Special issue. At a time when it is common to knock against Europe, an institution that is certainly imperfect and modifiable, it is good to remember that it was first a bold idea carried by a few men after a First World War which changed deeply the balances of the world, giving the deathblow to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and allowing Nazi populism to rise to power. These few men were not politicians but intellectuals, when that word still had a meaning: heirs of Kant, capable of using their reason and putting their intelligence at the service of an independent cause, contrary to parties and idolatries. Stefan Zweig was one of them.
In the beginning, there was pacifism. Not a bland, pasteurized idea, but a suffocated cry against a war which, for the first time in history, had caused millions of deaths in a handful of years. The Great War, the dirty war. It is enough to look at the war memorials and to read the list of names engraved in stone to realize the haemorrhage it caused in the population.
Glorious Minority
Alongside revengeful people of all persuasions, there was this thinking, glorious, fragile, tenacious minority. A minority represented above all by a humanist Austrian who did not mourn the loss of an empire, a minority admirably described by Jules Romains in a 1939 conference in Paris: “Stefan Zweig belongs to a species that may not be on the way to extinction – at least I hope so – but which is seriously threatened by current conditions, and which only survives through all kinds of difficulties: those of great Europeans. »
To refer today to Stefan Zweig is to refer to an admired ethics, but also mocked, jostled. Rare. What could be more difficult indeed than to advocate a revolution that passes not through blood and tears, but through heart and soul? This word is so ridiculous for us that even the translators of Freud, an admirer of Zweig, only very rarely dared to use it, replacing it modestly with “psyche”. That is ! She remains our mirror. And Zweig, this “soul hunter”as Romain Rolland said, never ceases to offer it to us.
“Stefan Zweig, the European”, a special issue from the “One life, one work” collection of “Le Monde”, 126 pages, 9.50 euros.
