Zlatko Kramarić*|ARGUMENTUM
Ambassador of Croatia to Albania
In our previous text, “Today’s Europe is an Odysseus who no longer knows where he is returning,” we attempted to show how a long history of European self-awareness stretches between Homer’s Odyssey and Sloterdijk’s notion of “anger” – from the mythical search for home to the philosophical attempt to understand one’s own rage. We could say that Europe has been searching for itself for millennia, constantly journeying between reason and wrath, hope and disappointment. This endless return, this journey without arrival, took on a moral-political dimension in the modern age: the continent that gave birth to the greatest ideals also became the site of their most radical defeats. That is why today, after Homer and Sloterdijk, we must read Stefan Zweig again – a writer who perhaps was the last to believe that the European spirit could be renewed by culture, dialogue, and humanism. If Homer’s Europe was in search of home, and Sloterdijk’s in search of meaning, Zweig’s – caught between despair and hope – sought moral equilibrium between past and future.
The Greek word krísis originally means decision, judgment, differentiation. In ancient medicine and philosophy, it refers to the moment when it is decided whether an illness will end in healing or death. In that original sense, crisis does not mean (certain) disaster, but a moment of truth – a boundary between possible salvation and final collapse.
Europe seems to have been in a permanent state of crisis for centuries. It is a continent that constantly questions itself, that constantly “re-decides what it wants to be.” In the 1930s this crisis took the form of political radicalization, economic collapse and spiritual disorientation; today it appears in more sophisticated forms: technocratic cynicism, populist anger, and moral exhaustion. Yet the common denominator remains the same – the loss of the meaning of togetherness.
In both cases, it is a crisis of the spirit. If Europe was once a place of humanism and reason, today it is increasingly a place of fear, division, and distrust. This is precisely the diagnosis that Stefan Zweig, a writer who embodied in his own life (he committed suicide in 1942 in Brazil) the tragic fate of European humanism, formulated with almost prophetic clarity.
Zweig was a “cosmopolitan of the spirit,” perhaps the last authentic European from the time before Europe. His idea of the continent was neither political nor economic but cultural-moral. For him, Europe was above all a community of conscience – a space where different nations recognize each other through a common faith in reason, dialogue, and beauty.
In his essays on Montaigne, Erasmus, Rolland or Tolstoy, Zweig creates a gallery of figures representing the best in European tradition: doubt instead of dogma, reason instead of fanaticism, peace instead of victory. These humanists are his spiritual allies, “resistant to national borders and hatreds,” because for him Europe is not a political entity but a community of conscience, a place of dialogue and tolerance. Ultimately, “Europe was born from the book, not from the sword”: it is a federation of peoples united by shared values, not by frontiers. Europe, in Zweig’s view, is an act of conscience rather than a geographical fact. And we should never allow that spirit of community to weaken; for when culture becomes mere decoration rather than a space of freedom, Europe begins to collapse from within.
This is where the connection between his vision of Europe and the ancient Greek word krisis – the moment of judgment and differentiation – becomes clear. For Zweig, the crisis of Europe is not merely a political or economic event, but a moral test for the continent: the moment when it must choose between reason and fanaticism, between humanism and extreme nationalism. In this context, crisis is not necessarily a misfortune, but a verdict: the moment when it becomes clear what Europe is – and what it definitely does not want to be.
In his autobiography The World of Yesterday, written in exile shortly before his suicide, Zweig reconstructs a world of security – that Mitteleuropa of the Viennese spirit, where culture and civility were the foundation of identity. That world collapsed into the barbarism of the 20th century, but in his memory it remained as a moral compass: proof that Europe once existed as a community of spirit, not of raw interests.
When Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West in 1918, the book became an intellectual bestseller precisely because it expressed a widespread mood of disappointment. Spengler saw history as a cycle of rise and decay of civilizations: every culture has its “childhood, youth, and old age,” and Europe, he argued, is already in terminal decline. Culture has turned into civilization (form without soul, a technical world devoid of creative energy), art into technology, and spirit into mere calculation.
Zweig shared the feeling of crisis, but rejected Spengler’s deterministic pessimism. For him, history is not a natural process of decay but a moral drama. Europe is not an organism that is dying, but a being that can recover – if it regains its faith in reason, empathy, and culture. He does not deny the collapse of the epoch, but sees in it an opportunity for moral awakening.
