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

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.