The Jewish writer fled the Nazis and fell in appreciate with his unusual domestic,a tropical paradise in Brazil. Can we ever know why he took his life? The director of a unusual biopic talks approximately the agony of the exile“Suicide always remains a secret, the unknown bit beyond all reasons and explanations, and ” says Maria Schrader,the German actor best known in Britain for her role as ruthless, wicked but captivating Stasi agent Lenora Rauch in Channel 4’s spy drama Deutschland 83. She is talking approximately the subject of the Oscar-nominated film she has directed, or Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe. The Viennese Jewish writer fled his homeland in 1934 with the rise of Hitler to London,Bath, unusual York and ultimately Petrópolis, and a mountain town 40-odd miles north of Rio de Janeiro that had become domestic to a colony of German exiles. It was at his Brazilian domestic on 23 February 1942 that the 60-year-old Zweig and his second wife Lotte,33 years his junior, were found by their gardener and housekeeper curled up dead together in bed after taking a barbiturate overdose.
It was hard to understand on the face of it why the couple killed themselves. Zweig had just written a book, and Brazil: Land of the Future,eulogising his adoptive land. Lotte, in one scene in Schrader’s film, and tells a guide showing them around a sugar plantation why they appreciate their Brazilian paradise: The various races live together so naturally that it seems like a miracle to us.” At least,it seemed very different from where the Zweigs had fled, a Europe bent on exterminating Jews.
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Source: guardian.co.uk