Guest speaker: Prof Klemens Renoldner (February 9th 2023)

In early February, an international conference on the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was hosted by the German section at the University of Auckland. Prof. Klemens Renoldner, founding director of the Stefan-Zweig-Centre at the University of Salzburg, gave a presentation on Zweig's autobiography Die Welt von Gestern for the Auckland Goethe Society.

Prof. Renoldner talked about Zweig's interest in the genre of autobiography and how his earlier explorations of autobiographical writing by others (Casanova, Stendal, Tolstoy) shaped the writing process his own memoirs. He argued that such important considerations should also be taken into account by anyone undertaking biographical work on Zweig.

Written by Stephan Resch