Unpublished texts by Stefan Zweig… Again? At regular intervals, sometimes even several times a year, texts unknown to the author of the The world of yesterday (2013, Les Belles lettres) appear in French. Stories, novels, essays, biographies, texts about Europe… The exploration of the plethora of production of the Austrian writer who died in 1942 seems endless.
This fall, Stefan Zweig returns to us, through a unique prism but with astonishing relevance on every page. Composed of one hundred and twenty letters and postcards addressed by the writer between 1900 and 1941 to forty-three recipients, Cosmopolitan (Editions du Portrait, translation by Frédérique Laurent) is a collection that explores the writer’s relationship with Judaism, Zionism, and the creation of a Jewish state.
At the origin of this project, the German historian Stefan Litt. In charge of the German-language archives of the National Library of Israel (NIB) in Jerusalem since 2010, he underlines the value of these epistolary exchanges to better understand the intellectual that was Stefan Zweig: “There have been attempts over the years to reconstruct what he thought about Judaism and its origins. But correspondence represents a direct opportunity to learn a lot.
about the thoughts and feelings of an author. »
a happy coincidence
Distributed around the world through sales and file transfers from his recipients, Stefan Zweig’s correspondence is abundant. “There is still no exhaustive publication or review, but researchers estimate that he wrote twenty-five thousand letters and postcards during his life.” explains Stefan Litt. Indeed, there is a German edition in four volumes of a thousand letters, but, until then, editors, in France and elsewhere, have preferred to publish this manna by addressees: his exchanges with Hermann Hesse, Klaus Mann and Romain Rolland are as follows available.
However, thematic research on a given topic is only possible by consulting the thousands of published or unpublished letters one by one. A challenge, “particularly for the German or Austrian Jewish authors of this period, who had to flee their country, often in haste, underlines Stefan Litt. Some took part of their files, others left them behind.. Stefan Zweig donated hundreds of letters he had received to the Jerusalem Library in 1933, but those he wrote are more difficult to locate. »
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