A Viennese childhood of security
Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna on 28 November 1881, the younger of two sons of Moritz Zweig, a Jewish textile manufacturer from a Moravian merchant family who had built one of the largest firms of its kind in the empire, and Ida Brettauer, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banking and merchant family with roots in Hohenems. He and his brother Alfred grew up in a grand apartment in the heart of the capital of the multi-ethnic Habsburg empire, in what he would later call “the golden age of security.”
Religion played little part in the household. Zweig once said his parents were Jewish only by accident of birth, and the family belonged to Vienna’s assimilated, German-speaking Jewish bourgeoisie, for whom education and culture were the highest goods. As a schoolboy he and his friends haunted the city’s coffee houses to follow every new book, play and concert, and at nineteen he published his first volume of poems, Silberne Saiten (Silver Strings).
Student, traveller, young writer
Zweig studied philosophy and literature in Vienna and Berlin and in 1904 took his doctorate at the University of Vienna with a thesis on the French critic Hippolyte Taine. He was a half-hearted student and a passionate traveller, spending long stretches in Paris and Belgium and later journeying to India and the Americas. He translated the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren and others into German and wrote for the cultural pages of the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s leading newspaper, whose literary editor, Theodor Herzl, soon to found modern Zionism, accepted some of his first essays. The two remained on warm terms, though Zweig never became a Zionist.
His first novella appeared in 1904, and the form, short and psychologically intense, would bring him his greatest fame. By the eve of the First World War he was an established author with friendships across Europe, including with the French writer Romain Rolland, who became a lifelong model of pan-European conscience.
The war and its contradictions
When war broke out in 1914 Zweig volunteered and was assigned to the war archives in Vienna. His record in those years is more complicated than his own account. His diaries and newspaper articles from the early war show him sharing the patriotic enthusiasm of the moment and supporting Austria’s war effort, while his memoir later presented him as an early and lonely pacifist. What is clear is that his feelings turned. By 1917 he had written Jeremiah, a biblical drama about a prophet who warns in vain against war, and he spent the last months of the war in neutral Switzerland among European pacifists, committed from then on to reconciliation between nations.
The experience made him a lifelong advocate of European unity long before the idea had institutions behind it. He lectured and wrote for understanding between former enemies, championed the work of foreign authors in German, and, as his biographer George Prochnik has noted, even proposed an international university with branches in every major European capital, where young people would study among other nations and faiths. The Habsburg empire of his youth, for all its autocracy, had given him a model of many peoples living under one roof; the rise of competing nationalisms after 1918 was, for him, a catastrophe in slow motion.
The most translated writer of his time
After the war Zweig married Friderike Maria von Winternitz, a divorced writer, and the couple settled in a small mansion on the Kapuzinerberg overlooking Salzburg, which became a meeting place for writers, musicians and artists. The 1920s and early 1930s were his golden years. His novellas, Amok, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Fear, Confusion of Feelings, Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, explored passion, obsession and shame with an intensity shaped by his friend Sigmund Freud, to whom he wrote that psychology was the great business of his life.
He was equally celebrated for biography and history: Three Masters, on Balzac, Dickens and Dostoevsky; Joseph Fouché; Marie Antoinette, later filmed by MGM; Mary Queen of Scots; and Decisive Moments in History, a collection of historical miniatures that became one of the best-selling books of its era. By the late 1920s he was among the most widely translated authors in the world. He was also a devoted collector of manuscripts, assembling one of the great private collections of autograph music and literary manuscripts, including Mozart’s own handwritten catalogue of his works, now in the British Library.
Burned books and a police search
In 1931 Zweig became librettist for Richard Strauss, succeeding Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Then the Nazis came to power. On 10 May 1933 Zweig’s books were among those thrown onto the bonfires in German cities, and the German market, his largest, closed to him as a Jewish author. Strauss insisted that Zweig’s name stay on the programme for the premiere of their opera Die schweigsame Frau in Dresden in June 1935; Goebbels stayed away, and the opera was banned after a few performances.
