Stefan Zweig und die Krise seiner Identität im Exil. Überlegungen zu den politischen Prämissen seines Werkes

Following the dominant narrative of the academic reception in the 1970s and 1980s of German literature from the years of exile, Stefan Zweig was not fighting hard enough against the national-socialist German Reich, especially when compared to Bertolt Brecht, Klaus Mann etc. To be sure, Zweig was not acting as a left-wing agitator, but as a Jew. After the „Nazi book burnings“ and living in exile, he faced the same conditions as his colleagues in exile. And therefore, every biography has its very special conditions. Forty years later, its necessary to revisit a different view on the legend of Zweig as an „unpolitischer Autor“. His cosmopolitical biography, his impetuous sympathy for European history, his literary works on tolerance and humanism, written in the years of exile, his correspondences, several activities, statements, interviews, lectures and articles between the years 1933 and 1942, show us a writer participating in and intimately connected with the contemporary political history. And as final conclusion: we should not diagnose further Zweig’s dialogue with eminent pacifists at the end of World War One 1918/1919/1920 as Zweig’s most important intellectual turn, but, quite to the contrary: the year 1933.