The Jewish writer fled the Nazis and fell in love with his new home, a tropical paradise in Brazil. Can we ever know why he took his life? The director of a new biopic talks about the agony of the exile

“Suicide always remains a secret, the unknown bit beyond all reasons and explanations,” says Maria Schrader, the German actor best known in Britain for her role as ruthless, wicked but captivating Stasi agent Lenora Rauch in Channel 4’s spy drama Deutschland 83. She is talking about the subject of the Oscar-nominated film she has directed, Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe. The Viennese Jewish writer fled his homeland in 1934 with the rise of Hitler to London, Bath, New York and ultimately Petrópolis, a mountain town 40-odd miles north of Rio de Janeiro that had become home to a colony of German exiles. It was at his Brazilian home on 23 February 1942 that the 60-year-old Zweig and his second wife Lotte, 33 years his junior, were found by their gardener and housekeeper curled up dead together in bed after taking a barbiturate overdose.

It was hard to understand on the face of it why the couple killed themselves. Zweig had just written a book, Brazil: Land of the Future, eulogising his adoptive land. Lotte, in one scene in Schrader’s film, tells a guide showing them around a sugar plantation why they love their Brazilian paradise: “The various races live together so naturally that it seems like a miracle to us.” At least, it seemed very different from where the Zweigs had fled, a Europe bent on exterminating Jews.

In another scene, Zweig and a fellow German exile are standing on a terrace looking at parrots flying around the gorgeous tropical landscape. “I have rarely been so pleasantly detached in these last three months. Nothing but working, walking and reading. We have no reason to complain,” says Zweig. “Not us,” agrees his friend happily.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘How can one bear this?’ … Zweig circa 1920. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

But just then, the mask of contentment slips. Zweig, who in Josef Hader’s nuanced performance has been until now a suave charmer, exasperatingly hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy adds, tears filling his eyes: “How can one bear this?”

It’s as if living in paradise only makes the loss of his beloved Europe even harder. But that would be only my reductive explanation for why, a few months after this scene, Zweig killed himself. Schrader is surely right in suggesting that suicide keeps its secrets. Lesser directors would have put her subject on narrative rails at the outset and sent him off implacably to his predictable doom. Schrader, instead, creates a space that allows the writer his ultimate mystery.

At the time of his death, Zweig was one of the world’s most popular and praised novelists (with the exception of Britain where he has always been widely unread). News of his death vied on the front pages of US papers with a wartime broadcast by President Roosevelt. “His suicide shocked the world,” says Schrader, who believes that Zweig’s tragedy resonates unexpectedly down the years. “I was intrigued by all the questions that arose from such a disturbing decision. How can you cope with a world that turns to radicalism? Is there something more valuable than physical safety and personal happiness? During the years of researching and developing the film I had no idea how relevant these questions will be today – with refugees fleeing their homes in search of safe haven in Europe.”

I prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness

And Schrader’s film – shortlisted in European Film awards and being bought by distributors around the world (with the exception of the UK, Schrader tells me) – is released as we live through a new refugee crisis. “It’s the opposite of what happened 70 years ago when millions of people left the continent. Now Europe seems to offer hope for many; they want to be on the right side of the Mediterranean.” Today, Schrader’s native Germany in particular strives to be what it wasn’t under Hitler, a refuge.

Schrader is not Jewish, but her best film work has been concerned with stories about German Jews during the second world war. In 1999, she starred in Aimée & Jaguar as a Jewish woman working under an assumed name as a journalist at a Nazi newspaper, who has a wartime love affair with the (gentile) wife of a philandering Nazi officer. Now she directs a film about a Jewish writer destroyed by Hitler. Why are you drawn to stories about wartime Jewish struggles? “How could I as a German not be preoccupied with Jewish suffering?” she asks me in return.

Why does Zweig’s tragedy matter today? One reason is that history is usually written by the winners, and the exile narratives most often heard are about those who thrived as strangers in strange lands, or, at least, weren’t consumed by loss. Zweig’s suicide and Schrader’s film, then, might serve as correctives.

Zweig’s suicide note read, in part:

… to start everything anew after a man’s 60th year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom – the most precious of possessions on this earth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A scene from Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe.

Unlike so many of Zweig’s fellow wartime exiles, he could not remake himself in the new world. Nor could he perform the imaginative feat of his even more eminent exiled contemporary Thomas Mann. “Where I am is Germany,” said Mann with typical imperiousness. The German Nobel laureate holed up at his house in Los Angeles and cultivated other eminent refugees from Hitler such as Schoenberg, Brecht and Adorno. Mann worked there on his last great novel Doctor Faustus, threading it through with wartime laments about Nazi Germany’s pact with the devil.

