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    Ostend
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    Ostend
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    Ostend
    Audiobook3 hours

    Ostend

    Written by Volker Weidermann

    Narrated by Dennis Kleinman

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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 home in Austria has been seized. He's been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town. So he journeys there with his new lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with his semi-estranged fellow writer and close friend Joseph Roth. For a moment, they create a fragile paradise. 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 group of found themselves in limbo while Europe teetered on the edge of fascism and total war.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateJan 26, 2016
    ISBN9781682628485
    Unavailable
    Ostend
    Author

    Volker Weidermann

    The award-winning writer and literary critic Volker Weidermann was born in Germany in 1969, and studied political science and German language and literature in Heidelberg and Berlin. He is the cultural editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and lives in Berlin.

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    Reviews for Ostend

    4/5

    4 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Weidermann gives us a charming, intelligent vignette of the life of the complicated, diverse community of writers exiled from Nazi Germany from the perspective of the group that came together to spend the summer of 1936 in the Flemish resort of Oostende. Maybe not the first place we would pick for a holiday, but it was apparently a lot nicer before it was bombed in WWII; and it seems to have been a convenient spot for them, not far from the exile publishing centre of Amsterdam, and only a short hop from both London and Paris. In any case, there was a formidable array of German literary and political talent assembled there, including the two writers who most interest Weidermann, the urbane, wealthy and popular Stefan Zweig and the touchy, impoverished and alcoholic Joseph Roth. At the heart of the story is the unlikely friendship and literary collaboration between Zweig and Roth and the perhaps equally unlikely love affair that developed between the jaded Roth the bright young novelist Irmgard Keun, an author of frivolous "chicklit" novels thrown together with the heavyweights of German Lit only by the quirks of Nazi censorship, but apparently well able to keep up with Roth's drinking. From reading their books, it would be hard to see what Roth and Zweig might have had in common apart from race and nationality, but clearly they each had a great deal of respect for the other's work, and they trusted each other far enough to work on rewriting unpublished texts together. Weidermann describes Roth solving a difficult problem of composition in one of Zweig's stories by writing a complete new scene for him. Although it's presented like a novel, this doesn't really seem to be a work of fiction in the usual sense - it's more like a piece of imaginative biography. Where Weidermann attributes thoughts or statements to his characters, he always seems to have a letter, diary entry or memoir to back it up, although he doesn't go to the length of providing footnotes. The novelist's freedom of invention seems to be exercised more in identifying patterns in the random events of his characters' lives than in interpolating fictional events between those in the historical record. It's obviously not meant as a profound piece of scholarship, but it gives us a few interesting insights into how literature copes with the idea of exile and it brings a generation of writers it's all too easy to overlook back into the limelight for a moment or two.
    • 5/5
      Verfolgte Schriftsteller, eine Gesellschaft der Stürzenden, die sich in diesem Badeort im Sommer 1936 treffen: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Irmgard Keun, Kisch, Toller, Koestler, Kesten, …, sie kennen sich, sie haben ihre Bücher gelesen, sind schon Freunde oder werden es in diesem magisch-unreellen Sommer, die Einsamkeit des Exils bringt sie zusammen, noch einmal, sie ahnen es: zum letzten mal, jeder wird seinen eigenen Weg gehen in die Fremde, in den Tod.Zweig diktiert seine Legende von dem begrabenen Leuchter seiner Sekretärin und Geliebten Lotte Altmann, bleibt stecken, Joseph Roth wird ihm ungefragt aushelfen.Die Sprache dieses Büchleins ist knapp berichtend, fast nüchtern zu nennen, doch nicht ohne Anziehungskraft. Ich glaube kaum, dass es hätte anders geschrieben werden können. Es läßt mich zu Zweigs Legenden greifen. (XII-17)