Name: WANDER LUIZ DEMARTINI NUNES
Publication date: 18/10/2024
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| JOSEMAR MACHADO DE OLIVEIRA | Presidente |
| LUIZ CLAUDIO MOISES RIBEIRO | Examinador Interno |
| MARCELO DURÃO RODRIGUES DA CUNHA | Examinador Externo |
| UEBER JOSE DE OLIVEIRA | Examinador Interno |
| VÂNIA MARIA LOSADA MOREIRA | Examinador Externo |
Summary: This paper analyzes Stefan Zweig’s work, an Austrian writer, novelist, poet, playwright, journalist and biographer who had Jewish origin and settled in Brazil from the 1940s onwards. It particularly focuses on his writings about the Brazilian reality, such as the book Pequena Viagem ao Brasil (Short trip to Brazil), which contains the core of several ideas developed by the author later in another work, entitled Brasil, um país do futuro (Brazil, a country of the future), equally important for the issues discussed in this thesis. As a Jew and Austrian, the most translated writer in the world in the 1920s, Zweig saw that his entire cultural universe, which was already extremely shaken by the First World War (1914 – 1918), totally collapsed because of the rise of Nazism. Even though many have called for a more energetic stance by the writer against Hitler and the regime he led, the marks of persecution and exile appear in his work as he described the world he saw, whether in essays or in his Autobiography. Therefore, this thesis points out the impact of knowledge about Brazil on his thinking, in the sense of understanding Stefan Zweig's utopian conception of Brazil's past, present and future, based on a reading that is often idyllic to demonstrate the limits of that conception. The study started from the analysis of his European trajectory, in the face of the cataclysmic events of the first half of the 20th century, as I consider that this experience directly interfered with the exaggeratedly positive impression he had about Brazil, especially regarding ethnic-racial relations. As Zweig did not present the bibliography used in his studies about the land of his final exile, I sought to compare his writings about the country with excerpts from Casa-Grande & Senzala, by Gilberto Freyre, which made it possible to find similarities and differences in the approach of certain aspects. The restrictive migratory legislation of the time is also evoked to highlight mistakes and allow us to conclude that Brazil during Vargas’ government was far from the “country of the future” dreamed by Zweig, as it did not coincide in any way with his expectation that the vast Brazilian territory could represent a relief for some of the millions of refugees of the 1930s and 1940s.
