Ostend Read online

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Carol Brown Janeway

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in Germany as Ostende: 1936, Sommer der Freundschaft by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, in 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: A. S. Kline: Excerpt from “The Violet” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by A. S. Kline, translation copyright © 2004 by A. S. Kline. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of A. S. Kline. Stephen Mitchell: Excerpt from The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of Stephen Mitchell.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weidermann, Volker, [date]

  [Ostend. English]

  Ostend : Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the summer before the dark / Volker Weidermann ; translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-87026-6 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-101-87027-3 (eBook).

  1. Authors, German—Homes and haunts—Belgium—Ostend. 2. Authors, Austrian—Homes and haunts—Belgium—Ostend. 3. Authors, exiled—Belgium—Ostend. 4. Zweig, Stefan, 1881–1942—Friends and associates. 5. Roth, Joseph, 1894–1939—Friends and associates. 6. Keun, Irmgard, 1905–1982—Friends and associates. 7. Ostend (Belgium)—Social life and customs. 8. Nineteen thirty-six, A.D. I. Janeway, Carol Brown, translator. II. Title.

  PT405.W3513613 2015 838'.91209—dc23 2015019901

  eBook ISBN 9781101870273

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover images: (top, right) Stefan Zweig: Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; (middle, left) Joseph Roth: Granger, N.Y.C.; (bottom) Port of Ostend: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  v4.1_r3

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Ostend

  About the Author

  IT’S SUMMER UP HERE by the sea; the gaily colored bathing huts glow in the sun. Stefan Zweig is sitting in a loggia on the fourth floor of a white house that faces onto the broad boulevard of Ostend, looking at the water. It’s one of his recurrent dreams, being here, writing, gazing out into the emptiness, into summer itself. Right above him, on the next floor up, is his secretary, Lotte Altmann, who is also his lover; she’ll be coming down in a moment, bringing the typewriter, and he’ll dictate his Buried Candelabrum to her, returning repeatedly to the same sticking point, the place from which he cannot find a way forward. That’s how it’s been for some weeks now.

  Perhaps his great friend Joseph Roth will have some advice. His friend, whom he’s going to meet later in the bistro, as he does every afternoon this summer. Or one of the others, one of the detractors, one of the fighters, one of the cynics, one of the drinkers, one of the blowhards, one of the silent onlookers. One of the group that sits downstairs on the boulevard of Ostend, waiting for the moment when they can go back to their homeland. Racking their brains over what they can do to change the world’s trajectory so that they can go home to the country they came from, so that in turn they can maybe even come back here to this beach on a visit one day, as guests. For now, they’re refugees in vacationland. The apparently ever-cheerful Hermann Kesten, the preacher Egon Erwin Kisch, the bear Willi Muenzenberg, the champagne queen Irmgard Keun, the great swimmer Ernst Toller, the strategist Arthur Koestler: friends, foes, storytellers thrown together here overlooking the beach in July by the vagaries of world politics. And the stories they tell will be the fragments shored against their ruin.

  Stefan Zweig in the summer of 1936. He looks at the sea through the large window and thinks with a mixture of pity, reticence, and pleasure about the group of displaced men and women he will be rejoining shortly. Until a few years ago, his life had been pure ascent—simple, greatly admired, and greatly envied. Now he’s afraid, he feels himself bound by a hundred obligations, a hundred invisible fetters. Nothing will loosen them, nothing will provide support. But there is this summer, in which everything might change. Here, on this extravagantly wide boulevard with its magnificent white house and its great casino, the extraordinary Palace of Luck. Holiday mood, lively atmosphere, ice creams, parasols, lethargy, wind, wooden booths.

  He was here once before; it was the summer of 1914, when the disaster began; with the headlines and the newsboys all along the beach promenade screaming more excitedly with every day that passed, excited and joyous because they were doing the best business they’d ever had.

  The majority of the bathers who tore the papers out of their hands were German. The boys yelled the headlines: RUSSIA PROVOKES AUSTRIA; GERMANY PREPARES TO MOBILIZE. And Zweig too—pale, well dressed, with wire-rimmed glasses—came down by tram to be closer to the unfolding news. He was electrified by the headlines; they made him feel delightfully aroused and excited. Of course he knew that the whole drama would subside into a general silence soon enough, but right now he simply wanted to savor it. The possibility of a great event. The possibility of a war. The possibility of a grand future, of an entire world in motion. His joy was especially great when he looked into the faces of his Belgian friends. They had turned pale in the course of these last days. They were unprepared to join the game and seemed to be taking the whole thing very seriously. Stefan Zweig laughed. He laughed over the pathetic troops of Belgian soldiers on the promenade. Laughed over a little dog that was dragging a machine gun along behind it. Laughed over the entire holy solemnity of his friends.

  He knew they had nothing to fear. He knew that Belgium as a country was neutral; he knew that Germany and Austria would never overrun a neutral country. “You can hang me from this lamppost if the Germans march in here,” he cried to his friends. They remained skeptical, and their faces turned grimmer as the days went by.

