In my presentation I will focus on the post-imperial memories of the Habsburg empire and their remediation in the autobiographical writings of Stefan Zweig (The World of Yesterday, Memoirs of a European, 1942) and Milos Crnjanski (Commentaries to Lyrics of Ithaka, 1959). I will position Stefan Zweig's memoires, written just before the Second World war and his suicide in Brazil, in relation to Crnjanski's post war autobiographical memories of his Habsburg years. Crnjanski's memories are under the influence of Serbian (later Yugoslav) nationalism, while Zweig's memories are given from the perspective of an author who represents the golden age of Viennese literary life and who colors his views with nostalgic feelings for the only homeland he had - multiethnic and multination empire. Nevertheless, I will argue that their memories, based on the same historical trauma, are examples of transnational memories (Rigney, De Cesari, 2014) that travel and converge, while leading in the same direction, towards the formation of the European cultural memory.
Through my analysis I will not only present two in essence opposite views of the same historical events, but will show how their position at the moment of writing, which in both cases was an exile, influenced new personal frames of remediation and reevaluation of their common past. The question of Jewish suffering will be crucial for my understanding of the European memories in Zweig and Crnjanski. These memories are based on personal experiences in the case of Zweig, while for Crnjanski they are connected to his failure to see the culmination of the fascist ideology in the horrors of the Holocaust, which can be understood as a position of the implicated subject (Rothberg, 2019). My presentation will pose the question of what does it mean to remember as a European? In order to better position this question I will apply the imagological approach (Leerssen, 2007) to the creation of the imaginary Europe understood as a cultural construct, and look for its origins in Crnjanski's and Zweig's autobiographical writing.
