ABSTRACT
Stefan Zweig was, of course, famed for his best-selling biographies of "great men," but these books intended to distill the creative psychology and historical significance of their subjects. Austrian identity itself was an uncertain thing weakened by regional and urban differences, class tensions and concomitant worker unrest, along with a growing pan-German racialist drive toward Anschluss with Germany. Though hardly liberal, the government attitude of tolerance and muddling through with politics reduced to parliamentary theatrics kept the lid on chaos, fostering what Zweig ironically termed the "golden age of security." Zweig's grouping of Holderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche points to a further refinement of his initial idea of portraying correspondences of temperament and psychology among different types of the creative imagination. Zweig once confessed to Jules Romains that he was "a creature of terrible passion, full of violence of all kinds.
