Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark

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. (Jan.)