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Stefan Zweig
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
Stefan Zweig |
Stefan Zweig
German Literature Companion:
Stefan Zweig |
Zweig, Stefan (Vienna, 1881-1942, Petrópolis nr. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, by suicide), of Jewish descent, studied at Berlin and Vienna universities and afterwards travelled extensively. In the 1914-18 War he developed pacifist views and moved to Zurich (where he met Romain Rolland) in order to be able to express them. Between the wars he lived chiefly in Salzburg, emigrating in 1938 to England. After a short period in New York he settled in Brazil.
Zweig's early collections of poems, Silberne Saiten (1901) and Die frühen Kränze (1906), are neo-Romantic (see Neuromantik) and related to those of H. von Hofmannsthal. His work was most deeply influenced, however, by the psychology of S. Freud, notably the stories Erstes Erlebnis (1911), Amok (1922), Verwirrung der Gefühle (1927, all titles of collections), Brennendes Geheimnis (1913), Angst (1920, shortened version 1925), the legend Der begrabende Leuchter (1937), and, written during his last months, Schachnovelle (1942). In this highly intricate narrative the game of chess provides an analogy to the psychological deterioration of a Jewish intellectual under interrogation by the Gestapo. Zweig wrote several plays, including Tereites (1907), Das Haus am Meer (1912), and Jeremias (1917), and provided R. Strauss with the libretto for Die schweigsame Frau (1935). He also made a translation of Ben Jonson's Volpone (1926), which had a successful run on the stage.
Zweig found his most congenial form in perceptive biographical essays on poets and artists, which concentrate on their inner conflicts and on the creative process. Drei Meister (1920) contained studies of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky; Der Kampf mit dem Dämon (1925) has as its subjects Hölderlin, H. von Kleist, and Nietzsche. Essays on Casanova, Stendhal and Tolstoy make up Drei Dichter ihres Lebens (1928). Zweig is also the author of the longer biographical studies Romain Rolland (1921), J. Fouché (1929), Marie Antoinette (1932), Maria Stuart (1935), and Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (1935), which has an equal claim with the later Schachnovelle to be his best work. With Castellio gegen Calvin. Ein Gewissen gegen die Gewalt (1936), these works were statements against fascism. Zweig's most ambitious project, Balzac (1946), was after his death edited with a postscript by R. Friedenthal. His poetry was collected in Die gesammelten Gedichte (1924) and his shorter biographical essays in Baumeister der Welt (1936). He created a new minor genre in his ‘historical miniatures’ (Miniaturen), Sternstunden der Menschheit (1927, expanded in 1936, and again in a posthumous edition, 1943). Apart from the biographies romancées on Marie Antoinette and Mary Stuart, he wrote one novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1939; its English title and that of its film version, Beware of Pity, corresponds to its working title). It confirmed Zweig's exceptional international standing among the reading public. Die Welt von Gestern (1942) is autobiographical and, though written from memory, a remarkable cultural document of his age and generation; it also shows his humanist and pacifist attitude which he had first adopted in the spring of 1915 (the conception of Jeremias), and which, together with his emphatic European outlook, formed the basis of his friendship with Romain Rolland. Many of his numerous essays and speeches are devoted to its cause. His correspondence with R. Strauss, ed. W. Schuh, appeared in 1957 and with P. Zech, Briefe 1910-1942, ed. D. G. Daviau, in 1984, with H. Bahr, S. Freud, Rilke, and Schnitzler, ed. J. B. Berlin, H.-U. Lindken, and D. Prater, and with Rolland (1910-40, 2 vols.) in 1987.
