SOME writers’ lives—and deaths—prove to be more enduring than their works. One of them is Stefan Zweig, born to Jewish parents in Vienna in 1881, whose short stories and historical biographies made him a literary celebrity in Europe and beyond before the second world war. The rise of the Nazis, who banned his books, drove him into exile. Crushed by the destruction of Europe, his “spiritual homeland”, he eventually settled in Brazil, where he and his young wife committed suicide together in February 1942 by swallowing poison. These final years have inspired books such as French novelist Laurent Seksik’s "The Last Days" and German literary critic Volker Weidermann’s "Summer before the Dark", set in Ostend in 1936. Now they are revisited in a new film, "Vor der Morgenröte" ("Before the Dawn"), an Austrian-German-French production directed by Maria Schrader. Rather than a linear biopic, it is a nuanced meditation on exile.
Set entirely in the Americas, the film assumes a bit of knowledge of Zweig, jumping past the celebrity years and the horrors of Nazism, and focusing on couple’s final months in Petropolis, some 70km outside Rio de Janeiro. The Europe that Zweig eternalised in his memoirs, "The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European", is gone. In its place is Brazil, which Zweig calls “land of the future”. He marvels at how its diverse inhabitants live peacefully side by side; “it seems like a miracle to us, coming from Europe,” says his wife Lotte, played with a quiet dignity by Aenne Schwarz. Though primarily in German, the film flits between languages with the ease of a Central European intellectual. Rather than a practical afterthought, language documents the Zweigs’ exile; at first, they chat to locals in rudimentary Spanish, only gradually picking up the Portuguese phrases of their adopted homeland.
