Volker Weidermann. (2016). Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Volker Weidermann. 2016. Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Volker Weidermann, Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016.

Volker Weidermann. Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{17AA930E-9A9F-4A16-BC68-4D45CA493D20}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{17AA930E-9A9F-4A16-BC68-4D45CA493D20}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/17A/A93/0E/{17AA930E-9A9F-4A16-BC68-4D45CA493D20}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/17A/A93/0E/{17AA930E-9A9F-4A16-BC68-4D45CA493D20}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781101870273
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 247643
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00X2FDZCU
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 247643
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781101870273
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 247643
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Volker Weidermann

title

Ostend

dateAdded

2016-03-10T20:27:00-05:00

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=2306818
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Ostend Stefan Zweig Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the Dark

crossRefId

2306818

subtitle

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

id

17aa930e-9a9f-4a16-bc68-4d45ca493d20

starRating

3.7

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: Ostend_9781101870273_2306818
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 5828529
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781101870273
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 247643
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 1/26/2016
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=17aa930e-9a9f-4a16-bc68-4d45ca493d20&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: Ostend_2306818
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 247643
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00X2FDZCU
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 1/26/2016
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=17aa930e-9a9f-4a16-bc68-4d45ca493d20&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: Ostend_9781101870273_2306818
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 5828515
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781101870273
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 247643
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 1/26/2016
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=17aa930e-9a9f-4a16-bc68-4d45ca493d20&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: World War II
2. • value: Biography
3. • value: War
4. • value: Historical
5. • value: Literary Criticism
6. • value: autobiographies
7. • value: Writing
8. • value: philosophy
9. • value: European History
10. • value: classic
11. • value: World History
12. • value: ww2
13. • value: Autobiography
14. • value: 20th Century
15. • value: german
16. • value: England
17. • value: WWII
18. • value: espionage
19. • value: true story
20. • value: biographies
21. • value: History
22. • value: Essays
23. • value: World War 2
24. • value: literature
25. • value: American Literature
26. • value: history books
27. • value: historical biographies
28. • value: historical books
29. • value: gifts for history buffs
30. • value: Literary gifts
31. • value: biographies of famous people
32. • value: literary biographies
33. • value: history gifts
34. • value: history buff gifts
35. • value: history lovers gifts
36. • value: history teacher gifts

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Weidermann, Volker
   • bioText: VOLKER  WEIDERMANN, born in Darmstadt in 1969, studied politics and German studies in Heidelberg and Berlin. He began his career as a culture journalist before serving as literary director and editor of the Sunday edition of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He is currently a writer and editor covering literature for Der Spiegel. Weidermann received the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for Literary Journalism for Buch der verbrannten Bücher (The Book of Burned Books) and is the author of several works of literary history and critical biography.
   • name: Volker Weidermann
2. • role: Translator
   • fileAs: Janeway, Carol
   • name: Carol Janeway

imprint

Pantheon

publishDate

2016-01-26T00:00:00-05:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Ostend

fullDescription

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 house in Austria—searched by the police two years earlier—no longer feels like home. He’s been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town that is a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with fellow writer and semi-estranged close friend Joseph Roth, who is himself about to fall in love. For a moment, they create a fragile haven. 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.
 
Ostend is the true story of two of the twentieth century’s great writers, written with a novelist’s eye for pacing, chronology, and language—a dazzling work of historical nonfiction.
 
(Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway)

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Signature
   • content: "In prose that reflects Zweig's own sparse, pretty, razor-sharp words, journalist and Der Spiegelliterary critic Weidermann puts his newsman talents to work for a lush re-creation of the summer a handful of Europe's most well-known intellectuals and artists gathered together in the hotels and bars of this resort community for a thrilling mix of hope, despair, and disbelief while the world outside them fell apart."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "Sparkling. . . . Weidermann's storytelling is piquant."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus (starred review)
   • content: "Taut, novelistic. . . . In lyrical prose, Weidermann re-creates the atmosphere of an ephemeral moment for both writers and the disillusioned men and women who gathered with them. . . . Evocative, sharply drawn portraits and a wry, knowing narrative voice make for an engrossing history."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Die Zeit
   • content: "Volker Weidermann has struck gold."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Die Welt
   • content: "A fascinating book . . . splendidly researched and highly informative."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Elke Heidenreich, Stern
   • content: "[Weidermann] paints a picture of how things could have been during this summer of farewells."
7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 2, 2015
     Weidermann’s novelistic retelling of the summer of 1936, when Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and several friends met up for one last time before WWII in the Belgian resort town of Ostend, will surely add to the recent resurgence of interest in Zweig—one of the interwar period’s most popular and translated writers—and his circle. At the story’s center is the unlikely friendship between the contrasting figures of Zweig and writer Joseph Roth—the first, elegant, wealthy, and successful; the second, a rumpled, alcoholic journalist from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. The book’s most sparkling moments, however, come from Roth’s even more unlikely lover, the fiercely intelligent Irmgard Keun, whom he met that summer after she was exiled from Germany for her assertively modern novels. Over the summer, the friends debated, drank, wrote, fought demons, and tried to balance hope against an increasingly awful reality. Though prior knowledge of Zweig and his friends will certainly help fill in gaps, Weidermann’s storytelling is piquant enough to draw the reader into the crumbling world of these displaced and despairing souls.

