Arts & Humanities

While anxieties about so-called Islamic terror are widespread, far less light is shone on the theologies of the rising contemporary European far right – but it’s more important than ever to critically examine how right-wing extremists promote their ideology through the recourse to religious vocabularies.

In 1939, Stefan Zweig prepared a lecture on history for the PEN Congress in Stockholm, but the event got cancelled. Published shortly after Zweig’s and his wife Charlotte Altmann’s suicide in 1942, Zweig’s essay is evidence of an attempt to spread optimism in bleak times. An excerpt.