Austrian novelist, biographer and translator, and for a period between the wars one of the most widely translated writers alive. His Paris was the city of his youth — a year there around 1904, and the friendship with the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren that came out of it — and it became one of the central settings of The World of Yesterday, his memoir of a European culture he watched destroyed.
Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881 into a wealthy Jewish family and had, by his own account, an almost frictionless start: money, education, and a literary career that took off early and never really faltered until history came for it.
Paris belongs to the beginning of that story. Around 1904, having completed a doctorate on the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine, he went to Paris and spent a formative stretch there. What came out of it that lasted was a friendship with the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, whose work Zweig translated into German and championed for years afterwards — one of the several careers Zweig quietly built for other people alongside his own.
The Paris connection persisted. In 1914, on the eve of the war that would end the Europe he believed in, Zweig met his publisher Anton Kippenberg of the Insel Verlag, together with Rainer Maria Rilke, Romain Rolland and Léon Bazalgette, in a Paris café to discuss a collected edition of Verhaeren. It is a small scene and a representative one: an Austrian, a Bohemian-Austrian, two Frenchmen and a German publisher, in Paris, planning the collected works of a Belgian. That was the transnational literary culture Zweig spent his life inside, and the following month it stopped existing.
Between the wars he became enormously successful — novellas, and biographies of Marie Antoinette, Erasmus and Magellan, translated everywhere. He left Austria in 1934 as the Nazi threat closed in, lived in England, then in the United States, and finally in Brazil. In February 1942, at Petrópolis, he and his second wife Lotte took their own lives together. He left a statement saying that the world of his own language had gone under and that he preferred to end things while he could still do so on his own terms.
The World of Yesterday, finished immediately before his death and published posthumously, is the book most people now read him for. It is an account of pre-1914 Europe written by someone who had just watched it destroyed twice, and its Paris chapters — the young man's year in the city, the friendships, the sense that the border-crossing culture of the time was permanent — are among the most quoted passages in it.
Born in Vienna on 28 November.
Completes a doctorate on Hippolyte Taine and travels to Paris; meets Émile Verhaeren.
Meets Kippenberg, Rilke, Rolland and Bazalgette in a Paris café to plan a collected Verhaeren, weeks before the war.
Leaves Austria as the Nazi threat closes in; exile in England, then the United States.
Dies with his wife Lotte at Petrópolis, Brazil, on 22 February. The World of Yesterday is published posthumously.
His main Paris period was a formative stay as a young man around 1904, after finishing his doctorate. He returned repeatedly, and the city recurs throughout his memoir, but he never settled there.
He met the Belgian poet around the time of his Paris year, translated his poetry into German, and promoted his work for years. In 1914 he was in Paris planning a collected edition of Verhaeren's works.
Zweig's memoir of European culture before 1914, finished just before his death in 1942 and published posthumously. It is now the book he is most read for.
He and his second wife Lotte took their own lives at Petrópolis in Brazil on 22 February 1942, in exile. He left a statement saying the world of his own language had gone under.
Lived at · 1904–1905
Zweig rented rooms at 5 rue Victor-Masse, then the rue de Laval, from November 1904 to June 1905, shortly after completing his doctorate on Hippolyte Taine. The stay became one of the set-pieces of his memoir The World of Yesterday.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Stefan Zweig and their work.
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