A SUMMER IN OSTEND: STEFAN ZWEIG AND JOSEPH ROTH IN 1936

1 R A S U M M E R I N O S T E N D S T E F A N Z W E I G A N D J O S E P H R O T H I N 1 9 3 6 V O L K E R W E I D E R M A N N Translated by Carol Brown Janeway It is July again. A new summer in Ostend. The streetlamps from which Stefan Zweig said, more than twenty years ago, he would hang himself are still there. And the sea is the same too, 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. The newspapers lie on the bistro tables, but there are no newsboys calling out alarming headlines for the Austrian tourists to make fun of. The mood along the shore is boisterous, the season has just begun, it’s hot, the entire youth of Belgium seems to have gathered this summer in what the advertising brochures like to call the ‘‘Queen of Beach Resorts,’’ on the white spun-sugar promenade by the North Sea. July 1936. Ostend. Stefan Zweig thinks back to that lost innocence, remembering a world he believed to be eternal, a world without end, and a man in a flat cap in a kingdom of the dead in mass revolt, a boneyard of masks. But Ostend also conjures up memories of bursts of energy, and intensity and strength, of a new beginning with the force of a 2 W E I D E R M A N N Y catapult, ripping him out of contented inertia to encounter the utterly unexpected possibility of a new world and its equally unanticipated sense of spiritual brotherhood. So even after the cataclysmic destruction began, with its aftershocks still to be felt now, in this new summer, the place itself will forever be associated with the hope of a sudden change in the course of the universe. What a youthful, yearning young man, so susceptible to wild enthusiasm, Stefan Zweig had been in 1914! Twenty-two years have passed since that summer, years in which he has become a world star of literature. His name is as internationally famous as that of Thomas Mann, his books outsell those of any other German author around the world. His novellas, his historical biographies, and Decisive Moments in History are global best sellers. He’s a child of Fortune, owns a little yellow castle in the woods up on the Kapuzinerberg overlooking Salzburg, corresponds with every great mind on the continent, and has long been married to his love of those years back then, Friderike von Winternitz. And now, in this new summer, he is a man struggling to find a foothold. Zweig has barely ever bothered with present-day politics or religion in the world in which he lives. In history – yes! If it was the world of Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette, or Joseph Fouché, he knew every historical and political detail, the mechanisms of power, the world-historical context, all of which he encompassed in his books as part of the human story, the story of mighty, individual people. Or, occasionally, as the story of powerless people who were singled out by a world-historical lightning bolt to change the course of destiny. None of it had anything to do with the world he actually lived in. It is only in recent years that he has begun to sketch himself in his historical personages and his present world in historical events. Two years ago he published a book about the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, and most recently a monograph titled Castellio Against Calvin, which carried as its subtitle ‘‘A Conscience Against Power.’’ Erasmus and Castellio are the heroes in whom he also describes himself, the ideals for which he strives: conscience against power, humanism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and reason. In the life and teachings of Erasmus, Zweig discerns the art of ameliorating conflicts by ‘‘well-intentioned understanding’’ and A S U M M E R I...