He was forced to flee his home country of Austria-Hungary with the Nazi movement gaining popularity in Europe. He was born into a well-off Jewish family with his father being a textile business owner and his mother belonging to a banking family. He had been one of the most successful writers of his generation and almost all of his books are still being printed in countless languages. He was one of the most notable novelists of the twentieth century and he also had his hands in playwrighting, journalism, and biography writing.
I thought history was a boring roll call of dates, battles and dead men until I read Zweig's Marie Antoinette.If you have ever been to a bookstore in the last hundred years or so, you have probably come across the name Stefan Zweig.
I doubt that I would have become a historian without this book because I had a string of absolutely terrible history teachers in Germany who made me hate the subject with a passion. What I do know is that I devoured it when I was 16 or 17 and that it planted a seed that has grown ever since. I don't dare open its pages ever again, in case the book is different to what I remember – which makes describing it somehow difficult. It has stayed with me almost as if encapsulated in a bubble. Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman is not like that. Some are cringingly embarrassing because they are so pompously pretentious, but that is what I consumed as a teenager. Those books are the opposite of being "timeless" because they are deeply rooted in a particular period or linked to a certain age. I have books in my head and heart for every Lebensabschnitt.
Instead I've picked one for a Lebensabschnitt – "a stage or period in one's life". We Germans have a compound noun for almost everything and I shall use one as an excuse for not being able to settle on a single defining book of a lifetime.
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