Stefan Zweig Centre Salzburg

Snapshot

Stefan Zweig was one of the most widely read writers in the world when his books were publicly burned in Salzburg on 30 April 1938, the first book burning in Austria after the Anschluss. He had already fled four years earlier. The city now maintains a dedicated research centre and museum at Schwarzstrasse 26 that holds his archive and traces those years with unusual care.

The Story

Stefan Zweig arrived in Salzburg in 1919, settling at the Paschinger Schlössl on Kapuzinerberg. The fifteen years he spent there were among the most productive of his life. He wrote “Amok,” “Verwirrung der Gefühle,” and major literary biographies. He collected manuscripts obsessively, corresponded with Freud, Romain Rolland, and virtually every significant European intellectual of the era, and hosted visitors from across the continent. The city gave him proximity to Vienna and Munich, distance from the capital’s frenetic pace, and a house with a view over the Salzach that he found genuinely beautiful.

He left in 1934, reading the political situation accurately before most people around him did. His villa was seized. In April 1938, weeks after the Anschluss, his books were burned in a public ceremony in Salzburg. In February 1942 he and his wife Lotte died by suicide in their Brazilian exile. The manuscript of “The World of Yesterday,” his memoir of the Habsburg world that had shaped him and then destroyed everything he had built, had been completed days earlier.

The Stefan Zweig Centre opened in 2008 at Schwarzstrasse 26, in the Palais Kieselburg near Mirabell Palace. It was founded by the University of Salzburg and runs a permanent exhibition on Zweig’s life and Salzburg years, a reference library, and an active archive. International scholars use the archive; public visitors come for the exhibition and the lectures and readings the Centre organises throughout the year. In 2024 the centre merged with the Salzburg Literature Archive to become the “House for Stefan Zweig,” expanding its scope and linking its scholarly work more directly to the city’s broader literary memory. The seven-volume annotated Salzburg edition of Zweig’s works was co-edited by the Centre’s leadership between 2017 and 2023.

The Kapuzinerberg house where Zweig lived is private and not open to visitors, but it is visible from the slope above the right bank. The Centre is the most direct way into his connection to Salzburg.

Visiting

The Stefan Zweig Centre is at Schwarzstrasse 26 (Palais Kieselburg), on the right bank near Mirabell Palace and the Capuchin Monastery Salzburg. Open Mon, Wed-Fri 2-4pm. Admission approximately EUR 5; guided group tours at EUR 100 per group (by appointment). Check stefan-zweig-zentrum.at for current programme and event listings. Reading one Zweig book before visiting rewards the exhibition considerably. “The World of Yesterday” is the obvious starting point.