ABSTRACT
Looking back, or not, into the past is a pressing issue for the exile from home, such as Walter Benjamin and for his near contemporary Stefan Zweig, who were displaced not only from their homes and home cities, but also from the past. In his recent study of the life and work of Stefan Zweig entitled The Impossible Exile, George Prochnik suggests that Zweig, 'the quintessential exile manque, offers a formula for toxic migration – what might be called "Lot's wife syndrome"' as 'he could not stop looking back over his shoulder'. 'The dialectical image' for Benjamin is 'the primal phenomenon of history'. It is also the primal phenomenon of geography and corporeality. Some cities, such as Dresden, Hamburg and Wurtzburg, were largely destroyed physically during World War II, the destruction of which neither Benjamin nor Zweig lived long enough to know about.