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from October 15, 2015
     A summer of sun for despondent exiles. In July 1936, the Austrian-Jewish writers Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and Joseph Roth (1894-1939) met in Ostend, Belgium, a seaside resort town that promised them a respite from the political turmoil perpetrated by Nazi Germany. As Weidermann, literary director and editor of the Sunday edition of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, portrays them in this taut, novelistic history, his first book to be translated into English, both men were facing personal and professional crises. Although Zweig was an enormously popular writer, his German publisher had just dropped him, and his latest book, on Calvin, elicited wrathful reviews. He wanted to wrest himself from his domineering wife and "dependent, needy, vain, useless" daughters to run off with his young, adoring mistress. Zweig was "tired, irritable, and depressed. He was sick of literature," sick of politics, sick of life. Roth, who had been supporting himself as a journalist, was distraught when his two recent novels were banned and burned in his beloved Austria. An angry alcoholic, he yearned nostalgically for the past, for "an old Austria and its monarchy, its empire," for "the great, glittering capital" of Vienna as it was in his youth. In lyrical prose, Weidermann re-creates the atmosphere of an ephemeral moment for both writers and the disillusioned men and women who gathered with them: German playwright Ernst Toller; Czech writer Egon Erwin Kisch, who was virulently anti-fascist; Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler; Zweig's diffident lover Lotte Altmann; and Roth's new lover, Irmgard Keun, a beautiful, feisty woman who had sued the Nazis for damages when her novels were banned (she lost). Weidermann's focus, though, is on Zweig and Roth: Zweig, "self-confident, worldly, with a firm stride, like an elegant shrew in his Sunday best"; and Roth, dumpy, unkempt, "like a mournful seal that has wandered accidentally onto dry land." Evocative, sharply drawn portraits and a wry, knowing narrative voice make for an engrossing history.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 1, 2015
     

     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. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers interested in the literary and cultural history of 1930s Europe. [See Prepub Alert, 7/13/15.]--Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge State Coll., GA

     Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2016
      Literary historian Weidermann portrays two masterful writers of conscience caught in a cataclysm of history. Two Jews forced out of their homeland. Two opposites in a symbiotic friendship. Stefan Zweig of Vienna is wealthy, famous, shy, and generous. Joseph Roth grew up poor and fatherless in the hinterland and is gregarious, worldly, and alcoholic, living by his wits as an intrepid journalist and genius novelist. As they watch their beloved homeland torn asunder by fascism and virulent anti-Semitism, Zweig convinces Roth to join him in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend in the summer of 1936, where they become the nucleus of a group of exiled writers, including the beautiful, brilliant, scene-stealing Irmgard Keun, who finds Roth irresistible. Weidermann has so deeply internalized the writings and temperaments of Zweig and Roth, he luminously and empathically chronicles the nuances of their bond, affirming their deep belief in writing, which Roth described as a sacred duty, and the countless blessings of books, as Zweig put it. A funny, bittersweet, tragic, and haunting tribute to the radiance of love and literature in the grimmest of times.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

popularity

31

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/17aa930e-9a9f-4a16-bc68-4d45ca493d20/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

17aa930e-9a9f-4a16-bc68-4d45ca493d20

starRating

3.8

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{17AA930E-9A9F-4A16-BC68-4D45CA493D20}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{17AA930E-9A9F-4A16-BC68-4D45CA493D20}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/17A/A93/0E/{17AA930E-9A9F-4A16-BC68-4D45CA493D20}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/17A/A93/0E/{17AA930E-9A9F-4A16-BC68-4D45CA493D20}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Biography & Autobiography
2. • value: History
3. • value: Nonfiction

publishDateText

01/26/2016

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9781101870266

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

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 house in Austria—searched by the police two years earlier—no longer feels like home. He’s been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town that is a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with fellow writer and semi-estranged close friend Joseph Roth, who is himself about to fall in love. For a moment, they create a fragile haven. 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.
 
...

sortTitle

Ostend Stefan Zweig Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the Dark

crossRefId

2306818

subtitle

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

publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: BIO006000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Historical
2. • code: BIO007000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Literary
3. • code: HIS037070
   • description: History / Modern / 20th Century