The 3 best books by Stefan Zweig

World War II had one of its most symbolic closings with the suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun. But a few years before this happened, another German of a very different political and social background did the same with his second wife.

It was about Stefan Zweig, who on February 22, 1942 saw the spread of Nazism as an incurable cancer that threatened the world. His Austrian origins, shared with Hitler, seemed to fill him with a guilt that he made his own as a shocked narrator and as a Jew who shared a country with a monster that marked the darkest historical evolution of Europe.

After Stefan Zweig there remains an extensive bibliography comparable in its vital trigger, not so much in the background, to that of another great of his time such as Thomas Mann, who came to assure that Stefgan Zweig, with an intense love life, had a dark exhibitionist behavior ... (perhaps the result of envy between authors?) And it is that both also shared that traveling spirit that helped them to take perspective and narrate with commitment to abandon nationalisms born from ethnocentrism and fear.

And in that bibliography we find everything, the typical essays that every writer of the XNUMXth century undertook to provide a critical vision to the troubled world of the great wars and the interwar period, as well as a juicy and vital novel that also addressed that existential point of the last century. .

Currently Zweig has already achieved the deserved recognition, despite going through a period of obscurantism perhaps promoted from whose injustice he was rescued by publishers and other areas of culture many years after his death in exile in 42.

Stefan Zweig's Top 3 Recommended Books

Chess novel

From the chess board to understanding the world. From the exponential mathematics of the probabilities of plays to the presentation of the millions of souls that roam this world of squares of two unique tones.

Mirko Czentovicz vs. Mr. B, an impromptu game on a ship that travels from North to South America. The Atlantic as a witness to the comings and goings of plays that reveal the level of two opponents determined to challenge their pieces in the melee of ideals. Getting a chess game to reach the level of a kind of suspense novel intellectual is only in the hands of an author like Zweig.

Culminated a few days after his suicide, his shocking lucidity invades us like the opening of curtains that have obscured the truth of our existence, or at least of the existence of a world that folds in on itself to contemplate what was in that moment. XNUMXth century, in the light of a mind faced with the crudest truths. And it is that a game of chess, as a maximum intellectual exercise, can become a fight between reason and passion.

Chess novel, Zweig

Marie Antoinette

Few fictionalized bibliographies of our history are approached with the brilliance and depth of this book. Being faithful to the facts and being able to outline the most well-known characters so that everything happens in a consistent way from the intimacy of the thoughts and passions that could move them, is a complicated task that Zweig achieved with full verbatim.

Something similar happened with his later novel about María Estuardo. Probably for Zweig the role of women, always forcing themselves to act from the second row, acquired the relevance of the greatest intelligence put into practice to face any destiny.

In the case of Marie Antoinette, who ends up being executed on October 16, 1793, both the outlining of the character and the extension to a monarchy on the verge of surrender in front of the people make up an intense story that complements the historical events with brilliant details of the Nineteenth-century Paris, full of histrionic characters and aspects barely covered in official history.

Marie Antoinette Zweig

Erika Ewald's love

The woman is undoubtedly a central figure in Zweig's fictional narrative. In this juicy story we meet Erika, an artist by trade but also by soul. with all that irrepressible passion of the artist who cannot concentrate solely on the keys of a piano.

Between melancholy, romanticism, the feeling of the first love as something unforgettable, the marked drives that mark the future of the spirit. A novel about the converging worlds of our reality and our dreams.

For an author like Zweig, manifestly in love with many women and sometimes surreptitiously accused of being an exhibitionist, this story deals with that hardly sustainable balance between the openly sexual, the sensual and the rational of appearances. A toast to sexual freedom in a world constrained by customs.

Erika Ewald's love
5/5 - (6 votes)

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