| Born: | 11-28-1881 |
| Faculty: | Philosophical School |
| Category: | Deprivation of academic degree |
Stefan ZWEIG, born on November 28th, 1881 in Vienna, deceased on February 22nd, 1942 in Petropolis, Brazil, is awarded his Ph. D. in Philosophy at the School of Philosophy of the University of Vienna on July 19th, 1904.
Stefan Zweig was a writer, a playwright, a lyricist, an essayist, a translator and a biographer. After graduating from grammar school in Vienna in 1900, he studied philosophy and German and Romance philology in Vienna and Berlin. He successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine" in 1904.
During World War I he worked at Vienna’s War Press Centre. Subsequently, as a staunch pacifist, he left Vienna in 1917 for a temporary sojourn in Switzerland. From 1919 onwards he lived in Salzburg, mostly.
In 1933, the Nazi student body in Berlin and 18 other German universities also burned Stefan Zweig's writings in the course of the "Buecherverbrennungen" in National Socialist Germany. In 1934 he emigrated to London. Since 1935 his name had been on the list of banned authors in Nazi Germany, and after the "Anschluss" in March 1938, the writings of Stefan Zweig, who had chosen to live in Salzburg, were also burned at the "Buecherverbrennung" on Salzburger Residenzplatz on April 30th, 1938.
He moved to London in 1934 and was granted British citizenship in 1940. He spended time in New York during the same year and moved to Petropolis, Brazil in 1941. Zweig put an end to his life in February, 1942 in Petropolis. His autobiography "The World of Yesterday" [Germ. orig. "Die Welt von Gestern"] was published in 1944.
On May 8th, 1941 he is divested of his academic title on racial grounds, because under national-socialist rules he, as a Jew, is deemed "unworthy of an academic title awarded by a German university".
Not until April 10th, 2003, 62 years after he had been divested of it and a very long time after the end of National Socialism, was his Ph. D. officially reinstated, or the divestiture posthumously declared "null and void to begin with".
Lit.: Archive of the University of Vienna/enrollment forms ("Nationale") PHIL 1900-1904, viva voce registry ("Rigorosenakt") PHIL RA 1704, geraduation registry ("Promotionsprotokoll") PHIL 1881-1905, No. 1401, Rectorate GZ 1386 ex 1939/40 (= S 127.5a), GZ 1309 ex 1941/42, RA GZ 140 ex 2002/03; Stefan ZWEIG, Die Welt von gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europaeers, Stockholm 1944, BOLBECHER/KAISER 2000, KERSCHBAUMER 2003, POSCH/STADLER 2005, 18f., 57, 113, 119-125; POSCH 2009, 11-14, 71, 79, 274, 361f., 499; SILVERMAN 2012, 273n93; Artur LARCATI, Klemens RENOLDNER u. Martina WOERGOETTER (ed.), Zweig. Ein Handbuch, Berlin, Boston 2018.
Herbert Posch
