DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig Annie Pfeifer Columbia University Abstract: In her scathing 1943 review of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday , Hannah Arendt casts Zweig as a character and his life as an emblematic drama of his time� Her historically-based biographical reading turns the book review into her own retelling of the “world of yesterday” through an extended analysis of the role of Jewish culture and history - a history that Zweig had neglected� The review’s focus on Zweig’s playacting and performativity not only provides an unsparing account of the Viennese theater scene but also anticipates Arendt’s later interest in politics as theater in The Human Condition � This article makes a case for reading Arendt’s review alongside her essay “The Jew as Pariah,” published six months after the review� Her essay develops a typology of the figures of the pariah and parvenu - the two roles conferred on Jews in post-emancipation Europe. Briefly elevated from pariah to parvenu in interwar Vienna due to his fame and commercial success, the apolitical Zweig remained silent about the rise of Nazism� When paired with “The Jew as Pariah,” Arendt’s interpretation of The World of Yesterday exposes the tragic illusions of the parvenu’s worldview, which contained the seeds of Zweig’s own demise� While Arendt provides an important historical frame to Zweig’s memoir, there are limitations to her method of reading that reduce Zweig to a character or symbol while overlooking the way that literary texts can speak beyond or counter to an author’s intention� Keywords: Judaism, Nazism, history, theater, criticism, fame, exile Hannah Arendt’s 1943 review of Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday contains a famously harsh denunciation of Zweig’s silence during the rise of fascism in his native Austria: Not one of Stefan Zweig’s reactions during all this period was the result of political convictions; they were all dictated by his supersensitiveness to social humiliation� Instead of hating the Nazis, he just wanted to annoy them� Instead of despising those of 62 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 his coterie who had been gleichgeschaltet, he thanked Richard Strauss for continuing to accept his libretti� Instead of fighting he kept silent , happy that his books had not been immediately banned […]. He failed to perceive that the dignified restraint, which society had so long considered a criterion of true culture, was under such circumstances tantamount to plain cowardice in public life (1943, 165)� 1 Zweig was not a surprising target� Born into an upper-class Jewish Viennese family in 1881, Zweig achieved considerable success and fame during his lifetime as a writer, dramatist, critic, and man of letters� Although he socialized with the glitterati of interwar Europe, he largely avoided commenting on politics, and according to Arendt, “continued to boast of his unpolitical view” even after the “events of 1933 changed his existence” (1948, 318)� Zweig became the center of controversy in 1934 when he completed The Silent Woman [ Die Schweigsame Frau ], an opera libretto, at the behest of the German composer Richard Strauss, the first president of Hitler’s Reich Chamber of Music. In spite of his prolific literary output, Zweig is portrayed by Arendt as a “silent” man, one unwilling to speak out on politics and history until his last moment of desperation� “Instead of fighting he kept silent” [ Anstatt zu kämpfen, schwieg er ], Arendt posits in the aforementioned quote� This book review is not atypical of Arendt’s reading of literature, which often uses authors’ lives to examine their work� Her studies of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Franz Kafka similarly enlist a biographical approach - what Eva Geulen has called the genre of the portrait� Including almost no quotations and few references to The World of Yesterday , Arendt’s review displays little interest in Zweig as an author� Rather than focusing on his prose or plays, she reads Zweig as a character and his life as an emblematic drama of his time� In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt expresses this biographical approach in abstract terms, declaring, “[t]hat every individual life between life and birth can eventually be told as a story with a beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end” ( The Human Condition 184)� She seems to invoke the ambiguity between Geschichte , meaning both story and history in German - one of the central claims Benjamin makes in “On the Concept of History” and other works to highlight the importance of a plurality of narratives [ Geschichten ]� Not only does this statement provide crucial insight into Arendt’s method of literature - namely reading the life as a story - it also sheds light on the way she constructs the macro (history) out of the micro (the life story)� In her historically-based biographical reading, Arendt turns the book review into her own account of the “world of yesterday” by filling in the gaps of Zweig’s gilded portrait of “the Golden Age of Security�” Her corrective historiography Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig 63 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 chides Zweig for his failure to mention the overarching problem of unemployment and for his “ignorance” in regarding “the impotent pacificism of Geneva and the treacherous lull before the storm, between 1924 and 1933, as a return to normalcy” (1948, 320)� 2 She interpolates an extended analysis of the role of Jewish culture and history into Zweig’s account - a history that Zweig had neglected since, according to Arendt, “The word ‘Jew’ does not occur to him” (1948, 327)� As Arendt’s other writings suggest, this omission results from Zweig’s status as a social parvenu, one of the two roles conferred on Jews after their emancipation in nineteenth-century Europe. Unlike Kafka or Benjamin, who adopt the other role granted to Jews - the pariah - Zweig seeks the “protective armor of fame” as an “escape from social pariahdom” (1948, 328). Prefiguring Arendt’s later interest in politics as theater, the review’s focus on Zweig’s performativity could be read as an early test case that helps her formulate the difference between acting as a natural