In that sense, Zweig stands as the ethical antithesis to Spengler. While Spengler claims that the “soul of the West” is exhausted, Zweig believes that precisely in exhaustion we may rediscover humanity. His humanism resists fatalism – he defends the right to hope when everyone else believes in the end. For him, history is ethical, not biological: it unfolds through human responsibility. He refuses the idea of the “decline of the West,” because he believes Europe – however weak (and old) – still represents a spiritual possibility. Where Spengler sees the death of culture, Zweig sees a call to awakening. In this sense, he anticipates the later thought of J. Habermas, who spoke of the “unfinished project of modernity.”
If we compare Europe of the 1930s with today’s Europe, we will recognize a number of troubling parallels:
Economic inequality and insecurity: then the Great Depression, today the consequences of globalization and technological transformation. Both produce social anxiety and political anger.
Crisis of liberal democracy: then institutions collapsed under dictatorships, today they are hollowed out by populism and indifference.
Propaganda and manipulation: then the totalitarian voice of radio, today replaced by digital algorithms and “post-truths” – but the result is the same: disinformation and the weakening of critical thought.
Cultural exhaustion and nostalgia: then Europe turned to its (imperial, national) past, today to an idealized “golden age” of prosperity and identity; it embraces nostalgia and pessimism, fearing its own future.
In both cases, the crisis is not merely material but ontological – a loss of meaning and trust. Zweig would recognize today’s Europe as a space of moral disorientation: a continent that knows everything, but no longer knows why.
German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in Rage and Time, describes the contemporary West as a space of “accumulated anger” – energy with no direction. Today’s world, he argues, produces frustrations but not ideals. And here is the paradox: we live in an age of unprecedented material advancement, yet also in an age of profound spiritual depression. He depicts the contemporary West as a “civilization of the resigned” – driven not by great ideas but by technological optimism and emotional exhaustion. His description perfectly matches Zweig’s sense of the end of an epoch – only now the end is global and devoid of tragic dignity.
Sloterdijk’s analysis complements Zweig’s melancholy. Both see that Europe has strayed from its foundations: efficiency has replaced reason, and markets have replaced culture. But while Sloterdijk analyzes symptoms, Zweig offers therapy: a return to humanism. Not a sentimental humanism, but an active one – expressed through education, empathy, and cultural dialogue.
Zweig’s humanism is not an abstract idea, but a strategy of survival. In a world collapsing, he holds on to the one thing that cannot be destroyed: the dignity of the spirit. Seen through Sloterdijk’s lens, Zweig’s European humanism can be understood as an attempt to restore Europe’s emotional balance – to return dignity and meaning to a world that measures everything in economic terms. His message is not nostalgia, but a call to spiritual resistance.
Zweig’s vision may also be seen as a precursor to Jürgen Habermas, who in the late 20th century argued that Europe must not abandon the Enlightenment ideals of reason, communication, and universal rights – even though these ideas are under pressure from relativism and cynicism.
Thus, Habermas and Zweig form two points of a single arc: the first begins it on the eve of catastrophe, the second continues it in a post-national Europe. Both believe that the European spirit is not a geographical fact but a moral task that must be continually renewed.
In contemporary political debates, the term “European values” has become a bureaucratic cliché. But Zweig would remind us that values cannot be administered. They must be lived – through culture, dialogue, education, and mutual respect.
Europe does not collapse when it loses territory, but when it loses meaning. That is why crisis, understood in its original sense, is not a punishment but a call: to choose humanism again.
Zweig, who ended his life in exile, does not write from a position of defeat, but from a tragic faith in possibility. His melancholy is not resignation, but testimony. At a time when the “decline of the West” is once more being discussed, his testimony is a precious reminder that Europe is not a project of power, but a project of spirit.
“Europe does not disappear when it loses territory, but when it loses its spirit.”
— Stefan Zweig
*Zlatko Kramarić is a Croatian publicist, author, and diplomat, currently serving as Ambassador to Albania. Formerly a university professor and politician, he is known for his work in literature, cultural studies, and regional history.
© 2025 Argumentum
