Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland and the Great War

Abstract

In 1942, in his autobiography Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), famous Austrian writer and pacifist Stefan Zweig presented himself as someone who, owing to his cosmopolitism, had managed to resist the agglutinating effect triggered by the beginning of the Great War. However, such self-representation was not in accordance with the facts. Instead, Zweig’s position had been quite ambiguous and, to a great extent, was only clarified by the involvement of French author Romain Rolland.
In the context of the turmoil and post-truths of the 21st century, it seems only appropriate to remember these bigger or smaller “falsifications” and evoke the friendship maintained by two intellectuals from enemy countries during the First World War. This paper will focus on a number of events of that period in which the kinship between both authors turned out to be decisive for the artistic and human stance of the Austrian writer.