Stefan Zweig (1881-1942): Home
On a sweltering ocean-liner travelling from India to Europe a passenger tells his story: the tale of a doctor in the Dutch East Indies torn between his duty and the pull of his emotions; a tale of power and desire, pride and shame and a headlong flight into folly. This is one the most intense and incisive of the novellas which brought Stefan Zweig to worldwide fame.
A casual introduction, a challenge to a simple game of chess, a lovers’ reunion, a meaningless infidelity: from such small seeds Zweig brings forth five startlingly tense tales--meditations on the fragility of love, the limits of obsession, the combustibility of secrets and betrayal. To read anything by Zweig is to risk addiction; in this collection the power of his writing--which, with its unabashed intensity and narrative drive, made him one of the bestselling and most acclaimed authors in the world--is clear and irresistible. Each of these stories is unforgettable.
Stefan Zweig was a born eulogist. In this collection of powerful elegies, homages and personal memories, Zweig forms a richly interconnected portrait of key creative figures in the European cultural diaspora up to 1939. Many of those mourned or celebrated here cast a long spiritual shadow over Zweig’s own writing life: Verhaeren, Rolland, Nietzsche, Roth, Mahler, Rilke and Freud. Zweig’s farewells, souvenirs and declarations of gratitude demonstrate his ardent pan-Europeanism and rich friendships across borders. Elegant and haunting, these tributes are a monument to his reverence for the arts and his belief in the sacredness of individualism.
"When I am on a journey, all ties suddenly fall away. I feel myself quite unburdened, disconnected, free – There is something in it marvellously uplifting and invigorating. Whole past epochs suddenly return: nothing is lost, everything still full of inception, enticement." For the insatiably curious and ardent Europhile Stefan Zweig, travel was both a necessary cultural education and a personal balm for the depression he experienced when rooted in one place for too long. He spent much of his life weaving between the countries of Europe, visiting authors and friends, exploring the continent in the heyday of international rail travel. Comprising a lifetime’s observations on Zweig’s travels in Europe, this collection can be dipped into or savoured at length, and paints a rich and sensitive picture of Europe before the Second World War.
Stefan’s Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories contains a new translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell of one of his most celebrated novellas, Letter from an Unknown Woman, the inspiration for a classic 1948 Hollywood film by Max Ophüls, as well as three new stories, appearing in English for the first time. A famous author receives a letter on his forty-first birthday. He doesn’t know the sender, but still the letter concerns him intimately. Its story is earnest, even piteous: the story of a life lived in service to an unannounced, unnoticed love. In the other stories in this collection, a young man mistakes the girl he loves for her sister; two erstwhile lovers meet after an age spent apart; and a married woman repays a debt of gratitude. All four tales, newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among Zweig’s most celebrated and compelling work.
As Europe faced its darkest days, Stefan Zweig was a passionate voice for tolerance, peace and a world without borders. In these moving, ardent essays, speeches and articles, composed before and during the Second World War, one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers mounts a defence of European unity against terror and brutality. These haunting lost messages, all appearing in English for the first time and some newly discovered, distil Zweig’s courage, belief and richness of learning to give the essence of a writer; a spiritual will and testament to stand alongside his memoir, The World of Yesterday. Brief and yet intense, they are a tragic reminder of a world lost to the ‘bloody vortex of history’, but also a powerful statement of one man’s belief in the creative imagination and the potential of humanity, with a resounding relevance today.
Ten turning points in history, vividly sketched by the great Stefan Zweig. "Such dramatically concentrated, such fateful hours, in which a timeless decision hangs on a single date, a single hour, even just a single minute, rarely occur in everyday life, and only rarely in the course of history." One of the twentieth century’s great humanists and a hugely popular fiction writer, Stefan Zweig’s historical works bring the past to life in brilliant Technicolor. This collection contains ten typically breathless and erudite dramatizations of some of the most tense and important episodes in human history. From General Grouchy’s failure to intervene at Waterloo, to the miraculous resurrection of George Frideric Handel, this, Stefan Zweig’s selection of historical turning points, newly translated by Anthea Bell, is idiosyncratic, fascinating and as always hugely readable.
