Zwischen Partikularismus und Universalismus: Jüdische Existenz und Kosmopolitismus in den Prosaschriften Stefan Zweigs

Arguing that Zweig's concerted cosmopolitanist engagement emerged only after World War I, the article examines the Jewish sensitivities that fuelled the writer's cosmopolitanism in essential ways. Zweig's prose writings between 1901 and 1941 afford a unique view at the shift from his pre-World War I search for a Jewish predicament combining Judaism – understood to be particularist – and Christianity – represented as universalizing – to his later assertion of a new particularist universality, from which a new, unified Europe beyond borders, national strife and antisemitism would emerge. The piece critically explores the ways in which Zweig positions the Jewish figure as the prototype of this particularist universality in both Jewish and (post)colonial perspective.