8 - True to Himself: Stefan Zweig's Visit to Argentina in September 1936

Summary

The very first lines of one of Stefan Zweig's most famous works, Schachnovelle (“The Royal Game,” 1942), set the novella on a steamer en route to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Twice, in 1936 and 1940, Stefan Zweig himself arrived in the Argentine capital on board an international passenger ship. Argentina, however, has always played second fiddle to Brazil in scholarship on Stefan Zweig, and his relationship to this country remains an underexplored topic. In part this tendency is reflective of the writer's own views. From the very start Zweig himself preferred Brazil to its southerly neighbor and, over time, he developed more profound ties to Brazil than to Argentina.

Yet Stefan Zweig's relationship to Argentina is worth a second look. Zweig's books were widely read in Argentina, and he collaborated closely with Alfredo Cahn, his translator and literary agent there. Alongside Zweig's New York publishers, Ben Huebsch and Gottfried Bermann Fischer, Cahn was one of only three people to whom Zweig mailed copies of his Schachnovelle on February 21, 1942, just a day before he committed suicide. In total, Zweig spent approximately six weeks in Argentina. His activities were not confined to the capital of Buenos Aires, but included visits to the cities of Rosario, Córdoba, Santa Fe, and La Plata. Although he never did achieve fluency in Portuguese, by the time of his second visit to Argentina Zweig had become sufficiently proficient in Spanish to lecture almost exclusively in this language, the native tongue of most Argentines. Furthermore, as an exiled Jewish writer, Zweig found much of interest in Argentina. His close friend Paul Zech emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1933, and was only one of over forty-five thousand Jewish refugees received by Argentina during the so-called Third Reich, the highest number of any Latin American country.

Most researchers have focused on Zweig's second trip to Argentina in 1940 and generally made use of two sources on the writer's activities there: his voluminous correspondence and the sympathetic record of his visits left behind by Alfredo Cahn, and Alfredo Bauer's fictionalized biography of Zweig, an informative, though not always factual, source.