human tendency that “reveals” a person’s identity and play acting as a form of dissimulation that hides it - a topic which takes center stage in part five of The Human Condition � While Arendt provides an important historical frame to The World of Yesterday , there are certain limitations to her method of reading that reduce Zweig to a character or symbol while overlooking the way his works speak beyond the parole of the author� In its emphasis on distant reading, her approach runs counter to the prevailing method of New Criticism which dominated American literary criticism in the mid-twentieth century� 3 Published during the war, Arendt’s review was beset by problems surrounding its translation and transatlantic reception� The earliest English version of Arendt’s review appeared under the title “Portrait of a Period” in the Menorah Journal in 1943 and was reprinted in The Jew as Pariah , edited by Ron H� Feldman (New York: Grove, 1978)� “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday,” Arendt’s longer German review of the same book was originally published as “Stefan Zweig: Juden in der Welt von gestern,” in Sechs Essays [Six Essays] (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1948)� While writing the review in October 1943, Arendt only had access to The World of Yesterday in the English translation� Arendt’s review was written in German, and translated into English by an individual who is not identified in the Menorah Journal � In fact, in the original version, Arendt translated passages from Zweig’s book back into German herself, presenting a challenge for later translators (Breysach et al� 404)� Not surprisingly, the two versions of the review are largely the same� The longer review contains two extra paragraphs on fame towards the end of the essay, amplifying a theme already present in “Portrait of a Period�” But the most obvious difference between the two reviews is that the longer version opens with a dream of Rahel Varnhagen, the German-Jewish writer who ran one of the most prominent salons in Central Europe during the late 64 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries� In the dream, which is also explicated in Arendt’s 1957 book-length biography Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess , Varnhagen stands with her two famous friends Bettina von Arnim and Caroline von Humboldt in the afterlife, recounting the worst things they had experienced in life, including disloyalty, sickness, and worry: Finally Rahel asked: Did you know disgrace [ Schande ]? As soon as this word had been spoken, there was a hushed silence [ verbreitet sich Schweigen ], and the two friends took their distance from Rahel and looked at her in a disturbed and strange [ befremdet ] manner� Then did Rahel know that she was entirely alone and that this burden could not be taken away from her heart� (1948, 317) Why might Arendt choose to open with a dream sequence by another author, especially in a review that devotes relatively little space to literary analysis of the subject in question? For one thing, this new introduction enables Arendt to more powerfully set up the discourse around “disgrace and honor” that takes center stage in her analysis of Zweig (1948, 317)� It also foregrounds the “hushed silence” [ Schweigen ] that divides the German-Jewish Varnhagen from her Christian friends through her admission of disgrace: her Jewish identity� Varnhagen’s dream allows Arendt to form a historical link between “disgrace” and “silence” that becomes central to her analysis of Zweig as well as the pariah/ parvenu distinction� Zweig’s tragic mistake, according to Arendt, is misreading his own time� In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt borrows Zweig’s phrase “the Golden Age of Security” for the title of a subsection of part one, “Antisemitism,” drawing directly from her essays on The World of Yesterday � 4 It was during this period that “Jews who had been admitted into society during the nineteenth century as exceptions to the rule of discrimination” discovered “the forces that would open all doors, the ‘radiant Power of Fame’ (Stefan Zweig)” ( The Origins of Totalitarianism 52)� Immediately afterwards, Arendt sets up the salient distinction “Between Parvenu and Pariah,” the title of the subsequent section (56)� At some point, according to Arendt, every nineteenth-century European Jew had to “decide whether he would remain a pariah and stay out of society altogether, or become a parvenu, or conform to society on the demoralizing condition that he not so much hide his origin as ‘betray with the secret of his origin the secret of his people as well’” (66)� 5 Although Zweig plays a minor role in Origins , the framing of this section coupled with Arendt’s reviews positions him as the parvenu par excellence� As Arendt states in her review, Jews “remained pariahs as long as they failed to make themselves fit for the salon [ Salonfähigkeit ] by some extraordinary means, such as fame� With regard to a famous Jew, society would forget its unwritten law� Zweig’s ‘radiant power Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig 65 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 of fame’ was a very real social force, in whose aura one could move freely and could even have antisemites as friends” (1948, 325). Ultimately, it is only Zweig’s “radiant power of fame” that temporarily elevates him from a pariah to a parvenu during this “Golden Age of Security�” The figure of the pariah occupies a central role in her analysis of anti-Semitism and becomes the subject of Arendt’s essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” originally published in April 1944, six months after the publication of her review of The World of Yesterday � 6 While Zweig is not mentioned by name, he lurks in the background of her portrait of the parvenu: “Realizing only too well that they did not enjoy political freedom nor full admission to the life of nations, but that, instead, they had been separated from their own people and lost contact with the simple natural life of the common man, these men yet achieved liberty and popularity by the sheer force of imagination” (“The Jew as Pariah” 109). According to Arendt’s redefinition, the “insouciant” pariah “is always remote and unreal” as “he stands outside the real world and