  Where had his Belgium gone so suddenly? His supposed land of vitality, of strength, of energy, and the intensity of another kind of life. That was what he so loved about this country and this sea. And why he so admired the country’s greatest poet.

  Émile Verhaeren had been the first spiritual love of Zweig’s life. As a young man, he’d found in him his first object of unconditional admiration. Verhaeren’s poems shook Stefan Zweig to the very marrow, as nothing had done before. Verhaeren’s was the style against which he honed his own, first imitating it, then making his own free renderings, then translating Verhaeren’s work into German, poem by poem. He was the one who had made Émile Verhaeren a name in Germany and Austria, and he had published an effusive appreciation in book form at Insel Verlag in 1913. In it he wrote, “And thus it is time today to speak of Émile Verhaeren, the greatest and indeed perhaps the only Modernist to have absorbed the conscious feeling of contemporary life in poetic terms and bodied it forth, the first to have fixed our era in permanent poetic form with incomparable inspiration and incomparable artistry.”

  It was also as a result of Verhaeren’s inspiration, his joy in life itself, and his trust in the world that Stefan Zweig had traveled to Belgium at the end of June, and to the sea. To strengthen the inspiration he drew from Verhaeren’s own inspiration. And to see the man whose poetry he had rendered into German. Like, for example, “Fervor,” which begins:

  If we truly admire one another

  From the very depths of our ardor and our faith,

  You the thinkers, you the scholars, you the
apostles

  You will draw on us to shape the laws that govern this new world.

  They are hymns to life, dream landscapes. Long, clear gazes at the world until it gives off its own illumination and corresponds to the poem that lauds it. And this love of the world, this enthusiasm were both hard-won. Laboriously wrested from a dark reality.

  I love my fevered eyes, my brain, my nerves

  The blood that feeds my heart, the heart that feeds my body;

  I love mankind and the world, I adore the force

  That my forces marshal and receive from man and universe

  For life’s meaning is: Receive and Squander.

  My peers are those who exult as I do,

  avid, panting in the presence of life’s intensity and the red fires of its wisdom.

  Two untamed creatures from the wilds of yearning had found each other. The young Austrian was enraptured by his conversations with his effusive master.

  The assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne had not made him change his plans at all. His secure world seemed secure for all time. Stefan Zweig had experienced more than one crisis, and this one was no different from all the others. It would pass and leave no trace. Like everything in his life thus far.

  They were actually due to meet on August 2, but then they crossed paths before that anyway, quite by chance, when Zweig was sitting for the painter Constant Montald in his studio in Brussels, and Verhaeren happened to drop by. They greeted each other and talked with their customary warmth. Zweig’s outpouring of enthusiasm struck the bearded Belgian as a little disturbing, but he put up with it. They wanted to see each other again soon and to plunge into discussions about everything imaginable, new poems, new plays, about love too, and new women. Zweig’s theme.

  But before this, given the young Austrian’s excitement, Verhaeren had a proposal: could Zweig meet a friend of his up there in Ostend? A rather strange friend, Verhaeren had to admit. Happy to have himself photographed playing the flute on the roofs of his hometown, a painter too, also made masks and drew caricatures, none too successfully up till now, actually not successfully at all. His first exhibition was held in a friend’s carpet shop. Once a year he organized a masked ball and ran all around the town with his friends in full costume. Called it “the Dead Rats’ Ball.” More people came every year. This man was called James Ensor. Verhaeren gave Zweig the address and a letter of introduction.

  And Zweig went. To the shop owned by Ensor’s mother, right behind the promenade along the beach. She sold carnival masks and shells and paintings by sailors and dried starfish. A narrow house with big display windows at street level, which showed off the exotic offerings hanging from transparent threads. Zweig went in. Yes, he was told, her son was upstairs, why didn’t he just go up? A dark, narrow hallway and stairs carpeted in red, with maliciously smirking masks lining the stairwell. He passed a tiny kitchen, red-enameled pots on the stove, dripping faucet. Up on the third floor a man wearing a flat cap was sitting at the piano playing quietly to himself, apparently oblivious to everything around him. On the wall behind the piano hung an enormous painting; hundreds of people in the strangest masks crowded the canvas, struggling toward some unidentifiable destination. Their stylized faces were in an array of garish colors, with long noses and empty eyes. A ball for the dead, a mortal folk festival, a communal frenzy. Zweig stared, mesmerized. This was not his Belgium. This was the home of Death, this was where he was celebrated. A round table displayed a large armful of dusty grasses in a vase, painted, Chinese, acting as the base for a laughing, toothless skull, wearing a woman’s hat stuck with dried flowers. The man at the piano kept playing to himself and humming. Stefan Zweig stood for a while as if paralyzed, then he turned around and ran down the stairs, through the shell shop and onto the sunny street, back into the daylight. He wanted to get away from here, back to being carefree, have something to eat, regain his composure.

  He hurried to his companion. Her name was Marcelle, and she had accompanied him here. A fantastic woman. Not marriage material, heavens no, more a novelistic thing. A story one could write up later. A sudden, unexpected intensity in one’s life, a plunge, an upward leap. A stunning eruption of passion. A Stefan Zweig story. Lived out, in order to be described.

