6-3-2016

 

Volker Weidermann, Ostende. 1936, Sommer der Freundschaft.

 

 

Volker Weidermann, Ostende. 1936, Sommer der Freundschaft., Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2014. 157 Seiten,

Summer Before the Dark: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Ostend 1936, by Volker Weidermann, Pushkin Press, 176 pages

 

   

 

NOTA DE LEITURA

 

Como o título inglês refere, os personagens principais deste livro são Stefan Zweig e o seu amigo Joseph Roth, o primeiro em trânsito para o exílio e o segundo para a morte. Mas o livro fala ainda de mais gente ilustre que estava em Ostende no Verão de 1936. Desde logo, Irmgard Keun que viveu com Roth uns dois anos, Hermann Kesten, Egon Erwin Kisch, Ernst Toller e sua mulher, a beldade Christiane Grautoff, de 23 anos, Willi Münzenberg, Arthur Koestler, Klaus Mann. São todos judeus, com excepção de Irmgard Keun, a qual viu proibidos e queimados os seus livros na Alemanha. O autor foi aos escritos de todos para narrar de um modo realista a passagem por Ostende dos seus personagens.

Acho o título da tradução inglesa algo desadequado. A “escuridão” que atingia os veraneantes de 1936 em Ostende não era a guerra que se aproximava, era algo do passado recente: o eclodir do nazismo na Alemanha, a proibição e queima pública dos livros de que o regime não gostava em 1933 e depois as leis raciais de 1935.

Li o livro duas vezes, primeiro na tradução inglesa e depois no original alemão (com muito uso do dicionário: tirei e anotei 1445 significados). Os meus conhecimentos de alemão não me permitem apreciar a escrita do autor, mas esta é na realidade difícil. Para descrever qualquer coisa, não se contenta com um adjectivo, põe dois, três ou quatro, quase sinónimos; o mesmo faz com verbos e advérbios. Por exemplo: os personagens estão na esplanada em frente do mar e o livro diz “an die Luft,  in den Wind, in die Sonne” (pag. 115, location 1167 na tradução inglesa – Kindle). Pode ser de facto muito literário mas…

Na Amazon, alguns leitores queixaram-se da tradução inglesa, enquanto outros escrevem que está muito bem feita. Acho que deve ter sido feita à pressa, porque encontrei alguns lapsos flagrantes:   

 

- location 328 pag. 34 do original alemão

„Friderike und die Töcther“ - Friderike and his daughters – deveria ser her daughters (enteadas de Stefan Zweig).

 

-location 581 pag. 58

und zur Begrüßung drei Orchideen von Landauer  jede einzeln verpackt. – a despropósito, foi traduzido : „three articles, individually packed”

 

-location 744 pag. 74

türmte Steuerschulden -  accumulated a mound of debts , mais correcto  “tax debts”

 

-location 885 pag. 87

Geschwister Mann - Mann children,  deveria ser „brothers and sisters“

 

-location 1133  pag. 112

Schachfuchs wird der Lektor deshalb von allen genannt    - esta frase não foi traduzida

 

Com o livro, o Autor faz biografias breves de Stefan Zweig e de Joseph Roth, que retrata bem,  enquanto aos restantes dedica apenas algumas pinceladas.  Está na onda da actualidade, pois Zweig voltou a estar na moda, em especial depois do filme “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, cujo realizador, segundo disse a imprensa, desenhou as personagens a partir de livros dele, em especial de The Post Office Girl, 1982 (Título original: Rausch der Verwandlung. Roman aus dem NachlaßThe Intoxication of Metamorphosis) e Beware of Pity, 1939 (Título original: Ungeduld des Herzens) .

 

O Autor já há tempos que se dedica ao estudo dos escritores banidos da Alemanha nos anos trinta, tendo publicado em 2008,  Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher.

Uma surpresa para mim, foi a descoberta de Irmgard Keun, que foi amante de Joseph Roth durante cerca de dois anos (1936 – 1938). Encontraram-se de facto em Ostende, como este livro narra. Na altura, Roth estava já muito viciado em álcool (schnapps) e acabou por a viciar também a ela. A relação dos dois tornou-se doentia, ele cheio de ciúmes, ela cansada de o suportar. Fugiu com um oficial da marinha para Nice quando estavam os dois em Paris.

Irmgard Keun nasceu na Alemanha em 1905, estudou teatro e foi actriz durante alguns anos, mas desistiu e aos 29 anos começou a escrever. Em 1931, o primeiro livro Gilgi, eine von uns vendeu 30 000 exemplares (um sucesso enorme) e no ano seguinte Das kunstseidene Mädchen quase outro tanto. Os livros não agradaram ao poder Nazi e foram proibidos; diziam que era Asphaltliteratur. Protestou, recorreu, mas de nada serviu. Os livros foram apreendidos. Pediu uma indemnização pelos livros confiscados. Negaram. Foi então que partiu para Ostende. 

Foi para a Holanda em 1940, quando os alemães ocuparam o País. Conseguiu seduzir um oficial alemão para ele lhe dar um passaporte em nome de Charlotte Tralow (um dos seus nomes próprios e o sobrenome do marido de quem já se divorciara). Refugiou-se em Colónia em casa dos pais. Por sorte, o Daily Telegraph de Agosto de 1940  noticiou que ela se tinha suicidado e conseguiu ficar incólume e em paz até 1945.

Em 3 de Julho de 1951, deu à luz uma menina que chamou Martina Charlotte Keun-Geburtig e anunciou no jornal „Die Geburt meiner kleinen Tochter Martina Charlotte zeige ich hocherfreut an. Frau Irmgard Keun“ .Negou-se porém a dizer quem era o pai. Por volta de 1970, foi internada por sofrer de depressão e alcoolismo e ficou no hospital durante 6 anos.  