Gesammelte Werke (19 unnumbered vols.) appeared in 1946-67 and (25 unnumbered vols.), ed. K. Beck, in 1982 ff. It includes his unfinished novel Rausch der Verwandlung (1982) and his diaries, Tagebücher (1984), in which he wrote the section ‘The Diary of the second war’ (1 September to 17 December 1939) in English, thus underlining the bitter finality of exile from German-speaking lands.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
Stefan Zweig |
Zweig, Stefan (shtĕf'än tsvīk), 1881-1942, Austrian biographer, poet, and novelist. Born in Vienna of a well-to-do Jewish family, he was part of the humanitarian, pan-European cultural circle that included Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. Zweig's first works were poetry and a poetic drama, Jeremias (1917, tr. 1929), which expressed his passionately antiwar feelings. Under National Socialism he went into exile in 1934, emigrating first to England. In 1941 he and his second wife went to Brazil, where they committed suicide. Zweig's best-known works of fiction are Ungeduld des Herzens (1938, tr. Beware of Pity, 1939) and Schachnovelle (1944, tr. The Royal Game, 1944), but his most outstanding accomplishments were his many biographies, which were based on psychological interpretation. The subjects of these include Marie Antoinette, Erasmus, Mary Queen of Scots, Magellan, Balzac, and Verlaine. Zweig's historical perception is best evident in Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928, tr. The Tide of Fortune, 1940).
Bibliography
See his autobiography, The World of Yesterday (1943); biographies by D. A. Prater (1972) and E. Allday (1972).
| Dictionary: Zweig, Stefan |
Austrian writer of poetry, fiction, and sensitive psychoanalytic biographies, notably Three Masters (1920), a study of Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky.
Psychoanalysis:
Stefan Zweig |
1881-1942
Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer, was born in Vienna on November 28, 1881, and committed suicide in Petrópolis, Brazil, on February 22, 1942. From a wealthy middle-class Jewish family, Zweig enjoyed a privileged childhood. He grew up in an open-minded and multilingual home—a background that undoubtedly played a role in his subsequent commitment to humanist and supranationalist thought. While young he became a celebrated author, traveled widely, and developed friendships with a host of literary figures, among them the French novelist and playwright Romain Rolland and the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, whose work he translated. Zweig's best-know works include the novels Amok (1922), Beware of Pity (1938), and Conflicts (1926), a collection that includes the novella Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman. His autobiography, The World of Yesterday, appeared posthumously in 1943.
Zweig's work, at once distinguished by its richness and diversity, includes poetry, plays, essays, short stories, novels, and biographies. He was one of the most prolific authors of his time and played a major role in creating a rapprochement between French and German literature.
In Mental Healers (1932), Zweig not only discussed Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and Franz Mesmer's animal magnetism; he also devoted an essay to Freud, for whom he expressed profound admiration and gratitude. In 1908 Zweig and Freud began a long correspondence that continued until the latter's death in London in 1939. Zweig delivered Freud's funeral oration.
In Zweig's letter to Freud of September 8, 1926, he wrote, "For me, psychology is today the great passion of my life (as you will understand better than anyone else). . . . You still play the decisive role in the invisible struggle for the soul. You alone are always the one to explain to us, in a creative way, the mechanism of the spiritual. More than ever we need you and your activity." Later, in his letter of October 21, 1932, he wrote, "Everything I write is marked by your influence and you understand, perhaps, that the courage to tell the truth, probably the essential thing in my books, comes from you: You have served as a model for an entire generation." Zweig's interest in psychoanalysis found expression in his writings. In both his novels and fictionalized biographies, the main characters are presented in "case histories," made more intriguing by a nostalgic evocation of a society condemned by history.
Freud recognized in Zweig an interest in, and aptitude for, psychological analysis. Although they argued several times—over errors Zweig made in translating Freud's work and concerning Zweig's appreciation of such detractors as Charles E. Maylan—Freud valued Zweig's friendship until the end of his life.
After the Nazis prohibited and destroyed his books in 1933, Zweig emigrated to London in 1934. Together with Salvador Dali, he visited Freud on July 19, 1938. Since Freud was near death, Zweig did not dare to show him the two sketches that Dali had made of him. In his last letter to Freud, dated September, 14, 1939, nine days before Freud's death, he wrote, "I hope that you are suffering only from the era, as we all do, and not also from physical pain. We must stand firm now—it would be absurd to die without having first seen the criminals sent to hell."
After obtaining British citizenship in 1940, Zweig settled in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1941. He became a symbol of the anguish of exile and the refusal to accept Hitler's early triumphs. Despite this, in profound despair after Nazi victories early in the war, he committed suicide together with his second wife, Lotte Altmann.