attacks it from without” (105). Unlike the parvenu who is shackled by his worship of the “idols of social privilege and prejudice,” the pariah finds freedom by existing outside “the political and social world” (103)� The fact that two out of the four case studies of pariahs in Arendt’s essay are the German-Jewish writers Kafka and Heinrich Heine highlights the extent to which literary analysis is foundational to her larger historical and philosophical project� If Zweig is the parvenu, then his foil is the pariah, Walter Benjamin� In spite of some obvious biographical parallels - German-speaking Jewish writers who fled Nazi Germany and committed suicide in exile - the two figures could not have been more dissimilar in their politics, literary styles, and social status� Although unknown to the broader public, Benjamin formed close friendships with Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem in Berlin and later Georges Bataille and the surrealists while in exile in Paris� In Vienna and Salzburg, the wealthy Zweig schmoozed with the high society of his day, yet he was spurned by notable writers like Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, and Brecht, who once boasted he had never read a word Zweig had written� Zweig was part of the inner circle of Austrian cultural life while Benjamin remained a scrappy outsider whose reputation was anything but secure� Shut out from the academy after his habilitation was rejected at Frankfurt University, Benjamin teetered on the edge of financial ruin for the rest of his life. In contrast, Zweig’s wealth and reputation insulated him until the very end: “Even if one fell back into anonymity for a time, fame stood like a solid suit of armor that one could don again at any moment in order to protect oneself from the terrible effects of life” (1948, 326). Even their suicides differed: Zweig and his wife took their lives in the comfort of their lush perch in Petrópolis, Brazil, while Benjamin died alone in 66 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 Portbou, Spain after he was unable to secure a transit visa to leave the country and faced the imminent prospect of deportation back to Nazi-occupied France� Although Arendt never labels Benjamin a pariah, her introduction to Illuminations makes this parallel clear� Beyond his marginalized status as an exiled German Jew, he is described as “an outsider - Benjamin had taken his degree in Switzerland during the war and was no one’s disciple” (Introduction 8)� According to Arendt, “no one was more isolated than Benjamin, so utterly alone” (9)� Even as a Marxist, he was alienated, she noted: “Benjamin probably was the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement, which God knows has had its full share of oddities” (11)� Torn between Brecht’s Marxism and Scholem’s spirituality, Benjamin had a conflicted relationship with Judaism throughout most of his life� 7 At the same time, as Arendt shows, Benjamin also disdained the role of the parvenu, as “the very notion of thus becoming a useful member of society would have repelled him” (4)� But perhaps the biggest clue is that Benjamin, according to Arendt, was the kindred spirit of Kafka - one of Arendt’s case studies in “The Jew as Pariah” essay� Reinforcing their similarities, she observes: What Benjamin said of Kafka with such unique aptness applies to himself as well: “The circumstances of this failure are multifarious� One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream” (Briefe II, 764)� He did not need to read Kafka to think like Kafka […] and the sentence with which he concludes this study reads as though Kafka had written it: “Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope” (Introduction 17)� Throughout her introduction, Arendt draws on Benjamin’s image of the “little Hunchback” [ bucklicht Männlein ] to explore the way he was plagued by a unique combination of personal misfortunes and societal obstacles� Zweig’s “radiant power of fame” stands in opposition to Benjamin’s growing posthumous acclaim� Arendt’s 50-page introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations begins with a section on Fama that did not appear in the German version: Fama, that much-coveted goddess, has many faces, and fame comes in many sorts and sizes - from the one-week notoriety of the cover story to the splendor of an everlasting name� Posthumous fame is one of Fama’s rarer and least desired articles; although it is less arbitrary and often more solid than the other sorts, since it is only seldom bestowed upon mere merchandise. The one who stood most to profit is dead and hence it is not for sale. Such posthumous fame, uncommercial and unprofitable, has now come in Germany to the name and work of Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish writer who was known, but not famous, as contributor to magazines and literary Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig 67 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 sections of newspapers for less than ten years prior to Hitler’s seizure of power and his own emigration� (Introduction 1)� Unlike Zweig, who courted Fama throughout his lifetime, Benjamin never experienced such levels of recognition before his death� Arendt explains, “Posthumous fame seems, then, to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones, that is, those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification” (3). It is precisely through Arendt’s classification that Benjamin came to be taxonomized and curated for an English-speaking audience� As Cosima Mattner has convincingly shown, Arendt herself bears significant responsibility for securing Benjamin’s “Fama” in the American context, since after the publication of Illuminations , Benjamin’s star rose exponentially to become one of the most cited critics in the U.S. 8 Benjamin’s posthumous fame is the opposite of Zweig, whose reputation has dwindled since his death and even lapsed into outright disdain� Particularly in the U.S., Zweig remained largely unknown by the general public and was considered unworthy of serious study by scholars (Botstein 63)� In his 2010 review of Anthea Bell’s translation of The World of Yesterday in the London Review of Books , Michael Hofmann wrote: “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake� He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing” (n. pag.). Over