Em 1977, o jornalista Jürgen Serke da Stern publicou uma série de artigos sobre os livros proibidos e queimados em 1933 e dedicou um dos artigos a Irmgard Keun. Foi o suficiente para os seus livros começarem a ser de novo procurados, editados e também traduzidos fora da Alemanha. Viveu então três anos feliz e sem dificuldades, até que faleceu de cancro do pulmão em 1982.

Jürgen Serke atribui-lhe a frase: Heil Hitler - bei mir nicht.

 

 

 The New York Times

 

JAN. 31, 2016

Review: ‘Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark’ Revisits Moments in Exile

By  

 

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

By Volker Weidermann

Translated by Carol Brown Janeway

165 pages. Pantheon.

 

Not that long ago, most American readers had never heard of Stefan Zweig, even though he was one of Europe’s most popular authors — every bit as famous as Thomas Mann, certainly — at the sunny peak of his career.

Over the last few years, however, several publishing houses have begun to reissue Zweig’s works — in slow bursts at first, and then in a fusillade, so that American audiences might delight in the short stories, novellas, biographies, essays and powerful novel, “Beware of Pity,” that brought Zweig so much glamour and recognition between the first and second World Wars.

Then the writer George Prochnik wrote a nuanced biography of Zweig, “The Impossible Exile,” in 2014, and Wes Anderson made “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” in which no less than three characters were modeled after the author in some way.

With “Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark,” Volker Weidermann has expanded the nimbus of Zweig’s mystique to include the cohort of exiles who surrounded the author in the summer of 1936, when he took refuge in the Belgian resort town of Ostend.

The son of a prosperous textile manufacturer, Zweig was the elegant embodiment of the assimilated Jew — urbane, instinctually tolerant, inclined toward pacifism. When he first arrives at the beach, he is a man in crisis: reeling from the incursions of his beloved Austria into the sanctuary of his home (the police raided his mansion in Salzburg), denuded of his German readership (Jews are no longer welcome in print), estranged from his wife (he has fallen in love with his secretary, Lotte Altmann).

“The universe, literature, politics — wouldn’t it be wonderful never to have to think about them again? Where would be the farthest place from it all?” Weidermann writes. “A beach in Belgium, white house, sun, a broad promenade, little bistros looking out over the water. He wants Ostend. With Lotte.” He brings her along.

Zweig’s friend the writer Joseph Roth descends from scrappier stock. He’s a “poor Eastern Jew from the far frontier of the monarchy” — bitter, bilious, “the king of grumps, the king of curses and the king of all hates.” From Amsterdam, he, too, joins Zweig on the beach, but only thanks to Zweig’s largess and patient indulgence: Roth is a penniless drunk and alcoholic of such spectacular devotion that he spends every morning throwing up, “sometimes for hours. He eats almost nothing.”

In “The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, Amos Elon argues that one of the greatest unrequited love stories may be that of the Jews with Germany. “Before Hitler rose to power, other Europeans often feared, admired, envied and ridiculed the Germans,” he writes. “Only Jews seemed actually to have loved them."

The same might readily be said of many Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and this pining for returned affection — all while its opposite, a genocidal hatred, is aborning back home — forms the emotional core of Mr. Weidermann’s book. The men and women in Zweig’s circle badly yearn for their native countries; away from home, they feel lost in their own skins. Five will eventually kill themselves, Zweig and Lotte included. There are some souls who survive deracination. But others shrivel at the roots.“On the day I lost my passport,” Zweig wrote in his memoir "The World of Yesterday,” published in 1942, “I discovered, at the age of 58, that losing one’s native land implies more than parting with a circumscribed area of soil.” It was in 1942 that Zweig also took his life, in Brazil.

Yet “Ostend,” as a work of nonfiction, is not grim. If anything, it’s the opposite — light on its feet, a reverie in a way; when it’s over, you’ll half wonder if you’ve dreamed it. Mr. Weidermann, who covers literature for Der Spiegel, draws from the same source materials that any traditional history would (diaries, correspondence, autobiographies), but he writes the book as a novel, almost, recreating scenes and channeling characters’ thoughts:

“Roth’s relief comes flooding back by the minute,” he writes of the author’s first encounter with Zweig at the Ostend train station. “A man, a friend who organizes things for him, his connection to the sun, to common sense, to the guarantee of a safe existence. How gladly he will entrust himself to him this summer. How confident his step becomes immediately.”

I enjoyed getting lost in the book’s melodies, but I also found its airiness dissatisfying in places; I longed for sharp analysis where there was only atmosphere. The first few chapters and subtitle both suggest that the book will be about the friendship between Zweig and Roth, as complicated a relationship as one might imagine (Zweig has the money and fame; Roth, the greater talent). But their story fades from view until the end of the book.

In the middle, readers are served a series of vignettes about émigrés in Roth and Zweig’s orbit — banned writers and Communists primarily, most of them Jewish but some not. They gossip, compete and hold forth about their passions at Café Flore, their bistro of choice. But their discussions, no matter how lively, are always tinged with fear. The impending Olympic Games in Berlin particularly fills them with dread. The Nazi propaganda machine is at full tilt, papering over its crimes, its hate.

“Der Stürmer has been censored for weeks,” says Ernst Toller, the exiled German playwright. “Not to remove any statements, just the anti-Semitic passages.”

“Wonderful!” says Roth. “So now they’re selling blank paper!”

