The Influence of Walt Whitman and Emile Verhaeren in Stefan Zweig’s Pre-1914 Conception of Cultural Modernism

Nikolaus Unger (University of Warwick) [BIO]

Email: N.R.Unger@warwick.ac.uk

 

ABSTRACT:

Between 1904 and 1914, Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) undertook a distinctly supranational cultural communication project as a substitute for the production of his own literary output; in addition to translating and publishing Emile Verhaeren’s (1855-1916) work, he served as a literary and theatrical publicist, working intensively to introduce the Belgian author to a German-speaking audience to which he had been virtually unknown. Zweig’s affection for Verhaeren’s work and the impetus for his activities are an expression of his direct engagement with cultural modernism, which the work of Walt Whitman (1819-1892) also influenced; as he writes in Emile Verhaeren (1910):

Walt Whitman war der Jubel des erstarkten Amerikas, Verhaeren ist der Triumph der belgischen und auch der europäischen Rasse. Denn so stark, so glühend, so männlich ist dieses freudige Bekenntnis des Lebens, daß man fühlt, es bricht nicht aus der Brust eines Einzelnen, sondern hier freut sich ein neues, junges Volk seiner schönen und noch unerkannten Kraft.

With these sentiments functioning as an intellectual point of departure, this paper will explore Zweig’s intellectual reception of both authors while gauging the influence of their individual national and humanist perspectives on his own understanding of a cultural modernism concurrently national and European in scope.