the past ten to fifteen years, there has been renewed interest in Zweig’s life and work with Bell’s translation, the New York Review of Books (NYRB) editions of many of his works, Oliver Matuschek’s Three Lives : A Biography of Stefan Zweig , George Prochnik’s The Impossible Exile , as well as three films: Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) inspired by Zweig’s autobiography, Maria Schrader’s Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe [Vor der Morgenröte] (2016), and Philipp Stölzl’s adaptation of Chess Story (2021)� But it is also just as likely that he reentered our cultural consciousness as a “potent lens, refracting momentous times” (Prochnik 5), all the more relevant with the resurgence of the far right across the world� A compellingly flawed and tragic figure who failed to take a stand until it was too late, Zweig is a lesson for our own time� Pre-posthumous fame was Zweig’s blessing and curse� According to Arendt, his reputation silenced Zweig and prevented him from speaking out on the rise of Nazism, especially against his collaborator friends like Strauss� In contrast, the more radical Benjamin was emboldened by his position as a pariah which left him with little to lose� While the bourgeois, well-heeled Zweig “kept himself completely aloof from politics” (1948, 317), Benjamin doubled down on revolutionary politics by embracing his own idiosyncratic blend of Marxism, forming alliances with Brecht and Asja Lācis, and taking a formative trip to the Soviet Union in 1926-27 where he sought to make connections with Soviet intellec- 68 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 tuals� Zweig’s success, according to Arendt, inoculated him from politics: “He continued to boast of his unpolitical point of view; it never occurred to him that, politically speaking, it might be an honor for him to stand outside the law when all men were no longer equal before it” (1948, 318)� Zweig’s silence during the rise of Nazism is all the more damning because unlike so many voiceless victims, he actually had a platform to speak out� Like Benjamin, Zweig was a passionate collector, whose collection was part and parcel of his work as a writer and scholar. But their differing collections manifested themselves in their divergent literary approaches once again coalescing around the parvenu/ pariah distinction� Benjamin was an eclectic collector of rare books, toys, and souvenirs, styling himself after the Parisian ragpickers who combed through the garbage looking for discarded treasures� Zweig’s preoccupation with prestige is exemplified by his world-renowned collection of over a thousand original and often autographed manuscripts of famous luminaries such as Freud, Rilke, Balzac, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Whitman as well as the musical manuscripts of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and countless other composers (Zohn 186)� 9 While Zweig collected manuscripts, what he really collected, it seems, were people - famous people� As Arendt explains: “In his guestbook at Salzburg Zweig gathered ‘eminent contemporaries’ as passionately as he had collected the handwriting and relics of dead poets, musicians and scientists� His own success, the renown of his own accomplishments, failed to sate the appetite of a kind of vanity which could hardly have originated in his character” (1943, 170)� Arendt implies that Zweig’s archival, textual practices of collecting are part and parcel of his collection of physical manuscripts� In a passage added to the 1948 review, Arendt continues: “Nothing does more harm to a highly differentiated sensibility than the comic vanity that, without any principle of selection and without any sense for differences, drops as many famous names as possible” (1948, 324)� Zweig’s obsession with name-dropping is another dimension of collecting, which, like his autographed manuscripts, feeds off the stature and power of its sources. Zweig’s collecting practices reflect his social milieu of parvenus who collected scraps of celebrities to try to attain fame� In interwar Vienna, Jewish youth “collected every scrap [ sammelte jeden Fetzen ] that had once belonged to famous people of other periods; and they strove to come into direct touch with every living period of renown, as if a tiny reflection of fame [ Abglanz des Ruhmes ] would thus fall upon them - or as if one could prepare oneself for fame by attending a school of celebrity” (1948, 322)� 10 Here the aura that Benjamin locates in the work of art is transferred to the famous individual� This pursuit of fame works by osmosis; young people clung to celebrity scraps to enhance their position just as Zweig believed the possession of famous authors’ manu- Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig 69 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 scripts would increase his literary standing� 11 This habit accords with Zweig’s longstanding feeling of inferiority described by Leon Botstein: “Zweig saw Jews only as witnesses and critics, mediators and inspirers� He, early in his career, subordinated his own original narrative work to the translations of others, proselytizing for particular European heroes, and rewriting plays (such as two by Ben Jonson)� He was a spiritual sycophant and facile hero worshipper for others who themselves were firmly rooted in a national culture” (Botstein 75). According to this logic, collecting - like rewriting, translating, or editing - is another form of mediation that privileges the works of others over creation� 12 In August 1933, Zweig even bought a thirteen-page manuscript of one of Hitler’s speeches (Matuschek 53), illustrating just how far his collecting practice diverged from any kind of political conviction� While Zweig’s collecting was a way of accessing social clout, Benjamin’s mode of collecting was a matter of radical aesthetics and politics� In her introduction to Illuminations , Arendt states, “collecting was Benjamin’s central passion� It started early with what he himself called ‘biblomania’ but soon extended into something more far more characteristic, not so much of the person as of his work: the collecting of quotations” (Introduction 39)� Once again, Arendt implies that an author’s