
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig (November 28,
1881, Schottenring 14, Innere Stadt, Vienna
, Austria
– February
22, 1942, Petrópolis
, Brazil
) was an
Austrian
novelist, playwright, journalist
and biographer.
Life
Zweig was the son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy
Jewish textile manufacturer,
and Ida (Brettauer) Zweig, from 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.
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.
During the
First World War he took a pacifist stand together with French
writer
Romain Rolland, summoning intellectuals from all over the world to join
them in active pacifism, which 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
European Union . Like Rolland, he wrote many
biographies. He described his
Erasmus of
Rotterdam as a concealed autobiography.
Zweig fled Austria in 1934, following
Hitler's rise to power in Germany.
He 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
, 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.
Work
Stefan Zweig was a prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s. Though
he is still well-known in many European countries, his work has
become less familiar in the
anglophone world. 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.
Zweig is best known for his novels (notably
The Royal Game,
Amok,
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). 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 also provided the
libretto for the
1934 opera
Die schweigsame
Frau (
The Silent Woman) by his friend
Richard Strauss.
Strauss famously
defended him from the Nazi regime, by refusing to remove Zweig's
name from the posters for the work's première in Dresden
. As a
result,
Hitler refused to attend as planned,
and the opera was banned after three performances. Zweig later
would collaborate 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.
Bibliography
The dates mentioned below are the dates of first publication in
German.
Note: This bibliography is still incomplete. Please refer to the
German version for more
information.
Fiction
- The Love of Erika Ewald, 1904 (Original title: Die
Liebe der Erika Ewald)
- Burning Secret, 1913
(Original title: Brennendes Geheimnis)
- Letter from an
Unknown Woman, 1922 (Original title: Brief einer
Unbekannten) - novel
- Amok, 1922
(Original title: Amok) - novel, 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, 1926 (Original title: Die Unsichtbare
Sammlung) - THIS REFERENCE IS UNCERTAIN
- 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) - novel 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) - novel
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)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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)
- Amerigo, 1944 (Original title: Amerigo.
Geschichte eines historischen Irrtums) - written in 1942,
published posthumously
- 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:
Jeremies)
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)
Books on Stefan Zweig
- 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)
Notes
See also
External links