Stefan Zweig (Vienna, 1881 – Petrópolis, 1942) wasn’t only the internationally successful author of Amok and Letter from an Unknown Woman, he was also an important collector of literary manuscripts. He managed to amass an eclectic range of texts that reflect his keen interest in the diversity of European literatures, a collection of several hundred autograph texts by the authors he most admired. This trove includes rough drafts of famous or unpublished works, preparatory notes, personal letters, even manuscripts meant for the printers, from Renaissance writers up to his contemporaries. This personal gallery of the “greatest masters of all time” – Goethe, Balzac, and Rimbaud found side by side with Racine, Casanova, and Wilde – also represented for him the chance to sound the mysteries of artistic creation, an abiding quest throughout his busy and turbulent life.

Forced into exile by the threat of Nazism, Zweig chose to part with his collection, a magnificent trove that he deemed “more worthy to survive [him] than [his] own works” (The World of Yesterday, 1942), and turned to the Viennese bookseller Heinrich Hinterberger, with whom he organized the sale of the manuscripts from London. The greater part of the collection was acquired by the Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer (Zurich, 1899 – Geneva, 1971), whose already famous library Zweig knew by reputation. The characteristic unity of the Zweig collection was thus largely preserved.

Bringing to light once again a collection that was long thought to be lost, the Michalski Foundation’s show De Stefan Zweig à Martin Bodmer (From Stephan Zweig to Martin Bodmer) offers a rare opportunity to see some of the finest pages of the world’s literary heritage in the author’s hand, while questioning what could have brought together these two collectors in their respective undertakings. As heirs to Goethe, they shared both a “magical” understanding of the autograph manuscript as the circle in which to conjure up “geniuses” through their written markings, and a humanist vision of Weltliteratur –  world literature – as a cultural horizon in the face of the brutal rise of nationalisms.