During the interwar period, Stefan Zweig achieved worldwide fame, particularly with his novellas and biographies. Due to his Jewish heritage, he went into exile in the mid-1930s, which led to his written legacy being distributed across numerous public and private collections, resulting in a complex and sometimes confusing situation for its preservation. Original manuscripts and other materials from one of the best-selling and most widely translated German-language authors of the 20th century were thus long unavailable or only available to a limited extent, despite continued interest in his work.

In response, the Stefan Zweig Digital initiative, founded by the Salzburg Literature Archive in 2016, aims to virtually reconstruct Zweig's posthumous papers and provide further relevant data about his life and work freely accessible online.

Since 2014, the Salzburg Literature Archive has held one of the largest collections of original materials from Stefan Zweig’s posthumous papers, including over 50 manuscripts and typescripts, more than a dozen notebooks with work notes, all of his known diaries, and well over 1,000 letters to and from him.

The core of the collection consists of numerous manuscripts of Stefan Zweig’s works, ranging from newspaper articles, speeches, and occasional poems to dramatic works, biographical essays, and the unfinished novels "Clarissa" and "The Post-Office Girl". Among the notebooks, there is one with early drafts of Zweig's autobiographical portrait "The World of Yesterday".

The large-format "Hauptbuch" is one of the most significant pieces in the category of Stefan Zweig’s personal documents. Created in 1932, it retrospectively and continuously records entries on his works published in book form, listing details about worldwide contracts for licensed editions, translations, and film adaptations. Nowhere else is Stefan Zweig’s global success at the height of his career documented more comprehensively and densely.

Additionally, the correspondence section holds important letters to and from Stefan Zweig, who maintained an intensive professional and personal correspondence with many prominent figures of his time since the beginning of his writing career. The collection at the Salzburg Literature Archive includes postcards, telegrams, and both typewritten and handwritten letters. In addition to individual items, the archive holds Zweig’s hitherto unpublished correspondence with his Viennese publisher Herbert Reichner and 47 letters from Stefan Zweig to Sigmund Freud.

The Stefan Zweig Digital initiative continues to be expanded with entries from its own and other collections and is regularly supplemented with additional pieces.