  His first love, Friderike von Winternitz, had stayed at home in Austria. She made no claims on him, nor could she, because she was married to someone else. And so she wrote to Zweig in Ostend to say he should enjoy himself with his little girlfriend, and enjoy the summer. The glorious summer of 1914, to which Stefan Zweig would always think back in later years, when he uttered the word summer. The two women, the sun, the sea, the kites in the air, vacationing bathers from all around the world, the great poet, a beach slowly emptying of people.

  —

  The German visitors were the first to leave, followed by the English. Zweig stayed on. His excitement grew. On the twenty-eighth of July, Austria declared war on Serbia, and troops were marshaled on the border with Russia. Now even Stefan Zweig was slowly obliged to realize that things could turn serious. He bought himself a ticket for the Ostend Express on the thirtieth of July. It was the last train to leave Belgium for Germany that summer.

  Every carriage was jammed, people were standing in the corridors. Everyone had a different rumor to recount, and every rumor was believed. When the train was approaching the German border and suddenly stopped in open country, and Stefan Zweig saw huge trucks coming toward them, all covered with tarpaulins, and thought he recognized the shapes of cannons underneath, it gradually dawned on him where this train was headed. It was headed into war, which now was ineluctable.

  —

  Stefan Zweig went into a frenzy. He wrote down everything, at once, in an exact but racing torrent in his diary, which he began to keep again. He could no longer sleep, he was unsteady on his feet, he wrote, “I am totally broken, I can’t eat, every nerve is twitching.” He felt ashamed in front of his friends when he hadn’t yet been called up by the third of August. Even Hofmannsthal* had already been called up. Most of all, he felt ashamed in front of women. He felt their looks. What are you still doing here, young man? they seemed to be asking. He himself didn’t know either.

  He did military service at home at his desk, writing an account for the newspaper of his return journey into war and justified himself in his diary by writing that only the very last lines of his article were something of a lie. “Never has Vienna seemed so lovable to me,” he wrote for the newspaper, “and I rejoice that this was the very hour in which I found my way back to her.” In his diary, on the other hand: “Vienna was in a state of consternation when I reached there on the 31st of July. People stood around the call-up placards for hours on end, struggling to understand their incomprehensibly abysmal German. As evening came, some of them (mostly veterans’ associations) tried to evince some enthusiasm, but it sounded pretty subdued.”

  Little lies. It was war. Truth was dead.

  Nonetheless Zweig believed every word he read in the German and Austrian newspapers: poisoned wells in Germany, helpless Germans stood against walls and shot. And then, on the fourth of August, a piece of news that struck him like a bolt of lightning. GERMANY INVADES BELGIUM! Was this folly or genius? He couldn’t believe it would go well. Germany and Austria were pitted against the whole world. Above all, Stefan Zweig wanted to go to sleep for six months, in order not to witness this defeat. His whole body shook. Not because of his friends in Belgium, not because of the little neutral country into which the German army had marched, the quicker to reach Paris. Not because of his Belgium, that glorious country with its vitality, its mixture of peoples, its joie de vivre, its enjoyment of the pleasures of life, that he’d celebrated before in his book on Verhaeren as the embodiment of the true Europe, and that had heroically resisted all invaders over the centuries. “At that time all they wanted was to preserve their bright and merry way of life, with its untrammeled Dionysian appetites, an empire of sensuous indulgence; they wanted to preserve th
eir excesses as mere moderation.” His Belgium (which didn’t have much to do with the real Belgium). He’d given up. Zweig now trembled only for Germany. And for Austria.

  He raced through the streets of Vienna in pursuit of the latest news, of new rumors, new announcements of victories by the German army. If word came suddenly that the war ministry was about to announce a great victory, he rushed there in the company of thousands of his fellow Viennese. They buzzed around the brightly lit windows like insects in the night. And again, no victory. Again another night without sleep.

  Stefan Zweig wanted to get out onto the field of battle. He grew a beard, so that he would look determined, wild, and ready to fight. The day Germany invaded Belgium, he made a will. He withdrew a large sum of money out of the safe at his bank. His diary entry reads: “The German victories are glorious!” He was in a fever. He cheered. He wrote, “Free air at last!” And how he envied Berlin its celebrations.

  —

  Even years later, long after he’s become a world-famous pacifist and has lived through other cataclysms, he writes in his memoir The World of Yesterday that despite all his abhorrence, despite his hatred of war, he would never want to have missed those days in August. Everything was smashed in the course of those days. Eternally, irreparably. And yet it was an extraordinary moment. “As never before, thousands upon hundreds of thousands felt what it would have been far better they had felt in peacetime: that they were as one.”

  —

  Zweig wrote adoring letters to Ida Dehmel, the wife of Richard Dehmel, the most rabid warmonger among the German poets, who from the very first days of the war had distinguished himself not just in the field but at his desk with the most fiery, nationalistic, fighting verse. “Even were the great and eternal efforts of our nation to end in the destruction of the state itself,” Zweig wrote to Frau Dehmel, “these poems alone would leave us thankful for our danger and our inner affliction.”