Summer Before the Dark

by Volker Weidermann

Pushkin Press, £12.99

Review by Alan Taylor

TO paraphrase Ford Madox Ford, this is as sad a story as you’re ever likely to read. Its principals are two writers, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, both born in Austria, both Jews, both unlikely to survive a fascist putsch. It is the summer of 1936, when it is becoming increasingly clear and ominous what are the intentions of Hitler and his vile apostles. The location for Volker Weiderman’s slim book is Ostend in Belgium, then the kind of seaside town attractive to a more discerning clientele, now, thanks to concerted Allied bombing, a husk of its former self. When Weidermann, literary editor of Der Spiegel and, significantly, author of Buch der verbrannten Bücher (Book of Burned Books), visited in the winter of 2012, he found little that was evocative of Zweig and Roth and their circle of talented exiles, except the sea and the beach and an old narrow house that had somehow escaped being reduced to rubble.

In 1936, Zweig, then 46, was a world famous and bestselling author. He was also a man of considerable means, at once envied and admired by his peers. He owned a grand house in Salzburg which, like Scott at Abbotsford, he stuffed full of curiosities, including manuscripts by the likes of Balzac, of whom he wrote a biography, Maupassant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He was no less in love with music. “His altar,” writes Weidermann, “is Ludwig van Beethoven’s desk, at which he loves to sit....” Much of his collection, however, has been dispersed as Zweig attempts to adapt to the melancholy clouds gathering over Europe. His books are no longer published in Germany and Austria and he is in the mood to start afresh, to shed his old skin and grow a new one. He seeks a simpler, less burdened life. He has left his wife, Friderike, and is living with his much younger secretary, Lotte Altmann, who he once took to Scotland when he was researching his book on Mary, Queen of Scots.

Roth, thirteen years younger than Zweig, is in a perpetual state of crisis. When he has money, he stays in the best hotels. When he has none, he is dependent on the charity of friends or lives rough. He is both reliant on Zweig – for cash, for advice, for kindness – and contemptuous of him, the way less successful writers often are of those who routinely top the bestseller lists. When the Nazis took power they immediately banned Roth’s books. Having said that, he would have not have wanted them available any way, as Zweig did for a while, earning him the unjust sobriquet, “Hitler’s house Jew”. Roth, best known perhaps for his novel The Radetzsky March, is angrily unhappy, drinking as if there is no tomorrow – which he believes there is not – and pleading with Zweig to join him in Ostend. “I’m dying, I’m dying,” he writes. “Dear Friend, if you want to come, then come soon, what’s left of me will be thrilled.”

And so Zweig – “a great admirer, a selfless worshiper of the art of others” – goes to Ostend as did many desperate artists in those bleak days. The way Wiedermann portrays it, in urgent, choppy, present-sense statements, it was a community of cultural refugees, all fleeing a threat to their existence, all unable to decide what move to make next. They are a disparate, voluble, motley bunch, a “company in freefall”, gathering in the evenings in the Café Flore. Among them is Arthur Koestler, yet to write Darkness at Noon, Egon Erwin Kisch, journalist and writer, implacable in his opposition to the Nazis, the playwright Ernst Toller who keeps a rope in his suitcase “so that he would have a final way to escape”, and the irreverent, spunky, attractive, young novelist Irmgard Keun who falls in love with Roth and matches him drink for drink. As odd couples go they could out-odd most.

Theirs is a world that is falling apart, in which the jackals have seized control of the zoo. Weidermann writes as a reporter who has a story that must be told quickly, without pausing for breath. His characters are like passengers on the Titanic humming along to a catchy tune while icy water slushes around their ankles. It is the year of the Berlin Olympics when Goering will attempt to pretend that is all is normal, there is no such thing as a “final solution”. Zweig and Roth know that this is all a con trick, that for those of their ilk their fate is all but sealed. But what to do, where to go? Soon Spain will become embroiled in civil war and Mussolini will further attach himself to Franco and Hitler in the most unholy trinity in history.

Summer Before the Dark is not with fault. Towards the end, for instance, it reads like a fact-filled newsreel. But there is no denying that what Weidermann relates is deeply affecting, economically expressed and almost unbearably sad. Ostend for a few months in 1936 was the lull before the lunacy began, a moment which allowed those who still hoped that sense might be seen. But what hope can there be when the barbarians are at the gate, banning and burning books? Zweig and Roth, who lived to write, knew in their hearts there was none.