The Baltic Sea

Drawing on a great wealth of newly available sources, this definitive biography recounts the eventful life of a great writer spoilt by success—a life lived in the shadow of two world wars, and which ended tragically in a suicide pact. Matuschek examines three major phases in the life of the world-famous Austrian author—his years of apprenticeship, his years of success as a professional working writer in Salzburg, and finally his years of exile in Britain, the USA and Brazil. Including the sort of personal detail conspicuously absent from Zweig's memoir, and incorporating newly discovered documents, Matuschek's biography offers us a privileged view into the private world of the master of psychological insight.

An original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig 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.

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.

Emile Verhaeren by Stefan Zweig is about philosopher Verhaeren's studies of the New Age, Youth in Flanders, and Les Flamandes. Excerpt: "The feeling of this age of ours, of this moment in eternity, is different in its conception of life from that of our ancestors. Only eternal earth has changed not nor grown older, that field, gloomed by the Unknown, on which the monotonous light of the seasons divides, in a rhythmic round, the time of blossoms and their withering; changeless only are the action of the elements and the restless alternation of night and day."