In his final declaration Zweig wrote, "It seems to me therefore better to put an end, in good time and without humiliation, to a life in which intellectual work has always been an unmixed joy and personal freedom earth's most precious possession." "I greet all my friends! May they live to see the dawn after the long night is over! I, all too impatient, am going on alone" (Allday, 1972, p. 238).
Bibliography
Allday, Elizabeth. (1972). Stefan Zweig: A critical biography. Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara.
Freud, Sigmund, and Zweig, Stefan. (1987). Correspondence. Paris: Rivages Poche.
Niémetz, Serge. (1996). Stefan Zweig: Le voyageur et ses mondes. Paris: Belfond.
Zweig, Stefan. (1932). Mental healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud. New York: Viking Press.
Further Reading
Mijolla, Alain de. (1998). Freud, biography, his autobiography, and his biographers. Psychoanalysis and History, 1 (1), 4-27.
—CHRISTINEDE KERCHOVE
Wikipedia:
Stefan Zweig |
Not to be confused with Stefanie Zweig.
See also: Zweig
Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881, Schottenring 14[1], Innere Stadt, Vienna, Austria – February 22, 1942, Petrópolis, Brazil) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer.
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Contents
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Life
Zweig was the son of Moritz Zweig (1845-1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Zweig née Brettauer (1854-1938), from an Jewish banking family. Joseph Brettauer did business for twenty years in Ancona, Italy, where his second daughter Ida was born and grew up, too. Zweig studied philosophy at the university of Vienna and in 1904 earned a doctoral degree with a thesis on "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine". Religion did not play a central role in his education. "My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth," Zweig said later in an interview. Yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith and wrote repeatedly on Jewish themes. 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.
In the First World War Zweig served in the Archives of the Ministry of War, and soon acquired a pacifist stand like his friend Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1915. Zweig remained pacifist all his life and advocated the unification of Europe. Like Rolland, he wrote many biographies. His Erasmus of Rotterdam he called a "concealed self-portrayal" in The World of Yesterday.
Zweig fled Austria in 1934, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany. He then lived in England (in London and from 1939 in Bath) before moving to the United States in 1940. In 1941 he went to Brazil, where in 1942 he and his second wife Lotte (née Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann) committed suicide together in Petrópolis,[2] despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth," he wrote. His autobiography The World of Yesterday is a paean to the European culture he considered lost.
Work
Stefan Zweig was a prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s. Though he is still well-known in many European countries, his work has become less familiar in the anglophone world. Since the 1990s there has been an effort on the part of several publishers (notably Pushkin Press and New York Review of Books) to get Zweig back into print in English.
Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Royal Game, Amok), novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion of Feelings, and the posthumously published The Post Office Girl) and biographies (notably Erasmus of Rotterdam, Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles). At one time his works were published in English under the pseudonym 'Stephen Branch' (a translation of his real name) when anti-German sentiment was running high. His biography of Queen Marie-Antoinette was later adapted for a Hollywood movie, starring the actress Norma Shearer in the title role.
Zweig also provided the libretto for the 1934 opera Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) by Richard Strauss. Strauss famously defended him from the Nazi regime, by refusing to remove Zweig's name from the posters for the work's première in Dresden. As a result, Hitler refused to attend as planned, and the opera was banned after three performances. Zweig later would collaborate with Joseph Gregor, to provide Strauss with the libretto for one other opera, Daphne, in 1937. At least[3] one other work by Zweig received a musical setting: the pianist and composer Henry Jolles, who like Zweig had fled to Brazil to escape the Nazis, composed a song, "Último poema de Stefan Zweig",[4] based on "Letztes Gedicht", which Zweig wrote on the occasion of his 60th birthday in November 1941.[5]
There are important Zweig collections at the British Library and at the State University of New York at Fredonia. The British Library's Zweig Music Collection was donated to the library by his heirs in May 1986. It specialises in autograph music manuscripts, including works by Bach, Haydn, Wagner, and Mahler. It has been described as "one of the world's greatest collections of autograph manuscripts".[6] One particularly precious item is Mozart's "Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke"[7] - that is, the composer's own handwritten thematic catalogue of his works.
Bibliography
The dates mentioned below are the dates of first publication in German.
