The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson’s joyously goofy caper is inspired by the works of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942). He is now largely forgotten, but he was one of the most popular and widely translated storytellers and biographers of his generation.

The caper is not part of Zweig’s own work. But, as Terry Grass told NPR’s Fresh Air last month, “What Zweig does have is an understanding of the absurdity of existence. And even beyond this, I think that one point that Anderson really gets in the film that we feel, when Zweig speaks about Vienna, he talks about a kind of laxity and a joyful sloppiness of the city. He talks about its deep investment in the idea of pleasure, maybe even a slightly transgressive pleasure. And I think the ways that Wes Anderson’s film has about it a celebration of life in the midst of a poignant tragedy is something the Zweig himself would have found very resonant.”

In exile in Brazil, convinced that the barbarians had destroyed Europe for ever, Zweig committed suicide.

Zweig plays a minor role in Eric Koch’s memoir Hilmar and Odette (1995).In 1919, Odette’s husband, Hanns Arens, was a young reporter when he was inspired by Zweig reading some of his verse in Bremen. Arens introduced himself. They began a correspondence and in the mid-twenties Zweig invited Arens to spend a few days with him in Paris.

In the early thirties, Arens wrote an admiring biography of Zweig. It was published just before Hitler assumed power in 1933 and was duly burned with other books by, and about, Jewish writers. Ironically, Zweig did not identify himself with the Jewish community and in his works did not deal with specifically Jewish subjects.

To make a living in Nazi Germany as a journalist, Arens had to conceal his admiration for Zweig. In 1942, Arens joined the Resistance.

He never knew that his wife, Odette, was half Jewish. Nor did she. It is a story that Zweig could have written.