Ostend
Subtitle: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the summer before the dark
By: Volker Weidermann ; translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway
Contributors: Janeway, Carol Brown, translator
Edition: First American edition.
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 163
ISBN-13: 9781101870266
Subjects: Austrian Authors; Homes and haunts; Friends and associates; German Authors; Social life and customs; Exiled Authors; Nineteen thirty-six, A.D.
Work titles: Ostende
Description: "The true story of two of the twentieth century's great writers exiled from Nazi Germany to a Belgian seaside resort, and the world they built there: written with a novelist's eye for pacing, chronology, and language--a dazzling work of historical nonfiction. 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 home in Austria has been seized. He's been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town--a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his new lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with his semi-estranged fellow writer and close friend Joseph Roth, himself newly in love. For a moment, they create a fragile paradise. 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"--
Notes: "Originally published in Germany as Ostende: 1936, Sommer des Freundschaft ... in 2014"--Title page verso.

Translated from the German.