Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig, c. 1912
Born	(1881-11-28)November 28, 1881 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	February 22, 1942(1942-02-22) (aged 60) Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Occupation	Novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer
Known for	The Royal Game, Amok, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Confusion
Spouse(s)	Friderike Maria von Winternitz (born Burger) (1920–1938; divorced) Lotte Altmann (1939–1942; his death)
Parent(s)	Moritz Zweig (1845–1926) Ida Brettauer (1854–1938)
Relatives	Alfred Zweig (1879–1977) (brother)
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Stefan Zweig (/zwaɪɡ, swaɪɡ/;German: [tsvaɪk]; November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world.

Zweig was born in Vienna, the son of Moritz Zweig (1845–1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer (1854–1938), a daughter of a Jewish banking family. He was related to the Czech writer Egon Hostovský, who described him as "a very distant relative"; some sources describe them as cousins.

Zweig studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and in 1904 earned a doctoral degree with a thesis on "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine". Religion did not play a central role in his education. "My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth," Zweig said later in an interview. Yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith and wrote repeatedly on Jews and Jewish themes, as in his story Buchmendel. Zweig had a warm relationship with Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, whom he met when Herzl was still literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, then Vienna's main newspaper; Herzl accepted for publication some of Zweig's early essays. Zweig believed in internationalism and in Europeanism, as The World of Yesterday, his autobiography, makes clear. According to Amos Elon, Zweig called Herzl's book Der Judenstaat an "obtuse text, [a] piece of nonsense".