Stefanie Zweig, Author Who
Fled Nazis to Kenya, Dies at 81
By PAUL VITELLOMAY 1, 2014
Stefanie Zweig, in 2012. She wrote
“Nowhere in Africa.”CreditUwe Zucchi/European Pressphoto Agency
Stefanie Zweig, the author of
“Nowhere in Africa,” a best-selling autobiographical novel about the life of a
Jewish family in Kenya after their escape from Nazi Germany and the inspiration
for an Oscar-winning film,
died on Friday in Frankfurt. She was 81.
Her publisher in the United States,
the University of Wisconsin Press, confirmed her death.
“Nowhere in Africa,” published in
1995, hewed closely to the story of her parents’ escape from Frankfurt with
their 6-year-old daughter in 1938, and the family’s adjustment to life as
farmers in British colonial Africa. The parents endured grinding work and bouts
of depression. Stefanie, who had been withdrawn, blossomed into a venturesome,
Swahili-speaking teenager.
The novel, the first of a dozen by
Ms. Zweig, sold about 5 million copies. A German film adaptation with the same title,
directed by Caroline Link, won the Academy Award for best foreign language film
in 2003. Ms. Zweig and Ms. Link wrote the screenplay.
In a sequel novel, “Somewhere in
Germany,” published in 1996, Ms. Zweig described the reverse adjustment the
family had to make when, in 1947, her father, a lawyer, was appointed a judge
in Frankfurt. As her father explained it to her at the time, she wrote, his
credentials as a German lawyer with no Nazi affiliations made him one of the
few people qualified for such a position afterWorld War II.
In fact, she wrote, he missed “the
sounds and memories of home,” which everyone except her oddly naïve father
seemed to know were beyond recovery.
Returning to bombed-out Frankfurt in
1947, the family joined a hungry, traumatized population in rebuilding the
country. Scores of their German relatives were missing. None had been heard
from since the start of the war in 1939, except a grandmother, who got a letter
out in 1941 with the help of the Red Cross.
“They were only allowed to write 20
words,” Ms. Zweig told an interviewer in 2003. “My grandmother wrote — ‘We are
very excited. We are going to Poland tomorrow.’ ” Reading that, she
continued, “my father said Poland meant Auschwitz.”
But her father cautioned her against
indiscriminate hatred, she wrote in an essay in The Guardian in 2003. As a
child she was not allowed to hate all Germans, she said, “only the Nazis.”
For a year after returning to
Frankfurt, the family lived in one room at the city’s former Jewish hospital.
She wrote, “We spent our days hunting for food and our evenings wondering why
nearly every German we talked to told us that they had always hated Hitler and
had felt pity for the persecuted Jews.”
Stefanie Zweig was born on Sept. 19,
1932, in Leobschütz, a German-speaking town in disputed territory belonging to
Germany at the time and to Poland since the end of the war. Her family moved to
Frankfurt when she was a toddler. After a decade of speaking English (and some
Swahili) in Kenya, she had to relearn German on returning to Frankfurt at 15,
she wrote.
Ms. Zweig was for many years the
arts editor and film reviewer for a Frankfurt newspaper, Abendpost
Nachtausgabe. She wrote children’s books in her spare time and began writing
novels only after the newspaper closed in 1988. She lived for many years with a
companion, Wolfgang Hafele, who died in 2013. She had no known survivors.
Ms. Zweig wrote “Nowhere in Africa”
in German, as she did all her books, but admitted to remaining unsure throughout
her life whether English or German was her true native language.
“I count in English, adore Alice in
Wonderland, am best friends with Winnie-the-Pooh,” she wrote in her Guardian
essay, “and I am still hunting for the humor in German jokes.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 1, 2014, on page A23
of the New York edition with the headline: Stefanie Zweig, 81, Author
Who Fled Nazis to Kenya.
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