Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters: New York, Argentina and Brazil, 1940–42

Stefan Zweig, novelist, essayist, biographer, dramatist and pacifist, was born in Vienna in 1881 into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. In the 1920s and 30s Zweig enjoyed great literary fame and was one of the most translated authors in the world. With the rise of Nazism, Zweig moved to England where, in 1940, he became a British subject. Following a lecture tour of South America and a period in New York, he moved to Brazil where in 1942, in despair at the future of Europe, he and his wife committed suicide. Lotte Zweig (née Altmann) was born in 1908 into a middle-class family of merchants in the Prussian city of Kattowitz. Soon after Hitler gained power in Germany, she moved to London. In 1934 Lotte was employed by Stefan Zweig as a multilingual secretary and research assistant. They married in 1939 and the following year left their home in Bath for the Americas. Darién J. Davis is Associate Professor of history at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. He has written on race, migration and twentieth century intellectual and cultural history. Oliver Marshall is an independent historian based in Sussex, England, who has published on South American and international migration history. He has been a research fellow at the University of London's Institute of Latin American Studies and at the University of Oxford's Centre for Brazilian Studies and its Centre for Latin American Studies.