archival, textual practices of collecting are interwoven with his collecting of physical objects - books� But unlike Zweig, who collected names and associations through his wealth, Benjamin - whose precarious exile left him with little disposable income - collected the content of the works, copying down thousands of quotations in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris for The Arcades Project � Just as Arendt links Zweig’s collecting of manuscripts to his name-dropping, she argues that Benjamin “shifted emphasis from the collecting of books to the collecting of quotations” (Introduction 45)� Even the motivation behind Benjamin’s collection differs fundamentally from Zweig’s� Irreverent in its relationship to his source materials, “Benjamin’s praxis of citation engages in a form of creative plunder that blows apart and refashions the original text” (Pfeifer 147)� While Zweig collects manuscripts to preserve their aura and bask in their reflection [ Abglanz ], “ The Arcades Project dismantles books and their auras in order to impart them with new meaning” (Pfeifer 141)� In other words, Zweig’s collecting practice was conservative and conservationist whereas Benjamin’s practice was revolutionary and even, at times, willfully destructive� At its core, Benjamin’s collecting practice was creative as it generated new material out of the refuse of existing works (Pfeifer 128)� This distinction may also shed light on the differences in their literary styles: Benjamin’s radical collecting was tied to his avant-garde, genre-bending style while for Zweig, it reinforced his debt not simply to established bourgeois taste, but to a more traditional, realist style� 70 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 Since Zweig’s manuscript collection was bound up with the prestige and power of his status, it disappeared with the rest of his property� After the Nazis seized power in Austria, Arendt points out, “[h]is collections were stolen from him, and with them his intimacy with the famous dead� His house in Salzburg was stolen, and with them his intimacy with the living” (1948, 327)� While Benjamin’s book collection was scattered during his exile in various countries, his masterpiece collection - The Arcades Project - was stowed away at the Bibliothèque nationale during the war under the care of Bataille and eventually published� Although many of Zweig’s expropriated manuscripts were donated to the British Library by Zweig’s heirs in 1986, they lack the storied afterlife of Benjamin’s Arcades Project which continues to inspire readers today� Beyond collecting, Zweig’s obsession with fame manifested itself in another ubiquitous mainstay of Austrian cultural life: the theater� According to Arendt, Zweig suffered from the same “disease of his time” [ Krankheit der Zeit ] that captivated the Viennese Jews: “[T]he school of fame which the Jewish youth of Vienna attended was the theater; the image of fame which they held before them was that of the actor” (1948, 322)� Far from being only the domain of Austrian Jews, this fixation was part of a larger social trend of celebrity worship: “The Viennese went to the theatre exclusively for the actors; playwrights wrote for this or that performer; critics discussed only the actor or his part; directors accepted or rejected plays purely on the basis of effective roles for their matinee idols� The star system, as the cinema later perfected it, was completely forecast in Vienna� What was in the making there was not a classical renaissance but Hollywood” (1943, 169)� Arendt herself alludes to the troubling parallel between the Viennese star worship and the cult of the strongman leader in fascist Europe which culminates in the “deification of the ‘great man’” (1948, 323). The result, scoffs Arendt, is a full blown “theater hysteria” [ Theaterhysterie ] (1948, 323) which accords with Zweig’s collecting mania [ Sammelmanie ], both linked to the cult of celebrity, both elevating the self by drawing on the cultural capital of others� Theatrical references dominate Arendt’s essays on Zweig, allowing her to situate her literary analysis within her longstanding interest in the study of politics� Although now known primarily for his prose, Zweig, who wrote no less than fourteen complete plays between 1907 and 1935, was deeply involved in the theater� 13 Yet, Arendt’s focus on theater has more to do with an analysis of the European political and cultural milieu than a close reading of Zweig’s dramas� She observes, “For fifty years - before the opposing economic interests burst into national conflicts, sucking the political systems of all Europe into their vortex - political representation had become a kind of theatrical performance [ eine Art Theater ], sometimes an operetta of varying quality” (1948, 320). In effect, Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig 71 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 Arendt argues, “governments played ever-narrowing and empty representative roles, which grew more and more obviously theatrical and operettalike” (1948, 321)� If governments are emptied out, it is unsurprising that the writers, like statesmen and functionaries, had little more to offer than vacuous words and empty gestures� “Simultaneously, as political activity began to resemble theatre or operetta, the theatre itself developed into a kind of national institution, the actor into a national hero� Since the world had undeniably acquired a theatrical air, the theatre could appear as the world of reality” (1943, 169)� Against this political backdrop, theater emerges as the dominant cultural institution especially in Zweig’s native Vienna: “In no other European city did the theatre ever acquire the same significance that it had in Vienna during the period of political dissolution” (1943, 169)� Whereas reality as politics had become the central theater, theater had become reality for Viennese Jews, according to Arendt� “The Jew as Pariah” gives this statement more complexity, implying that theatricality is the inevitable outcome of typecasting Jewish people into pariah/ parvenu roles� Deprived of any real power in post-emancipation Europe, Jews are merely permitted “to ape the gentiles or an opportunity to play the parvenu” (“The Jew as Pariah” 100)� 14 As Michael Steinberg, Eric