The panel on Stefan Zweig at the Austrian Cultural Forum, moderated by Jonathan Taylor, was probably the most successful panel I attended during these past several days, and this must have had something to do with the fact that all the speakers seemed to know each other, so there was a chemistry between them that didn’t exist at most of the other panels.  And then, there was the fact that one of them, translator Michael Hofmann, took a position that is rarely seen at such events: he basically reduced Zweig to a zero that not only was incapable of “predicting the future,” but wrote “bad literature.”  To begin with, Hofmann almost provoked a revolution...