6/20/2023 0 Comments Stefan zweig kleistTwenty-four hundred people attended a lecture he gave in Carnegie Hall in 1938. (“I was sure in my heart from the first of my identity as a citizen of the world,” he wrote in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday.) His splendid biography of Marie Antoinette was made into an MGM movie starring Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power. Born in Austria, brought up in Vienna, he was a true cosmopolitan, at home in France, Italy, England, and the United States, able to give formal lectures in French, Italian, and English. Stefan Zweig was an internationally bestselling author of both fiction and biography. On February 23 of that year, in a mountain town outside Rio de Janeiro called Petrópolis, at the age of sixty, along with his second wife Lotte, who was twenty-seven years younger than he, Stefan Zweig took his own life. “Their friendships were transitory,” Zweig writes, “their appointments fugitive, their work unremunerative they stood ever in vacant space and created in the void.” Zweig is here describing the reverse of his own career and life-that is, until 1942. Not one of the three, along with their congeners Michelangelo and Beethoven, married or had children, or had a regular income or possessions. In The Struggle with the Daemon-one of his three studies in the typology of writers-Stefan Zweig describes three writers, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, each possessed by his daemon, or inner spirit.
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