This volume is comprised of 14 contributions, which are revised and expanded versions of lectures held at an international conference on Stefan Zweig that took place in Israel in 2004. The essays focus on Zweig's biographical writings (for example Erasmus and Fouché), as well as on several aspects of his literary works that have been neglected since the revival of academic studies of his writings and career commenced some 25 years ago. These include: Zweig's conception of the daemonic, Zweig and Christianity, the discourse of love in his writings, Zweig as an Austrian eulogist, his understanding of theater, etc. Contributors from Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Slovenia, and Israel bring refreshingly diverse perspectives and new concerns to this scholarly project. With contributions from Vera Apfelthaler, Matjaz Birk, Denis Charbit, Sarah Fraiman-Morris, Mark H. Gelber, Jacob Golomb, Bernhard Greiner, Gert Kerschbaumer, Hanni Mittelmann, Klaus Mueller, Michel Reffet, Ingrid Spoerk, Robert Wistrich.

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.

A new collection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day Stefan Zweig was one of the twentieth century's greatest authors and a tireless champion of freedom, tolerance and friendship across borders. Encounters and Destinies collects his most impassioned and moving tributes to his many illustrious friends and peers: literary, philosophical and artistic luminaries from across the Old Europe that Zweig loved so much, and which he grieved to see so cruelly destroyed by two world wars. Including pieces on Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky and Arturo Toscanini, this essential collection is also Zweig's tribute to the ideal of friendship: an ideal he clung to as the world he knew was torn apart.

Unlock the more straightforward side of The World of Yesterday with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, the author’s autobiography and a masterful depiction of the changes wrought by the two world wars in Europe. Zweig grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna at a time when the city was at the heart of a vast centuries-old empire and the cultural and artistic capital of the continent. However, he watched in horror as simmering tensions and growing nationalist fervour culminated in two bloody wars, resulting in countless deaths and destroying the Europe of his youth. Mounting anti-Semitism in Europe and the worsening of the Second World War led him to flee to Brazil with his wife, where they both committed suicide in 1942. He left behind a vast and influential body of work, comprising novels, novellas, essays, plays, biographies and poetry. Find out everything you need to know about The World of Yesterday in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!

A new critical assessment of the works of the Austrian-Jewish author, in whom there has been a recent resurgence of interest, from the perspective of world literature.

An NYRB Classics Original Stefan Zweig was particularly drawn to the novella, and Confusion, a rigorous and yet transporting dramatization of the conflict between the heart and the mind, is among his supreme achievements in the form. A young man who is rapidly going to the dogs in Berlin is packed off by his father to a university in a sleepy provincial town. There a brilliant lecture awakens in him a wild passion for learning—as well as a peculiarly intense fascination with the graying professor who gave the talk. The student grows close to the professor, be­coming a regular visitor to the apartment he shares with his much younger wife. He takes it upon himself to urge his teacher to finish the great work of scholarship that he has been laboring at for years and even offers to help him in any way he can. The professor welcomes the young man’s attentions, at least on some days. On others, he rages without apparent reason or turns away from his disciple with cold scorn. The young man is baffled, wounded. He cannot understand. But the wife understands. She understands perfectly. And one way or another she will help him to understand too.

**Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Biography** Now in paperback, the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, the inspiration behind The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson’s award-winning film By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was also an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler’s rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile—from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis—where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself. The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig’s extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era—the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.