The careers of Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin offer a contrast so perfect as to become almost a parable. The two writers were contemporaries—Benjamin was born in 1892, Zweig in 1881—and both operated in the same German literary ecosystem, though Benjamin was from Berlin and Zweig from Vienna. Both reached their height of productivity and reputation during the Weimar Republic, and as Jews both were forbidden from publishing in Germany once Hitler took power. And both ended darkly as suicides: Benjamin took his life in 1940 while trying to flee from France to Spain, and Zweig died a year and a half later in Brazil, where he sought refuge after unhappy sojourns in England and America.

Yet the similarities end with their biographies. As writers, they could not have been more different, and their literary destinies were exact opposites. Zweig flourished during his lifetime, enjoying huge sales of his psychologically charged novels and his popular historical biographies. Born with a fortune—his father was a textile manufacturer in Bohemia—he earned another fortune through his books, carrying into literature the bourgeois discipline and regularity that he inherited from his businessman ancestors. Three Lives, the definitive biography of Zweig by Oliver Matuschek, describes his annual production of books during the 1920s:

Over time Zweig had evolved a taut and effective work schedule for the production of his books. The winter months were spent in assembling the material, the spring was used for working up the early drafts, so that the final draft could be completed during the summer and the manuscript then sent off to the publisher as soon as possible. This allowed the typesetting and proofreading to be completed in good time by the autumn, in order to get the printed and bound copies into the bookshops to catch the Christmas trade.

Benjamin, by contrast, was not remotely as popular, nor would he have wanted to be. His audience was not the public at large but his fellow writers and intellectuals, who held him in the highest esteem; Brecht, Hofmannsthal, Adorno, and Scholem were among his friends and patrons. Zweig, whose books were bestsellers in several languages, was able to survive the loss of his German market and remain fairly prosperous; but for Benjamin the exile from Germany was devastating, and he spent the rest of his life in dire poverty. When the two men died, Zweig was one of the most famous writers in the world, Benjamin one of the most obscure.

Yet today there has been a reversal of their fortunes. It is Benjamin who has been canonized as one of the most important theorists of modernism, his works studied and debated and interpreted endlessly. He has become an emblem of the fate of the mind under fascism, not just a thinker but—in the hands of admirers such as Susan Sontag—also a kind of saint. Zweig, on the other hand, was until very recently a cipher on the American scene, a name from history rather than a living literary presence. It is a literary tortoise-and-hare fable, whose familiar if unwelcome lesson is that the most serious, most difficult, most “highbrow” writing is usually what wins in the end.