China's Stefan Zweig: The Dynamics of Cross-Cultural Reception by Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle (review)

Who would have guessed that some of the greatest admirers of Stefan Zweig's melancholy tales of fin-de-siècle and post–World War I Central Europe are to be found in China? Zweig's reputation in Europe and the Americas soared in the years after the First World War, plummeted after the Second World War, and began to rise to respectability again only in the 1980s (though, to be sure, Brazilians have always been fond of Zweig—Zweig not only died in Brazil but also wrote a glowing account of Brazilian life). All that time, though, the Chinese resolutely honored Zweig (pausing only during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution). We know all this because of Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle's fascinating account of Zweig's reception in China.

Hoefle, a researcher at the Austrian National Library, is quite at home in German, English, and Chinese. Her book is part of a series, edited by Sheldon H. Lu, called "critical interventions," which studies East Asian culture and cross-cultural transfer.

Given the wild swings of Zweig's reputation in Europe and the Americas, and his steady popularity in China, his "international reception presents," Hoefle writes, "one of the greatest riddles of twentieth-century European literature" (2). China's long engagement with Zweig both demonstrates the labyrinthine nature of cross-cultural transfer and new ways to read Zweig's work.

Hoefle's book is divided into five chapters. The introduction identifies what Hoefle calls "The Stefan Zweig Conundrum." Chapters 2 and 3, which make up Part I, explore Zweig's reception in pre-Communist China from 1921 to 1949. Chapters 4 and 5, which make up Part II, examine Zweig's reception in Communist China, from 1949 to 2013. Hoefle concludes with a brief "Outlook." Throughout, Hoefle's book is full of surprises. Two are particularly arresting.

First, Hoefle's work demonstrates that cross-cultural transfer is no easy business. Just consider Zweig in China. In the 1920s and 1930s, Zweig's work came to China largely thanks to "a Chinese diplomat in Russia, a Marxist professor in Shanghai, and a writer of controversial erotic literature in Beijing" (21). The diplomat, a participant in China's "New Culture Movement," saw Zweig as an ally in the struggle against China's old Confucian culture. The Marxist thought of Zweig as a compelling critic of bourgeois society. The erotic writer saw in Zweig a great contributor to the "love letter" craze, which swept China in the 1920s and 1930s, reflecting an enthusiasm for the private and personal in a society that had, for centuries, honored the familial and social. Each of these Zweig promoters brought to China a slightly different Zweig, the differences compounded by the fact that the Chinese editions sometimes relied not on Zweig's German but on English or Russian translations.

Things did not get any simpler after the Communist Revolution. At least some Communists continued to see Zweig as a powerful critic of decadent bourgeois society. Though Zweig temporarily disappeared from China's bookshelves during the 1960s Cultural Revolution, he returned in post-Mao China, not only as a social critic but now as the creator of a distinct type of female protagonists, the "Zweig-Style Female Figures" (95), figures especially intriguing to Chinese writers and readers struggling to cope with all the complexities of gender. That Zweig translations and commentary also moved back and forth between China and Taiwan added new interlocutors and complications to China's Zweig reception.

Second, for Zweig's readers in Europe and the Americas, Hoefle's examination of the Chinese Zweig suggests that there is far more to Zweig than his Old and New World readers imagined. "Chinese discourses have revealed," Hoefle writes, "many important aspects of Zweig's writings that have been neglected, particularly in German-language countries" (130)—Zweig the erotic writer, the feminist, the shrewd cultural observer, and, by means of his cultural commentary, Zweig the...