Stefan Zweig worked for peace and European understanding

Person: Stefan Zweig
Lived: 1881–1942
Field: Literature
From: Austrian

The story

Stefan Zweig's record in the early years of the First World War was mixed. Like many European intellectuals, he was swept up in the initial enthusiasm for war; he volunteered, was posted to the war archives in Vienna, and his journalism of the time supported Austria's war effort. But his views changed. Influenced by his friend the French writer and pacifist Romain Rolland, he resolved, as he later put it, to begin his own personal war against the betrayal of reason to mass passion.

In 1917 he wrote Jeremiah, a play about the biblical prophet in which he first set out his pacifist creed. He was released from military service in 1917, and preparations to stage the play in Zurich allowed him to move to neutral Switzerland, where he met many exiled intellectuals and pacifists. In 1918 he published a short book about a visit to the International Red Cross in Geneva, called The Heart of Europe.

After becoming a pacifist, Zweig wanted, in the words of the Austria-Forum biography, to work for understanding between European countries and for lasting peace. He was a cosmopolitan who called himself a 'European', and he championed writers from other nations. He wrote a study of the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren in 1910 and a book on Romain Rolland, published in 1921.

During his years in Salzburg in the 1920s and early 1930s, he spoke out strongly against nationalism and revenge politics and argued for an intellectually united Europe, influenced by the Pan-European movement and the Locarno treaties. He gave a series of speeches on the European idea and saw European unity as the only way to prevent future wars. Through essays, lectures and friendships across borders, Zweig promoted a vision of a united European culture at a time when competing nationalisms were tearing the continent apart.

His commitment to peace was so complete that even admirers sometimes found it troubling. In 1952 Thomas Mann admitted that Zweig's unconditional pacifism had once tormented him, but said that experience of war had made him think again. That vision, expressed most memorably in The World of Yesterday, has gained new relevance in the decades since.

Why it matters

Zweig's advocacy of peace and European unity anticipated ideals that later helped bring former enemies together after the Second World War.

About Stefan Zweig

Viennese Jewish novelist and biographer, among the world’s most translated writers of the interwar years, whose exile memoir The World of Yesterday mourns a lost Europe.

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Stefan Zweig

1881–1942 · Literature

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