Zweig’s death arguably marked the high point of his literary standing: to most English-speaking readers, he is now little more than a name. In his suicide note, he spoke of “my own language having disappeared from me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself.” He concluded, “I salute all my friends! May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.” An editorial the next day, titled “One of the Dispossessed,” saw in Zweig’s final act “the problems of the exile for conscience sake.” Zweig, a Jew, had left Austria in 1934, living in England and New York before the final move to Brazil, and his work had been banned and vilified across the German-speaking world. The New York Times carried the news on its front page, alongside reports of the rout of Japanese forces in Bali and of a broadcast address by President Roosevelt. When news of their suicides broke, it was reported as a matter of worldwide significance. They lay down-she in a kimono, he in a shirt and tie-after taking an enormous dose of barbiturates.
On February 22, 1942, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his second wife went to the bedroom of a rented house in Petrópolis, Brazil. Zweig painstakingly cultivated his image as a supremely civilized man of letters, but his most memorable work draws its power from the frail, tormented self that lay beneath.
