Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig wrote biographies of Erasmus, Magellan, Marie Antoinette, Balzac — and made each one a novel. He believed in Europe as a single civilization. When that Europe collapsed, he took his own life.

He was born in Vienna in 1881, into a Jewish family. Gymnasium, Berlin, Paris, Vienna again. Success before the First World War, greater success after it.

Marie Antoinette, Adepts in Self-Portraiture, Beware of Pity — he was called the most widely read author in the German language. In 1934 he fled Austria: London, then Brazil.

The World of Yesterday is his memoir of a vanished Europe. On 22 February 1942, in Petropolis, he and his wife took poison. "I think it better to depart in good time."