Zweig, Stefan

ZWEIG, STEFAN. - Austrian writer, b. in Vienna to a well-to-do Jewish family on 28 Feb. 1881, d. by suicide together with his wife at Petropolis on 23 Feb. 1942.

In his early youth the Viennese milieu offered him whatever his spirit, eager to embrace the most vital demands of humanity in its various tendencies and manifestations, required. The journeys he undertook after taking his degree in philosophy increased his experiences and his innate, exceptional gift for understanding and feeling. His studies on Baudelaire (1902), Verlaine (1907), E. Verhaeren (1910), R. Rolland (1920), and his biographies: Marie Antoinette (1932), Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (1934), Maria Stuard (1935), bear witness to his sojourns in various countries and his relations with men of letters of other nations; while his essays in triptychs: Drei Meister (Balzac, Dickens, Dostojewsky; 1919), Der Kampf mit dem Dämon (Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche; 1925), Drei Dichter ihres Lebens (Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoi; 1928), Die Heilung durch den Geist (Mesmer, Mary Backer-Eddy, Freud; 1931), reveal his acumen as a psychologist, not divorced from a superior ideal of humanity, and his narrative art, which often touches accents of undoubted poetry. He also attempted lyric poetry (Silberne Saiten, 1900; Die früheren Kränze, 1907); but the theatre (Tersites, 1907; Das Haus am Meer, 1912; Jeremias, 1917; Das Lamm des Armen, 1930) and especially narrative prose prevailed. Die Kette, 3 vols. of short stories (Erstes Erlebnis, 1911; Legende eines Lebens, 1919; Amok, 1921; Die Augen des ewigen Bruders, 1925; Verwarrung der Gefühle, 1926, etc.), strikes us for its profound knowledge of the human spirit, as well as for Z.'s extraordinary sensitivity. His ideal was European spiritual unity above every barrier and division. The drama Jeremias, which is perhaps his best theatrical work, expresses his intimate revolt against war, the instrument of destruction of the hoped-for European brotherhood. Political circumstances, however, forced him to leave Vienna definitively in 1938 to seek refuge in the United States, in Argentina and finally in Brazil. But when neutrality ceased even here, he could not find the strength to continue his nomadic life. The moral and material destruction of Europe, which frustrated the aim of his entire existence, strained toward the achievement of a spiritual understanding among peoples, was the principal cause of his suicide.

Sergio Lupi