Ostend

November 2, 2015
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.

Starred review from October 15, 2015
A summer of sun for despondent exiles. In July 1936, the Austrian-Jewish writers Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and Joseph Roth (1894-1939) met in Ostend, Belgium, a seaside resort town that promised them a respite from the political turmoil perpetrated by Nazi Germany. As Weidermann, literary director and editor of the Sunday edition of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, portrays them in this taut, novelistic history, his first book to be translated into English, both men were facing personal and professional crises. Although Zweig was an enormously popular writer, his German publisher had just dropped him, and his latest book, on Calvin, elicited wrathful reviews. He wanted to wrest himself from his domineering wife and "dependent, needy, vain, useless" daughters to run off with his young, adoring mistress. Zweig was "tired, irritable, and depressed. He was sick of literature," sick of politics, sick of life. Roth, who had been supporting himself as a journalist, was distraught when his two recent novels were banned and burned in his beloved Austria. An angry alcoholic, he yearned nostalgically for the past, for "an old Austria and its monarchy, its empire," for "the great, glittering capital" of Vienna as it was in his youth. In lyrical prose, Weidermann re-creates the atmosphere of an ephemeral moment for both writers and the disillusioned men and women who gathered with them: German playwright Ernst Toller; Czech writer Egon Erwin Kisch, who was virulently anti-fascist; Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler; Zweig's diffident lover Lotte Altmann; and Roth's new lover, Irmgard Keun, a beautiful, feisty woman who had sued the Nazis for damages when her novels were banned (she lost). Weidermann's focus, though, is on Zweig and Roth: Zweig, "self-confident, worldly, with a firm stride, like an elegant shrew in his Sunday best"; and Roth, dumpy, unkempt, "like a mournful seal that has wandered accidentally onto dry land." Evocative, sharply drawn portraits and a wry, knowing narrative voice make for an engrossing history.

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December 1, 2015

By the summer of 1936, with World War II looming, acclaimed German novelist, playwright, and biographer Stefan Zweig and a group of well-known compatriots, including friend and fellow writer Joseph Roth, playwright Ernst Toller, and Arthur Koestler, retreated to the Belgian resort town of Ostend. Situated on the North Sea, Ostend was a tenuous beacon of hope for intellectuals and outsiders who, once among the country's literary elite, suddenly found themselves unwelcome in Nazi Germany. The group were "friends, foes, storytellers thrown together here overlooking the beach in July by the vagaries of world politics," writes Weidermann (Sunday edition literary director & editor, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). "And the stories they tell will be the fragments shored against their ruin." Within a handful of years, Zweig, Roth, and Toller were dead, the remnants of their group scattered to the winds as war consumed Europe. The book is rendered in vignettes notable for their economy of language, and Weidermann's keen sense of place anchors an incisive, sympathetic overview of the sweeping political and cultural shift in 1930s Germany. Janeway's elegant translation only strengthens a worthy addition to the growing body of work on Zweig (most recently George Prochnik's The Impossible Exile) and his contemporaries. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers interested in the literary and cultural history of 1930s Europe. [See Prepub Alert, 7/13/15.]--Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge State Coll., GA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2016
Literary historian Weidermann portrays two masterful writers of conscience caught in a cataclysm of history. Two Jews forced out of their homeland. Two opposites in a symbiotic friendship. Stefan Zweig of Vienna is wealthy, famous, shy, and generous. Joseph Roth grew up poor and fatherless in the hinterland and is gregarious, worldly, and alcoholic, living by his wits as an intrepid journalist and genius novelist. As they watch their beloved homeland torn asunder by fascism and virulent anti-Semitism, Zweig convinces Roth to join him in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend in the summer of 1936, where they become the nucleus of a group of exiled writers, including the beautiful, brilliant, scene-stealing Irmgard Keun, who finds Roth irresistible. Weidermann has so deeply internalized the writings and temperaments of Zweig and Roth, he luminously and empathically chronicles the nuances of their bond, affirming their deep belief in writing, which Roth described as a sacred duty, and the countless blessings of books, as Zweig put it. A funny, bittersweet, tragic, and haunting tribute to the radiance of love and literature in the grimmest of times.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)