, of cultural memory and expectation, of history, emotion, and the aesthetic sensibility in our experience of the world as a shifting symbolic topography.Less

Short and Shortest Times

in On Borrowed Time: The Art and Economy of Living with Deadlines

This chapter discusses conceptions of short and shortest times associated with the Greek gods Chronos and Kairos, and through the works of Friedrich Schiller, Stefan Zweig, and Èmile Zola.

‘Fin de Siècle and No End’: The Austrian Art of Being Late

Ben Hutchinson

in Lateness and Modern European Literature

The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment in the development of modernity, and it plays an important role in the European narrative of constructions of lateness. Chapter 11 ... More

The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment in the development of modernity, and it plays an important role in the European narrative of constructions of lateness. Chapter 11 focuses on how the key terms Epigonentum, Fin de siècle, and Dekadenz express variations on lateness in the Viennese literature of the latenineteenth century. Focusing in particular on essays and poems by figures such as Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as well as on cultural criticism by the likes of Carl Spitteler, Max Nordau, and Otto Weininger, the chapter explores the extent to which Viennese modernity is predicated on a sense of arriving too late, after the perceived high point of European culture. Hermann Broch’s era-defining cliché ‘the Gay Apocalypse’ captures the Dionysian duality at the heart of the period: modernity is understood to be dying, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.Less

Berlin, 1991: Dialectical Dilemmas in the Universities: West Side Story, East Side Story

John Rodden

in Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995

Western Berlin, October 3, 1991. Tag der Einheit: “Unity Day.” The first anniversary celebrating German reunification. Or perhaps “marking” reunification is a more accurate term. No jubilant talk ... More

Western Berlin, October 3, 1991. Tag der Einheit: “Unity Day.” The first anniversary celebrating German reunification. Or perhaps “marking” reunification is a more accurate term. No jubilant talk of a New Germany, no flag-waving nearby. My forehead pressed against the cool glass of the third-storey living-room window, I watch a half-dozen skinheads swagger in the street below. “Asylanten Raus!” (“Asylum Seekers Out!”) they chant. “Deutschland den Deutschen!” (“Germany for the Germans!”). Black jeans, jackboots, bomber jackets stabbed with Waffen SS insignias. Dirty blond hair clipped close on the sides, Hitler-style, with a single long forelock. Punk turned political with a vengeance. Waving swastikas, shouting the inevitable yet overwhelming “Sieg Heil!” they’re heading toward the Breitscheidplatz, West Berlin’s central square. Behind me, the Thursday evening news. The sparkle of holiday fireworks gives way to the explosion of terror sweeping across the country. Shelters for asylum seekers torched in Karlsruhe in the southwest and Dusseldorf in the northwest. On the island of Rügen, in the Baltic, a dormitory for refugees razed and incinerated; two Lebanese children severely burned. A hostel for foreigners firebombed in Bremen. “. . . at least 16 racist assaults within 48 hours, bringing the number of attacks to 1,387 since the beginning of the year: the worst outbreak of violence since Hitler’s Germany.” The right-wing German People’s Party, which has just captured an alarming six seats in Bremen’s local elections, does not denounce the violence; its spokesman instead urges immediate restrictions on immigration. A conservative minister pitches Prime Minister Kohl’s proposal to push through a constitutional amendment curbing Germany’s liberal provisions for asylum, which have already opened the doors to more than 1.3 million foreigners since 1989. An interview with historian Golo Mann: “It’s 1933 again.” But dinner is ready. Wolfgang, 44, a wissenschaftlicher Assistent (lecturer) in sociology at the Free University of Berlin, joins me at the window. He takes a long drag of his cigarette. “The Hitler Youth of the ’90s,” Wolfgang says. “German Unity!?! Who knows what this ‘new Germany’ will lead to?” He turns his back on the receding parade of young faschos. Less