“History as a poet”

Despite being a bourgeois Austrian writer, several historical and biographical texts by Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) were published in China only a few months after Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic in October 1949. Why these translations could still be published under communist censorship is closely linked, I argue in this chapter, to the specifics of the literary genre in question. In his lecture “History as a Poet” (“Die Geschichte als Dichterin,” 1939) Stefan Zweig devised a poetology of historical and biographical literature which resonated with ancient Chinese theories of life writing. In addition, it was purposefully employed by intellectuals during turbulent times, first during the New Culture Movement in the 1920s and then again, in a revised form, in the early 1950s. Taking the Chinese legacy of life writing and its adaptations in the twentieth century into account, the biographical genre, as a hybrid form between literary and historical work, thus played a crucial role in the Chinese reception of Zweig’s work.