Ostend
Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It’s the summer of 1936, and the writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his house in Austria—searched by the police two years earlier—no longer feels like home. He’s been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town that is a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with fellow writer and semi-estranged close friend Joseph Roth, who is himself about to fall in love. For a moment, they create a fragile haven. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn. In Ostend, Volker Weidermann lyrically recounts “the summer before the dark,” when a coterie of artists, intellectuals, drunks, revolutionaries, and madmen found themselves in limbo while Europe teetered on the edge of fascism and total war.
Ostend is the true story of two of the twentieth century’s great writers, written with a novelist’s eye for pacing, chronology, and language—a dazzling work of historical nonfiction.
(Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weidermann's novelistic retelling of the summer of 1936, when Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881 1942) and several friends met up for one last time before WWII in the Belgian resort town of Ostend, will surely add to the recent resurgence of interest in Zweig one of the interwar period's most popular and translated writers and his circle. At the story's center is the unlikely friendship between the contrasting figures of Zweig and writer Joseph Roth the first, elegant, wealthy, and successful; the second, a rumpled, alcoholic journalist from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. The book's most sparkling moments, however, come from Roth's even more unlikely lover, the fiercely intelligent Irmgard Keun, whom he met that summer after she was exiled from Germany for her assertively modern novels. Over the summer, the friends debated, drank, wrote, fought demons, and tried to balance hope against an increasingly awful reality. Though prior knowledge of Zweig and his friends will certainly help fill in gaps, Weidermann's storytelling is piquant enough to draw the reader into the crumbling world of these displaced and despairing souls.
