Gathering around a birthday cake served during a visit to the Stefan Zweig archive in Reed Library are students enrolled in the course ENGL 213: Texts & Contexts.
Students in Department of English Professor Birger Vanwesenbeeck’s ENGL 213: Texts & Contexts class celebrated the birthday of the Austrian-Jewish author Stefan Zweig.
The Nov. 28 celebration included a birthday cake and visit to Reed Library’s Stefan Zweig Archive.
Students were given a tour by Coordinator of Special Collections and Archives Mandi Shepp and also consulted unique primary materials including early drafts of Zweig’s works, hand-written letters to him by 20th century authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and well as documents pertaining to Zweig’s naturalization as a British citizen.
Students were stunned to see that an official government document from 1940 would list the author’s nose as “normal,” a sobering reminder that, even as Jewish exiles like Zweig found temporary refuge in Britain during World War II, their exclusionary status was often simultaneously reinforced by state-sponsored racial stereotypes.
With over 6,000 manuscript letters written to Zweig by over 300 correspondents between 1900 and 1942, the Zweig archive in Reed Library is home to one of the world’s most significant collections of Zweig personal items and written materials. He is regarded as one of the most translated authors in the world during the 1920s.
