Stefanie Zweig

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Stefanie Zweig (2012)

Stefanie Zweig (born September 19, 1932 in Leobschütz , Upper Silesia Province ; † April 25, 2014 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German writer .

life and work

In 1938, in the face of National Socialist persecution , Zweig's Jewish family fled to Kenya , where Stefanie Zweig spent her childhood on a farm and discovered the country for herself. She later attended an English boarding school in what was then the British colony . After the Second World War , the family returned to Germany in 1947. Stefanie Zweig attended the Schillerschule in Frankfurt am Main until she graduated from high school in 1953. From 1959 she worked as a cultural editor for the evening post / night edition in Frankfurt, where she headed the feature section from 1963 to 1988. However, since she missed the country of her childhood in Germany, she began to record her experiences and impressions in several autobiographical novels. Stefanie Zweig became a bestselling author with her African novels.

Her first African novel Ein Mundvoll Erde was published in 1980, a new version entitled Vivian and ein Mundvoll Erde followed in 2001. The autobiographical novel describes the main character Vivian's first love for a Kikuyu boy. Vivian fled to Africa with her father during the Second World War, can hardly remember Germany and regards the Kenyan farm Ol'Joro Orok as her home. She is well acquainted with the customs of the Kikuyu people and by the age of eight speaks three different languages: Kikuyu , Swahili and German. The reader grows up with Vivian on the farm, gets to know her friends, her enemies and her family. You learn a lot about African customs and traditions. When Vivian has to return to Germany at the end, one understands her insecurity and her feeling of being uprooted. The book was selected for the German Youth Book Prize . In 1995 it was awarded the Crystal Globe of the Royal Dutch Geographical Society ( Geographical Royal Dutch Society ) excellent.

Her autobiographical novel Nirgendwo in Afrika was published in 1995. She gave the people in history different names than in reality. The novel was six years later by Caroline Link filmed, the movie was established in 2003 with an Oscar award in the category "foreign-language Best Picture".

Her novel Irgendwo in Deutschland , the sequel to Nowhere in Africa , describes life after returning to Germany.

In her autobiography : Nowhere Was Heimat: My Life on Two Continents from 2012, the author documented her entire family history from her birth in Upper Silesia to the present in letters and her own diary notes.

Stefanie Zweig lived as a freelance writer in Frankfurt am Main and wrote regularly for the Frankfurter Neue Presse . Her books reached a circulation of over 7.5 million copies.

Stefanie Zweig died in 2014 at the age of 81. The grave is located in the New Jewish Cemetery in Frankfurt am Main.

“Your love and kindness will not be forgotten, even if your life was marked by loss. Your stories remain an eternal gift to us "

- Inscription on the tombstone

Awards

Stefanie Zweig received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1993 .

Works

literature

  • Christine Arendt: Variants of autobiographical writing with Stefanie Zweig. From the experience of Africa to the presentation and documentation of exile . Journal for Intercultural German Studies 11, 2020, H1, 65–81.
  • Christine Arendt: Depiction of exile in “Nowhere in Africa” by Stefanie Zweig . In: Zhu, Jianhua; Zhao, Jin & Szurawitzki, Michael (eds.), With the collaboration of Bischoff, Doerte u. a., files of the XIII. International Germanist Congress Shanghai 2015. German Studies between Tradition and Innovation. Vol. 9. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2017, 197–201.
  • Stefanie Zweig , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 32/2003 of July 28, 2003, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of the article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Stefanie Zweig  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stefanie Zweig. In: Kürschner's German Literature Calendar . Volume II: PZ. Walter De Gruyter Incorporated, 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-033720-4 , p. 1193.
  2. ↑ Information about the author on the website of her publisher , accessed on April 27, 2014.
  3. ↑ knerger.de: Stefanie Zweig's grave
personal data
SURNAME Zweig, Stefanie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 19, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Leobschütz , Province of Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 2014
Place of death Frankfurt am Main