Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on his Literary and Biographical Writings (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on his Literary and Biographical Writings Steven R. Cerf Stefan Zweig Reconsidered: New Perspectives on his Literary and Biographical Writings, edited by Mark H. Gelber. Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2007. 225 pp. €62.00. Mark H. Gelber is to be congratulated for editing this essay collection on Stefan Zweig’s relationship to his Judaism. Comprising revised papers from the International Zweig Conference held in Israel in 2004, this anthology, with fourteen contributions by European and Israeli scholars, sheds new light on Zweig’s life-long ambivalence towards his Jewish roots. Underscoring the international scope of the project, half of the articles are in English, five are in German, and two are in French. Informative footnotes and up-to-date bibliographies abound, and English translations from Zweig’s primary texts are presented along with German citations. In his introduction, Gelber sets the tone for the anthology by emphasizing the difference between the first Israeli Zweig conference twenty-three years before and this second convention; in 1981, distinguished elder Viennese born personalities, who had known Zweig or his family, had spoken with emotion about the writer. The 2004 conference, by contrast, was a research-sharing occasion for literary scholars to analyze Zweig’s erratic secular Jewish identity. Particularly significant are those contributions which deal with the Jewish characters in Zweig’s psychological novellas and those which analyze Zweig’s deeply personal stand towards his heritage as manifested in his public and private non-fiction. The two essays from the first cluster that should be singled out are Sarah Fraiman-Morris’ discussion of “Untergang eines Herzens” (“Destruction/Death of a Heart”) and Hanni Mittelmann’s treatment of androgyny in Zweig’s novellas, which she depicts in her title as “tales of the assimilationist Jewish predicament.” Fraiman-Morris’ analysis is based on Zweig’s affinity with Tolstoy. The Austrian’s early “Im Schnee” (“In the Snow”)—an account of an entire Jewish community’s flight from a pogrom and its dying in the snow—was inspired by Tolstoy’s “The Snowstorm.” The protagonist in Zweig’s mature “Heart” novella, Salomonsohn undergoes an inner journey from empty materialism to spiritual insight in the face of illness, in much the same manner as Tolstoy’s eponymous Ivan Illych. Throughout Zweig’s story, the existential aloneness of Salomonsohn parallels Ivan’s escapism and the worldly success of each protagonist stands in sharp contradistinction to his own final spiritual commitment. Whereas Tolstoy’s protagonist eventually feels closeness to his son and wife, Zweig’s protagonist is reunited with his sectarian community and God. Clearly, Zweig’s admiration for the traditional spirituality of the Eastern European [End Page 162] Jewish community comes across, as does the wisdom of the tellingly named son of Solomon. Mittelmann’s comparison of Bertold Berger in “Scharlach” (“Scarlet Fever”) and Edgar in “Brennendes Geheimnis” (“Burning Secret”) is revelatory. In Berger’s case, it his intellectual courage that transcends his feminized daily routine. In Edgar’s case, there is no outwardly redeeming act, and this protagonist’s infantilized behavior is congruent, just as Berger’s life is, with Otto Weininger’s critique of the Jewish male in his negativist, but highly influential, 1906 study of Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). Mittelmann continues by discussing Zweig’s female protagonists, including Irene in “Angst” (“Fear”) who “display the feminine qualities of emotionality and sensitivity, of childlike vulnerability . . . which are linked by Weininger to the Jew” (p. 168). Mittelmann emphasizes that androgyny mends the rift between the desire to belong and the distance of the outsider, providing a humanistic alternative to the ideology of assimilationism. Matjaž Birk’s comparison of “Fear” with Schnitzler’s “Die Braut” (“The Bride”) not only reveals how dependent Zweig was on Schnitzler’s artistry, but complements Mittelmann’s treatment of the same Zweig text. Three essays on the non-fiction representation of Judaism comprise the anthology’s other most helpful portion. Robert S. Wistrich’s discussion of Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday pinpoints Zweig’s ambivalence towards Judaism. Zweig barely mentions the rampant antisemitism in turn-of-thecentury Vienna under the openly racist mayor Karl Lueger. Moreover, Zweig’s inability to discuss the...