Ostend

by Volker Weidermann

  Now it is Zweig’s collection that is being scattered to the winds. He knows that years of wandering lie ahead, and that the new apartment in London will not become a new home. He wants to be free, or a little free, in this world of bonds and shackles.

  Nineteen thirty-six is a year of farewells and decisions for Stefan Zweig. His German publishing house no longer publishes him, the German market is lost to him, along with Austria, his collection, and his magnificent house—all of it is now nothing but a wearying burden. It is not easy to jettison what one has built up over the years. An entire life. Will a new one begin? Everything old is a fetter. Most of all his wife, Friderike, who back in 1914, when she was still in her first marriage, had sent word to Ostend to “have lots of fun with Marcelle”; Friderike, whom he had married in 1920.

  Stefan Zweig doesn’t want this marriage anymore. Love is long gone.

  It was two years ago that Friderike surprised him in Nice with his secretary, Lotte Altmann. A painful situation for everyone involved, but Friderike was prepared to draw a veil of silence over it all. She knew her husband, she knew his books, his novellas about passion. She knew what was to be expected, it was part of his life. And now she had just caught him at it for the first time. Friderike Zweig didn’t consider Lotte Altmann to be a real rival.

  Later Friderike was keen to tell everyone who wanted to know, and everyone else as well, that it was she who had chosen Lotte Altmann as her husband’s secretary. Diligent, quiet, pale, sickly, unobtrusive, gifted at languages. These were the qualities that had struck Friderike and that in her eyes had made Lotte the ideal secretarial help for the duration of Stefan Zweig’s stay in England.

  —

  Lotte Altmann, born in Kattowitz in Upper Silesia in 1908, had studied French, English, and economics at the University of Frankfurt. As a Jew, she had already been denied formal status in the summer of 1933. Her brother was a doctor and since May 1933 had already been banned from practicing. He and his whole family had soon decided to look on this as a kind of blessing, for it compelled them to leave Germany early, before the great wave of refugees was unleashed. Her brother opened a practice in London that achieved some considerable success; as time passed, more and more German émigrés came to him as patients. Lotte Altmann was attending language courses in the hopes of getting work one day as a librarian, when the job with Stefan Zweig was offered to her in the spring of 1934. A dream for her; she would never have imagined being allowed to work with this world-famous man and even to be of assistance to him in many situations. She was twenty-six years old when she met him, unsure of herself, without a profession or a husband or a country. And a dream for him too, very uneasy in this foreign city and in the English language, and so more in need of support than he had ever been. He was fifty-three and world famous. Famous, yes, but shy and strangely ill at ease in new situations and in company, never entirely sure of himself. Stefan Zweig was a seeker, always trying to locate the still center in himself, always pursuing self-awareness. A man who always admired others for their secure footing in the world. He, by contrast, was constantly summoning all his strength to stand steady without examining himself constantly to check that this stance was good and upright and respectable and proper and stable. For a man like him, a threatened state of exile was fatal. Riches and fame were of no help to him. He was totally dependent on his homeland and the security it offered him, and on his friends. And he was worried about getting older. One of the darkest days of his life had been his fiftieth birthday. He couldn’t tolerate aging. And then into his life came this pale, beautiful, young, reserved, intelligent woman who worshiped him silently, admired his writing, and loved his shy ways. It was that very shyness that Friderike had tolerated at best, that she regarded as a silly, somewhat embarrassing affectation even after all their years of marriage. At some point it would happen, she thought, at some point his fame and social routine would cure him of it. But it didn’t get better; on the contrary, the older he got, the worse his insecurity became, and the more acute his self-scrutiny, his unsteadiness, his fear of any gust of wind and of anything unknown.

  Lotte was a known quantity to him from the very first, without a word being said. Her quietness, her childlike joy in little things, her attentiveness when she looked at him and asked him things that no one had asked him for years, about his work and his books, things that Friderike and his daughters had long taken for granted about him. And he didn’t need to instruct her as to his literary intentions. All she had to do was to write his letters, ensure that there were always enough stamps, that bills got paid and appointments were kept. But she wanted to know everything, not in a demanding way but with a look that made him talk and talk. What he wrote had a significance. None of it was routine to her, or the obligations of the job. Through her eyes he recaptured his own vision of why he wrote, and the purpose of his labors, the fussing over every comma, his designs for a new world. Just the way Roth had once written to him in his wonderfully exaggerated fashion to say that it didn’t matter a shit if millions of Russians were learning the alphabet, the only thing that mattered was that someone called Stefan Zweig was writing. That was it. So none of it was in vain, none of it was some mere fulfillment of an obligation that, once in finished book form, would be attacked in every literary, political, and moral aspect by the critics and thrown to the winds. It was important, it was the creation of another world. This was what Roth kept telling him in his letters. And this was what Lotte Altmann said to him unbidden. It came from inside her. And Stefan Zweig loved her for it, with a silent, restrained, shy depth of feeling. “A young woman loves me,” he had written to Roth. And when he was away from her, what he wrote to her in his somewhat old-fashioned, hesitant way was “I wish you might miss me a little.” And that he worried about her, since she seemed to care so little about her own happiness. He wanted her always to know how much he himself cared about her happiness, and there was no way she could know this, but he was loyal, a faithful man when once he encountered true friendship. He never forgot. In this he was different from other men, he wrote, and would never forget her or what she was giving him. She could depend on this, she must depend on it, forever.

