Stefan Zweig and World Literature

Reviewed by: Stefan Zweig and World Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives ed. by Birger Vanwesenbeeck and Mark H. Gelber Ruth V. Gross Birger Vanwesenbeeck and Mark H. Gelber, eds., Stefan Zweig and World Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. 266 pp. Was Stefan Zweig a first-class second-rate author or a modern master? This question haunts Stefan Zweig studies, which are currently experiencing a kind of renaissance. With the success of Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel, for which the filmmaker says he got his inspiration and even “stole” from Zweig’s stories, and the recent almost-bestseller The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World by George Prochnik (2014), Zweig’s works have once again found an audience. To be sure, Zweig, one of the most widely read and translated European authors of the first half of the twentieth century, has had minor resurgences before, but the aim of the editors of the book under review is to situate Zweig’s oeuvre firmly in the category of “world literature” as we define it in the twenty-first century, thus providing the often underrated author an honored place in literary studies. And yet, as we are told in the book’s introduction, this is the first book-length study of Zweig and his works in over twenty-five years. Occasional reviews and essays on his work, an example of which is Michael Hofmann’s “Vermicular Dither” in the London Review of Books in 2010, have often been critical of Zweig. What is it about the Viennese, Jewish Zweig, who went into exile when the Nazis came to power—first to England, then to the United States, and finally to Brazil—that so often causes readers to become apoplectic and harshly criticize both the author and their own enjoyment of his works? Other authors with a similar profile have not been subject to the same scorn that Zweig continues to engender. The current volume, with contributions by the two coeditors, and, among others, Klaus Weissenberger, Jeffery Berlin, Klemens Renoldner, and Robert Weldon Whalen, tries to provide some answers. The contributors hope to counter the recurring negative responses to [End Page 152] Zweig and his work, some of which have arisen because of his failure to speak out unequivocally during the days of his exile from Germany and before his suicide in 1942. Divided into four parts, the book contains twelve essays, some of which are expanded papers that were given at an international Zweig conference held in 2009; others were specifically written for the volume. All try to approach Zweig and his works through the broader perspective of world literature. The single essay that comprises Part I is coeditor Vanwesenbeeck’s discussion of “A Stefan Zweig Revival” and deals with the negativity in Zweig criticism but also with some recent projects concerning the author that globalize his work and could serve to create a transnational context for it in future discussions. The Zweig under consideration is not the nostalgic European who was so popular in the 1920s and 1930s but rather a writer interested in translation and intercultural exchange. According to the current categorical definition proffered by David Damrosch, true world literature is a literature of exile never completely anchored in its nationalistic ground. Vanwesenbeeck argues that through new lenses, Zweig goes beyond his linguistic and cultural points of origin and appropriately fits into this category. The case of placing Zweig in a broader context is well made and raises the issue of his not fitting the mold of other expatriate modernist writers who felt that their continuing writing was one way to understand and explain the exile experience. Because Zweig did not use his exile experiences in his work in the same way as they did, and ultimately because he committed suicide rather than continue an exile’s existence, critics like Klaus Mann, Hannah Arendt, and more recently Michael Hofmann have questioned his modernist credentials. Vanwesenbeeck’s contribution, as well as several others in the volume, reexamines and redefines the question. Marc Gelber, in his essay on “Stefan Zweig and the Concept of World Literature,” considers possible reasons for Zweig’s

Art · Art history · Humanities · Classics · German History and Society · Literature and Cultural Memory · Schopenhauer and Stefan Zweig