After the war, he continued to be read in Germany and Austria and remained a popular author in Europe and Latin America. Translated from his native German into 50 languages, Zweig’s books survived being burned and banned in Nazi-occupied Europe for the duration of the Third Reich. Before his death by suicide at the age of 60, he produced 15 volumes of fiction 15 volumes of non-fiction three plays an opera libretto hundreds of translations of poems hundreds of journalistic dispatches thousands of letters and his classic memoir of turn-of-the-twentieth century Vienna, The World of Yesterday. Zweig (1881–1942) was a Viennese Jew, journalist, playwright, author of fiction and non-fiction books, public intellectual, sometime pacifist, and cosmopolite. In adopting it as his own title, biographer Oliver Matuschek implicitly adopts Zweig’s own map of his life - not always the best strategy for a biographer and probably not the best one for this subject, whose life straddled many worlds. Three Lives was Stefan Zweig’s own working title for his memoir The World of Yesterday, his last complete work. Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig by Oliver Matuschek. In despair over the fate of Europe, Zweig committed suicide with his wife Elisabeth in 1942.Stefan Zweig’s was a dramatic, action-packed, intense epic of a life, but Oliver Matuschek’s biography, “Three Lives,” simply plods along. There he continued to write in protest of the Nazi regime. The Nazis burned all of his works including Jeremias, for its indictment of war.Īfter an Austrian police raid of his house in 1934 and the forced closing of the Richard Strauss opera for which he had written the libretto, Zweig emigrated to England. Zweig was a generally apolitical man whose writing reflected his sensitivity to man's struggles. His fame also rested on a series of psychological short stories and novels. A prolific author, Zweig wrote essays and plays, but it was his biographies of historical and cultural figures that made him one of the most popular writers of the interwar period. This 1917 work was an unsparing indictment of an insane war. During World War I, he wrote the influential anti-war tragedy Jeremias. Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna, Austria.

Phantastische Nacht (Transfiguration) in Amok, Stefan Zweig, 1922 Which of Stefan Zweig's Works were Burned?Īll works published before May 1933 Who was Stefan Zweig? He who has grasped the human in himself understands all mankind. Whoever has found himself can never again lose anything in this world.

But one who understands will not judge, and will have no pride.

Stefan zweig kleist