  When he went to Scotland to research his biography of Mary Queen of Scots, he took her with him. As his secretary, to write down what he dictated, but most of all as observer, as interlocutor, as an enraptured young woman who was so eager to learn everything about the life of this queen, what it had really been like, how one might view it from today’s perspective, how Stefan Zweig saw it, how she saw it through his eyes.

  For a long time Friderike Zweig guessed none of this. She was too convinced she knew her husband, and she despised pale Lotte too much. She was overconfident that her life as Frau Zweig would continue forever as it had until now. So she passed over this little episode. But her husband did not. Not that he articulated this; she had to piece it together from hints and tales told to her by friends.

  With the passage of time she was obliged to admit that something was irreparably broken. He had distanced himself from Austria and the yellow house, and now he was distancing himself from her too.

  —

  Friderike is very attached to the house in Salzburg; she identifies with its scale and its grandeur. And she doesn’t understand her husband’s revulsion at the police search, or at least she doesn’t share it. She can go on living there quite happily with her two grown daughters.

  That’s all Zweig needs. He only has to hear mention of the two daughters, and he goes into a rage: dependent, needy, vain, useless—the chains that weigh down his life. The refrain runs through his letters. But the heaviest burden is their mother.

  The last time she was in London, they had had only written communication with each other. He made a list of the times when she was forbidden to enter the apartment. He needed peace and quiet. She didn’t stick to it. He was furious. She was persistent. He was evasiveness itself, hated conflict, particularly a conflict like this, when everything depend
ed on it. “You are utterly heartless,” she said in a letter, as she left London after a huge fight, on her way back to Salzburg.

  —

  Friderike has no more than a suspicion that Zweig and Lotte Altmann are now a couple. Before her departure in May, she happened to go into a restaurant where he was sitting with Lotte. “An awkward encounter” was how she put it in a letter to her husband. In her correspondence with Stefan Zweig, she only ever referred to Lotte Altmann as “A” or, in ironic quotation marks, as “your close friend.” To friends, she speaks of her as the “Viper.”

  Stefan Zweig flees through the world, striking off one fetter after the other, if possible without causing anyone pain. It’s an illusion. The fetters only tighten.

  And the new book is no source of joy. Of all places, the protests start in unoccupied Switzerland. May was when there were anniversary celebrations of the Reformation in Geneva and other Swiss cities. Calvin was honored as a national saint. And he was the man whom Zweig in his book made into a forerunner of Hitler. His friend the Communist Romain Rolland sent effusive congratulations from Villeneuve in Switzerland. “Your book is perfectly timed for the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. I don’t advise you to settle here anytime soon. Beware the fury of the so-called ‘Momiers.’ When the French edition comes out, you’ll be torn to pieces. They’ll never forgive you for your attack on Calvin.”

  The aggressive, battle-hardened, eminently political Nobel Prize–winner Rolland meant his congratulations seriously. He had encouraged Zweig repeatedly to go on the attack, and he seemed barely able to believe that his friend had so determinedly set out to follow him. But this letter filled Zweig with horror. It hadn’t been his intention. Was he once again going to reap nothing but hate for a book in which he was celebrating the gentle, flexible, restrained Castellio as his hero? For this the French were going to tear him to pieces?

  Him, Zweig, the herald of balance, of listening, of communication? But that was how things were in this world, in this year, on this continent. Moreover, he had yielded to the pressure from his publisher Reichner to finish the book in such haste that several historical errors were not caught in the first printing. A further joy for his enemies. The attacks didn’t let up.

  Stefan Zweig was having a severe life crisis. He was tired, irritable, and depressed. He was sick of literature, he wrote. What he’d really like to do would be to buy up the entire print run of Calvin and burn it. “The only way to fight hatred must come from ourselves,” he replied to Rolland. He was dreaming, he said, of retreating into a mousehole and, most of all, of never having to read a newspaper again. The universe, literature, politics—wouldn’t it be wonderful never to have to think about them again? Where would be the farthest place from it all? Where would he find the mousehole for this summer?

  A beach in Belgium, white house, sun, a broad promenade, little bistros looking out over the water. He wants Ostend.

  With Lotte.

  “Dear Fräulein Altmann,” he writes from Vienna to London on June 22. They’re going to spend July together in Ostend, and they’re going to be setting off in a week.

  “Large suitcases unnecessary,” he writes. “We’re going to live simply.”

