Brazil was Stefan Zweig’s final place of settlement and the setting in which he wrote The Royal Game in 1941. His arrival there followed a series of departures driven by the rise of Nazism and the upheavals of the Second World War; he and his wife were found dead the following year.

Zweig’s Flight and Settlement

After moving to London in 1934 as Nazism rose, Zweig later lived in Bath and took British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War. The fall of France in 1940 prompted him to leave Britain for New York. He subsequently settled in Brazil, the last country named in this account of his wartime movements.

The Royal Game and Zweig’s Final Years

Zweig wrote The Royal Game in Brazil in 1941. The country is therefore tied to the composition of a work produced during the final phase of his life, after successive moves across Europe and the Atlantic. In 1942, Zweig and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. The biographical account establishes the sequence of these events but does not specify where their deaths occurred.