Intellectual Hero, Most Beloved Master: Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud in British Exile

Abstract

On September 26, 1939 two of Sigmund Freud’s adherents held a eulogy by the coffin of the departed—the British analyst, Freud’s friend and biographer Ernest Jones, and the Austrian author Stefan Zweig. Zweig, who initially lived in voluntary and later forced exile in Great Britain, had been in contact with Freud since 1908 and was indebted to his “master” in many ways, not least in matters of literary psychology; Freud appreciated Zweig as “creator of the first order” [“Schöpfer ersten Ranges”] and subjected the author’s literary texts to psychoanalytic interpretation. In British and later South-American exile Zweig wrote a psychological novel set in Austria Beware of Pity [Ungeduld des Herzens] (1939) and his canonical historical “biography” The World of Yesterday (1942). Reconsidering Zweig’s eulogy at Sigmund Freud’s funeral [“Worte am Sarge Sigmund Freuds”] this chapter focuses on the role of Freud and psychoanalysis in these critical accounts of the Habsburg monarchy as a world unto itself as well as on the interplay of language, style and doctrine. Zweig’s rhetoric mobilizes pathos as one of the languages of exile, a means of forming a community of the displaced.