Stefan Zweig: Contradiction and Self-Deception

By Mundilfury | redice.tv

Stefan Zweig (28 November 1881—22 February 1942) was an Austrian novelist, librettist, journalist, and biographer. He was born in Vienna to Moritz Zweig (1845-1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer (1854-1934) who was from a Jewish banking family.

He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, and in 1904 completed his dissertation on the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine to earn his doctorate.

According to Zweig, religion did not play a central role in his education: “My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth.”

He did not renounce his Jewish faith, however, and wrote repeatedly on Jewish themes, as in his story Buchmendel.

Zweig struck up a friendship with Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, whom he met when Herzl was the literary editor of one of Vienna’s newspapers the Neue Freie Presse; Herzl published some of his early essays.

During the First World War, he served in the Archives of the Ministry of War in Austria. Zweig married Friderike Maria von Winternitz in 1920; they divorced in 1938. In the late summer of 1939, he married Elisabet Charlotte “Lotte” Altmann at Bath, England.

In 1934, following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, Zweig left Austria for England, living in London and from 1939 onward in Bath. Because of Hitler’s rapid advance westward, he and his second wife left for the United States and settled in New York City. They lived for two months at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and then rented a house in Ossining, New York.

On 22 August 1940, they moved to Petropolis, a German-colonized mountain town near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After writing a note about his depression at the rise of authoritarianism and Nazism, Zweig and his wife were found dead in their home of a barbiturate overdose on 23 February 1942.

The Zweigs’ house in Brazil was later turned into a cultural centre and is now known as Casa Stefan Zweig.[1]

Contradiction and Self-Deception

It is telling that several articles have emerged in 2017 that venerate Stefan Zweig including one in the New Yorker and another produced by the BBC. The contemporary cultural-Marxist press is continually forced to make arguments that bolster the multicultural narrative. The rise of nationalist movements in the United States, the wider Anglosphere, and throughout Europe, has sent the Leftist propaganda apparatus into overdrive. The fawning over Stefan Zweig’s life and works is yet another iteration of the culture war as the forces of globalism and nationalism clash.

To the present reigning elite, Stefan Zweig serves as an intellectual and ideological foil to the populist national socialism of the Third Reich in a presentist manner. Just as the past has been employed recently in a weaponized way to vilify Sebastian Gorka, for example, our hostile elites invoke champions of cosmopolitan pluralism from the past to serve in the culture war being waged in the realm of ideas in the here and now. For the Left, Stefan Zweig is the perfect tool to invoke. Not only is he ideologically aligned and of the same ethnic in-group, Zweig took part in an operatic production that protested Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in the 1930s.[2]

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