Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) was an Austrian writer.

Stefan Zweig

Life and work

Stefan Zweig was a very well-known writer in the 1920s and 1930s, but since his death in 1942, his work has become less familiar to the English-reading public. While he is still read in Germany and also in France, his name is barely known to the average Anglophone reader. In the last few decades, however, there has been an effort on the part of several publishers to get Zweig back into print in English.

Zweig wrote novels and short stories, and several biographies, of which the most famous is probably that of Mary Stuart. This was published in German as Maria Stuart and in English as (The) Queen of Scots or Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. 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 MGM actress Norma Shearer in the title role.

Born in Vienna, Zweig was the son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida (Brettauer) Zweig, the daughter of an Italian banking family. He studied philosophy and the history of literature, and in Vienna he was associated with the avant garde Young Vienna movement. Jewish 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. 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.

During the First World War he took a pacifist stand together with Romain Rolland from Switzerland, summoning intellectuals from all the world to join them in active pacifism, which actually led to Romain Rolland being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Zweig remained pacifist all his life but also advocated the unification of Europe before the Nazis came, which has had some influence in the making of the EU.

Like Rolland, he wrote many biographies but considered the one on Erasmus Rotterdamus his most important one, which he described as a concealed autobiography.

Zweig fled Austria in 1934 following Hitler's rise to power. He was famously defended by the composer Richard Strauss who refused to remove Zweig's name (as librettist) from the posters for the premiere, in Dresden, of his opera Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman). This led to Hitler refusing to come to the premiere as planned; the opera was banned after three performances.

Zweig then lived in England (in Bath and London), before moving to the United States. In 1941 he went to Brazil, where in 1942 he and his second wife Lotte (née Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann) committed suicide together in Petrópolis using the barbiturate Veronal, 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. His autobiography The World of Yesterday is a paean to the European culture he considered lost.

There are significant Zweig collections at the British Library and at State University of New York at Fredonia. The BL Zweig collection, given to the library by its trustees in May 1986, includes a wide range of items of surprising variety and rarity, among them Mozart's own Verzeichnüss, that is, the composer's own handwritten thematic catalogue of his works.

Stefan Zweig by Friderika Zweig (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1946) OCLC 273327 is an account by his first wife, telling, inter alia, of the breakup of the marriage.

The German writer Stefanie Zweig (b. 1932) is not related to Stefan Zweig .

Bibliography

Fiction

• The Love of Erika Wald (1904) (Die Liebe der Erika Wald)
• Fear (1920) (Angst)
• The Eyes of My Brother, Forever (1922) (Die Augen des Ewigen Bruders)
• Amok (1922), his most famous novel. Also includes the following six short stories: Twilight, The Cross, A Lazy Man, Moonbeam Alley, Leporella and The Refugee
• The Invisible Collection (1926) (Die Unsichtbare Sammlung)
• The Refugee (1927) (Der Flüchtling)
• Confusion of feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D (1927) (Verwirrung der Gefühle)
• Kleine Chronik (1929) (Short stories) is a volume of short stories, Buchmendel among them.
• Buchmendel (1929)
• Gesammelte Erzählungen (1936) (Collected Stories) consists of two volumes of short stories: 1. Die Kette (The Chains) and 2. Kaleidoskop (Kaleidoscope). The second volume 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 (1938) (Ungeduld des Herzens)
• Letter From an Unknown Woman (Brief einer Unbekannten) a short novella, year of original publishing unknown.
• Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau) a short novella, year of original publishing unknown.
• Burning Secret (Brennendes Geheimnis) a short novella, year of original publishing unknown.
• The Royal Game or Chess Story (Schachnovelle) (1941), his most famous novella, about a man's obsession with chess, formed in the captivity of the Gestapo. Most recent translation by Joel Rotenberg, New York Review Books, 2006. ISBN 1-59017-169-1.
• Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Metamorphosis) is a posthumously published novel and one of his literary feats in fiction.

Biographies

• Joseph Fouché (1929)
• Mental Healers (Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud) (1932; German: Heilung durch den Geist, 1931) - a short three-part work consisting of three individual biographies. The driving idea of this work is that Christian Science, the religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy, and Psychoanalysis, the medical and literary movement founded by Sigmund Freud, are both rooted in the discoveries of a misunderstood scientist and hypnotist of the 18th century, Franz Mesmer.
• Nietzsche
• Marie Antoinette (1932)
• Erasmus (1934)
• Romain Rolland: The Man and His Works (1921)
• Paul Verlaine
• Balzac (1922), published alone or included in the three-part book Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky.
• Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles (1935) (also published as (The) Queen of Scots)
• Sebastian Castellio - The Right to Heresy, or how John Calvin killed a Conscience
• Magellan - Der Mann und seine Tat (1938)
• Amerigo - Geschichte eines historischen Irrtums (written 1942, published posthumously 1944)