Ostend; Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, And The Summer Before The Dark

The format is approximately 5.5 inches by 7,75 inches. [4], 164 pages. Illustration. Volker Weidermann (born 1969) is a German writer and literary critic. He currently works for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as the literary director and editor of the newspaper's Sunday edition. Ostende: 1936, Sommer der Freundschaft (Ostend 1936: Summer of Friendship) appeared in 2014. It concerns the friendship of two very different writers, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, and their meeting up at the Belgian coastal resort in 1936. Other exiled German writers and artists were at Ostend at the same time, including Roth's latest love, Irmgard Keun, along with Hermann Kesten, Egon Erwin Kisch, Arthur Koestler, Willi Münzenberg, Ernst Toller and Toller's young wife, Christiane Grautoff. 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. As Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn. 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 story of two great writers, written with a novelist's eye for pacing and language, a dazzling work of historical nonfiction. Stefan Zweig (28 November 1881 - 22 February 1942) was an Austrian writer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world. Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Royal Game, Amok, and Letter from an Unknown Woman - which was filmed in 1948 by Max Ophüls), novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion of Feelings, and the posthumously published The Post Office Girl) and biographies (notably of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Ferdinand Magellan, and Mary, Queen of Scots, and also the posthumously published one on Balzac). At one time his works were published without his consent in English under the pseudonym "Stephen Branch" (a translation of his real name) when anti-German sentiment was running high. His 1932 biography of Queen Marie Antoinette was adapted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a 1938 film starring Norma Shearer. Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, was completed in 1942 one day before he died by suicide. It has been widely discussed as a record of "what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942" in central Europe; the book has attracted both critical praise and hostile dismissal. Moses Joseph Roth (2 September 1894 - 27 May 1939) was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job (1930) and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927; translated into English as The Wandering Jews), a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth. Despite suffering from chronic alcoholism, he remained prolific until his death in Paris in 1939.[8] His novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939) chronicles the attempts made by an alcoholic vagrant to regain his dignity and honor a debt. Roth's final collapse was precipitated by hearing the news that the playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York.[9] Roth died from pneumonia on 27 May 1939 and was buried on 30 May at the Cimetière de Thiais, south of Paris. First American Edition [stated], First printing [stated].…