Stefan Zweig Biography and List of Works

German biographer, essayist, short story writer, and cosmopolitan, who advocated the idea of a united Europe under one government. Zweig achieved fame with his biographies of historical characters in which he used psychoanalytical theories. Among Zweig's best-known works is BAUMEISTER DER WELT (1936, translated as Master Builders), a collection of his biographical studies. Zweig was a prolific writer, whose vivid character portraits, whether fictional or factual, were emphatically probing and believable. In the 1930s Zweig 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. Among his friends were Maksim Gorky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, and Arturo Toscanini.

DIE ZÄRTLICHKEITEN

Ich liebe jene ersten bangen Zärtlichkeiten,
die halb noch Frage sind und halb schon Anvertraum,
weil hinter ihnen schon die andern Stunden sechreiten,
die sich wie Pfeiler wuchtend in das Leben baun.

Ein Duft sind sie; des Blutes flüchtigste Berührung,
ein rascher Blick, ein Lächeln, eine leise Hand -
sie knistern schon wie rote Funken der Verführung
und stürzen Feuergarben in der Nächte Brand.

Und sind doch seltsam süss, weil sie im Spiel gegeben
noch sanft und absichtslos und leise nur verwirrt,
wie Bäume, die dem Frühlingswind entgegenbeben,
der sie in seiner harten Faust zerbrechen wird.

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna into a family of wealthy industrialist. He studied in Austria, France, and Germany. The Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, accepted his earliest essays. By 1904 he had earned a doctorate from Vienna University - his dissertation dealt with Taine. Zweig travelled widely before settling in Salzburg in 1913. The following year he married Friderike von Winternitz. 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 and later in New York in 1939.

In Salzburg Zweig lived for nearly twenty years, also travelling a good deal. During World War I he worked in the archives of the Austrian War Office, but he had to move to Zürich when his pacifist views alarmed authorities.

Zweig first became known as a poet and translator, and later as a biographer, short-story writer, and novelist. Among his works in the 1920s is a study of Friedrich Nietzsche in Master Builders (1925), STERNSTUNDEN DER MENSCHHEIT (1928), a biography of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), and a short story collection Conflicts (1925). Zwieg's essays include portraits of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich von Kleist. He was interested in the teachings of Sigmund Freud, which influenced his biographies, and translated works from such authors as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Émile Verhaeren. Several of Zweig's stories have been filmed - the best know is Letter From an Unknown Woman, directed by Max Ophuls (1947).

During the years at Salzburg Zweig began to suspect that Hitler's persecution of Jews was directed at him personally, a paranoid delusion from which he never recovered. 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. He immigrated to England in order to research work for the book on Mary, Queen of Scots. He also visited Freud, whom he had met already in the 1920s. In 1938 he became a British citizen, and in 1940, after a successful lecture tour in South America, he settled in Brazil.

Disillusioned and isolated, Zweig committed suicide with his second wife, Charlotte E. Altmann, in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro on February 23, 1942. Brazil's populist dictator, Getulio Vargas, ordered that his burial expenses should be paid for by the state. Zweig's autobiography The World of Yesterday was published posthumously in 1943. In the same year his famous novella The Royal Game, which uses two games of chess to illustrate the psychology of Nazism, was published. In the story Czentovic, a semiliterate peasant chess champion travels on a ship from Europe to South America. 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. first began to play chess while in solitary confinement after the Gestapo arrested him. His game against Czentovic becomes an imprisonment of logic for him and 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?" Chess becomes an image of life, in which people move without free will in the hands of gods.

In World Authors 1900-1950 (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 but they still offer inspiring insights into historical figures and are a good source for further investigation.

For further reading: Moral Values and the Human Zoo by D. Turner (1946); Stefan Zweig: A Tribute, ed. by H. Arens (1951); Stefan Zweig: A Bibliography by R.J. Klawitzer (1965); European of Yesterday by D.A. Prater (1972); Stefan Zweig by E. Allday (1972); Lives in Between by L. Spitzer (1990); World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996) - Film adaptations: Brennendes Geheimnis by Robert Siodmark (1933); Amok, dir. by Fedor Ozep (1934); Valkoiset ruusut, dir. by Hannu Leminen (1943); Beware of the Pity, dir. by Maurice Elvey (1946); Letter from an Unknown Woman, dir. by Max Ophuls (1947); Schachnovelle, dir. by Gerd Oswald (1960); Burning Secret, dir. by Andrew Birkin (1989) - See also: Nelly Sachs, Gabriela Mistral, Rainer Maria Rilke.

SILBERNE SAITEN, (1901)