Leben erzählen: Stefan Zweigs biographisches Erzählen und sein Leben als Gegenstand biographischer Repräsentation

Abstract

This essay examines the narratological and semantic implications of Stefan Zweig’s biographical narration, demonstrating how the biographical texts and the fictional narratives differ in the degree to which they represent the complexity of the narrated life. This applies in a similar way to biographical literature about Stefan Zweig, which appears in different genres and media in the late modern age. The unifying focus of this essay is the mediality of narration, which draws attention to the given media-aesthetic peculiarities in each case and in sum clarifies the biographical complexity that relates to the narration of life in modernity.