Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was an Austrian-born British novelist, playwright, journalist, and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the ’20s and ’30s, he was one of the most widely translated and famous writers in the world.
Born in Vienna, of secular Jewish parentage, Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany, and settled in Salzburg in 1913. He served in World War I and emerged from it a pacifist.
Zweig was first known as a poet and translator of Ben Jonson, then as a biographer of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Marie Antoinette, Joseph Fouché, and Mary Stuart. He also wrote short stories such as Kaleidoskop (1934; Kaleidoscope, 1934) and novels, including Der Zwang (1920; Passion and Pain, 1924) and Ungeduld des Herzens (1939; Beware of Pity, 1939,) all distinguished for their deep psychological insights.
Zweig’s essays include studies of Balzac, Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Émile Verhaeren.
In 1934, the Nazis drove Zweig into exile, and he immigrated to England. He lived in London until 1940 and took British nationality. He later went to the USA and Brazil, where he and his wife committed suicide in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro. His autobiographical Die Welt von Gestern (1943; The World of Yesterday, 1943) was published posthumously.
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Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses … merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces.
—Stefan Zweig
Topics: Discovery
Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can’t claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent., as one of countless human beings, I can
—Stefan Zweig
Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.
—Stefan Zweig
Topics: Solitude
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