Stefan Zweig and His Literary Biographies

Abstract

In the early twenties, Stefan Zweig was at the peak of his success. His poems and plays were well known and widely read all over Europe, but his novellas enjoyed an even larger readership. It was, most of all, the way in which Stefan Zweig described the inner life of his characters which was fascinating. While travelling a lot he met the most important intellectuals and writers all over the world. When he was at home, his house on the Kapuzinerberg in Salzburg became a centre for a European exchange of ideas. In this house there was, according to his own words, “a cult room”¹ in which with loving care he kept his collection of autographs and manuscripts. In his autobiography Die Welt von gestern, written in exile, Zweig mentioned this collection several times and described at length what his underlying intentions were. When he started it, it was not only because of the autograph as such, because What I was looking for were originals or drafts of literary works or compositions because I am more than anything interested in the problem of the coming into existence of a work of art in the biographical as well as in the psychological sense: That mysterious second of transition, when out of the vision and intention of a genius averse or a melody becomes an earthly thing by being graphically fixed, where you can listen to it, study it, if not in the masters’ original texts through which they fought their way or which they speeded along as if in a trance.²