Document Type
Article
Date
Winter 1999
Keywords
Judaic Studies, Vienna, Stefan Zweig
Disciplines
Religion
Description/Abstract
IN THE STORY "BUCHMENDEL" ( 1929), Stefan Zweig represents Jewish identity
in Vienna as it is displaced. eclipsed, and then destroyed. Yet the narrator.
a man of the world much like Zweig himself. does not mourn this process of
ethnic effacement. Instead, he bemoans the associated destruction of literary
culture at !arge and seems unconcerned about the implications for Jews in
Vienna or elsewhere. Like other residents of Vienna during the First World
War, the urbane postwar narrator even shows a measure of unexamined xenophobia, which is surprising in light of the nesh-and-blood author's Jewish ethnicity and cosmopolitanism. Because the Judaic subtext of "Buchmendel" is
subordinated to a universal drama, ethnicity is a suppressed theme.
Recommended Citation
Frieden, Ken, "The Displacement of Jewish Identity in Stefan Zweig's "Buchmendel"" (1999). Religion - All Scholarship. 61.
https://surface.syr.edu/rel/61
Source
local input
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
