Stefan Zweig
1881–1942
Biography
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was an Austrian writer who grew up in Vienna in a prosperous Jewish family, within the Habsburg monarchy. Through the 1920s and 1930s he was among the most translated authors in the world. He wrote novellas that probe obsession, desire and secret feelings, biographies of historical figures such as Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette, and critical studies of major novelists, Balzac, Dickens and Dostoevsky among them.
In 1934, as Nazi power grew in Germany and an authoritarian regime took hold in Austria, he left Europe for England. In 1940 he went briefly to New York and then settled in Brazil, a country he came to love and wrote about in Brazil, Land of the Future. As the years passed he grew more despairing about Europe's future, and in February 1942 he and his wife Lotte were found dead in their house at Petrópolis from a barbiturate overdose. His memoir The World of Yesterday, which appeared that year, recalls the last decades of the Habsburg empire under Franz Joseph I, and it remains one of the most read accounts of that vanished world.
Two of his books are here in German. Brennendes Geheimnis (Burning Secret, 1913) is a novella built around a secret, and Die Liebe der Erika Ewald (The Love of Erika Ewald, 1904) is an early collection of novellas. Both show the close attention to hidden inner lives that marks his fiction, with characters who keep their real feelings from the people around them.
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Books
Brennendes Geheimnis: Erzählung
by Stefan Zweig
At a resort hotel in the mountains, a bored young baron makes friends with a twelve-year-old boy in order to get close to the boy's mother. The child, delighted at first, slowly realises that the grown-ups are keeping a secret from him and sets out to discover it. A tense…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Die Liebe der Erika Ewald: Novellen
by Stefan Zweig
Four early stories by Stefan Zweig. In the title story a shy young piano teacher in Vienna is courted by a violinist and must decide what she wants from love; the others turn to devotion, longing and the wonders of faith and painting. Intense, lyrical studies of feeling at its…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.