PEN festival 2014 - The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World

Deutsches Haus at New York University presents,
as part of our Literary Mews - a festival within the PEN World Voices Festival:
The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World with the author George Prochnik, the book critic Ruth Franklin, and moderation by Professor Eric Jarosinski.
Recently, Wes Anderson acknowledged the debt his film Grand Budapest Hotel owed to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, and revived the interest of a vast U.S. audience in the author's work. In the 1930's Stefan Zweig was a shooting star in Europe, and the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler's rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile-from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis, Brazil-where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself.
George Prochnik's The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig's extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era-the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.
George Prochnik's essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous journals. He has taught English and American literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine, and is the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. He lives in New York City.
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and a contributing editor at the New Republic. She has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review and is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim fellowship, the 2012 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, and a 2012-2013 Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Currently she is working on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson, to be published by Norton in 2016. Ruth received a B.A. in English literature from Columbia University and an M.A. in comparative literature from Harvard. She has delivered lectures at numerous colleges and universities, including Columbia, New York University, Brandeis, and Colgate.
Eric Jarosinski teaches German literature and culture at the University of Pennsylvania. He will soon be leaving academia, however, to devote himself full-time to his post as editor of Nein.Quarterly, a highly respected and non-existent journal of utopian negation found on Twitter and in the German weekly "Die Zeit". He is currently writing occasional articles for a number of German publications and completing his first book - Nein. A Manifesto - to be published next year by Fischer in Germany and Lebowski Books in the Netherlands.
Video recorded and edited by Laia Cabrera & Co. laiacabrera.com/company