stefan zweig

Stefan Zweig (1881 Vienna - 1942 Petropolis)was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist, biographer and cosmopolitan. He advocated the idea of an united Europe under one government. Prolific writer, he was in the 1930's one of the most widely translated authors in the world.He was the son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Zweig, the daughter of an italian banking family. He studied philosophy and the history of literature, and in Vienna he was associated with the avant garde Young Vienna movement. Jewish religion did not play a central role in his education. "My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth", Zweig said later. Although his essays were published in the Neue Freie Presse, whose literary editor was the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, Zweig was not attracted to Herzl's Jewish nationalism. Zweig studied in Austria, France and Germany. Before settling in Salzburg in 1913, he travelled widely. In 1914 he married Friderike Maria Burger von Winternintz, who had started to send him fan mail already in 1901. She became also a writer; they were together for more than 20 years.During the First World War, he took a pacifist stand together with French writer Romain Rolland, summoning intellectuals from all the world to join them in active pacifism. His antiwar play, JEREMIAH, which he wrote in 1917 while still in the army, was produced in Switzerland. During the war, Zweig worked in the archives of the Austrian War Office. When his pacifist views alarmed authorities, he had to move to Zürich. Zweig remained pacifist all his life but also advocated the unification of Europe before the Nazis came. Zweig gained first name as a poet and translator, and then as a biographer, short-story writer, and novelist. He wrote many biographies but considered the one on Erasmus his most important one, which he described as a concealed autobiography. 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 Emile Verhaeren. Among Zweig's works from the 1920's are a study of Friedrich Nietzsche in Master Builders (1925), Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928), a biography of Joseph Fouché (1929), and short story collection Conflicts (1925). Zweig fled Austria in 1934 following Hitler's rise to power. He was famously defended by the composer Richard Strauss who refused to remove Zweig's name (as librettist) from the posters for the premiere, in Dresden, of his opera Die schweigsame Frau. Zweig then lived in England, before moving to the US. In 1941, he went to Brazil, where in 1942 he and his second wife Lotte committed suicide together in Petropolis, despairing at the future of Europe and its culture.His extensive travels led him to India, Africa, North and Central America, and Russia. Among his friends were : Rainer Maria Rilke Paul Valéry Maxime Gorki Romain Rolland