"Meine geistige Heimat": Stefan Zweig im heutigen Europa ed. by François Genton et al. (review)

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Reviewed by:

• "Meine geistige Heimat": Stefan Zweig im heutigen Europa ed. by François Genton et al.
• David L. Smith

François Genton, Herta Louise Ott, Matjaž Birk, and Thomas Nicklas, eds., "Meine geistige Heimat": Stefan Zweig im heutigen Europa. Schriftenreihe des Stefan Zweig Zentrum Salzburg 13. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2022. 223 pp.

No one can dispute that Stefan Zweig's advocacy for a shared European identity at a time of increasing nationalism and fascist oppression continues to resonate in and outside academia. In addition to a robust number of journalistic retrospectives commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death, not to mention recent translations of his works and scholarly publications such as the Stefan-Zweig-Handbuch (2018), two recent building dedications warrant mention: first, the 2018 opening of a university student dormitory in Grenoble, France, in his honor, and second, the European Parliament's renaming of the Atrium building after him in Brussels in 2019. The editors cite both public recognitions as part of the impetus for convening an international conference in December 2020 to discuss Zweig's conception of Europe and its current relevance, a meeting that took place in virtual space because of the COVID-19 pandemic but led to the publication of the present volume.

Though not demarcated as such in the table of contents, the volume's chapters contribute to a fourfold focus. The first four literature-based studies analyze Zweig's conception of Europe through his writings on Freud; Nietzsche; the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; and historical figures such as Erasmus, Mary Stuart, and Sebastian Castellio. The ensuing four articles investigate Zweig's understanding of politics and its relation to a shared European cultural history. Next, three contributions examine the evolution of Zweig's conception of European identity after the Nazis seized power in 1933 and his short layover in Galicia in 1936 during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. The final two chapters ponder the timeliness of Zweig's writings for today's Europe more specifically, though this implied question informs the entire volume; the first does so by examining the depictions of Europe and Europeans in two comics-based adaptations of Schachnovelle and the second highlights correlations between Zweig's ideas for intercultural exchange and current European Union initiatives such as the Erasmus program.

Ideally, the chapter on Schachnovelle would be bolstered by additional analyses of film, graphic novel, or other adaptations of his works, especially [End Page 121] for the commentary they might provide regarding notions of European identity in the decades since the end of the Cold War. This desideratum is tempered by the recognition that conference volumes are beholden to the range of topics people are able to contribute, especially during a global health crisis; this criticism should not detract from the fact that this volume offers nuanced, complementary discussions of Zweig's work, not all of which can be discussed here, and it does so while acknowledging familiar criticisms of Zweig as politically aloof and overly idealistic given the fraught times in which he was literarily active.

In the case of Die Welt von Gestern, for example, Mark H. Gelber draws on a reading of Zweig's unpublished 1936 review of Freud's Selbstdarstellung to elucidate the limits of Zweig's reflections as autobiography. Similar to Freud's work, which employs recollection to focus on the development of psychoanalysis, Zweig's tome can be read as a memoir designed to advance his own "principle," namely that of the "unity … or unification of Europe" through the recognition of a shared "European spirit" ("dieses Prinzip [ist] die Einheit Europas …, oder die Vereinigung Europas, im Sinne der Vereinigung des europäischen Geistes," 21). Such a focus helps explain Zweig's idealized or even naïve view of the Habsburg monarchy as a multicultural society in which ethnic and national interests played no significant role. How, though, did Zweig conceive of this European "spirit" beyond a respect for tolerance and a support of the arts, and how might it relate to European identity today? For Zsuzsa Bognár, Zweig provides insight when he selectively emphasizes aspects of Nietzsche's life to depict him as a supranational...