Gorham and others have pointed out, Arendt’s interest in the theater of politics is an important through-line in her work, most notably in “What is Freedom? ” and The Human Condition , where she declares that “the theater is the political art par excellence” (188)� 15 Steinberg observes: Not that Arendt was hostile to the theatrical� The political sphere she strove throughout her career to defend and restore depended on the performative abilities of its participant speakers� But Arendt’s theatricality is that of the speech act, not of the stage in a literal sense, where -pace performance studies - original utterances and originary deeds are not primarily at stake […]� Arendt versus Zweig thus amounts to a strong distinction (if not necessarily a clean opposition) between acting in the world and acting onstage, between performativity and performance, between reason and representation� Representation, in this usage, refers to the repetition of a prior authority and not the communication of interests, as in democratic political representation (Steinberg 881)� In Arendt’s interpretation, Zweig’s theatrical inclination was a manifestation of his larger confusion of aesthetic claims with social and political reality� Far from regarding acting as categorically wrong, Arendt considers acting and human performance to be an indispensable part of communication and public life� In The Human Condition , Arendt posits that “playacting actually is an imitation of acting” in a world composed out of the “living flux of acting and speaking” (187). At the same time, there is a key difference between the two which sheds light on 72 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 Zweig’s charade, namely that “in acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world” (179)� Content with his role as a star man of letters on the Austrian cultural stage, Zweig had no desire to break character and take any action in the political sphere� According to Arendt’s schema, Zweig’s acting is not a form of being in the world that “reveals” or “communicates” who he is, but a form of dissimulation that hides his Jewish identity and hence becomes a means of avoiding action and retreating from public responsibility� Characteristic of Arendt’s conflation of biography with an author’s work is that she neglects Zweig’s own theater pieces by focusing only on his theatricality� Instead, her primary concern is Zweig as an actor and symbol for the theater of politics� Throughout her review, Arendt insinuates that Zweig is merely performing a part, criticizing Zweig’s many roles as if they were theatrical ones he had taken on in various plays: intellectual, socialite, mediator, pacifist, and most damningly, “the self-appointed spokesman who had never in his whole lifetime concerned himself with their [the Jews’] political destiny” (1948, 327)� Even in his historical dramas, “Zweig needed the cloak of historical personalities, the appearance that their voice, not his own, was being heard,” asserting that through authors “greater than himself his greatest role in history and the world of letters would be played” (Botstein 65—66). Here too, his role seems to be confined to a mediator or collector who speaks through the works of others� It was only at the end of his life, Arendt maintains, that Zweig the man was unmasked: “Without the protective armor of fame, naked and disrobed, Stefan Zweig was confronted with the reality of the Jewish people” (1948, 328)� Ultimately, The World of Yesterday exposes the tragic illusions of the parvenu’s worldview, which contained the seeds of Zweig’s own demise� What Austrian Jews lacked, according to Arendt, is a desire for real political power� For Arendt, Zweig is representative of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Austria who “was uninterested in positions of power, even of the economic kind� It was content with its accumulated wealth, happy in the security and peace that its wealth seemed to guarantee” (1948, 327)� This charge is part and parcel of the distinction Arendt later makes in The Human Condition : “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds are not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities” (200)� The implication is that even with his international success, Zweig epitomized the Jewish preference for cultural or economic privilege over real political power� Yet, rather than blaming Zweig, Arendt demonstrates that he too is a victim of a system that only grants Jews two roles: the parvenu - who assimilates under the pledge of not disrupting the Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig 73 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 social order - or the pariah - who opts out� The problem is that both of these options became untenable after 1933: “Today the bottom has dropped out of the old ideology� The pariah Jew and the parvenu Jew are in the same boat, rowing desperately in the same angry sea� Both are branded with the same mark; both alike are outlaws” (“The Jew as Pariah” 121)� A parvenu like Zweig is guilty not of political collaboration but of naively imagining that he could exist beyond politics in a sphere of enlightened, international humanism� Not coincidentally, playacting was one of the ways Zweig’s gleichgeschaltete [Nazified] friend Richard Strauss justified his cooperation with the Nazi regime. In a June 1935 letter to Zweig, Strauss characterized his role as president of the Reich Chamber of Music as “play-acting” and “miming” (Kater, The Twisted Muse 207)� The letter was intercepted by the Gestapo and prompted the composer’s forced resignation and the cancellation of all further productions of The Silent Woman � In a desperate act of damage control, Strauss personally wrote Hitler assuring him that the letter to Zweig “does not represent my view of the world nor my true conviction” (Marek 283)� 16 Even in his spineless attempt to save face, Strauss once again claims that he had merely been acting� In Arendtian terms, Strauss exists only in the realm of appearances, taking on one role in front of Zweig and another in front of the Nazi regime� For his part, Zweig maintained his “silence” on the situation, “hiding behind his admiration of Strauss” and “failing to inquire about issues in Germany” (Botstein 76)� Like Strauss, Zweig was too