On Manichaeism in Stefan Zweig

Last night I finished Zweig’s book on Erasmus of Rotterdam. Once again, reading Zweig is a pleasure. His storytelling is masterful. However, I am beginning to notice a clear tendency toward dualism in his work. For Zweig, there are no middle tones. Almost everything is black or white. One must keep in mind that this man had to leave his homeland, go into exile, and live as a wanderer because of Hitler’s rise to power.

Zweig was a humanist, like Erasmus himself, no doubt. He lived the disappearance of that European culture as a personal tragedy. It was the destruction of a world where one could travel freely across the continent without a passport. That accumulation of terrible experiences reinforced his pessimism and fueled a visceral hatred toward totalitarianism. I understand it completely.

The thing is, reading the book on Erasmus, everything points to Luther being evil, extremely evil, and Erasmus being good, extremely good. There is a fierce criticism of Luther, undoubtedly justified. He must have been an arrogant and aggressive person, no doubt about it. As for Erasmus, Zweig does analyze and point out his weaknesses, but he always ends up defending him.

My objection, then, is not so much his treatment of Erasmus, but the way he characterizes Luther. From what I have read, the characterization fits who Luther was quite well. Still, I am not sure he was as absolutely wicked, violent, and vindictive as the Austrian author paints him.

I also think of another book of his I read, Castellio against Calvin. The same extreme duality reappears there. Castellio possesses the truth. Calvin becomes a gloomy, Machiavellian, absolutist figure, without the slightest mercy or humanity. I do not think Calvin was a paragon of virtue. Rather, I think he was someone who gradually empowered himself until he became the absolute ruler of Geneva, regulating both collective and individual aspects of its citizens' lives.

However, cross-checking information, it is not true that singing or performing plays was forbidden, as Zweig indicates in his book. All of this needs nuance. It was allowed, as long as Calvin's rules were respected. Deep down, this resembles a dictatorship, though not to the extreme often told. As for Genevans leaving their doors open and putting no curtains on their windows, these seem not to be rules dictated by Calvin, but the effect of strong neighborly self-surveillance, never formally established. Even so, everything indicates that it was hardly a regime of freedoms or a healthy society. Geneva must have become a sort of open-air collective asylum.

What happens is that Zweig tends to exaggerate, and he uses that exaggeration as a literary device. It is true that reading becomes much easier and more accessible when the world is divided into good and bad. I do not think he should be condemned for this. After all, he wrote fictionalized biographies. No biography can faithfully reflect the life of its subject, which is impossible to know with complete accuracy anyway. The biographer always has wide margin to modify the real profile of their subject. Either one accepts a biography like this, or we are left without a biography at all. Every text, at its core, is subjective.