- Person
- Stefan Zweig
- Lived
- 1881–1942
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Austrian
The story
By 1941 Stefan Zweig had lost almost everything that had defined his life: his home in Salzburg, his Austrian citizenship, his German readers and the Europe he loved. He and his wife Lotte settled that summer in Petrópolis, a small town in the hills of Brazil. There, far from the Europe he had lost, he completed a short novella, begun in 1938, that would become his most famous work.
Schachnovelle, known in English as The Royal Game and Chess Story, is set aboard a passenger liner travelling from New York to Buenos Aires, where the cold, mechanical world chess champion Mirko Czentovic meets a mysterious passenger, Dr B. He reveals that he was a lawyer who managed the assets of the Austrian nobility and church, and that the Gestapo held him in total isolation in a hotel to force information from him. He kept his sanity by memorising a stolen book of masters' chess games, then playing endless games against himself in his head, until the strain nearly destroyed him.
The story reflects real persecution: after the annexation of Austria in 1938, thousands of Austrian monarchists and conservatives were executed or sent to concentration camps. Zweig also built his chess carefully. A key position in the story matches a real game between Alexander Alekhine and Efim Bogoljubow from 1922. The novella first appeared in 1942 from a publisher in Buenos Aires.
The Austria-Forum biography calls it Zweig's most successful and most widely read work to this day, and an expression of his deepening pessimism about events in Europe. It inspired the 1960 film Brainwashed, originally titled Schachnovelle, two Czechoslovak films, and a 2021 German film directed by Philipp Stölzl.
Chess Story continues to be read as a gripping story and as a powerful portrait of the psychological cruelty of Nazi persecution. It sets a humane, imaginative individual against a cold and inhuman system, and shows how isolation can be used as a weapon against the mind.
Why it matters
Chess Story has given millions of readers insight into the human cost of totalitarian persecution and the resilience of the mind.
About Stefan Zweig
Viennese Jewish novelist and biographer, among the world’s most translated writers of the interwar years, whose exile memoir The World of Yesterday mourns a lost Europe.
More about Stefan Zweig
- Zweig's Decisive Moments in History made the past vividStefan Zweig's Sternstunden der Menschheit (1927), historical miniatures of turning points, appeared in English as The Tide of Fortune (1940) and as Shooting Stars (2013).
- Zweig championed tolerance through Erasmus and CastellioIn exile from the Nazis, Stefan Zweig wrote biographies of Erasmus (1934) and of Sebastian Castellio, A Conscience Against Violence (1936), celebrating tolerance against fanaticism.
- Zweig's manuscript collection is at the British LibraryStefan Zweig assembled a great collection of autograph manuscripts, including Mozart's handwritten catalogue of his works. His heirs donated it to the British Library in 1986.
- Stefan Zweig worked for peace and European understandingAfter the First World War, Stefan Zweig became a pacifist who worked for understanding between European countries and lasting peace, long before European unity had institutions.
- Stefan Zweig wrote the libretto for a Richard Strauss operaStefan Zweig wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss's opera Die schweigsame Frau. At the 1935 Dresden premiere Strauss refused to remove Zweig's name from the programme.
- Zweig's The World of Yesterday preserved a lost EuropeStefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday, sent to his publisher in 1942, has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire.
Sources
- Zweig, Stefan Austria-Forum
- The Royal Game Wikipedia
- Stefan Zweig Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.