preoccupied with a false kind of acting to take an ethical stance or political action� But unlike Strauss, Zweig had no other options but to play a part in a script composed by an anti-Semitic society� Zweig’s and Strauss’s dissimulation is illuminated by Arendt in The Human Condition , where she suggests that a person’s identity can be “hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity” (179)� In the case of Zweig, silence and passivity are equivalent, foregrounding once again the distinction between Arendt’s formulation of action as “disclosing” reality and the theatrical playacting of interwar Vienna� In Arendt’s view, it was only in Zweig’s last, poignantly-titled article, “The Great Silence,” that “he tried to take a political stand for the first time in his life” while Europe is “choked into silence” [ in Schweigen erstickt sei ] (1948, 327)� One of Zweig’s later articles, “The Great Silence,” was published in June 1940 in The Shreveport Times in English and the Neue Volkszeitung in German� Not surprisingly does Arendt consider it “the finest of Stefan Zweig’s work” (1948, 327), for it was the first time, she claimed, that he had spoken out. 17 In this piece, Zweig comes closest to renouncing his apolitical stance by asserting that the “duty of those with the freedom of speech” is to “speak on behalf of the millions and millions who cannot do so themselves because this inalienable right has been stolen from them” (“The Great Silence” 103)� According to Zweig, it is the 74 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 Nazis whose “slogan from day one was: suffocate [ ersticken ], suffocate all voices, except one” (104)� He continues: This silence, this terrible, impenetrable, endless silence, I hear it by night, I hear it by day, it fills my ear and my soul with its indescribable terror. It is more unbearable than any noise; there is more horror in it than in thunder, the wail of the siren, the crash of explosions� It is more nerve-shattering and soul-crushing than screams or sobs, because with every second I am aware that in this silence millions and millions of beings are held in bondage [ dass in dieses Schweigen die Knechtschaft von Millionen und Millionen Wesen eingepresst ist ]� (106) 18 In this passage, silence [ Schweigen ] is not just a form of disengagement, it is implicated in the oppression of millions of people� Sitting thousands of miles away from the warfront in his South American sanctuary, Zweig acknowledges his complicity: “To talk while these millions and millions of beings rattle under the gag is a shame [ Scham ] to me and I strain to hear them” (107)� Here Zweig anticipates Arendt’s argument in part five of The Human Condition , namely that speech or the lack thereof (silence) can itself be an action� It is a powerful admission from a former parvenu who spent his career upholding and venerating different forms of authority whether artistic, social, or political. Nevertheless, in Arendt’s view, this recognition came too late for Zweig, who was never able to come to terms with his fall from grace� As her review concludes: Thus this Jewish bourgeois man of letters, who had never concerned himself with the affairs of his own people, became nevertheless a victim of their foes - and felt so disgraced [ Schande ] that he could bear his life no longer� Since he had wanted all his life to live in peace with the political and social standards of his time, he was unable to fight against a world in whose eyes it was and is a disgrace [ Schande ] to be a Jew� When finally the whole structure of his life, with its aloofness from civic struggle and politics, broke down, and he experienced disgrace [ Schande ], he was unable to discover what honor can mean to men (1948, 328)� The operative word “disgrace” [ Schande ] that was so central to Varnhagen’s dream again takes center stage in the closing lines of her review� But Zweig’s predicament adds another layer to Varnhagen’s confession of disgrace that elicited the silence of her friends� A few lines later, Arendt’s conclusion brings these strands together: “From the ‘disgrace’ of being a Jew there is but one escape - to fight for the honor of the Jewish people as a whole” (1948, 328). In a Benjaminian reversal, she elevates the other Jewish role - the figure of the pariah - into the true vanguard against disgrace and thus anti-Semitism� Meanwhile, the parvenu becomes a disgrace precisely by trying to escape “his own people�” When read Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig 75 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 together with The Human Condition, her review suggests that “disgrace” stems not from a person’s Jewish identity but the parvenu’s denial of it and subsequent failure “to fight for the honor of the Jewish people.” As “The Great Silence” attests, Zweig’s own shame stems from his inaction - his inability to alleviate the sufferings of his fellow humans. In evocative terms, Arendt interprets Zweig’s life as a drama, replete with a culminating tragic demise rooted in his Achilles’ heel - his penchant for fame and prestige - while trapped in a social milieu that offered few alternatives� But this passage also epitomizes the danger of Arendt’s biographical approach of reading that reduces Zweig to a character instead of an author� In her introduction to Illuminations , this approach is generative as it brings the reader closer to Benjamin by weaving together his work and life story, while for Zweig, it can be a red herring that impedes our understanding of his work� The title of Arendt’s Zweig essay, “Portrait of a Period,” is especially revelatory as it sets out to portray an era rather than the author� In contrast to her three-dimensional portraits of Benjamin and Brecht whose works are interesting irrespective of their historical context, Zweig merely functions as a symbol of an epoch� More than a literary critic, Arendt becomes a storyteller� As Arendt explains in The Human Condition , this is part of her method: “Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants” (192)� With this wider perspective, Arendt the storyteller becomes a historian who pieces together a history through Zweig’s actions� For this reason, Arendt focuses on the “rare value of his document” as a historical rather than a literary text (1948, 