Stefan Zweig e Thomas Mann. Sul mito biblico di Rachele

In a profound epistolary dialogue between 1911 and 1940 Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann recognized themselves as the heirs of Weimar Classicism, the cultural device that in the years of Hitler’s dictatorship served to defend the cosmopolitan German spirit from the obscurantism of Nazified Germany in the ideal of Goethean Weltliteratur. My interest in their correspondence lies in the reconstruction of the links between epistolary texts and poetic texts, knotted by the fil rouge of their works, of the common relations with intellectuals, translators and publishers, of the destiny of Europe on the eve of a new war catastrophe, of the own commitment of emigration writers in the German resistance to National Socialism, who allow to trace or even intuit mutual influences in their literary production. Their correspondence, however, is silent on the shared fascination for the Jewish female character of Rachel. An almost inexplicable silence, considering the regular update on the respective literary production documented by the correspondence and also considering that the legend Rahel rechtet mit Gott (1927) by Stefan Zweig and the first book of Thomas Mann’s tetralogy, Die Geschichten Jaakobs (1933), were published a few years from each other by the common publisher Samuel Fischer. This article tries to shed light on the possible common genesis of the two works.