Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig: Europe's Bestseller in Exile

One day after finishing *The World of Yesterday*, his account of the vanished Europe that made him, Stefan Zweig swallowed a barbiturate overdose in a house in Petrópolis, sixty-eight kilometres north of Rio de Janeiro. His second wife, Lotte, died with him. They were found on 23 February 1942, holding hands. He had been, a decade earlier, one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world.

A Vienna Made of Money and Books

He was born on 28 November 1881 into the Habsburg capital's Jewish haute bourgeoisie: his father, Moritz Zweig, a wealthy textile manufacturer; his mother, Ida Brettauer, a daughter of a Jewish banking family. Zweig kept the inheritance at arm's length. "My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth," he wrote — though Jewish themes ran through his work all the same. He read philosophy at the University of Vienna and took his doctorate in 1904 with a dissertation on the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine, the French critic who insisted that a writer be explained by race, milieu and moment. It is a fitting apprenticeship for a man who would spend his career explaining people by their circumstances.

The Miniaturist of Obsession

The 1920s and 1930s were his. *Amok* and *Letter from an Unknown Woman* appeared in 1922, *Fear* in 1925, *Confusion of Feelings* and *Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman* in 1927, *Beware of Pity* in 1939, *The Royal Game* in 1941. Running alongside the fiction was a second and equally successful career as a portraitist of the famous dead: *Three Masters* (1920) on Balzac, Dickens and Dostoevsky; *Decisive Moments in History* (1927); *Joseph Fouché* (1929); *Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman* (1932); *Maria Stuart* (1935). The subtitle of the Marie Antoinette book is the key to the whole enterprise — Zweig's instinct was always to find the ordinary human being inside the historical monument, and then to watch what pressure did to them.

The formula travelled. He was enormously popular in the United States, South America and across continental Europe, translated at a rate few living authors matched. He lived in Salzburg with his first wife, Friderike Maria von Winternitz, whom he married in 1920, in a large house once occupied by Mozart's sister Nannerl. It was the life of a European man of letters at the exact moment such a life was about to become impossible.

The War He Told Two Ways

Zweig called himself a citizen of the world before he had to become one. "I was sure in my heart from the first of my identity as a citizen of the world," he wrote, and he meant internationalism, Europeanism, the conviction that culture crossed borders more truthfully than armies did. The record from the First World War complicates the self-portrait. He served in the Archives of the Ministry of War, and his diaries of the period celebrate Austrian military victories. In his memoir he presented himself as a pacifist who refused to join in "rabid calumnies against the enemy" — yet he was at the same time promoting Austrian war propaganda. The contradiction is not a footnote. It is the seam running through his whole persona: the cosmopolitan who was also a patriot, the pacifist who was also on the payroll.

Exile

In 1934, with Hitler in power in Germany and the Ständestaat regime installed in Austria, Zweig left. England came first — London, then Bath, where in the late summer of 1939 he married his secretary, Elisabet Charlotte "Lotte" Altmann, having divorced Friderike the previous year. In 1940 he crossed to New York, where the Zweigs were guests of Yale in New Haven and then lived in Ossining. In August 1941 they went on to Brazil.

Brazil gave him a subject — he wrote *Brazil, Land of the Future* — and a friend in the poet Gabriela Mistral. It did not give him back Europe. Writing to Jules Romains, he described the exact shape of the injury: "My inner crisis consists in that I am not able to identify myself with the me of passport, the self of exile." The most famous writer of the German-speaking world had become a man whose documents no longer matched him.

Petrópolis

The despair had a formal, almost eighteenth-century composure to it. "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 — a sentence in which the two things he had lost, work and freedom, are named in order. He finished *The World of Yesterday*, his memoir of the culture the Nazis were erasing — a book since called the most famous ever written on the Habsburg Empire, and read as a record of what it meant to be alive in central Europe between 1881 and 1942 — and then, on 22 February 1942, ended it. He was sixty.

Why Stefan Is Called a Genius

The claim for Zweig rests on craft rather than on originality of thought — he founded no school and made no formal innovation. What he had was psychological compression: the ability to isolate a single obsessive stretch of a life, twenty-four hours in the case of one famous novella, and make the reader feel that everything about a person had been exposed in it. The same instinct powered the historical portraits, where a Fouché or a Marie Antoinette is reduced from monument to nervous system. Married to that was a rarer commercial gift — he made European high culture legible to enormous popular audiences in several languages simultaneously, which is why the 1920s and 1930s belonged to him.

The counter-case is loud and has been made by serious people. Critical opinion has always split between those who praise his "humanism, simplicity and effective style" and those who find the writing "poor, lightweight, and superficial." The translator Michael Hofmann was merciless: "Zweig just tastes fake. He's the Pepsi of Austrian writing," adding that even the suicide note produced "the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it." His reputation is unstable in a way genuine genius usually is not: huge in his lifetime, faded in America until Pushkin Press and the New York Review of Books revived him in the 1990s, largely ignored in Britain throughout. And the war record sits awkwardly against the humanist self-presentation. He was a superb popular writer whose gift was empathy and pace; whether that is genius is precisely the argument.

Legacy

His house in Petrópolis is now the Casa Stefan Zweig, a cultural centre, and the College of Europe named its 1993–94 academic year for him. The screen has been kinder than the critics: Max Ophüls filmed *Letter from an Unknown Woman* in 1948, MGM made *Marie Antoinette* with Norma Shearer in 1938, and Wes Anderson built *The Grand Budapest Hotel* (2014) on what he cheerfully admitted was "stealing" from *Beware of Pity* and *The Post Office Girl*. That last theft is the neatest summary of his afterlife: a lost Mitteleuropa, reconstructed by an admirer, running on borrowed Zweig.