320)� 19 In effect, she writes against the grain of New Criticism which loomed large in the postwar American literary scene and championed close reading and formal analysis� Privileging the life over the work, Arendt’s reading method overlooks the way that texts can speak in ways that the author cannot or even the way texts can be read counter to an author’s intention� A case in point: in Zweig’s 1917 play Jeremias , the voice of the eponymous prophet cannot be silenced even as he screams into the abyss. Prefiguring Zweig’s “The Great Silence” in the midst of another world war, Jeremias’s lamentation sounds eerily prescient: “Silence, nothing but silence, while within is unceasing turmoil and storm-tossed night� With scorching talons it tears at my vitals and yet cannot grasp them� I am scourged with visions, and know not who holds the scourge� My cries go forth into the void” (1982, 6)� 76 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 Notes 1 Italics mine� I will distinguish Arendt’s two reviews of Zweig by referring to “Portrait of a Period” as 1943 and “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday” as 1948� 2 Leon Botstein provides a telling summary of Zweig’s historical approach: “A specific subject was not chosen by Zweig in history because it to some degree revealed or was ‘typical’ of the general in history� Rather, Zweig chose subjects that permitted him to shut out the details of history� In the name of history, the historical biographies by Zweig avoided historical detail and context” (70)� 3 Here, distant reading does not refer to forms of computational methods of reading examined by Franco Moretti but rather reading at a meta level with an eye towards historical context� 4 Some sentences from The Origins of Totalitarianism directly paraphrase her review of Zweig’s memoir: “[A] famous Austrian Jew was more apt to be accepted as an Austrian in France than in Austria� The world citizenship of this generation, this remarkable nationality that its members claimed as soon as their Jewish origin was mentioned, somewhat resembles those modern passports that grant the bearer the right of sojourn in every country except the one that issued it” (1948, 325—26)� 5 The important but understated role of Zweig in The Origins of Totalitarianism is just one example of how literature informed Arendt’s interpretation of history as much as history shaped her literary interpretations� Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Balzac and other writers are more than simply references or footnotes, their stories help structure and define her argument. 6 According to Ron Feldman, “Arendt’s solution to her own ‘Jewish problem’ was not to repudiate her Jewishness nor blindly affirm it, but to adopt the stance of a conscious pariah -an outsider among non-Jews, and a rebel among her own people� It was because of this marginal position that she was able to gain critical insights into both the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds” (lxxi)� 7 For more on Benjamin’s relationship with his Jewish heritage, see Scholem’s Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship � Benjamin’s memoir Berlin Childhood around 1900 describes his conflicted relationship with Judaism. 8 See Cosima Mattner’s “The Transatlantic Critic: Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag�” 9 The most unique feature of his collection, according to Harry Zohn, was Zweig’s Autographenkataloge , a catalogue that contained lists of the prices and rarity of manuscripts from Goethe’s age until his own time (Zohn 187)� Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig 77 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 This catalogue was another way that enabled Zweig to orient his collecting habits around the aesthetic preferences of other collectors� 10 Translation altered� 11 Arendt similarly invokes aura in The Origins of Totalitarianism , arguing: “[W]hat distinguished the Jewish pursuit of fame from the general fame idolatry of the time was that Jews were not primarily interested in it for themselves� To live in the aura of fame was more important than to become famous; thus, they became outstanding reviewers, critics, collectors, and organizers of what was famous” (52)� 12 Zohn notes, “Stefan Zweig’s activities as a collector may be regarded as yet self-effacing way of approaching the works and serving the memories of great, admired artists, comparable to his faith in reverent Nachdichtungen , translations, introductions, and works of criticism” (182)� 13 However, “Zweig’s career as a dramatist was plagued by tragedy” as four major actors died during the production (Poupard 422)� For more on Arendt’s relationship with the theater, see Eric Gorham’s The Theater of Politics � 14 Arendt’s phraseology is instructive: “What Kafka depicts is the real drama of assimilation” (“The Jew as Pariah” 116)� 15 Gorham argues that Arendt’s conception of politics is “grounded in her notion of the space of appearance” (42), noting: “Political action, then, is worldly theater, a drama that may occur at any place where citizens meet and at any time individuals think and conduct themselves as citizens� To Arendt, then, politics is a theater because as actors disclose themselves on stage as citizens do in the polis […] in various ways and venues� Just as there are multiple stages for actors to portray a self, so there are multiple spaces for citizens to present and re-present themselves” (33)� 16 Translation of Strauss’s letter by George Marek� I am indebted to Kater for citing it in his text ( Composers of the Nazi Era 247)� 17 Arendt incorrectly refers to “The Great Silence” as Zweig’s last article, “written shortly before his death” (1948, 327)� The version of the essay cited by Arendt, which appeared almost two years later, could not be verified (Breysach et al� 404)� 18 Translation mine� 19 Using a similar formulation, she later reiterates, “there is no better document of the Jewish situation in this period than the opening chapters of Zweig’s book” (1948, 322)� 78 Annie Pfeifer DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0005 Works Cited Arendt, Hannah� The Origins of Totalitarianism � New York: Harvest Book, 1973� —� Introduction to Illuminations by Walter Benjamin . 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