Stefan Zweig

The biographer, dramatist, poet, essayist, and novelist Stefan Zweig grew up in Vienna in luxury and security in a wealthy, nonobservant family in the last days of the Habsburg Empire. He began writing feuilletons and poems while still a teenager, publishing his first book of poetry in 1901 and completing his doctor­ate at University of Vienna in 1904. With the rise of Hitler, Zweig moved to England in 1934 and then to the United States in 1940, but before the year was up, he left for Brazil, where, depressed by the collapse of European civilization, he committed suicide in 1942. His works were translated into many languages, and in the interwar years he was one of the most famous writers in the world. He was known particularly for his biographies of historical and literary figures and for his novellas. His much-read autobiography The World of Yesterday (1942) is both praised (as elegiac) and damned (as naïve). Always identified and iden­tifying as Jewish, Zweig’s writings—with the notable exceptions of Mendel the Bibliophile (1929) and The Buried Candelabrum (1936)—rarely address Jewish themes; even his popular grand “biblical” verse drama Jeremiah (1917) serves more as a pacifist allegory than an assertion of its author’s Jewishness.