We periodically find Zweig breathless with disbelief as he is ushered into another scintillating salon, or opens another letter from Richard Strauss telling him he's wonderful. His life stories of doomed queens were hits: there was one of Mary Queen of Scots, and another of Marie Antoinette, the latter adapted as a Hollywood screenplay in 1938, with Norma Shearer luminous in the title role.Ĭertainly, the autobiography is full of a kind of bumbling, 'little old me?' modesty. The stories, such as Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922) and Fear (1925), borrow from the tropes of 19th-century melodrama. Zweig was an out-and-out bestseller, the most translated author in the world, loved by a generation for his undemanding novellas and popular biographies. This assessment clashes considerably with what's come before.

Hofmann pours acid scorn over Zweig's novellas and essays, as well as The World of Yesterday, and sums up by saying that not only was Zweig's literary output 'just putrid', but that he knew damn well it was, too. What has so upset the custodians of the Stefan Zweig Centre in Salzburg (among many others) is Michael Hofmann's red card tackle review of the autobiography – now reissued, along with a number of Zweig's fictional works, by Pushkin Press, in a new, elegantly fluid translation by Anthea Bell. His is an exemplary 20th-century life, all the way to the joint suicide with his second wife Lotte in Brazil in 1942. Zweig went on to break bread, pass the time of day, argue the toss and shake hands with the entire cast of the European intelligentsia, from theosophical loony Rudolf Steiner to the elderly Freud, then in crumbling exile in north London. At 19, he sent an unsolicited poetry essay to the Neue Freie Presse, and found himself invited to the office of the literary editor, Theodor Herzl, where Herzl read the piece, nodded thoughtfully and announced he was going to publish it. More than any other figure of his time, Zweig made success look easy.

Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig