"Collaborators in the Great Cause of Liberty and Fellowship": Whitmania as an Intercultural Phenomenon

Writing European Lives. Stefan Zweig as a Biographer of Verhaeren, Rolland and Erasmus

“…8 Verhaeren 'in himself represents all the contrasts, all the advantages of the Belgian race', as Zweig puts it (23). By making use of clichés about the typical duality in Belgian culture, where mysticism coexists with 'sensuality and pleasure in excess', he pictures the poet as a healthy and joyful artist who is full of religious feeling and a lust for life (16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24).…”

“…18 it is worth mentioning here that Zweig belonged to a group of Whitman enthusiasts, who knew each other well. 19 Johannes Schlaf and léon Bazalgette, for example, had published translations and biographies on both Whitman and Verhaeren several years before Zweig. Many aspects of his study correspond to their work, but the european frame figures most prominently in Zweig's biography.…”

“…The humanistic ideal remained an utopia, but, at least, it survived. erasmus, he notes, 'brought it safely out of the terrible storm of hate' and inspired numerous intellectuals in later centuries (19). Zweig presents a line of filiation from erasmus to Spinoza, Diderot, Voltaire, lessing, Schiller, Kant, Tolstoy, gandhi, rolland and all "the good europeans" who drew on aspects of erasmian humanism in their own diverging ways (19,(245)(246).…”