Their only salvation can be found in writing. It’s their sole form of agency, their one means to will themselves into existence while their works are being burned and destroyed at home. In a letter, Irmgard Keun, Roth’s lover, says that she and Roth engage every day in “the purest literary Olympics,” working at opposite ends of a cafe and counting who has written the most pages by day’s end. Zweig does some of the best work of his career. Roth helps him.

And what is Zweig’s story about? The lost menorah of the Temple of Solomon. “It will become in some small way their shared book,” Weidermann writes, “the story of eternal flight and of the belief that there is a place, which will hold its secret forever, where the Jews of the world will be able to live in peace.”

 

Correction: February 4, 2016 
 

The Books of The Times review on Monday, about “Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark” by Volker Weidermann, gave outdated information about Mr. Weidermann’s employment. He currently covers literature for Der Spiegel; he no longer is the literary editor for the Sunday edition of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

  

 

Summer Before the Dark: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Ostend 1936 by Volker Weidermann; trans. by Carol Brown Janeway, book review

Two books examine the life and work of prescient Austrian writer Stefan Zweig

Lucy Scholes 

 

In the essay "1914 and Today", written in 1936 by Stefan Zweig in celebration of the French writer Roger Martin du Gard's novel L'Été 1914 and included in Messages from a Lost World, a new collection of the Austrian's works, Zweig writes about standing on a precipice. A fevered sense of desperate urgency infuses the piece as he describes the "situation of total apathy" that pervades a Europe within which "the idea of Internationalism has been scattered to the winds, the League of Nations is shackled and the obligations of treaties and accords cannot be enforced". He ends with a warning: "If we do not finally take hold of ourselves, it will not be another epic saga as in Roger Martin du Gard's book, but merely a sad testimony to the colossal universal fatigue and incomprehensible indifference of the individual today with regard to his own destiny."

For some wider context, we can turn to Volker Weidermann's captivating new book Summer Before the Dark. In 1936, all too aware of the conflict that was about to engulf the world as he knew it, Zweig – "a world star of literature" – couldn't help but think back to 1914, both the previous tipping point in violent European history and the last time the writer had walked the beach promenade in Ostend. But where 22 years previously, the then-33-year-old had felt "electrified by the headlines" which made him feel "delightfully aroused and excited" now he was "struggling to find a foothold".

Weidermann's book is written as a non-fiction novel. Ostend during the summer of 1936 is his setting, and his characters a band of exiled intellectuals, "refugees in vacationland", orbiting the central figures of Zweig and his friend and fellow writer Joseph Roth as they struggle to contend with the horrors befalling their beloved Europe. And although the cast is an impressive one, at its heart it is the tragic story of the troubled friendship between Roth and Zweig: "Two men, both falling, but holding each other up for a time."

Somewhat reminiscent of that other gem, Florian Illies's 1913: The Year Before the Storm, in the effortless combination of grand epoch-defining moments with seemingly mundane observations of the everyday, it's also steeped in that particular melancholy that permeates the works of both its subjects. Think the loneliness of Roth's The Hotel Years, or the nostalgia-filled pages of Zweig's memoir of Vienna's lost golden age, The World of Yesterday.

We see much of the same in the 10 essays collected in Messages from a Lost World – appearing here in English for the first time, seamlessly translated by Will Stone – that chart Zweig's increasing disillusionment and despair from 1914 through to 1941 (a year before he committed suicide). What Zweig describes in one piece as "the bloody vortex of history" hangs heavily over the collection, the course of which is "as random as roulette", he declares in another. It's not only Zweig who is seeking solace in the past during this period, though. "Why are they all writing works of history?" asks Irmgard Keun, the German author and soon-to-be Roth's lover, on her arrival in Ostend in Summer Before the Dark.

Although beautifully suited as companion pieces, each book stands alone – Messages from a Lost World a necessary addition to any Zweig library, and Summer Before the Dark a historical triumph.

 

 

January 22, 2016

‘Summer Before the Dark’, by Volker Weidermann

Review by Rebecca Abrams

 

I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere,” wrote Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday, the memoir he completed in Brazil shortly before his suicide in 1942. In the summer of 1936, this realisation was still only starting to take root. Zweig was staying with his secretary and lover, Lotte Altmann, in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend. He was writing well, in excellent health and surrounded by kindred spirits.

Ostend had become a temporary magnet for an array of displaced and disaffected intellectuals and revolutionaries, and for the length of one heady, surreal summer, Zweig and his fellow exiles met daily and argued mightily about life, politics and literature. Among them were Arthur Koestler, Egon Kisch, Hermann Kesten, Ernst Toller and, last but not least, Joseph Roth — author of the brilliant novels Job and The Radetzky March and a writer more than equal to the world-famous Zweig. 

In Summer Before the Dark, Volker Weidermann deftly reconstructs that moment. The book’s subtitle alludes quietly to Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939(1978), in which a group of middle-class Jews gather in a resort for the summer, failing to understand that this is the last stop on their journey to the concentration camps. Ostend in 1936, likewise, proves to be a last stop of sorts.

Weidermann, an award-winning German writer and critic, draws extensively on letters, novels, memoirs and biographies, suffusing the pages with people’s actual words. This is a marvellous book about many things — politics, love, identity, belonging — but at its heart is the story of a great and troubled friendship between two great and troubled writers.

