Otto Neurath liest Stefan Zweigs “Die Welt von Gestern”: Zwei Intellektuelle der Wiener Moderne im Exil ed. by Friedrich Stadler and Arturo Larcati (review)

This volume had its roots in an exceptional find: a copy of Zweig’s World of Yesterday (the 1942 English version) heavily annotated by the philosopher and sociologist Otto Neurath (1882–1945), discovered in Neurath’s library from his exile in the United States, long thought lost. Neurath had shipped out about three thousand books to Oxford; half ended up in Vienna in 1995, among them the volume under consideration here. The annotations in it, according to the editors, document eine “indirekte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Untergang der Monarchie und der Zerstörung der Ersten Republik” (8). The two had never met, but Neurath’s reactions to Zweig’s book contextualize its moment as few have ever done.

A November 2019 Symposium at the Stefan Zweig Zentrum in Salzburg, supported by the Wiener-Kreis-Institut der Universität Wien, was dedicated to this dialogue on paper. Otto Neurath liest Stefan Zweigs “Die Welt von Gestern” offers a wealth of visual and text materials, expanded versions of all the presentations from the symposium (plus one by Katharina Prager), and appendices with unpublished work by Zweig, Neurath, and H. G. Wells.

The introduction situates Otto Neurath and Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) as two exile intellectuals from much the same milieu in Vienna, coming of age at the fin de siècle and ending up with very different attitudes and exile experiences. Neurath found a place in the U.K. as a representative of the Vienna Circle; Zweig committed suicide in Brazil.

The introduction, by Arturo Larcati and Friedrich Stadler, sets the stage for examining this “dialogue” that poses problems often circumvented in current research: how period ideals are to be understood and how the history of ideas and social history might go together (9), especially for a book often denounced as impossibly nostalgic. Yet a contemporary’s reaction, both to form and content, may well recapture it in another way. At very least, the text opens out Neurath for Vienna Circle scholars by confronting them with the fact that he was a polymath who did not himself leave an autobiography (except for From Hieroglyphics to Isotype: A Visual Autobiography, 2010) but who at the time was a builder of bridges between their philosophical world and other branches of culture.

Herwig Gottwald initiates this ambitious program of reevaluating Zweig by discussing “Der Wiener Kreis und die Literatur” as a case study in the failures of postwar literary studies: literary scholars have not approached the Vienna Circle or connections to authors like Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Jean Améry. Scholars have let these voices go lost in the history of the Second Republic after 1945, that they failed “in diesen Fächern wissenschaftlich verbindliche Maßstäbe in Bezug auf Überprüfbarkeit und Kritisierbarkeit zu entwickeln was vielleicht allzu oft gar nicht erwünscht sein dürfte” (55). Gottwald shows both some ways that these lacunae might be filled and the results to be gained.

Alessandra Schininà follows up with a detailed and wide-ranging reception study of Die Welt von Gestern, with a special emphasis on the problem of genre it presents. Again, a careful consideration of theories implicated in the issues is included with the actual reception data.

Friedrich Stadler, in “Otto Neurath liest Stefan Zweigs Die Welt von Gestern—Zwei Wiener und Welten im Exil,” introduces the materials the volume works with, especially to highlight Neurath’s most conceptually important annotations. This beautifully written and impeccably illustrated and documented essay is followed by a companion essay, by Alfred Pfoser, subtitled “Seine Annotationen als kritische Lektüre.” He first compares the two authors’ biographies and then contextualizes them and the annotations historically. Pfoser elucidates the era’s politics by filling out gaps between Zweig’s and Neurath’s politics. Neurath’s often biting...