Stefan Zweig
1881 – 1942 · Austria
Known for: Chronicler of a Europe that vanished
“A citizen of the world of yesterday, who left its memory in the keeping of his readers.”
Biography
Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna on 28 November 1881, the son of Moritz Zweig, a prosperous Jewish textile manufacturer, and of Ida Brettauer, who came from a Jewish banking family. He grew up in the confident, music loving Vienna of the late Habsburg monarchy, studied philosophy at the university there and took his doctorate in 1904 with a thesis on Hippolyte Taine. Religion played little part in his upbringing, yet he wrote on Jewish subjects throughout his life, and among his first encouragements were early essays accepted for the Neue Freie Presse by its literary editor Theodor Herzl. From the beginning he considered himself a citizen of the world, and the idea of a shared European culture became the fixed point of his thinking.
Zweig became one of the most widely read and most translated writers of the 1920s and 1930s, at home in Salzburg and at ease in the company of Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud. His gift was for compression: novellas that turn on a single obsession, among them Amok, Brief einer Unbekannten, Angst, Verwirrung der Gefühle and Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau, and later the novel Ungeduld des Herzens and the Schachnovelle. He was drawn in equal measure to lives and to turning points, writing Drei Meister on Balzac, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, the historical miniatures of Sternstunden der Menschheit, and biographies of Joseph Fouché, Marie Antoinette and Maria Stuart. He wrote about the past in order to explain the present, and he wrote for readers rather than for scholars, which brought him an audience in every European language.
In 1934, after Hitler's rise in Germany and the establishment of the Ständestaat in Austria, Zweig left for England, living first in London and then in Bath, where in 1939 he married his secretary Lotte Altmann. In 1940 the couple crossed the Atlantic to New York, and in August 1941 they settled in Petrópolis in the hills above Rio de Janeiro. There he wrote Brazil, Land of the Future, formed a friendship with the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, and finished Die Welt von Gestern, the memoir that remains the most vivid account of the vanished Habsburg world. Despairing of Europe and of its future, Stefan Zweig and his wife took their own lives with an overdose of barbiturates and were found in their house on 23 February 1942. His books went on being read and filmed, and the house in Petrópolis is today the Casa Stefan Zweig.