It was, in many respects, an unlikely friendship. Zweig, the elegant Viennese Jew, then 53, is “self-confident, worldly, with a firm stride, like an elegant shrew in his Sunday best”; Roth, the scruffy, penniless eastern Jew, 13 years younger, is already in the advanced stages of alcoholism, his feet so swollen he can hardly put on a pair of shoes. He barely eats, throws up for hours every day, is constantly touching Zweig for cash. Zweig pays his bills, buys him new clothes, makes him eat and take exercise, and tries in vain to curb his drinking. Yet Roth is also a marvellous raconteur, “better in conversation than in his books”. His girlfriend that summer, the novelist Irmgard Keun, says “she has never met, either before or since, a man with the sexual magnetism of Joseph Roth”.

As Weidermann makes clear, Zweig and Roth shared a literary sensibility and emotional affinity that went beyond their differences. Roth “sees everything exactly, both his own downfall and the downfall of his world”, according to Keun, and it is this pitiless clearsightedness that the romantic Zweig values most of all: the strain of sentimentality in Zweig’s fiction is ruthlessly extirpated in Roth’s.

Wiedermann reveals each man’s literary debt to the other, even to the extent of Roth supplying a crucial scene for one of Zweig’s short stories. He is surely also correct in his reading of Roth’s last work, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, as a valedictory thank you to Zweig, his friend and, for a while, saviour.

Roth never let Zweig off the hook artistically, even as his emotional demands wore down the friendship. Roth is Zweig’s “burden, the most beloved weight on his shoulders, his bad conscience, his literary conscience, his incorruptible, difficult friend”. When, in 1939, news of Roth’s death reaches Zweig, he is heartbroken. “I loved him like a brother,” he says.

Summer Before the Dark is literary biography at its best. Faithful to facts, it reads like a novel. With its elegiac atmosphere, extreme personalities, tense political backdrop and tragic central relationships, it would make a terrific film — Death in Venice with more sex, more booze, more action and considerably more conversation.

It is Roth who emerges most brilliantly in the book, as a restless, unsparing observer and exemplar of the tragedy of European Jewry. In 1937, a year after the summer in Ostend and with his own life in freefall, he wrote a new preface to one of his greatest works, The Wandering Jews. “No one loves victims,” he wrote, “not even their fellow victims...With his senses sharpened by despair, the emigrant can hear the inaudible call to him from every border: ‘Die miserably where you are!’” Words as pertinent now as they were then.

Rebecca Abrams is the author of ‘Touching Distance’ (Picador)

 

 

 

 

newstatesman

   

 

 

 

25 JANUARY 2016

 

Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth: How Europe’s exiled intellectuals ended up on a Belgian beach

 

In choosing to take up this story in the summer of 1936, Weidermann finds a moment of relative calm and normality in the émigrés’ lives.

BY ADAM KIRSCH

 

On 3 July 1936, a Czechoslovakian Jewish journalist named Stefan Lux entered the general assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva, shouted “C’est le dernier coup”, and shot himself with a revolver. Lux wanted his suicide to be a warning cry against anti-Semitism and Nazi militarism. But if he thought that even such a public sacrifice would serve as the “final blow” against fascism, he was tragically mistaken. Two years after Lux’s death came the dismemberment of his country in the Munich Agreement and the Germany-wide pogrom known as Kristallnacht. The following year
brought the Second World War and the beginnings of the Holocaust. All that Lux’s death accomplished was to confirm the very powerlessness it was meant to protest. Nor did he even win the posthumous thanks of posterity, given that today his name and his deed are practically unknown.

Lux features in an offstage cameo role in the non-fiction chamber drama that is Summer Before the Dark. The German journalist Volker Weidermann has devoted this short, elegiac book to the German émigré writers, most of them Jews, who congregated in Ostend in the summer of 1936, mainly because they had no place better to go. At the centre of this unhappy cenacle were two writers who shared Lux’s fate. Stefan Zweig’s journeys took him all the way to Petrópolis, Brazil, before he gave up hope and took an overdose of barbiturates (with his wife, Lotte) in 1942. Joseph Roth’s death also deserves to be called a suicide: he died in Paris in May 1939 after years of acute alcoholism. (His final crisis was precipitated by yet another suicide, that of Ernst Toller, the communist playwright, who had killed himself in New York City a few days earlier.)

The effects of exile on Zweig and Roth had been immediate and dramatic. When Hitler came to power in 1933, each man was at the peak of his literary career, though that success took very different forms. Roth was a long-time star correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and had just written the novel that was his masterpiece, The Rad­etzky March. Zweig, who lived in splendour in Salzburg, Austria, was a writer of sensational novellas and digestible works on the history of ideas, books that were immensely popular in Germany and beyond. Their close friendship endured despite the evident differences in their temperament – Zweig was a moderate bourgeois, Roth a romantic bohemian – and, trickier still, in their abilities: Roth was a writer of genius, while Zweig knew he had only talent.

Roth, as a Jew and a well-known critic of Nazism, knew that he had to flee Germany immediately. He left for Paris on the day Hitler took power, 30 January 1933, and never returned. Zweig, an Austrian citizen and an outspoken liberal pacifist, soon came under pressure from his country’s authoritarian regime, and he transplanted himself to England in 1934. Zweig’s books were burned and banned in Germany, but he remained so popular in translation that he was never short of money. Roth, on the other hand, was now unemployable as a journalist, and lived hand-to-mouth on tiny advances from small émigré publishers. Their correspondence, which can be found in the 2012 book Joseph Roth: a Life in Letters, is fascinating for the double imbalance of power it shows. Roth depended on Zweig’s money and influence, yet he insisted on the superiority of his own literary and political standards. He had no qualms about lecturing the man who supported him, writing to Zweig in October 1933, for instance: “Haven’t you got that yet? The word has died, men bark like dogs. The word has no importance any more, none in the current state of things . . . Everything is shit.”