Note: This bibliography is still incomplete. Please refer to the German version for more information.
Fiction
- The Love of Erika Ewald, 1904 (Original title: Die Liebe der Erika Ewald)
- Burning Secret, 1913 (Original title: Brennendes Geheimnis)
- Letter from an Unknown Woman, 1922 (Original title: Brief einer Unbekannten) - novella
- Amok, 1922 (Original title: Amok) - novella, initially published with several others in Amok. Novellen einer Leidenschaft
- Fear, 1925 (Original title: Angst. Novelle)
- The Eyes of My Brother, Forever, 1925 (Original title: Die Augen des ewigen Bruders)
- The Invisible Collection see Collected Stories below , (Original title: Die Unsichtbare Sammlung, first published in book form in 'Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr 1927'[8])
- The Refugee, 1927 (Original title: Der Flüchtling. Episode vom Genfer See).
- Confusion of Feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D, 1927 (Original title: Verwirrung der Gefühle) - novella initially published in the volume Verwirrung der Gefühle: Drei Novellen
- Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman, 1927 (Original title: Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau) - novella initially published in the volume Verwirrung der Gefühle: Drei Novellen
- Short stories, 1930 (Original title: Kleine Chronik. Vier Erzählungen) - includes Buchmendel
- Collected Stories, 1936 (Original title: Gesammelte Erzählungen) - two volumes of short stories:
1. The Chains (Original title: Die Kette)
2. Kaleidoscope (Original title: Kaleidoskop). Includes: Casual Knowledge of a Craft, Leporella, Fear, Burning Secret, Summer Novella, The Governess, Buchmendel, The Refugee, The Invisible Collection, Fantastic Night and Moonbeam Alley - Beware of Pity, 1939 (Original title: Ungeduld des Herzens) novel
- The Royal Game or Chess Story (Original title: Schachnovelle; Buenos Aires, 1942) - novella written in 1938-41, published posthumously
- Clarissa, 1981 unfinished novel, published posthumously
- The Post Office Girl, 1982 (Original title: Rausch der Verwandlung. Roman aus dem Nachlaß; The Intoxication of Metamorphosis) - unfinished novel, published posthumously, and in 2008 for the first time in English.
Biographies and Historical Texts
- Béatrice Gonzalés-Vangell, Kaddish et Renaissance, La Shoah dans les romans viennois de Schindel, Menasse et Rabinovici, Septentrion, Valenciennes, 2005, 348 pages.
- Emile Verhaeren, 1910
- Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky, 1920 (Original title: Drei Meister. Balzac – Dickens – Dostojewski)
- Romain Rolland. The Man and His Works, 1921 (Original title: Romain Rolland. Der Mann und das Werk)
- Nietzsche, 1925 (Originally published in the volume titled: Der Kampf mit dem Dämon. Hölderlin – Kleist – Nietzsche)
- Decisive Moments in History, 1927 (Original title: Sternstunden der Menschheit)
- Adepts in Self-Portraiture: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy, 1928 (Original title: Drei Dichter ihres Lebens. Casanova – Stendhal – Tolstoi)
- Joseph Fouché, 1929 (Original title: Joseph Fouché. Bildnis eines politischen Menschen)
- Mental Healers: Franz Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, 1932 (Original title: Die Heilung durch den Geist. Mesmer, Mary Baker-Eddy, Freud)
- Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, 1932 (Original title: Marie Antoinette. Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters)
- Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1934 (Original title: Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam)
- Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles or The Queen of Scots, 1935 (Original title: Maria Stuart)
- The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin, 1936 (Original title: Castellio gegen Calvin oder Ein Gewissen gegen die Gewalt)
- Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, 1938 (Original title: Magellan. Der Mann und seine Tat)
- Amerigo, 1944 (Original title: Amerigo. Geschichte eines historischen Irrtums) - written in 1942, published posthumously
- Balzac, 1946 - written, as Richard Friedenthal describes in a postscript, by Zweig in the Brazilian summer capital of Petrópolis, without access to the files, notebooks, lists, tables, editions and monographs that Zweig accumulated for many years and that he took with him to Bath, but that he left behind when he went to America. Friedenthal wrote that Balzac "was to be his magnum opus, and he had been working at it for ten years. It was to be a summing up of his own experience as an author and of what life had taught him." Friedenthal claimed that "The book had been finished," though not every chapter was complete; he used a working copy of the manuscript Zweig left behind him to apply "the finishing touches," and Friedenthal rewrote the final chapters (Balzac, translated by William and Dorothy Rose [New York: Viking, 1946], pp. 399, 402).
