Stefan zweig the grand budapest hotel

"I had never heard of Zweig - or, if I had, only in the vaguest ways - until maybe six or seven years ago when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity," said Anderson when interviewed by the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper in 2014.

"I loved this first book. I also read The Post Office Girl. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself - our 'Author' character, played by Tom Wilkinson, and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law.

But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes, is modelled significantly on Zweig as well."

Zweig was famous for creating stories within stories and this is also seen in Anderson's movie where a present-day teenage girl reads from an author's memoir where the author is narrating a tale about a trip he made