The Drama of Prophecy: On Stefan Zweig and ‘Jeremiah’
February 22, 2011 by Rudiger Gorner
When in the late summer of 1939 Stefan Zweig drafted his contribution to the 17th international PEN congress in Stockholm, he called history not only a ‘poetess’ but historical episodes ‘God’s workshops’. It was rare for God to feature at all, let alone prominently, in his work. Since the mid-1920s, Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew, had been one of the most prominent representatives of German- language literature worldwide, yet he had felt that he had no choice but to emigrate from Fascist-prone Austria well before the Anschluss. Was Fascism also one of God’s workshops, according to Zweig? Or were these workshops more like laboratories for cruel experiments with humans, and our reactions to them test cases of morality?
