Stefan Zweig
(1881-1942)
Austrian biographer, essayist, short story writer, and cosmopolitan,
who advocated the idea of an united Europe under one government. Stefan
Zweig achieved fame with his vivid and psychoanalytically-oriented
biographies of historical characters. Among his best-known works is
BAUMEISTER DER WELT (1936, translated as Master Builders), a collection
of his biographical studies. Zweig was a prolific writer. In the 1930s
he was one of the most widely translated authors in the world. His
extensive travels led him to India, Africa, North and Central America,
and Russia. Zweig's friends included Maksim Gorky, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Auguste Rodin, and Arturo Toscanini.
Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna, the son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy
Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida (Brettauer) Zweig, the daughter of
an Italian banker family. However, 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. His early life
Zweig devoted to aesthetic matters. Although his essays were accepted by
the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, literary editor of the Neue Freie
Presse, Zweig was not attracted to Herzl's Jewish nationalism. Zweig
studied in Austria, France, and Germany. By 1904 he had earned a
doctorate from Vienna University – his dissertation dealt with Hippolyte
Taine. Before settling in Salzburg in 1913, Zweig traveled widely. In
1914 he married Friderike Maria Burger von Winternitz (1882-1971), who
had started to send him fan mail already in 1901. She became also a
writer; they were together for more than twenty years. Friderike had two
daughters from her previous marriage.
Zweig's first work, SILBERNE SAITEN, a collection of poems, appeared
in 1901. His antiwar play, JEREMIAH, which he wrote in 1917 while still
in the army, was produced in Switzerland. The Biblical play was inspired
by World War I. In New York it was performed in 1939. Zweig's other
early plays include TERSITES (1907), a tragedy written in blank-verse,
and DAS HAUSE AM MEER (1912), which dramatized the American
Revolutionary War.
In Salzburg, a city of 17th- and 18th-century houses, Zweig lived for
nearly twenty years, also traveling a good deal. During World War I, he
worked in the archives of the Austrian War Office. When his pacifist
views alarmed authorities, he had to move to Zürich. Berlin and
especially its nightlife of the Twenties appalled Zweig: "Along the
entire Kurfürstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they
were not all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some
money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government official and
men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without
any shame."
Zweig gained first fame as a poet and translator, and then as a
biographer, short-story writer, and novelist. His collection of
autographs and manuscripts of writers and artists grew into a unique
personal collection, which achieved international renown; it has been
viewed as an integral part of Zweig's literary oeuvre. In one of his
stories, 'Buchmendel' (1929) Zweig portrayed a Galician bookseller,
whose customer, Jakob Mendel, "knew nothing about the world, for all the
phenomena of existence only began to be real for him when they were
moulded into letters, gathered in a book and, as it were, sterilized. He
did not read even these books, however, for their meaning, for their
intellectual and narrative content: it was only their names, their
prices, their physical appearance, and their title-pages, that attracted
his passion." The narrator's ambivalence towards Mendel has been
interpreted as a kind of self-criticism – Zweig was aware of his own
tendency to "conceive culture as a glass bead game of the the spirit."
(The 'Jewish Question' in German Literature 1749-1939 by Ritchie
Robertson, 2002)
Zweig was interested in the teachings of Sigmund Freud, which
influenced also his biographies, and translated works from such authors
as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Émile Verhaeren. Among Zweig's
works from the 1920s are a study of Friedrich Nietzsche in Master
Builders (1925), STERNSTUNDEN DER MENSCHHEIT (1928), a biography of the
French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), and short story collection
Conflicts (1925). Zweig's essays include portraits of Honoré de Balzac,
Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich
von Kleist. In Casanova, whom Zweig dismissed as "a mere pretender in
the world of letters", he admired his ability to make friends with
emperors and kings, and secure immortality. The essay was published in
DREI DICHTER IHRES LEBENS (1928, Adepts in Self-Portraiture). Erasmus,
the famous Duch humanist, Zweig considered his spirirual ancestor ("the
most eloquent advocate of the humanist ideal of friendship towards the
world and the spirit"), and portrayed him in TRIUMPH UND TRAGIK DES
ERASMUS ROTTERDAM (1934, Erasmus of Rotterdam). Luther represented the
opposite of Erasmus, "the revolutionary; driven by the demonic energies
lurking in the German people". With his views about Germany's "national
spirit" Zweig was not alone – the book was published a few years after
the Nazis had seized power.
