Culture | Home Entertainment

Love and exile in “Letter from an Unknown Woman”

Stefan Zweig’s book, and Max Ophüls’s film, evoke thwarted passion and a lost world

THE ART conceived in Sigmund Freud’s Vienna has stood the test of time better than some of his debatable theories. For the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, for instance, Freud—whom Zweig knew and revered—meant not so much a set of clinical doctrines as a climate of feeling.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Love’s labour’s lost”

The Fed that failed

From the April 23rd 2022 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Angela Merkel in Frankfurt, Germany in December 1991

Germany’s former chancellor sets out to restore her reputation

But her new memoir is unlikely to change her critics’ minds

Blue books forming a winner rosette on a red background

The best books of 2024, as chosen by The Economist

Readers will never think the same way again about games, horses and spies


Elon Musk speaks at the Milken Institute's Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

What to read to understand Elon Musk

The world’s richest man was shaped by science fiction


Tech and religion are very much alike

They both have gods, rich institutions and secretive cultures

Woodrow Wilson’s reputation continues to decline

A dispassionate new biography chronicles the former president’s hostility to suffrage

The cult of Jordan Peterson

What the Canadian intellectual gets right about young men