"I had never heard of Zweig until six or seven years ago, as all the books began to come back into print, and I more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I immediately loved this book, his one, big, great novel--and suddenly there were dozens more in front of me waiting to read." --Wes Anderson The Society of the Crossed Keys contains Wes Anderson’s selections from the writings of the great Austrian author Stefan Zweig, whose life and work inspired The Grand Budapest Hotel. "A Conversation with Wes Anderson": Wes Anderson discusses Zweig’s life and work with Zweig biographer George Prochnik. "The World of Yesterday": Selected extracts from Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, an unrivalled evocation of bygone Europe. "Beware of Pity": An extract from Zweig’s only novel, a devastating depiction of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love. "Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman": One of Stefan Zweig’s best-loved stories in full--a passionate tale of gambling, love and death, played out against the stylish backdrop of the French Riviera in the 1920s.
"The time provides the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, and it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation – our unique generation, carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history." During his lifetime, Stefan Zweig’s (1881-1942) works were immensely popular and widely translated. In the decades after his death, he was largely forgotten in the English-speaking world. Recent years, however, have witnessed a resurgence of interest in this singular author, and Pushkin Press has been at the forefront of this movement. The World of Yesterday, Zweig’s memoir, was completed shortly before his suicide. It charts the history of Europe from nineteenth-century splendour, decadence and complacency, through the devastation of the First World War, to the resultant brutality and depravity of the Nazi regime. The World of Yesterday is a heartfelt tribute to an age of humanity and enlightenment that Zweig feared was lost for ever. An incomparable record of a lost era, this is also essential reading for those who have already fallen in love with Zweig’s fiction.
The twenty-first century has seen a renewed surge of cultural and critical interest in the works of the Austrian-Jewish author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), who was among the most-read and -acclaimed authors worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s but after 1945 fell into critical disfavor and relative obscurity. The resurgence in interest in Zweig and his works is attested to by, among other things, new English translations and editions of his works; a Brazilian motion picture and a best-selling French novel about his final days; and a renewed debate surrounding the literary quality of his work in the London Review of Books. This global return to Zweig calls for a critical reassessment of his legacy and works, which the current collection of essays provides by approaching them from a global perspective as opposed to the narrow European focus through which they have been traditionally approached. Together, the introduction and twelve essays engage the totality of Zweig's published and unpublished works from his drama and his fiction to his letters and his biographies, and from his literary and art criticism to his autobiography.
During his lifetime Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig was among the most widely read German-language writers in the world. Always controversial, he fell into critical disfavor as writers and critics in a devastated postwar Europe attacked the poor literary quality of his works and excoriated his apolitical fiction as naïve Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, Zweig’s works have enjoyed continued admiration and popularity, even canonical status. This book unveils the extraordinary success of Zweig’s novellas in China, where he has been read in an entirely different way. As Hoefle makes clear, Zweig’s works have never been passively received in China. Intermediaries have actively selected, interpreted, and translated his works for very different purposes. The present work not only re-conceptualizes our understanding of cross-cultural reception and its underlying dynamics, but proposes a serious re-evaluation of one of the most successful yet misunderstood European writers of the twentieth century. This book, with its wealth of hitherto unexplored Chinese-language sources, sheds light on the Stefan Zweig conundrum through the lens of his Chinese reception to reveal surprising, and long overlooked, literary dimensions of his works.
Among the 70,000 refugees from Nazi Germany who had entered Britain by 1939 were some of the leading literary personalities of the Weimar era. This book tells the stories of five emigre writers, two Austrian, three German - the Austrian and internationally known novelist Stefan Zweig, the leading Berlin theatre critic and essyist Alfred Kerr, the writer and poet Max Herrmann-Neisse, the radical, pacifist journalist Karl Otten, and the Austrian novelist and literary parodist Robert Neumann. All were banned from publishing in Germany from which they fled for their lives. Only Zweig was already known in Britain. Using unpublished diaries, memoirs, letters and British government records, the author follows the difficult, often dramatic and tragic lives of these men and their families in their efforts to establish themselves in British society.
This remarkable work, first published ten years ago, is a model of what multicultural, multidisciplinary scholarship should be. In a virtuoso study of three widely different yet compellingly similar human stories that begin in the late nineteenth century and end in the mid-twentieth, Leo Spitzer considers what he calls the "predicament of marginality" at a time when mainstream bourgeois culture proclaimed the virtue of assimilation; and he boldly addresses the social and moral anguish faced by subordinate peoples trying to adjust to dominant societies. Each of the three families spawned prominent figures: the best-selling author Stefan Zweig, the engineer and abolitionist Andre Reboucas, and the mayor of Freetown, Cornelius May. Yet each suffered terribly, and Spitzer offers a brilliant analysis of the historical, sociological, and psychological bases of their experiences.
