Quo usque tandem abutere, Stefan Zweig, patientia nostra? How much longer, Stefan Zweig, will you be testing our patience? This well-known opening question from Cicero's In Catilinam orations (63 BCE), addressed not to Stefan Zweig, but to the Roman senator Catiline, may serve as a model for the exasperation and indignation that the name Stefan Zweig continues to inspire in certain literary and intellectual circles. Mockingly referred to in his lifetime as “Erwerbszweig” (commercial branch) and famously attacked by Hannah Arendt for his apparent refusal to articulate political opinions in public, Zweig has, perhaps more than any other modern writer, suffered from a steady barrage of attacks on his work and person, even as readers worldwide and in large numbers have continued to read his works. Time and again in such diatribes Zweig has been evoked as a kind of bad seed, as a literary populist whose “plotting,” like the more malicious scheming of the Roman senator Catiline, makes his continued presence within the “Republic of Letters” intolerable to those “senators,” that is, those critics committed to serious literary value.

Michael Hofmann's highly publicized attack on Zweig in the January 28, 2010, issue of the London Review of Books is perhaps the most prominent recent example of a literary polemic against him. As does Cicero in his orations against Catiline, Hofmann accuses Zweig of mendacity and deception: “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He's the Pepsi of Austrian writing.” Noting that there is something “‘not quite right’ about this popular-again popularizer,” Hofmann launches into a series of ever-more specific, demonstratively determined epithets: “this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew” “this cosmopolitan loner and blue-riband refugee.” Like the anaphoric structure of Cicero's opening questions, these formulations draw their rhetorical strength from a sudden shift in tone and form.