Author Bio
• Birth—November 28, 1881
• Where—Vienna, Austria
• Death—February 22, 1942
• Where—Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Education—Ph.D., University of Vienna
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 popular writers in the world.
Personal
Zweig was born in Vienna, the son of Moritz Zweig (1845–1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer (1854–1938), from a Jewish banking family. He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and in 1904 earned a doctoral degree with a thesis on "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine."
In 1920, he married Friderike Maria von Winternitz; however, they divorced in 1938. As Friderike Zweig she published a book on her former husband after his death and, later, a picture book on Zweig. In 1939 Zweig married his secretary Lotte Altmann.
Religion
His faith did not play a central role in his education. "My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth", Zweig said later 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.
Pacifism
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, all showed support. Zweig, although patriotic, refused to pick up a rifle; instead, he served in the Archives of the Ministry of War, and soon acquired a pacifist stand like his friend Romain Rolland (recipient of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature). Zweig remained a pacifist all his life and advocated the unification of Europe.
Nazism and despair
In 1934, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Zweig left Austria. He lived in England (in London first, then Bath). Because of the swift advance of Hitler's troops westwards, Zweig and his second wife crossed the Atlantic Ocean, settling in New York City in 1940. In August of 1940, they moved again to Petropolis, a town in the greater Rio de Janeiro area. Feeling more and more depressed by the growth of intolerance, authoritarianism, and Nazism, and feeling hopeless for the future for humanity, Zweig wrote a note about his feelings of desperation.
Then, in February 23, 1942, the Zweigs were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in the city of Petropolis, holding hands. He had despaired at the future of Europe and its culture, writing...
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.
The Zweigs' house in Brazil was later turned into a museum and is now known as Casa Stefan Zweig.
Work and their reception
Zweig was a prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s. He was extremely popular in the United States, South America and Europe, and remains so in continental Europe, although he was largely ignored by the British public, and his fame in America has since dwindled. Since the 1990s, there has been 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 Ebooks has begun to publish electronic versions of his non-fiction as well.
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)". See London Review of Books.
A.O. Scott of the New York Times, however, lauded Zweig, calling his work...
Touching and delightful. Those adjectives are not meant as faint praise. Zweig may be especially appealing now because rather than being a progenitor of big ideas, he was a serious entertainer, and an ardent and careful observer of habits, foibles, passions and mistakes.
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 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles and his also posthumously published, 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 biography of Queen Marie-Antoinette was later adapted as a Hollywood movie, starring the actress Norma Shearer in the title role.
Zweig's autobiography, 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 enjoyed a close association with Richard Strauss, and provided the libretto for 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 Brazil, Land of the Future, which was an accurate analysis of his newly adopted country, and in his 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 and at the State University of New York at Fredonia. 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. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/27/2014.)