In recent years, the reputations of both men have undergone a sudden revival in the English-speaking world, thanks to extensive new translations and biographical works. Summer Before the Dark is a sign of how far this revival has succeeded: it is now possible for these writers and their émigré milieu to be the subject of a work of popular history very much like those Stefan Zweig used to write. One of his most successful books, Sternstunden der Menschheit (Decisive Moments in History, 1927), was a collection of a dozen historical sketches of moments that “changed the world”, from the Battle of Waterloo to the fall of Constantinople. Summer Before the Dark, on the other hand, is a story of people who failed to change the world: men who were expelled from history by the Nazis and had to watch helplessly as it steamrollered them into oblivion.

In choosing to take up this story in the summer of 1936, Weidermann finds a moment of relative calm and normality in the émigrés’ lives. The urgent flight from Germany is over; the chaotic and deadly flight from the German armies is still in the future. Ostend itself seems like a place where nothing bad could happen: “the expansive long beach, the big, overly broad promenade, the elaborately curved casino with its large terrace, the bistros with their little marble tables outside, the wooden bathing huts in the sand”. It is a middle-class paradise of the sort we associate with pre-First World War Europe. Indeed, Zweig was at Ostend in July 1914, and continually delayed his departure in the belief that war was just a rumour. Not until he was on the last train to Germany, and passed trucks carrying cannons towards the Belgian border, did he
begin to believe that the crisis was for real.

Weidermann opens his book at that moment of false security, just as Europe’s new Thirty Years War is about to break out. He sketches in the subsequent lives and careers of Zweig and Roth with economical strokes, bringing out the ready-made contrast between the two. Like virtually every writer on the subject, Weidermann can’t help condescending to Zweig:

Zweig is still writing out of a world, and about a world, that no longer exists. His ideal [of tolerance and mutual understanding] is pointless, unrealistic, risible, and dangerous . . . What use is tolerance in a world in which any man and everything he lives for and everything he writes are in danger of being ground to a pulp?

By contrast, Roth, with his fantastic dreams of restoring the Habsburg throne, may be unreal and absurd, but at least he is passionately committed.

Zweig is partly to blame for the way posterity treats him. In his memoir, Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), he is so modest about his achievements that he practically writes himself off, along with the liberal values he held dear. Yet how many people are possessed of the genius they high-handedly condemn Zweig for lacking, and in a geopolitical crisis how many would demonstrate better judgement than he did? Perhaps we dislike Zweig precisely because he reminds us too much of ourselves; and we romanticise in Roth the egotistical, self-destructive artist we would shun in real life.

For even in Weidermann’s friendly account, Roth comes across, without question, as an impossible man: self-pitying, improvident, monstrously needy. Irmgard Keun, another émigré writer in Ostend that summer – and “the only Aryan here”, as she cheerfully acknowledged – fell in love with Roth at first sight and spent years tending to his needs, such as holding his head during his daily bouts of vomiting. But even she eventually ran away: “I left him with a deep sigh of relief . . . I felt as if I’d escaped an unbearable burden.” Zweig was able to maintain a relationship with Roth only by keeping him at a distance, emotionally and physically. Yet under the circumstances, his devotion to his friend must be considered truly magnanimous.

A book about Roth and Zweig – and Keun and Toller and Arthur Koestler and Willi Münzenberg, all of whom play small roles – is necessarily a book about despair. Yet if there is an objection to be made to Summer Before the Dark, it is that Weidermann turns what ought to be a wretched, wrenching experience into one that is merely melancholy, not without a kind of glamour. He does not omit the grim details of the émigrés’ lives: we see Roth’s “badly swollen” feet, the stigmata of advanced alcoholism, which make it hard for him to wear shoes. Yet the whole approach and tone (and title) of the book are intent on turning Ostend 1936 into a kind of late-afternoon idyll of European civilisation. From our point of view, it is all so “interesting” – the brilliant minds, the political drama, the friendships and love affairs. Only by turning to Roth’s letters, or the essays of Walter Benjamin, can we begin to grasp what it really meant to be exiled and waiting for death in an indifferent world – as millions of people are in our own time.

 

Adam Kirsch’s books include “Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas” (W W Norton)

 

 

 

Exilliteratur:Juden auf Wanderschaft

Volker Weidermann erzählt vom Juli 1936, als sich die halbe deutsche Exilliteratur noch einmal in Ostende trifft

Von Andreas Isenschmid

17. Juli 2014, 8:00 Uhr / Editiert am 31. Juli 2014, 2:10 Uhr DIE ZEIT Nr. 30/2014

 

Welch ein Fund: Stefan Zweig im Juli 1936 im belgischen Seebad Ostende, die halbe deutsche Literatur ist mit ihm dort versammelt, Joseph Roth, Irmgard Keun, Egon Erwin Kisch, Hermann Kesten, Arthur Koestler, Willy Münzenberg, Ernst Toller, alle Sorgen und Hoffnungen der Hitler-Gegner gehen in diesen dreißig Sommertagen hin und her. Donald Praters klassische Zweig-Biografie widmete diesem magischen Monat auf 550 Seiten gerade mal zwanzig belanglose Zeilen. Die neue Zweig-Biografie von Oliver Matuschek segelt wortlos an ihm vorbei. Es musste der Literaturkritiker Volker Weidermann kommen, seit seinenLichtjahren ein Mann mit einem Händchen für Spezielles, um den Goldschatz dieses Monats zu heben.

Und in welch feiner erzählerischer Komposition er das tut. Altmodisch, gar nicht so anders als Zweig, fühlt er sich in sein Sujet ein. Doch für bloß gefühlig Daherfantasiertes sollte man das nicht halten. Vage und präzis zugleich zielt Weidermann gleich auf der ersten Seite auf eine "Legende", bei der Zweig an einer Stelle immer wieder ins Stocken gerät. "Seit einigen Wochen geht das schon so. Vielleicht weiß Joseph Roth ja Rat, der alte Freund, den er nachher im Bistro treffen wird."

Es ist nicht irgendeine Legende, von der da die Rede ist. Es ist die Legende Der begrabene Leuchter, wichtig, weil Zweig, der Jude im Exil, darin einen siebenarmigen Leuchter "als Symbol der ganzen jüdischen Wanderschaft" deutet. Wichtig dazu, weil Joseph Roth, exilierter Jude auch er, Zweig tatsächlich in Ostende mit einem eigenen Textstück über die schwierigste Stelle hinweggeholfen hat. Zusammengenommen mit Zweigs Rat zu Roths Beichte eines Mörders, auch in Ostende, ist das der beste und der letzte Moment ihrer Freundschaft.

Aber diese so sprechende Geschichte, die er erst kunstvoll aus allerhand Fußnoten der Roth-Forschung herausklamüsern musste, berichtet Weidermann natürlich nicht so simpel. Er lässt die Legende, ohne mehr zu ihr zu sagen, am Anfang einfach kurz auftauchen und erzählt sich dann durch die Geschichte dieses verzweifelten Sommermonats. Erst nach hundert Seiten, fast schon am Ende des Sommers, kehrt er zurück zur Legende, kommt er zum Mittagessen, bei dem Zweig und Roth sich zusammen über die Geschichte beugen, worauf Roth Zweig noch gleichentags eine Art Liebesbillett samt Textvorschlag zur schwierigen Stelle ins Hotel bringen lässt, den Zweig dann variiert und einbaut.

Was tut Weidermann dazwischen? Er denkt zurück an die Zeit, als Roth und Zweig zueinanderfanden. Zwei Sachen nehmen an diesen Rück- und Seitenblicken besonders ein. Weidermann hat eine Wünschelrute für erstklassige Zitate, und er weiß sie zu montieren. Zu Beginn fasst er den Sommer 1914 ins Auge, als Zweig in den letzten Tagen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg schon einmal in Ostende war. Warum melden die "Intellectuellen Österreichs" sich nicht "freiwillig an die Front", fragt sich Zweig. Weil sie nicht so feine Feinde haben wie die Deutschen, die gegen eine Kulturnation wie Frankreich kämpfen dürfen. Für die "Außenposten der Donaumonarchie" zu kämpfen, da fehle ihm "der Zusammenhang. Brody ist mir nicht so viel wie Insterburg."

Brody? Dieses Wörtchen greift Weidermann auf und erzählt die Geschichte eines achtzehnjährigen Juden aus Brody, der mit Zweig immerhin so viel Zusammenhang hatte, dass er sich 1913, ein Jahr davor, auf seiner jüdischen Wanderung nach Westen voller Bewunderung zu Stefan Zweigs Wiener Wohnung begab, freilich ohne den Verehrten anzutreffen. Es brauchte dann noch einmal dreizehn Jahre, bis auch Stefan Zweig anlässlich eines Buches über Juden auf Wanderschaft seinerseits von Bewunderung für dessen Verfasser, eben den jungen Juden, der natürlich Joseph Roth hieß, gepackt wurde und ihm den ersten Brief ihrer künftigen Freundschaft schrieb.

In den gekonnt verschränkten Rück- und Seitenblicken erzählt Weidermann von der Heimatlosigkeit, die Zweig und Roth im Sommer 1936 nach Ostende getrieben hat. Zweig reich und unglücklich, Roth arm, trunksüchtig und noch unglücklicher. Er erzählt von Zweigs so lautloser, instrumenteller Liebe zu Lotte Altmann und von Roths gerade damals beginnender, so turbulenter zu Irmgard Keun. Er berichtet von den Begegnungen Roths und Zweigs mit Kesten, Koestler, Kisch und all den andern. Und er tut das mit knappen Strichen bis ans Ende eines jeden Lebens.

Es darf offen bleiben, ob er für jede Einzelheit dieser mit Zeitgeist aller Art so geladenen Begegnungen gleich zuverlässige literaturgeschichtliche Quellen hat wie für den Fall des Begrabenen Leuchters. Wen kümmert’s, dass manches nur dreiviertelgestütztes Seemannsgarn sein mag. Das war in Kestens Meine Freunde, die Poeten ähnlich und in Zweigs splendider Balzac-Biografie nicht anders; man nennt es historisches Erzählen. Und von Zweig hat Weidermann offenkundig viel gelernt. Die Prosa hat Zug, wehende Ambiance, schöne treffende Kurzcharakterisierungen, hin und wieder ein Tröpfchen sentimentalen Parfüms.

Hätte Weidermann seine kleine Ostende-Geschichte Stefan Zweig gezeigt, hätte der gesagt: "Sehr gut, junger Mann. Nur dass Sie Martin Bodmer einen Autografen-Händler nennen, das sollten Sie ändern; Bodmer ist einer der bedeutendsten Sammler unserer Zeit, das ist was ganz anderes. Dann haben Sie eine merkwürdige Stil-Marotte mit den Anaphern, diesen endlosen Reihungen, die Sie uns um die Ohren hauen, als seien wir als Ihre Leser fortwährend vom Einschlafen bedroht. Sind wir gar nicht. Aber sonst: fabelhaft! Sie haben mich und meine Sommergäste sehr fein verstanden."

