Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.
Background
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, Austria-Hungaria. Zweig was the son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer, from a Jewish banking family. Joseph Brettauer did business for twenty years in Ancona, Italy, where his second daughter Ida was born and grew up, too. About his childhood and adolescence, the future writer, little is known: he said it rather sparingly, stressing that early in his life, everything was exactly the same as that of other European intellectuals turn of the century.
Education
He tried to avoid lectures as much as possible and rather wrote for the feuilleton of the “Neuen Freien Presse”. In 1904 he earned a doctoral degree with a thesis on "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine". Religion did not play a central role in his education. Already during his studies at his own expense, he published his first collection of poems ("Silver Strings» (Silberne Saiten), 1901). Poems were written under the influence of Hofmannsthal and Rilke, whom Zweig ventured to sent his collection. Rilke sent in response to his book. So struck up a friendship that lasted until his death in 1926, Rilke.
Career
At the beginning of World War I, patriotic sentiment was widespread, and extended to many German and Austrian Jews: Zweig, as well as Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen, showed support. Zweig served in the Archives of the Ministry of War and adopted a pacifist stand like his friend Romain Rolland, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1915. Zweig married Friderike Maria von Winternitz (born Burger) in 1920; they divorced in 1938. As Friderike Zweig she published a book on her former husband after his death. She later also published a picture book on Zweig. In the late summer of 1939, Zweig married his secretary Elisabet Charlotte "Lotte" Altmann at Bath, England. Zweig's secretary in Salzburg from November 1919 to March 1938 was Anna Meingast (13 May 1881, Vienna – 17 November 1953, Salzburg).
In 1934, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Zweig left Austria for England, living first in London, then from 1939 in Bath. Because of the swift advance of Hitler's troops westwards, Zweig and his second wife crossed the Atlantic to the United States, settling in 1940 in New York City; they lived for two months as guests of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, then they rented a house in Ossining, New York.
On August 22, 1940, they moved again to Petrópolis, a German-colonized mountain town 68 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro known for historical reasons as Brazil's Imperial City. Zweig, feeling increasingly depressed about the situation in Europe and the future for humanity, wrote in a letter to author Jules Romains, "My inner crisis consists in that I am not able to identify myself with the me of passport, the self of exile". On February 23, 1942, the Zweigs were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in the city of Petrópolis, holding hands. He had been despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth," he wrote.
Zweig was a prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s, befriending Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud. He was extremely popular in the United States, South America and Europe, and remains so in continental Europe; however, he was largely ignored by the British public. His fame in America had diminished until the 1990s, when there began an effort on the part of several publishers (notably Pushkin Press, Hesperus Press, and The New York Review of Books) to get Zweig back into print in English. Plunkett Lake Press has reissued electronic versions of his non-fiction works. Since that time there has been a marked resurgence and a number of Zweig's books are back in print.
Critical opinion of his oeuvre is strongly divided between those who despise his literary style as poor, lightweight and superficial, and those who praise his humanism, simplicity and effective style. Michael Hofmann is scathingly dismissive of Zweig's work, which he dubbed a "vermicular dither", adding that "Zweig just tastes fake. He's the Pepsi of Austrian writing." Even the author's suicide note left Hofmann gripped by "the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn't mean it, his heart isn't in it (not even in his suicide)".
Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Royal Game, Amok, and Letter from an Unknown Woman – which was filmed in 1948 by Max Ophüls), novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion of Feelings, and the posthumously published The Post Office Girl) and biographies (notably of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Ferdinand Magellan, and Mary, Queen of Scots, and also the posthumously published one on Balzac). At one time his works were published without his consent in English under the pseudonym "Stephen Branch" (a translation of his real name) when anti-German sentiment was running high. His 1932 biography of Queen Marie Antoinette was adapted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a 1938 film starring Norma Shearer.
Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, was completed in 1942 on the day before he committed suicide. It has been widely discussed as a record of "what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942" in central Europe; the book has attracted both critical praise and hostile dismissal.
Zweig acknowledged his debt to psychoanalysis. In a letter dated 8 September 1926 he wrote to Freud, "Psychology is the great business of my life ". He went on explaining that Freud had considerable influence on a number of writers such as Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce giving them a lesson of "courage" and helping them overcome their inhibitions, "Thanks to you, we see many things. – Thanks to you we say many things which otherwise we would not have seen nor said." Autobiography in particular had become "more clear-sighted and audacious."
Zweig enjoyed a close association with Richard Strauss, and provided the libretto for Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman). Strauss famously defied the Nazi regime by refusing to sanction the removal of Zweig's name from the programme for the work's première on June 24, 1935 in Dresden. As a result, Goebbels refused to attend as planned, and the opera was banned after three performances. Zweig later collaborated with Joseph Gregor, to provide Strauss with the libretto for one other opera, Daphne, in 1937. At least one other work by Zweig received a musical setting: the pianist and composer Henry Jolles, who like Zweig had fled to Brazil to escape the Nazis, composed a song, "Último poema de Stefan Zweig", based on "Letztes Gedicht", which Zweig wrote on the occasion of his 60th birthday in November 1941. During his stay in Brazil, Zweig wrote Brasilien, Ein Land der Zukunft (Brazil, Land of the Future) which was an accurate analysis of his newly adopted country; in this book he managed to demonstrate a fair understanding of the Brazilian culture that surrounded him.
Zweig was a passionate collector of manuscripts. There are important Zweig collections at the British Library, at the State University of New York at Fredonia and at the National Library of Israel. The British Library's Stefan Zweig Collection was donated to the library by his heirs in May 1986. It specialises in autograph music manuscripts, including works by Bach, Haydn, Wagner, and Mahler. It has been described as "one of the world's greatest collections of autograph manuscripts". One particularly precious item is Mozart's "Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke" – that is, the composer's own handwritten thematic catalogue of his works.
The 1993–1994 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour.
Religion
He did not renounce his Jewish faith and wrote repeatedly on Jews and Jewish themes
Politics
Zweig believed in internationalism and in europeanism.He remained a pacifist all his life and advocated the unification of Europe.
"The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth. "
Views
Zweig portrayed himself as an idealist, devoted to the cause of international brotherhood.
Quotations:
"Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems."