Arquivo

The last week in the life of the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who wrote the book Brasil, País do Futuro (“Brazil, Country of the Future”), and his young wife, Lotte. The couple committed suicide in Petrópolis, a mountain resort up Rio de Janeiro State, soon after the Carnival of 1942 in a death pact shrouded in mystery. Sixty years on, their act still causes wonder and awe for its premeditation and emblematic characteristic. The writer took refuge in Brazil in order to escape the Nazis’ destruction and persecution and hoped to find in his new home country a world free of the horrors left behind in Europe. However, the incomprehension that surrounded Zweig’s stay in this new environment, which local codes and prejudice were unknown to him, plunged him in a vicious circle of grief and hopelessness that may have contributed to his final drastic act.