 

 

Literaturkritik.de

 

Ausgabe Nr. 6, Juni 2014

Stefan Zweig und Joseph Roth

Volker Weidermann erzählt von deutschen Schriftstellern in der Emigration in „Ostende“

Von Alexandra Pontzen

 

Dieser „Sommer der Freundschaft“ im friedlichen, ehedem so glanzvollen Ostende an Belgiens Küste ist nicht so unbeschwert, wie es der Titel vermuten lässt. Und dass nicht eine fiktive Geschichte zu erwarten ist, sondern ‚wahre‘ Geschichte erzählt werden soll, signalisiert schon die vorangestellte Jahreszahl 1936, das Jahr Vier der NS-Herrschaft in Deutschland, aus dem die Freunde, verfemt und angefeindet, hatten fliehen müssen: „Der scheinbar immer frohe Hermann Kesten, der Prediger Egon Erwin Kisch, der Bär Willi Münzenberg, die Champagnerkönigin Irmgard Keun, der große Schwimmer Ernst Toller, der Stratege Arthur Koestler, Freunde, Feinde, von einer Laune der Weltpolitik in diesem Juli hierher an den Strand geworfene Geschichtenerzähler.“

Über ihrer aller Lebens- (und Liebes-)umstände wird der Leser im Laufe seiner Lektüre verständnisvoll und unterhaltsam unterrichtet, und in einem angehängten, durch eine kleinere Schrifttype als ‚Bericht‘ gekennzeichneten knappen Schlusskapitel erfährt er in geraffter Form ihr späteres Schicksal bis zu ihrem Tode.

Im Mittelpunkt, wenn auch vielleicht nicht dieses Kreises von Kollegen, so doch der Erzählung, stehen als Hauptfiguren der 1881 geborene Stefan Zweig und der 1894 geborene Joseph Roth, beide Österreicher, literarische Schwergewichte und einander seit Jahren durch Freundschaft verbunden. Weidermann rekapituliert ihre Biographien, wobei ihm bald schon, bei Schilderung der Stimmung bei Kriegsausbruch 1914, der glückliche Umstand zupass kommt, dass Zweig just im Juli 1914 ebenfalls in Ostende weilte, um von dort überstürzt in das kriegsbegeisterte Wien zurückzueilen. Hier, wie immer wieder im weiteren Gang des Erzählens, fallen die Partien über Zweig regelmäßig ausführlicher aus als die über Roth, wenngleich der Autor sich Mühe gibt, das wohl materialbedingte Ungleichgewicht zu überspielen. So gönnt er Roth das Ende seiner Erzählung; sie schließt mit Roths Tod im Mai 1939 in Paris. Dennoch behält Zweig das letzte Wort: „Ich habe ihn wie einen Bruder geliebt.“

Für den Sommer 1936 in Ostende, den übrigens Zweig in seinen Erinnerungen „Die Welt von Gestern“ (1942) mit keinem Wort erwähnt – ebenso wenig wie Freund und „Bruder“ Joseph Roth, das gibt denn doch zu denken –, scheint das Materialproblem allerdings gering zu sein. Etliche der Beteiligten haben sich dazu (und über einander) geäußert, sei es brieflich gegenüber Dritten, im Tagebuch oder in späteren Zeugnissen, allen voran Irmgard Keun, die stante pede ein Liebesverhältnis mit Roth eingeht und darüber u.a. ihrem Verehrer in Amerika freimütig berichtet.

Roths Verhältnis zu Zweig war in seinen besten Zeiten von kollegialem Austausch geprägt; jetzt macht sich zunehmend das materielle Gefälle bemerkbar und die starken finanziellen Unterschiede dominieren die Beziehung. Zweig, der berühmte und vermögende Großschriftsteller, unterstützt den bewunderten, aber literarisch weitgehend erfolglosen Roth schon seit längerem mit Zuwendungen. So auch hier in Ostende, z.B. lässt er ihm einen Anzug schneidern, kommt für seine Hotelrechnung auf und hinterlässt beim Abschied einen größeren Geldbetrag, während Roth sich immer mehr dem Alkohol ergibt, hierin von Keun akkompagniert. Als Zweig gegen Ende des Sommers zum ersten Mal nach Brasilien aufbricht, beruhigt er sich zwar, er habe Roth in Ostende wieder auf die Beine geholfen, doch gleichzeitig weiß er, dass diesem nicht mehr zu helfen ist. Im folgenden Jahr bittet Roth ihn dringlich, wieder nach Ostende zu kommen. Zweig schickt ihm Geld, und Roth schreibt: „Das Krepieren dauert länger als das Leben.“ Zweigs Freitod im Februar 1942 im brasilianischen Petrópolis vermerkt der Bericht außerhalb der Erzählung (s.o.) am Textende.

Weidermann hat ein lesbares Buch von handlichem Umfang über diese Menschen geschrieben, nahe am Klatsch, aber doch taktvoll und mit Empathie, eine weniger dokumentierende als narrativ verfahrende Reportage, die das Material, aus dem sie schöpft, geschmeidig nutzt und zitiert. Mit literarischen Wertungen hält er sich zurück. Nicht das Werk der auftretenden Autoren, ihre Persönlichkeit steht im Vordergrund des Interesses, ihre Art zu leben und den Bedrängnissen der Zeit zu begegnen. Roth und Zweig gewinnen soviel Kontur, dass dem Leser die Motive ihres je eigenen Lebens und Sterbens einsichtig werden.

