The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World. By George Prochnik. Other Press; 390 pages; $27.95. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk

KNOWN today as the inspiration behind Wes Anderson’s film, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, Stefan Zweig was one of the most popular writers of his day. His biographies of Marie Antoinette, Erasmus and Mary Stuart, all published in the early 1930s, were acute studies of doomed protagonists; his novellas sharp parables for his own dark times.

Zweig was raised in the glamour of fin-de-siècle Vienna and became part of the cultural ferment that produced Gustav Mahler and Gustav Klimt. But behind the Jugendstil façade, Zweig’s Vienna was also the place where another young man eight years his junior was rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts and began to ponder the programme of racist terror that he would inflict on continental Europe a generation later.

Partly as a result of Hitler’s campaigns in the wake of the Great Depression, by the mid-1930s the cosmopolitan Europe that Zweig had known—in the coffee houses of Vienna, the salons of Paris and the cabarets of Berlin—had shrunk into a draughtboard of warring nation-states. Zweig, the consummate European who had once been at home everywhere, suddenly found himself safe nowhere. As a pacifist, Jewish intellectual, his books were burned in Berlin in 1933, and, like millions of others, he was driven into an exile that took him to London, New York and, finally, Brazil, where he committed suicide in February 1942. He died not so much a man without a country as a man without a world.

Subtle, prodigiously researched and enduringly human throughout, “The Impossible Exile” is a portrait of a man and of his endless flight. George Prochnik sets about excavating Zweig’s sensibility and psychology as the celebrated writer tried—and failed—to endure the greatest upheaval his native Europe had ever known. “The Impossible Exile” is thus a Zweigean portrait of Zweig, who turns out to be as idealistic as Erasmus, as helpless as Mary Stuart and as delusional as Marie Antoinette.

Illusions stubbornly maintained were the essence of Zweig’s ultimate tragedy. “All his life,” writes Mr Prochnik, “Zweig had venerated two things: the dream of human unity on earth and the capacity of art to induce a sense of earthly transcendence—all woes and petty factionalism sublimated in aesthetic rapture.” Even after 1933, Zweig was still certain that the German veneration of Bildung, or “self cultivation”, would make it impossible for a “beer-hall agitator” to appeal to the educated ranks of German society, arguing instead that the surest way to fight Nazi brutality was for artists to showcase the strength of the country’s cultural heritage. “We must never permit ourselves to descend to the intellectual level of our opponents,” he wrote.

But perhaps the most poignant of Zweig’s illusions was his ideal of a universal European citizenship. Before the second world war Zweig had been at ease in a host of different identities: he was Austrian, a curator of the German language, a Jew, a European and a cosmopolitan—a true citizen of the world. In the end, he was reduced to a life of visas and passports, imprisoned in a singular identity, that of the Jewish refugee. As Mr Prochnik elegantly shows, Zweig’s exile was technically an exile from Europe, but his “impossible exile” was an exile from himself.