  THIS SUMMER THAT OTHER MAN, the man from Brody in the far east of the empire, is living right nearby. For a few months he has left Paris for Amsterdam, and at the end of May he writes to Stefan Zweig, “You must realize that everyone everywhere has a relative, a mother, a brother, a cousin, but I come from a very long way away, and I don’t even know the names of my relatives in the east anymore. And if they are still alive, they’re certainly living in absolute penury. What am I to do? I have to treat you as my brother, I beg you, allow me to speak to you just like a brother.”

  Joseph Roth has reached the end. By comparison with him, Stefan Zweig’s problems are in the realm of luxury. Immediately after the Nazis took power in Germany, Roth’s books were banned. Nor does he want them to be available there anymore. “Hell reigns,” he writes to Zweig. He also says there can be no compromises with the enemy. Anyone who continues to have business in Germany, anyone who so much as maintains any connection to Germany, is a monster. He regards Zweig’s decision to keep his books on sale in Germany via the Reichner publishing operation as a betrayal. In May 1936, after it has become clear that Zweig’s books will no longer be able to be sold there either, a jubilant Roth writes: “I congratulate you on being banned in Germany.”

  These two men have been bound for years by a remarkable love. Zweig, the elder by thirteen years, owner of a castle, man of the world, best-selling author—and Roth, successful journalist, feature writer in the 1920s for the Frankfurter Zeitung, author of not-very-successful documentary novels, inhabiter of hotel rooms, drinker, gregarious, generous, garrulous, always surrounded by friends, audiences, and hangers-on. When finally he wrote Job and Radetsky March, novels that would in any rational world have brought him both fame and fortune, his books were banned and burned, and he went into exile.

  He is an unhappy man, clear-sighted and angry, and he seeks salvation in the past, in old Austria and its monarchy, its empire, that took him, the fatherless Jew who grew up so far from the great, glittering capital and raised him up and opened the world to him. A state that was a universe, that encompassed many different peoples without distinguishing between them, and in which one could travel freely without a passport or papers of any kind. The older he gets and the more the world darkens, the more he yearns to travel back in time to that other world that is transfigured in his eyes, and is lost.

  “Lemberg still in our possession.” Now, so many years after it fell and the empire itself collapsed, Lemberg seems more completely his than ever before.

  —

  In the spring of 1936, Joseph Roth started on the novel about his homeland. It was supposed to be called Strawberries. “In my hometown there lived roughly ten thousand people. Three thousand of them were crazy, if not a danger to the others. A gentle derangement enveloped them like a golden cloud. They pursued their business and earned money. They married and begat children. They read books and newspapers. They spent no time worrying about the affairs of the world. They spoke to one another in every language in which the mingled peoples of our region communicated among themselves.”

  —

  He would never finish the book. His situation worsened dramatically in the course of three months. He had received advances for several novels, and these were long spent. The exiles’ publishing house, always on the verge of bankruptcy, would give him no more money unless and until he delivered a finished book. One novel, Confession of a Murderer, was almost completed; another, Weights and Measures, was half done; he wrote and he wrote. He used the material from the Strawberries novel to fill out the other books so as to finish them more quickly. He knew this wasn’t a good idea. Even Zweig, who had always admired him to a fault, warned him in his letters not to “stuff” his novels. It was what had damaged the last book, he said. But what was Roth to do? He had no money.

  —

  From a distance Zweig kept trying to appeal to Roth’s good sense, to get him to save money, to drink less, to stop living in the most expensive hotels. At the end of March he wrote, “You should finally have the courage to admit to yourself that no matter how great your stature as a writer, you are in material terms a poor, small Jew, almost as poor as seven million others, and you are going to have to live like nine-tenths of the people on this earth, in the tiniest and narrowest estate.” This letter almost put an end to their friendship. Joseph Roth was deeply offended. Zweig had put a name to the root of what divided them, the deep gulf that yawned invisibly between the assimilated western Jew born to wealth and the poor eastern Jew from the far frontier of the monarchy. It was self-defense. For Zweig saw that he couldn’t help Roth, that it didn’t matter how much money he gave him, that he just kept sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss, because he was drinking more and more heavily, slowly losing his mind and with it hi
s art. “You do not need to tell me, of all people, what a little poor Jew is,” Roth replied. “I have been one since 1894 and am proud of it. A devout eastern Jew from Radziwillow. Stop it! I’ve been poor and I’ve been small for thirty years. I am poor.”

  —

  Roth cursed, stormed, begged Zweig to come to him. “I’m dying, I’m dying,” he wrote. And on the ninth of April: “Dear friend, if you want to come, then come soon, what’s left of me will be thrilled.” The situation was dramatic, and Roth heightened the drama in the letters to his friend. Zweig dodged. The only flights to Amsterdam were by Lufthansa, and he wasn’t going to fly Lufthansa. At the same time he wrote to his American publisher, Ben Huebsch, saying he was afraid of meeting Roth. He’d been telling him for years to rein himself in financially, alcoholically, and literarily. Nothing had helped, and nothing would ever help. “One could wish he would commit some minor infraction that would get him jailed for two or three months. There’s no other way to stop him drinking.” And he added the information that would be fatal to Roth: “The quality of his books must suffer over the long term because of the folly of his way of life.”