ZWEIG, STEFAN. – Austrian writer, born in Vienna into a prosperous Jewish family on 28 February 1881, died by suicide together with his wife in Petropolis on 23 February 1942.
The Viennese environment offered him in his early youth everything necessary for his spirit, eager to receive the most vital aspirations of humanity in its various tendencies and manifestations. The journeys he undertook after graduating in philosophy increased his experience and his innate, exceptional capacity for understanding and feeling. His studies on Baudelaire (1902), Verlaine (1907), E. Verhaeren (1910), and R. Rolland (1920), and his biographies: Marie Antoinette (1932), Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (1934), Maria Stuard (1935), bear witness to his stays in various countries and his relations with writers 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 psychological acumen, inseparable from a superior ideal of humanity, and his narrative art, which often reaches 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 prevailed. Die Kette, three volumes of stories (Erstes Erlebnis, 1911; Legende eines Lebens, 1919; Amok, 1921; Die Augen des ewigen Bruders, 1925; Verwarrung der Gefühle, 1926, etc.), impresses us through its profound knowledge of the human spirit, as well as through Z.’s extraordinary sensitivity. His ideal was European spiritual unity
above every barrier and division. The drama Jeremias, which is perhaps his finest theatrical work, expresses his intimate revolt against war, an instrument of destruction of the hoped-for European fraternity. Political circumstances instead forced him to leave Vienna permanently in 1938, seeking refuge in the Stati Uniti, Argentina, and finally Brasile. But when neutrality ceased here as well, he was unable to find the strength to continue his nomadic life. The moral and material destruction of Europe, which frustrated the purpose of his entire existence, devoted to achieving a spiritual understanding among peoples, was the principal cause of his suicide.