Plays
- Tersites, 1907 (Original title: Tersites)
- Das Haus am Meer, 1912
- Jeremiah, 1917 (Original title: Jeremias)
Other
- The World of Yesterday (Original title: Die Welt von Gestern; Stockholm, 1942) - autobiography
- Brazil, Land of the Future (Original title: Brasilien. Ein Land der Zukunft; Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm 1941)
Books on Stefan Zweig
- Elizabeth Allday, Stefan Zweig: A Critical Biography, J. Philip O'Hara, Inc., Chicago, 1972
- Alberto Dines, Morte no Paraíso, a Tragédia de Stefan Zweig, Editora Nova Fronteira 1981, (rev. ed.) Editora Rocco 2004
- Alberto Dines, Tod im Paradies. Die Tragödie des Stefan Zweig, Edition Büchergilde, 2006
- Randolph J. Klawiter, Stefan Zweig. An International Bibliography, Ariadne Press, Riverside, 1991
- Donald A. Prater, European of Yesterday: A Biography of Stefan Zweig, Holes and Meier Publ., (rev. ed.) 2003
- Marion Sonnenfeld (editor), The World of Yesterday's Humanist Today. Proceedings of the Stafan Zweig Symposium, texts by Alberto Dines, Randolph J. Klawiter, Leo Spitzer and Harry Zohn, State University of New York Press, 1983
- Friderike Zweig, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1946 (An account of his life by his first wife)
Notes
- ^ Prof.Dr. Klaus Lohrmann "Jüdisches Wien. Kultur-Karte" (2003), Mosse-Berlin Mitte gGmbH (Verlag Jüdische Presse)
- ^ The United Press (February 24, 1942). "STEFAN ZWEIG, WIFE END LIVES IN BRAZIL". The New York Times. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70815FA3A5F167B93C6AB1789D85F468485F9. Retrieved 10 April 2009.
- ^ http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/z/zweig/
- ^ Musica Reanimata of Berlin, Henry Jolles accessed Jan 25, 2009
- ^ Biographical sketch of Stefan Zweig at Casa Stefan Zweig accessed September 28, 2008
- ^ The Zweig Music Collection at the British Library
- ^ Mozart's "Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke" at the British Library Online Gallery[1] accessed October 14th, 2009
- ^ http://openlibrary.org/b/OL6308795M/unsichtbare_sammlung.
See also
External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Stefan Zweig |
- Zweig Music Collection at the British Library
- Stefan Zweig Collection at the Daniel A. Reed Library, State University of New York at Fredonia, Fredonia, NY
- Stefan Zweig Online Bibliography, a wiki hosted by Daniel A. Reed Library, State University of New York at Fredonia, Fredonia, NY
- StefanZweig.org
- StefanZweig.de
- PushkinPress.com English editions of Stefan Zweig's novellas
- 'Beware of Pity' - The New York Review of Books at www.nybooks.com A lengthy review of Beware of Pity June 2006
- Stefan Zweig: The Secret Superstar, from Intelligent Life Magazine
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Mentioned in
- Die Schweigsame Frau (music)
- Beware of Pity (1946 Drama Film)
- Impaciencia del Corazon (1960 Film)
- Affair in Monte Carlo (1953 Drama Film)
- La Paura (1955 Drama Film)
- Vingt-Quatre Heures de la Vie d'une Femme (1968 Drama Film)
- Franta (1989 Film)
- 24 Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau (1931 Drama Film)
- Amok (1993 Drama Film)
- Amok (1934 Drama Film)
- Oviedo Express (2007 Comedy Drama Film)
- Marie-Antoinette (person)
- Friedenstag (Peace Day) (Album by Richard Strauss)
- Almanach der Psychoanalyse (psychoanalysis)
