Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig

<o:p>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.</o:p>