Stefan Zweig ( ZWYGHE, SWYGHE; German: [ˈʃtɛfan t͡svaɪ̯k] or Austrian German: [t͡svaɪ̯g]; 28 November 1881 – 22 February 1942) was an Austrian writer. At the height of his literary career in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world.
Born into a Jewish family, Zweig was raised in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He wrote studies of famous literary figures, such as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Drei Meister (1920; Three Masters), and of historical events in Decisive Moments in History (1927). He wrote biographies of Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935) and Marie Antoinette (Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, 1932), among others. Zweig's best-known fiction includes Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922), Amok (1922), Fear (1925), Confusion of Feelings (1927), Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), the psychological novel Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity, 1939), and The Royal Game (1941).
In 1934, as a result of the Nazi Party's rise in Germany and the establishment of the Ständestaat regime in Austria, Zweig emigrated to England and then, in 1940, moved briefly to New York and then to Brazil, where he settled. In his final years, he would declare himself in love with the country, writing about it in the book Brazil, Land of the Future. Nonetheless, as the years passed Zweig became increasingly disillusioned and despairing at the future of Europe, and he and his wife Lotte were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in Petrópolis on 23 February 1942; they had died the previous day. His work has been the basis for several film adaptations. Zweig's memoir, Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday, 1942), is noted for its description of life during the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under Franz Joseph I and has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire.
Zweig was born in Vienna, the son of Ida Brettauer (1854–1938), a daughter of a Jewish banking family, and Moritz Zweig (1845–1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer. He was related to the Czech writer Egon Hostovský, who described him as "a very distant relative".
Zweig studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, and in 1904 earned a doctoral degree with a thesis on "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine". Religion did not play a central role in his education. "My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth", Zweig said in an interview. Yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith and wrote repeatedly on Jews and Jewish themes, as in his story Buchmendel. Zweig had a warm relationship with Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, whom he met when Herzl was still literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, then Vienna's main newspaper; Herzl accepted for publication some of Zweig's early essays. Zweig, a committed cosmopolitan, believed in internationalism and in Europeanism, as The World of Yesterday, his autobiography, makes clear: "I was sure in my heart from the first of my identity as a citizen of the world."
Zweig served in the Archives of the Ministry of War and supported Austria's war efforts through his writings in the Neue Freie Presse and frequently celebrated in his Diaries the capture and massacre of opposing soldiers (for instance, writing about the innumerable citizens killed at gunpoint under the suspicion of espionage that "what filth has made ooze must be cauterized with scalding iron".) Zweig viewed Serbian soldiers as "hordes" and stated that "one feels proud to talk German" when thousands of French soldiers were captured in Metz. Conversely, in his memoirs, The World of Yesterday, Zweig portrays himself in the role of pacifist at the time of the First World War, states that he refused "to participate in those rabid calumnies against the enemy" (although, through his work in the official Neue Freie Presse, Zweig promoted the war propaganda issued from the Austrian crown) and affirms that among his intellectual friends he was "alone" in his stance against the war.
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. They lived in Salzburg in a large but famously inaccessible home later bought by Wolfgang Porsche named "Paschinger Schlössl" which had previously been occupied by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s sister, Nannerl. In September 1939, Zweig married his secretary Elisabet Charlotte "Lotte" Altmann in Bath, England. Zweig's secretary in Salzburg from November 1919 to March 1938 was Anna Meingast (13 May 1881, Vienna – 17 November 1953, Salzburg).
Leaving Europe after the rise of Hitler
Zweig's high profile did not shield him from the threat of persecution as a Jew. In 1934, after Hitler's rise to power in Germany, and following the establishment of the Austrofascist political regime known as the Ständestaat, Zweig left Austria for England, living first in London, and later in Bath, where he remarried. But England was not far enough away from the Nazi threat for Zweig; in 1940 he and his second wife crossed the Atlantic to the United States, settling in New York City. It turned out that Zweig was correct to fear being targeted by the Nazis, even in England: as part of the preparations for their invasion of England – known as Operation Sealion – the SS had prepared a list of persons in the UK who were to be detained immediately. This so-called Black Book came to light after the war; Zweig was listed on page 231, including his London address.
The Zweigs lived only briefly in the US: for two months as guests of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, then renting a house in Ossining, New York. On 22 August 1941, they moved again to Petrópolis, 68 kilometres north of Rio de Janeiro. There, he wrote the book Brazil, Land of the Future and developed a close friendship with Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. 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". He had been despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. He wrote: "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". On 23 February 1942, the Zweigs were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in the city of Petrópolis, having taken their own lives. Their bodies were found holding hands. The Zweigs' house in Brazil was later turned into a cultural centre and is now known as Casa Stefan Zweig.
Zweig was a prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s and a friend of Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud. He was extremely popular in the United States, South America, and Europe, and remains so in continental Europe, but he was largely ignored in Britain. His fame in America had diminished until the 1990s, when an effort began 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 many of Zweig's books are back in print.
Critical opinion of his oeuvre is strongly divided between those who praise his humanism, simplicity, and effective style, and those who criticize his writing as poor, lightweight, and superficial. In a review entitled "Vermicular Dither", German translator Michael Hofmann scathingly attacked the Austrian's work. Hofmann opined that "Zweig just tastes fake. He's the Pepsi of Austrian writing." Even the author's suicide note, Hofmann suggested, induces "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)".