In einem einzigen Kapitel wird die Ostender Sommergesellschaft im Ganzen vorgeführt, wie sie da im Café Flore zusammensitzt, lästert (mit Vorliebe über Mitglieder der Familie Mann) und witzelt. Indes: „Noch einmal versucht, eine Sorglosigkeit zu simulieren…eine große lange Urlaubsreise…Und irgendwann eben wieder zurück. Nur wann? Diese Frage wird, je drängender sie ist, umso weniger gestellt. Mit jedem weiteren Tag, den dieser Urlaub andauert, wird eine Rückkehr unwahrscheinlicher. Alle wissen es. Aber man spricht nicht darüber. Es herrscht Pflicht zum Optimismus. Den Strick hat man im Koffer [wie Ernst Toller – A.P.], darüber wird nicht geredet.“

Ein Beitrag aus der Redaktion Gegenwartskulturen der Universität Duisburg-Essen

 

 

Besprechung von 22.07.2014

Freundschaft am Abgrund


Volker Weidermann ruft zum Abschiedsfest der europäischen Kultur


Was ist das für ein Buch, das den Titel „Ostende“ trägt, im Untertitel „1936, Sommer der Freundschaft“ heißt, aber ohne Gattungsbezeichnung erscheint? Ein geschickt arrangiertes Sachbuch? Eine Novelle, die auf literarhistorischen Fakten gründet? Der FAS-Literaturkritiker Volker Weidermann erzählt von zwei österreichischen Autoren, die im Sommer 1936 in Ostende noch einmal das Glück erleben – umgeben von einem illustren Kreis, der sich wie zu einem Abschiedsfest der europäischen Kultur in dem belgischen Küstenort eingefunden hat.
  Der Zeitpunkt, noch einmal das Panorama der deutschen Literatur auszubreiten, ehe deren Protagonisten in alle Richtungen ums Leben flüchten mussten, ist von Weidermann klug gewählt. Wer sehen wollte, für den war im Sommer 1936 längst zu erkennen, dass die Nationalsozialisten sich mit der Herrschaft über Deutschland nicht zufrieden geben werden; aber andere mochten damals noch ihre Illusion hüten, über Deutschland und Italien wäre befristet eine autoritäre Ära verhängt, die eines nicht allzu fernen Tages am demokratischen Widerstand in diesen Ländern auch wieder ihr Ende finden werde.
  Erzählt wird von einer Sommerfrische, aus der keiner erholt ins bürgerliche Leben zurückkehren wird. Die einen bereiten sich an ihrem Ende darauf vor, in den spanischen Bürgerkrieg zu ziehen, andere beginnen verzweifelt, nach irgendeinem Land zu suchen, in dem sie noch einmal neu beginnen könnten, und zwei, die beiden zentralen Gestalten des Buches, machen sich auf, ihren Tod zu suchen.
In „Ostende“ steckt ein Roman, es ist der Roman der Freundschaft, die den weltberühmten, reichen, über die Maßen freigebigen Stefan Zweig und den von materieller Not niedergedrückten, im Alkohol verkommenen Joseph Roth verbunden hat. Diese Freundschaft hatte über Jahrzehnte Bestand, wiewohl sie nicht nur innig, sondern auch prekär war von Anbeginn, investierte doch der eine, Zweig, viel Sorge, Zeit und Geld in sie, um von Roth dafür oft mit kränkenden Anklagen und übler Nachrede bedankt zu werden. Zweig, dessen Werk neuerdings in aller Welt wiederentdeckt wird, liebte Roth nicht nur wie einen Bruder, wie er schrieb, als er Nachricht von dessen Trinkertod in Paris erhielt, sondern verehrte ihn auch als jenes Genie, für das er, der mit so leichter Eleganz zu formulieren verstand, sich selbst nicht hielt.
Im Sommer 1936 hat Zweig die verquälte Ehe mit Friderike von Winternitz beendet, das einst geliebte Salzburg mit seinem berühmten Schlösschen auf dem Kapuzinerberg verlassen. Nun bestellt er Lotte Altmann nach Ostende, die blasse junge Sekretärin, der er seine Bücher diktiert und die als seine zweite Frau mit ihm nach Brasilien ins Exil und dort 1941 in den Tod gehen wird.
 Auch Roth erfährt 1936 noch einmal das unverhoffte, gar nicht mehr ersehnte Liebesglück, denn nach Ostende kommt auch die junge, viel umschwärmte Irmgard Keun, die sich sofort in ihn verliebt. Roth ist bereits vom Alkohol gezeichnet: die Haut schuppig, das Gesicht aufgedunsen, die Beine voller Wasser. „Sie versucht, ihm das Trinken abzugewöhnen, und er, es ihr anzugewöhnen. Ich glaube, er gewinnt“, diese richtige Prognose, die Volker Weidermann in seinem gut recherchierten Buch zitiert, stammt von Egon Erwin Kisch, dem kommunistischen Reporter aus der ideologisch sehr heterogen zusammengesetzten Tafelrunde von Ostende.
Weidermann hat sich durch Berge von Sekundärliteratur gearbeitet und weiß seine Funde zumeist unangestrengt in sein Buch zu integrieren. Hermann Kesten, der schon genannte Egon Erwin Kisch, Ernst Toller und seine 23 Jahre jüngere Frau, die Schauspielerin Christiane Grautoff, Arthur Koestler, Otto Katz und Klaus Mann würdigt er in markanten Porträts. Häufig wechselt der Autor vom neutralen Bericht zur intensiven Vergegenwärtigung, wobei er dann stilistisch etwas forciert auf Pointe, auf den rhetorischen Effekt setzt. Was ihm jedenfalls gelingt: das bewegte und bewegende Bild einer literarischen Freundesgruppe am Abgrund, die durchaus repräsentativ für die deutsche Literatur, die europäische Kultur steht.


KARL-MARKUS GAUSS