Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters

Stefan Zweig, novelist, essayist, historian, poet, and noted pacifist, was born in Vienna in 1881 into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. In the 1920s and 30s Zweig enjoyed great literary fame and was one of the most translated authors in the world. With the rise of Nazism in Germany, Zweig moved to England where, in 1939, he became a British subject. Following a lecture tour of South America and a period in New York, he moved to Brazil where in 1942, in despair at the future of Europe, he and his wife committed suicide. Lotte Zweig (nee Altmann) was born in 1908 into a middle-class family of merchants in the Prussian city of Kattowitz. Soon after Hitler gained power in Germany, she moved to London. In 1934 Lotte was employed by Stefan Zweig as a multilingual secretary and research assistant. They married in 1939 and the following year left their home in Bath for the Americas. Darien J. Davis is an associate professor of history at Middlebury College, Vermont. He has written on race, migration and twentieth century intellectual and cultural history. Oliver Marshall is an independent historian based in Sussex, England, who has published on South American and international migration history. He has been a research fellow at the University of London's Institute of Latin American Studies and at the University of Oxford's Centre for Brazilian Studies and its Centre for Latin American Studies.

"Davis and Marshall have filled a gap in Latin American literary history by presenting us with a picture of the last years of the famed author, cast adrift by the rise of Nazism and enforced exile. The letters of Stefan and Lotte Zweig cast a flickering light on the psyches of many Austrian and German Jews who, rejected by their homelands, were incapable of either adapting to a new home or of drawing sustenance from their Jewish origins. Aloof from the satisfactions of popular acclaim and paralyzed by guilt over their comfortable life in Brazil, the Zweigs broke through their emotional isolation with an act that sealed their unique place in literary history. Davis and Marshall create a coherent narrative from the episodic correspondence and bring the role of Lotte into view. But the Zweigs' brief sojourn in South America confirms the European boundaries to Stefan's oevre and his marginalization from Argentine, Brazilian, and Jewish history." -- Judith Laikin Elkin, Latin American Jewish Studies Association

• Introduction; Part I: Letters from Argentina and Brazil, 1940-41; Part II: New York Interlude, 1941; Part III: Letters from Brazil, 1941-42; Part IV: Postscript: Letter from Ernst Feder, Petropolis, 1942; Dramatis Personae.