Stefan Zweig

Vienna

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna on 28 November 1881, the second son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer, from a family of bankers. They were Jewish and assimilated, and Zweig later wrote that religion played almost no part in his childhood.[1]

He grew up in the Vienna of Freud, Mahler, Klimt and Schnitzler, in a prosperous, cultured, liberal city that he later said had been wrong to assume its own stability would last. He took a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1904, on the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine, and never needed to earn a living from a job.

He published poems at nineteen and translated Verlaine, Baudelaire and the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren, who became a friend. In his twenties he travelled constantly — India, North America, Europe — and collected manuscripts, eventually assembling one of the great private collections of composers' and writers' working papers.[2]

In 1914 he met his publisher, Anton Kippenberg of the Insel Verlag, in a Paris café, together with Rainer Maria Rilke, Romain Rolland and Léon Bazalgette. They were there to plan a collected edition of Verhaeren. The war began before it could be made.[3]

The First World War

When the First World War began in 1914, Zweig was found unfit for combat and worked in the war archives in Vienna. He had friends in every country now fighting, and the collapse of that shared world into nationalism appalled him.[4]

His friend the French writer Romain Rolland, then in Switzerland, argued that writers should stay in contact across the lines. Zweig agreed. He wrote an anti-war play, Jeremias, published in 1917 and staged in Zurich in February 1918, and spent the last part of the war in Switzerland among other pacifists.[2]

The First World War fixed the theme he returned to for the rest of his life: that European civilisation was a shared inheritance, that it was more fragile than anyone believed, and that nationalism would destroy it.

Salzburg and success

After the war Zweig settled in Salzburg with his first wife, Friderike von Winternitz, in a house on the Kapuzinerberg above the town. It became one of the meeting places of European literary life — Rolland, Joyce, Toscanini, Richard Strauss and many others came through.[1]

Between the wars he became extraordinarily successful. His novellas, story collections and biographies were translated into dozens of languages and sold in the millions, and by the early 1930s he was one of the most translated writers alive.[5]

He also wrote for the stage and for music. He wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss's opera Die schweigsame Frau. It was performed in Dresden in 1935 and then banned by the Nazi regime because Zweig was Jewish.[4]

What he wrote

Zweig's fiction is short, fast and psychological. His usual method is to have a narrator meet a stranger who tells a story of one overwhelming episode, and the story is compressed into a few hours or a single day.

Letter from an Unknown Woman, published in 1922, is the confession of a woman who has loved a writer since childhood and whom he has never once recognised. Amok, from the same period, follows a doctor in the tropics who refuses a woman's desperate request for help and is destroyed by what follows. Chess Story, his last work of fiction, is about a man who survives Gestapo isolation by playing chess in his head and comes out permanently damaged.[5]

His biographies use the same turning-point method over a longer span: Marie Antoinette, Mary Stuart, Erasmus, Magellan, Balzac. He was interested in the moment where a life turns, and he wrote history as a sequence of such moments.[5]

Exile

In February 1934 the Austrian police searched Zweig's Salzburg house, looking for weapons belonging to the socialist militia. Nothing was found, but the search told him what was coming. He left for London within weeks.[1]

He lived in London and then in Bath. He divorced Friderike in 1938, married his secretary Charlotte Altmann, known as Lotte, in 1939, and took British citizenship in 1940. She was twenty-seven years younger and had chronic asthma.[4]

Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and Zweig became stateless overnight. His books were burned and banned in Germany, and his readership in his own language effectively disappeared. He kept writing in German for a public that no longer existed.[1]

Brazil

In 1940 Zweig and Lotte left England for New York, then travelled through South America. In August 1941 they settled in Petrópolis, a hill town above Rio de Janeiro.[4]

He had visited Brazil before and admired it, and wrote a book about it, Brazil: Land of the Future. The couple lived quietly, he worked on Chess Story and on his memoir, and he corresponded with other exiles.[5]

Living that far from Europe did not ease it. He was sixty, in a country whose language he did not speak, reading daily reports of German victories, with almost every European friend dead, scattered or in danger. In February 1942 the fall of Singapore convinced him that the war would go on for years and that Europe as he had known it was gone for good.

The World of Yesterday

The World of Yesterday is Zweig's memoir of the Europe he grew up in, written in exile without access to his papers, from memory.[6]

It describes the pre-1914 world as an age of security: the belief that progress was permanent and that catastrophe belonged to earlier centuries. Zweig calls that belief an illusion, and blames it for how unprepared his generation was. It then follows the two wars from the point of view of a man watching his own civilisation from outside.

He posted the manuscript to his publisher the day before he died. It is now his most read book.[6]

Death

On 22 February 1942, in their rented house at Petrópolis, Zweig and Lotte took an overdose of veronal, a barbiturate, and died together. They were found the next day, lying on the bed, his hand on hers. He was sixty; she was thirty-three.[1]

He left a short note, written in German and dated the day before. It thanked Brazil for taking him in. It said his own world was gone and that he was too tired at sixty to build another. He wrote that his friends might still live to see the war end, and that he was too impatient to wait for it and would go first.[1]

The reasons he gave are the ones the record supports: exhaustion, homelessness, the loss of his language and his readers, and his conviction that the war would not end in his lifetime. Lotte left no note of her own. Whether she chose to die with him or followed his decision is not documented. The note was his, and they died side by side.

Reputation

Zweig's reputation collapsed after his death and stayed low for decades, particularly in the German-speaking world, where critics dismissed the work as smooth and sentimental. He was compared unfavourably with harder writers of the same period.

Zweig's reputation recovered from the 1980s onwards, first in France and then in English. The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson's film of 2014, took its manner and much of its material from Zweig's writing and sent a new generation of readers to him.

Why Stefan Zweig matters

Zweig wrote about the collapse of Europe between the wars from inside a rich and famous life. He had every advantage — money, fame, translation, friends in every capital — and he lost all of it in eight years, and he wrote down what that felt like while it was happening.

The fiction lasts because of its compression. A Zweig novella takes one person, one obsession and a few hours, and finishes in eighty pages. Chess Story, written in his last months, is the clearest thing he ever wrote about what political violence does to a mind, and he posted it from Brazil, the last country he reached as a refugee.