During the years at Salzburg, Zweig began to suspect that Hitler's
persecution of Jews was directed at him personally. He never recovered
from this paranoia. EINE BLASSBLAUE FRAUENSCHRIFT (1941), set in prewar
Vienna, showed how anti-Semitism had spread into all levels of the state
apparatus. The protagonist, an influential government official and an
opportunist, is morally too weak to change anything in his life or
restore his integrity. DIE SCHWEIGSAME FRAU (1935), an opera for which
Zweig wrote the libretto and Richard Strauss composed the music, was
banned by the Nazis and Zweig was driven into exile. Ironically, before
their comedy was performed in Dresden, Stauss said to Zweig: "If you
just could see and hear how good our work is, you would drop all race
worries and political misgivings with which you, incomprehensibly to me,
unnecessarily weight down your artist's mind..."
Zweig immigrated first to England to do research work for the book on
Mary, Queen of Scots. He also visited Freud, whom he had met already in
the 1920s. UNGEDULD DES HERZENS (1938), a black love story, shows
Zweig's familiarity with the psychoanalytical idea of the sense of
guilt. Anton Hofmiller, the narrator, is drawn into the life of a young,
crippled girl. Hofmiller responds to her need to be loved with feelings
of guilt and pity, eventually defects her and she commits suicide.
In 1938 Zweig became a British citizen, and in 1940, after a
successful lecture tour in South America, he settled in Brazil. Zweig
had divorced Friderike in 1938 and the next year married Charlotte
Altmann, his secretary from 1933; she was twenty-seven years his junior.
In Brazil: A Land of the Future (1941) Zweig examined the history,
economy, culture of the country, and depicted his impressions of the
cities. Quoting Amerigo Vespucci, he describes how the first European
seamen saw the new land: "If paradise on earth exists anywhere in the
world, it cannot lie very far from here!"
The fall of Singapore in 1942 made Zweig fear that Nazism would
eventually conquer the world. Disillusioned and isolated, Zweig
committed suicide with his wife near Rio de Janeiro on February 23,
1942. Brazil's populist dictator, Getulio Vargas, ordered that the
burial expenses should be paid by the state. Zweig's nostalgic but
rather impersonal memoirs of the "Golden Age of Security", The World of
Yesterday, was published posthumously in 1943. The work did not have any
reference to his marriage, but it nevertheless condemned puritanical
attitudes and sexual hypocrisy. Like Joseph Roth in Radetzkymarsch
(1932), Zweig could not accept cultural values of his day, but did not
idealize the prewar Hapsburg Empire. "Even in the abyss of despair in
which today, half-blinded, we grope about with distorted and broken
souls, I look again and again to those old star patterns that shone over
my childhood, and comfort myself with the inherited confidence that this
collapse will appear, in days to come, as a mere interval in the eternal
rhythm of the onward and onward."
The Royal Game, also published in 1943, used two games of chess to
illustrate the psychology of Nazism. Mirko Czentovic, a semiliterate son
of a Danube boatman, "incapable of writing any sentence in any language
without making spelling mistakes", travels on a ship from Europe to
South America. However, he is the world chess champion. He wins the
first game, but the second against Dr. B., a Viennese lawyer and refuge,
occupies the central part of the story. Dr. B. has started to play chess
with himself in solitary confinement, when he was arrested by Gestapo.
During his game against Czentovic he breaks down. "But are we not
already guilty of an insulting limitation in calling chess a game? Isn't
it also a science, and art, hovering between these two categories like
Muhammad's coffin hovered between heaven and earth?" As in Vladimir
Nabokov's novel The Defense (1930), chess becomes an allegory of
alienation, in which people, estranged from life, move like characters
on a giant chessboard.
In World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 4. (1996) Zweig wrote, that "my main
interest in writing has always been the psychological representation of
personalities and their lives and this was also the reason which
prompted me to write various essays and biographical studies of
well-known personalities". The popularity of Zweig's biographies has
gradually declined and his humanism, based on the values of the late
nineteenth-century Viennese liberalism, has been an easy target for
criticism. However, his work still offer inspiring insights into the
lives of great historical figures and are good sources for further
investigation. Several of Zweig's stories have been filmed – the
best-know is perhaps Letter From an Unknown Woman, directed by Max
Ophüls (1947), starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan.
