Second World War

The Second World War is a turning point in Stefan Zweig’s biography as presented in the book’s author note: its outbreak leads him to take British citizenship, and the fall of France in 1940 precedes his departure from Britain for New York. His subsequent move to Brazil provides the setting in which he writes The Royal Game in 1941, linking the conflict’s chronology to the work’s creation.

Zweig’s Wartime Displacement

After moving to London in 1934 amid the rise of Nazism, Zweig later lived in Bath. He took British citizenship after the outbreak of the Second World War, a change of status that forms part of a sequence of departures rather than an end to his movement across borders. When France fell in 1940, he left Britain for New York.

Brazil and The Royal Game

Zweig eventually settled in Brazil. There, in 1941, during the Second World War, he wrote The Royal Game. The author note thus places the novella within the circumstances of his wartime exile: the move from Britain to New York, followed by settlement in Brazil, precedes its composition. The conflict is not described through a battlefield episode here; it supplies the historical frame for the writer’s displacement and for the work’s time and place of creation.