Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig by Oliver Matuschek (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Excellent biography of a trully unique man. I love Zweig and have read almost everything he wrote. The only thing I find a bit unpleasant about #Three Lives…” is the font size. It is extremely small, and I find it hard to read even with my reading glasses. I must use a magnifying glass.

⭐Matuschek’s style is pretty objective, and can be somewhat “colorless”, but he does manage to give one a more balanced view of Zweig, who was a rather odd bird. Matuschek portrays him as a bit self-posessed, somewhat obsequious and insecure fellow, who having sufficient family money had the luxury of “flitting about”, dabbling in life and observing those who actually lived real lives that he could admire ” from without”.

⭐I found this book quite interesting as it was written by someone who didn’t belong to Stefan Zweig”s family. I had read the biography written by Friedricke, Stefan’s first wife, but seemingly she did not treat all matters with the same objectivity as she would have had she not been, a close family member, and , as such, an important part of the story.

⭐bought this because I heard some short stories and a bit about his life on public radio. I found it so interesting I bought the book, this was before I bought my Kindle. very interesting and worth reading.

⭐It is an interesting account of Stefan Zweig’s life. A good start to understand who was this Austrian intellectual. Recommended!

⭐The Zweig resurgence continues. This biography is essential to those enjoying the revival.

⭐Stefan Zweig has written what amounts to an autobiography in “The World of Yesterday” (see my five star Amazon review). His provisional title for it had been “My Three Lives”. The title of Matuschek’s rather dry and somewhat plodding biography of Zweig alludes to this provisional title, the three lives being those Zweig had lived in Vienna (1881 to 1919), in Salzburg (1919 to 1934), and in exile in Britain, the United States and Brazil (1934 to 1942). Matuschek’s is not a mere retelling of Zweig’s book: he has found a lot of other material: four books published about him by his divorced first wife Friderike, unreliable though he found them to be in several respects; letters written by Zweig’s second wife, Lotte; and thousands of letters written by and to Zweig; Zweig’s diary – these are among further important sources for Matuschek’s biography. And there are of course details about Zweig’s family background which Zweig had never mentioned in his own book with its concentration on the wider aspects of “the world of yesterday”.The ”first life” saw him having a book of poems published when he was only twenty: it had over forty reviews. He wrote poems, essays and short stories in various journals, including the Neue Freie Presse. He translated, from the French, poems by Verhaeren, Verlaine and Baudelaire. He wrote a couple of plays. Novellas, biographies, biographical essays, novels and a libretto came later. (The libretto, in 1935, was for Richard Strauss’ opera “Die schweigsame Frau”. Because Zweig was Jewish, the opera was banned in Germany after three performances.) Matuschek lists many of these works, without any critical discussion of them – which is one reason why I call his book “somewhat plodding”. The immensely long list of Zweig’s writings can be found on Wikipedia.He travelled all over Europe and made friends with many famous writers and artists. He also visited India and the United States. All his life he was a compulsive traveller.Matuschek devotes many pages to the hobby on which Zweig spent much of his time and money for most of his life: a considerable collection of manuscripts by and memorabilia by famous people.In this “first life” he met Friderike von Winternitz. Her marriage was on the rocks. She was herself a novelist, and a convert from Judaism to Catholicism. She and Zweig took to each other, though at the same time Zweig had an affaire with a milliner, of which he made no secret to Friderike. In 1914 Friderike secured her divorce. But Zweig was unwilling at the time to commit himself to a permanent relationship, and in any case in Catholic Austria-Hungary a marriage when a former spouse was still alive was illegal.In the First World War, Zweig was unfit for active military service. He and Friderike were pacifists. They had a three weeks’ holiday in Salzburg, which struck them as an ideal place in which to live after the war, and they bought a house there in October 1917. They spent a prolonged period at the end of the war in Switzerland, where Zweig was the Swiss correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse. In March 1919 they returned to Austria, not to Vienna but to the house they had bought in Salzburg, where was the scene of his “second life”.In the new Austrian republic, remarriage while a former spouse was still alive was no longer illegal, and in January 1920, Zweig and Friderike married. But it was never a good marriageBy now his books, mostly published by the Insel Verlag in Leipzig, had become hugely popular. The sales figures often broke all records within weeks of publication. He gave many public readings.But antisemitic attacks on him were beginning, and, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Zwei’s works were among those that were publicly burnt in May, 1933. It was clear he could no longer travel to or through Germany. The German Insel Verlag had to stop selling his books. An Austrian publishing house took on the list, and after the Anschluss Zweig found another publisher based in Sweden and the Netherlands. He was never short of money.But, long before the Anschluss, Zweig felt insecure in Austria. On February 12th, 1934 an uprising by the Viennese socialists against the Dollfuss government began. On February 18th, Zweig’s house in Salzburg was perfunctorily searched for half an hour “for weapons” by the Austrian police. Right wingers and antisemites may have smeared Zweig with the accusation that he was hiding weapons in his house on behalf of the socialists. In any case, this totally arbitrary irruption by the police – for Zweig was totally unpolitical – made him feel so unsafe that two days later he left for England, and his “third life”, as exile, began.Shortly afterwards, Friderike followed Zweig to London. She failed to persuade him to return to Salzburg, and their marriage was in crisis. Zweig had a new secretary, Lotte Altmann, a German-Jewish refugee; and in December 1935 Friderike discovered that Zweig and Lotte had become lovers. Zweig and Friderike divorced in November 1938. He and Lotte married on 6th September 1939. They were naturalized as British citizens in the spring of 1940.But when the Germans overran the Low Countries and France, the Zweigs, fearing that England would be next, emigrated again, to the United States, en route to Brazil which Zweig had first visited in 1936, and where he had been received with great acclaim. They arrived in Rio in August 1940.But Zweig was beginning to suffer from depression. They rented a house in the small hill town of Petropolis, some 40 miles from Rio. There he recovered somewhat. But when the war expanded after Pearl Harbour, he became depressed again. He and Lotte decided to commit suicide and wrote valedictory letters to their friends and relations. They were found dead on February 23rd, 1942.Matuschek’s book ends here – characteristically without any assessment or summing up.

⭐I suspect that most English readers of this book, like me, have been impressed by the Pushkin Press translations of Zweig’s fiction and want to find out more about the writer and his work. If so, this biography will be a disappointment. It’s obviously carefully researched and the translation is competent but Zweig obstinately refuses to come alive in its dry pages, ironic for the master of the imaginative biography. Sadly the book has also little to tell us about his fiction. Even his only published novel receives a couple of perfunctory mentions with no information about either its content or its genesis. The first time it’s mentioned with only its German title with a literal translation. Only when it returns do we realise this is the book the English world knows as Beware of Pity.There is no index of Zweig’s work and no checklist of his work. The bibliograpy is so opaque that it would be difficult to relate what’s described to what’s been translated. What are Pushkin Press thinking of? There on the back page is a list of their pioneering and invaluable translations of Zweig’s work which are of course under their English titles. And no way here to link them to the life of the man who wrote them.

⭐Good

⭐I love Zweig’s work and had hoped to find a lovely man behind the work. Sadly this was not the case. I wonder if this is a true portrait of the writer or if the biographer ended up not liking him. It is an uneasy read.

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