The Impossible Exile

By the 1930s Stefan Zweig, born to an affluent Jewish family in Vienna, had become the most widely translated living author in the world - his novels, short stories, and biographies were instant bestsellers. Zweig was also an intellectual, and a patron of the arts. In 1934, following Hitler's rise to power, Zweig left Vienna for England, then New York, and, finally, Petropolis, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. His life in exile became increasingly isolated, and in 1942 he and his wife, Lotte Altmann, were found dead. They had committed suicide, just after Zweig had completed his famous autobiography, The World of Yesterday.

The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig's extraordinary rise and fall, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the struggle of the refugees forced into exile. It reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behaviour, the end of an era - he witnessed, and embodied, the implosion of Central Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.