In February 1934, amid Austria’s own slide into dictatorship, police searched Zweig’s Salzburg house for weapons. He took it as a sign and left for London, a decision that effectively separated him from Friderike, who stayed behind; they divorced in 1938. He avoided public political statements, which some fellow exiles resented, preferring to write about history’s defenders of conscience, among them Erasmus and the sixteenth-century humanist Sebastian Castellio, who had challenged Calvin over the burning of a heretic.
Exile
When Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 his Austrian passport became worthless, and he applied for British citizenship, which he received. His mother died later that year. In September 1939, in Bath, he married his secretary, Lotte Altmann, a German-Jewish refugee. After the war began, the SS prepared a list of people to be arrested immediately after a German invasion of Britain; Zweig was on it.
In 1940 he and Lotte crossed the Atlantic, spending time at Yale and in Ossining, New York, where fellow refugees, poorer and less connected, appealed constantly to his well-known generosity. He felt uprooted, joking that his profession was now “expert in visas” and he wrote of being unable to identify himself with the self of his passport, the self of exile. In August 1941 they settled in Petrópolis in the hills above Rio de Janeiro. Brazil had enchanted him on a 1936 lecture tour, and his book Brazil, Land of the Future celebrated it as a society without the racial fanaticism tearing Europe apart, though critics there faulted its picture of the country and his praise for the authoritarian Vargas government.
The World of Yesterday
In exile, without his library or notes, Zweig wrote his memoir, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European. It is an elegy for the civilisation of pre-1914 Vienna and Europe, for an age of free travel without passports, and for a culture he believed had been destroyed by war, revolution and above all nationalism. He confessed a tormenting shame that Nazi ideology had been conceived in his own language, the German of Goethe and Rilke. Lotte typed the final version, which he posted to his publisher the day before he died.
In Petrópolis he also completed his most famous novella, The Royal Game, also known as Chess Story, about a man who keeps his sanity in Gestapo solitary confinement by memorising chess games, and who is nearly destroyed by them.
Petrópolis, February 1942
As news came of Japan’s advances in Asia and Nazi victories in Europe, Zweig sank into despair. On 22 February 1942 he and Lotte took an overdose of barbiturates in their rented bungalow; they were found dead the next day, lying together. In a farewell declaration he thanked Brazil for its hospitality and wrote that, at sixty, his strength was exhausted by long years of homeless wandering. He saluted his friends and wished that they might yet see the dawn after the long night; he, too impatient, was going on ahead.
Brazil gave the couple a state funeral, attended by thousands. Their deaths shocked the exile world: some, like Thomas Mann, saw in the suicide a gift to the enemy, while others understood it as the end of a man who had lost everything he had lived for.
A Jew and a European
Zweig’s Jewishness was cultural rather than religious, but it never left his work or his fate. He wrote on Jewish themes in Jeremiah, in the story Buchmendel about a Jewish book-pedlar destroyed by wartime suspicion, and in The Buried Candelabrum, a legend about the wanderings of the Temple menorah. It was as a Jew that his books were burned, his homeland closed to him and his name placed on an arrest list. His papers and collections are held today at the British Library, the National Library of Israel and other institutions.
After decades of neglect in the English-speaking world, his work returned to print from the 1990s, and Wes Anderson credited Zweig as the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Critics remain divided between admirers of his humane, lucid storytelling and those who find him sentimental. But The World of Yesterday endures as perhaps the most famous portrait of the vanished Habsburg world, and as a warning about what nationalism can destroy. His house in Petrópolis is now the Casa Stefan Zweig, a museum devoted to the refugees who found shelter in Brazil.
Sources & further reading
Stefan Zweig, Wikipedia · Zweig, Stefan, Austria-Forum (biography) · Benjamin Ramm, “Zweig: The writer who dreamed of a world without borders”, BBC Culture (2017) · Stefan Zweig, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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