On January 4, 1939, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig arrived at a stately, imposing home on 65 Stockton Street in Princeton, New Jersey. Originally built for President Garfield’s son in 1908, its current resident was Thomas Mann, the author of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain. When Mann first heard of Zweig’s arrival in New York a week or so earlier, he’d written at once to invite him to lunch on January 4 at 1:30pm. He was “eager to discuss the whole thing with you,” as he put it in his letter.
“The whole thing” meant, of course, the fact that both writers were living in exile from their respective countries. Mann had left Germany and spent five years in Switzerland before emigrating to the United States; Zweig, now cut off from Vienna by the Nazi annexation of Austria, had been in London since 1934. Many of their literary colleagues, they knew, had not been so lucky. The writer and revolutionary Erich Mühsam was tortured to death in Oranienburg in 1934. The Austrian cultural historian Egon Friedell threw himself from his apartment window in Vienna when Sturmabteilung troops came knocking in March 1938. The Nobel Prize-winner Carl von Ossietzky had died just a few months prior while in Nazi captivity. There were innumerable other grisly examples, and many more to come.
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