"Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come." -- Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 — February 22, 1942) 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.
"Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.""Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.""In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.""In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.""It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.""Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.""Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.""One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.""Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.""Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.""The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.""The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.""There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.""Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.""When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process."
Zweig was the son of Moritz Zweig (1845—1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer (1854—1938), 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. 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 later in an interview. Yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith and wrote repeatedly on Jewish themes. Although his essays were published in the Neue Freie Presse, whose literary editor was the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, Zweig was not attracted to Herzl's Jewish nationalism.
Stefan Zweig was related to the Czech writer Egon Hostovský. Hostovský described Zweig as "a very distant relative"; some sources describe them as cousins.
In the First World War Zweig served in the Archives of the Ministry of War, and soon acquired a pacifist stand like his friend Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1915. Zweig remained pacifist all his life and advocated the unification of Europe. Like Rolland, he wrote many biographies. His Erasmus of Rotterdam he called a "concealed self-portrayal" in The World of Yesterday.
Zweig fled Austria in 1934, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany. He then lived in England (in London and from 1939 in Bath) before moving to the United States in 1940. In 1941 he went to Brazil, where in 1942 he and his second wife Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann committed suicide together in Petrópolis. 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 very prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s. He was extremely popular in the USA, South America and Europe, and remains so in continental Europe; however, 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 and New York Review of Books) to get Zweig back into print in English.
Criticism over his oeuvre is severely divided between some English-speaking critics, who despise his literary style as poor, light-weighted and superficial, and some of those more attached to the European tradition, who who praise his humanism, simplicity and effective style.
Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Royal Game, Amok, Letter from an Unknown Woman – filmed in 1948 by Max Ophuls), 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 also posthumously published, Balzac). At one time his works were published 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 for a Hollywood movie, starring the actress Norma Shearer in the title role.
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 program 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.
There are important Zweig collections at the British Library and at the State University of New York at Fredonia. The British Library's Zweig Music 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.
Letter from an Unknown Woman, 1922 (Original title: Brief einer Unbekannten) – novella
Amok, 1922 (Original title: Amok) – novella, initially published with several others in Amok. Novellen einer Leidenschaft
Fear, 1925 (Original title: Angst. Novelle)
The Eyes of My Brother, Forever, 1925 (Original title: Die Augen des ewigen Bruders)
The Invisible Collection see Collected Stories below, (Original title: Die Unsichtbare Sammlung, first published in book form in 'Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr 1927')
The Refugee, 1927 (Original title: Der Flüchtling. Episode vom Genfer See).
Confusion of Feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D, 1927 (Original title: Verwirrung der Gefühle) – novella initially published in the volume Verwirrung der Gefühle: Drei Novellen
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, 1927 (Original title: Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau) – novella initially published in the volume Verwirrung der Gefühle: Drei Novellen
Short stories, 1930 (Original title: Kleine Chronik. Vier Erzählungen) – includes Buchmendel
Collected Stories, 1936 (Original title: Gesammelte Erzählungen) – two volumes of short stories:1. The Chains (Original title: Die Kette)2. Kaleidoscope (Original title: Kaleidoskop). Includes: Casual Knowledge of a Craft, Leporella, Fear, Burning Secret, Summer Novella, The Governess, Buchmendel, The Refugee, The Invisible Collection, Fantastic Night and Moonbeam Alley
Beware of Pity, 1939 (Original title: Ungeduld des Herzens) novel
The Royal Game or Chess Story (Original title: Schachnovelle; Buenos Aires, 1942) – novella written in 1938–41, published posthumously
Clarissa, 1981 unfinished novel, published posthumously
The Post Office Girl, 1982 (Original title: Rausch der Verwandlung. Roman aus dem Nachlaß; The Intoxication of Metamorphosis) – unfinished novel, published posthumously, and in 2008 for the first time in English.
Biographies and historical texts
Béatrice Gonzalés-Vangell, Kaddish et Renaissance, La Shoah dans les romans viennois de Schindel, Menasse et Rabinovici, Septentrion, Valenciennes, 2005, 348 pages.
Emile Verhaeren, 1910
Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky, 1920 (Original title: Drei Meister. Balzac — Dickens — Dostojewski)
Romain Rolland. The Man and His Works, 1921 (Original title: Romain Rolland. Der Mann und das Werk)
Nietzsche, 1925 (Originally published in the volume titled: Der Kampf mit dem Dämon. Hölderlin — Kleist — Nietzsche)
Decisive Moments in History, 1927 (Original title: Sternstunden der Menschheit)
Adepts in Self-Portraiture: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy, 1928 (Original title: Drei Dichter ihres Lebens. Casanova — Stendhal — Tolstoi)
Joseph Fouché, 1929 (Original title: Joseph Fouché. Bildnis eines politischen Menschen)
Mental Healers: Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, 1932 (Original title: Die Heilung durch den Geist. Mesmer, Mary Baker-Eddy, Freud)
Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, 1932 (Original title: Marie Antoinette. Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters) ISBN 4-87187-855-4
Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1934 (Original title: Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam)
Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles or The Queen of Scots, 1935 (Original title: Maria Stuart) ISBN 4-87187-858-9
The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin, 1936 (Original title: Castellio gegen Calvin oder Ein Gewissen gegen die Gewalt)
Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, 1938 (Original title: Magellan. Der Mann und seine Tat) ISBN 4-87187-856-2
Amerigo, 1944 (Original title: Amerigo. Geschichte eines historischen Irrtums) – written in 1942, published the day before he died ISBN 4-87187-857-0
Balzac, 1946 – written, as Richard Friedenthal describes in a postscript, by Zweig in the Brazilian summer capital of Petrópolis, without access to the files, notebooks, lists, tables, editions and monographs that Zweig accumulated for many years and that he took with him to Bath, but that he left behind when he went to America. Friedenthal wrote that Balzac "was to be his magnum opus, and he had been working at it for ten years. It was to be a summing up of his own experience as an author and of what life had taught him." Friedenthal claimed that "The book had been finished", though not every chapter was complete; he used a working copy of the manuscript Zweig left behind him to apply "the finishing touches", and Friedenthal rewrote the final chapters (Balzac, translated by William and Dorothy Rose [New York: Viking, 1946], pp. 399, 402).
Plays
Tersites, 1907 (Original title: Tersites)
Das Haus am Meer, 1912
Jeremiah, 1917 (Original title: Jeremias)
Other
The World of Yesterday (Original title: Die Welt von Gestern; Stockholm, 1942) – autobiography
Brazil, Land of the Future (Original title: Brasilien. Ein Land der Zukunft; Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm 1941)
Elizabeth Allday, Stefan Zweig: A Critical Biography, J. Philip O'Hara, Inc., Chicago, 1972
Alberto Dines, Morte no Paraíso, a Tragédia de Stefan Zweig, Editora Nova Fronteira 1981, (rev. ed.) Editora Rocco 2004
Alberto Dines, Tod im Paradies. Die Tragödie des Stefan Zweig, Edition Büchergilde, 2006
Randolph J. Klawiter, Stefan Zweig. An International Bibliography, Ariadne Press, Riverside, 1991
Donald A. Prater, European of Yesterday: A Biography of Stefan Zweig, Holes and Meier Publ., (rev. ed.) 2003
Marion Sonnenfeld (editor), The World of Yesterday's Humanist Today. Proceedings of the Stafan Zweig Symposium, texts by Alberto Dines, Randolph J. Klawiter, Leo Spitzer and Harry Zohn, State University of New York Press, 1983
Friderike Zweig, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1946 (An account of his life by his first wife)
