Stefanie Zweig

Stefanie Zweig
Stefanie Zweig, 2008
Born	(1932-09-19)September 19, 1932 Leobschütz, Germany
Died	April 25, 2014(2014-04-25) (aged 81) Frankfurt, Germany
Occupation	Author
Language	German
Nationality	German
Notable works	Nowhere in Africa
Partner	Wolfgang Häfele

Stefanie Zweig (19 September 1932 – 25 April 2014) was a German Jewish writer and journalist. She is best known for her autobiographical novel, Nirgendwo in Afrika [Nowhere in Africa] (1995), which was a bestseller in Germany. The novel is based on her early life in Kenya, where her family had fled to escape persecution in Nazi Germany. The film adaptation of the novel (2002) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Her books have sold more than seven million copies, and have been translated into fifteen languages.

Zweig was born in Leobschütz, Germany (now Głubczyce, Poland). Her parents and she, being Jewish, fled to Africa in 1938 to escape persecution in Nazi Germany. They went from a prosperous urban life in Breslau (now Wrocław) to a poor farm in Kenya; Zweig was five years old. Paul Vitello writes in his obituary that, "The parents endured grinding work and bouts of depression. Stefanie, who had been withdrawn, blossomed into a venturesome, Swahili-speaking teenager." In 1941, the family received a postcard from Zweig's grandmother saying, "We are very excited, we are going to Poland tomorrow". Zweig's father explained that the grandmother was being sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was operated by the German occupiers of Poland. She and many others were murdered there. Zweig attended an English boarding school while in Kenya, which was a British colony at the time. Zweig's father became a British soldier during World War II (1939–1945), when Britain was fighting Germany and the other Axis powers, but in 1947 he took his wife, daughter and infant son back to Germany.

The family's original home had been in Upper Silesia, which was in the east of prewar Germany. After the war, most of the region became part of Poland and the German residents had to move. Zweig's father had been offered a position as a judge in Frankfurt in western Germany. His appointment was part of the "denazification" of the judicial system in postwar Germany; only Germans without connections to the Nazi party could serve as judges. Zweig was enrolled in the . Having become primarily an English speaker in Kenya, she needed to relearn German. She later wrote, "Learning German so that I could read and write and get rid of my English accent took me a couple of months; the assessment as to which is my mother-language is still going on. I count in English, adore Alice in Wonderland, am best friends with Winnie-the-Pooh and I am still hunting for the humour in German jokes."