Unlike Mann, Zweig could not carry his homeland with him. And the lament he wrote was very different from Mann’s. The day before Zweig took his life he had posted the manuscript of The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European to his publisher.

It is a book that typifies how Zweig suffered from what his biographer George Prochnick calls Lot’s Wife’s syndrome – the abiding desire to look over his shoulder at a disappearing world. Even before he quit his native Vienna, he was prone to it. He had amassed a collection of European cultural memorabilia including Goethe’s pen, Beethoven’s desk, Mozart and Balzac manuscripts – all of which he had to leave on the other side of the Atlantic when he fled Europe.

The Nazis burned his books and shut down a production of the opera he made with Richard Strauss

He wrote in The World of Yesterday: “When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security.”

Zweig led a charmed life in that ostensible golden age in the Habsburg empire, one that turned out not to be secure at all. Born in 1881 to a wealthy family of Jews (father a wealthy manufacturer, mother the daughter of a banking family), writing and fame seemed to come easily to him. He published his first volume of poetry aged 19 and everything he wrote thereafter – novellas, novels, poetry, biographies, journalism – seemed to be composed, as he put it, with “a polished ease of versified expression”. He lived in a Vienna that was, or so he thought, the epitome of civilisation.

That Vienna, Zweig believed, was destroyed by Hitler. Even his high-placed friends couldn’t protect him from being erased in German-speaking lands. Certainly, after he fled his homeland the Nazis took to burning his books. He collaborated with Richard Strauss on an opera called The Silent Woman that had its Dresden premiere in 1935. But, though Strauss was head of head of music in the Third Reich, the Nazis shut the production down because Zweig, its librettist, was a Jew.

Zweig has, to put it mildly, his detractors. His contemporary Elias Canetti, gaudy hater and Nobel Laureate, for instance, once met Zweig in Vienna where the latter had returned to visit the dentist and to establish a publishing house for his books. “I believe nearly all his teeth were extracted,” wrote Canetti waspishly, the implication being that Zweig’s teeth were more worth mentioning than his books.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I believe in a free Europe’ … Zweig as portrayed in the new film.

“Zweig just tastes fake,” argues poet and translator Michael Hoffmann. “He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing.” Hoffmann doesn’t just indict the novels, but also Zweig’s suicide note: “Like most of what he wrote, [it] is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined – actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note – that one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn’t mean it, his heart isn’t in it (not even in his suicide).”

Zweig’sbooks nevertheless remain popular. In his biography The Impossible Exile, Prochnik explains the appeal of such novels and novellas as Amok, Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Royal Game and the posthumously published The Post Office Girl: “With their penchant for revealing erotic secrets and muting exterior reality, Zweig’s stories conveyed a sense of intimacy to mass audiences. Readers curled around them like cats before fires.” Among those captivated today are the Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant and Wes Anderson, who admitted that he stole from Zweig for his 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Schrader’s film is agnostic about Zweig’s literary merits and, more importantly, thoughtful about his worth as a human being. In one scene, a Jewish journalist has flown to Buenos Aires from New York determined to get a printable condemnation of Hitler from the world’s most famous novelist that might prove useful in spurring the US to join the war. Zweig refuses to pass judgment on what is going on the other side of the world.

'I don't think he was a coward. He withdrew his opinion while everyone else was giving theirs'

“He’s a coward,” snaps the disappointed journalist. “He’s self centred. There are no islands left. His island flooded a long time ago and one day soon he’ll have to swim one way or another.” Not so: while contemporary writers such as Sartre made the existential choice of political commitment, Zweig chose another way – not to swim, but to sink.

What does Schrader make of Zweig’s refusal to condemn Hitler? “I find it questionable, but I don’t think he was a coward, nor was he non-political. He’s someone who withdrew his opinion while everybody else was giving theirs. That’s what I try to show Zweig doing in the film. I find that inspiring, especially today when everyone is clicking their likes and interfering in public discussion has become so easy that it’s meaningless. We need people who resist this urge to speak up. People knew his stance, but he refused to attack and he was a master of nuances. Zweig’s work was very political, maybe his work had a bigger impact, things like The Royal Game might have been more powerful for instance than speaking up.”

At the end of the press conference in Schrader’s film, Zweig is asked if he has any hope for Europe. For once, he isn’t overcome by Lot’s Wife’s syndrome, but imagines a hopeful future. “I believe in a free Europe,” he says. “I believe that borders and passports will one day be history, but I doubt I’ll be there to experience it.”

He wasn’t. And as for a European continent without borders that Stefan Zweig dreamed of in 1941, it seems very unlikely any of us will be around to see that.

• In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.