Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig was among the most widely translated writers in the world in the 1920s and 1930s, and he killed himself in Brazil in 1942 because he did not believe Europe would come back. He was born into a wealthy assimilated Jewish family in Vienna and belonged completely to the cosmopolitan literary culture of the Habsburg capital: friend of Freud, Rilke, Richard Strauss and Romain Rolland, pacifist during the First World War, collector of manuscripts. His novellas and his biographical studies of Marie Antoinette, Erasmus and Magellan sold in enormous numbers. His house in Salzburg was searched in 1934 on a pretext and he left Austria then, four years before the Anschluss made it compulsory, moving to England, then New York, then Petropolis in Brazil. The World of Yesterday, written in exile and posted to his publisher the day before he died, is his account of the world the First World War ended - a Europe of open borders and shared culture that he described as the golden age of security, knowing that describing it that way was itself a symptom. He and his second wife took veronal in February 1942. His note said his own language had gone from him and his spiritual home, Europe, had destroyed itself, and greeted his friends, hoping they might see the dawn after the long night. His work was burned in Germany in 1933 and his libretto for Richard Strauss was performed three times in 1935 before the regime stopped it, Strauss having insisted his Jewish librettist be credited. Zweig's own diagnosis of what had happened to Europe was that the generation before 1914 had mistaken security for a permanent condition. The World of Yesterday is read now mostly as evidence about that mistake.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history