The vanquished Heroes of Europe — Stefan Zweig’s Poetics of Defeat in The World of Yesterday

Abstract

The ‘victor in defeat’ (Donald Daviau) has long been a key concept in Stefan Zweig scholarship. This reversal of the traditional hero narrative has been applied to understand how Zweig constructs his historical biographies, drawing on both his understanding of history and his convictions about the moral responsibilities of the writer. It has also been used to demonstrate how Zweig values defeat as a means for moral development in his novellas and dramas. This essay argues that Zweig’s poetics of defeat can be equally applied to his autobiography. Through their shared values of humanism, supranationalism and pacifism, the individuals remembered by Zweig form a heroic collective in their seemingly impossible fight against nationalism and fascism. The World of Yesterday thus needs to be read as a cornerstone of Zweig’s Historiography of Tomorrow, a new way of writing history, which the author proposes in the last years of his life.