Stefan Zweig
In 1881, on 28 November, Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna, a city that would shape the world he later wrote about across a wide range of literary forms.
Educated at the University of Vienna, Zweig worked throughout his career as a novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, biographer, historian, literary critic, journalist, and translator. He was also a musician and a collector. An Austrian citizen who had also been a citizen of Cisleithania, he held pacifist convictions and composed his work primarily in German, while also working in French, English, Spanish, and Italian. Among his notable works of fiction and prose are Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Post Office Girl, and The Royal Game, alongside the non-fiction work The World of Yesterday.
The range of languages in which Zweig worked — German, French, English, Spanish, and Italian — reflects the breadth of his engagement with European literary culture. As a translator as well as an original writer, he moved across the boundaries of genre and national tradition throughout his career. His output spanned fiction, drama, poetry, biography, history, journalism, and criticism, making him one of the more versatile literary figures of his era.
Zweig died in Petrópolis on a date recorded variously as 22 or 23 February 1942. He was sixty years old at the time of his death, having been born in November 1881. The works he left behind — including The World of Yesterday, The Royal Game, and Letter from an Unknown Woman — remain among the titles associated with his name and continue to appear in discussions of his career.
Quotes by Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig's insights on:
He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime.
The longest voyage of discovery, the boldest adventure in the records of our race, had begun.
Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don’t get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.
They did nothing – other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.
The clouds floating white and restless in the sky were those you see only in May or June. They were innocent companions, still young and flighty, who ran playfully across the blue road to hide suddenly behind high mountains, linking arms and running away, sometimes crumpling up like handkerchiefs, sometimes unravelling into streamers, and eventually playing a practical joke by setting themselves down on the mountain like white caps.
For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.
And the child – your child – was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.
My today and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one, but several existences, each one different from the others.