Ostend

by Volker Weidermann

  Zweig, naturally, is right. But the American market is the only possible financial salvation for German writers, and Huebsch the publisher is powerful.

  Zweig wrote to Roth, “Roth, hold yourself together now, we need you. There are so few people and so few books in this overpopulated world!” But Roth was still clear-sighted, even now. A good judge of character and an acute reader. He knew that Zweig didn’t want to come and didn’t want to see him. And he could read flight schedules: “It’s not correct that only German planes fly here. The only Lufthansa flight is the 6 a.m. Besides that one there are Dutch flights at 7 a.m., 10, 12, 3 p.m., 2:10 p.m., and 7:45. But you simply don’t want to come, and you’d do better to say so.” And yes, he would hold himself together, Zweig wasn’t to worry. He was holding himself together, nobody could hold himself together more than he was doing day by day. “I write every day, if only to lose myself in the fates of strangers. Don’t you see, my fellow human, my friend, my brother—you once said Brother in a letter—that I’m close to dying?”

  It was an aerial battle being fought in dire straits by the two writers. Aerial chess between friends. Who would give way? Could Zweig save his friend? Did he even want to? The man who wanted to free himself of all shackles was now attached to this particular shackle and couldn’t get free. Roth was not prepared to release him from the responsibilities of their friendship. Zweig had a bad conscience and struggled with himself. He did love his friend, he still admired his art, and he respected his judgment more than anyone else’s. Roth had always been severe with him, devoid of leniency. The flowery, the cloudy, the metaphorically overflowing, the false images, the adjectives that only half fit—Roth was pitiless, both in his letters and in conversation. He didn’t care that he was dependent on Zweig and that the other man was so much more successful than he was. None of it had anything to do with precision, beauty, or literary quality. But he also knew what his own literary debt to Stefan Zweig was. He knew it, and he put it down on paper. In 1930 he dedicated a copy of Job to him with these words: “Stefan Zweig, to whom I owe thanks for this Job—and more than Job, and more than any book—for the full measure of friendship: please accept this book and keep it as a small salute. Joseph Roth.”

  In 1931 they had written together in Antibes, reading aloud to each other in the evenings what they had written during the day, correcting words, adding words. Roth read to Zweig from what was becoming Radetsky March, and Zweig was happy and thrilled and started repeatedly to tell his own stories as he listened, interrupting the reader with memories of his own early Austria, pictures from his childhood.

  And later, when Roth sent the finished book to his friend, he included a letter with it: “I totally forgot to tell you that you are the source of some of the scenes in my book. You will recognize them. Despite my dissatisfaction with the novel, I am very, very grateful to you.”

  Henceforward Stefan Zweig’s literary counsel would be almost indispensable to him. In January 1933 Roth wrote to Zweig: “I cannot begin anything new whatever until I have talked to you. I have to have your goodness and your intelligence.”

  A few weeks later Roth goes through the second half of Confession of a Murderer with Zweig once more. He reads aloud, Zweig criticizes, thinks ahead, reformulates, offers ideas, notions, observations, cuts verbiage and repetitions, and points out false connections. Roth listens with fascination and close attention and is open to his suggestions.

  In the spring of this year, Roth was totally bowled over for the first time by something his friend had written. The settling of accounts with the reformer, Calvin, was a great joy to Roth, the Jew who revered Catholicism. He read it over three nights, he wrote. “Despite all your worldliness, there was always a lingering impulse toward illusion in your books, or rather an unspoken hope, a certain moral ballast. You’ve jettisoned that, which has allowed you to reach higher. It’s the pristine, the clear, the transparent that I love so much both in the flow of thought and in the form itself. The ballast of metaphors has been dropped.” And he added, “You can imagine the pleasure this gives me, given my almost Calvinist fanaticism about the purity of language.” He continued in this laudatory vein, interrupting himself to say oh he was testing himself to see if his friendly literary conscience would allow him to write this to his patron. But yes, he had examined himself and had nothing to reproach himself with. It was simply too good, and he wasn’t being venal. And added, happily, as ultimate praise, “I feel as if you’ve found your way home, and in a small way that I’m part of it.”

  One writer finding his way home to another. Joseph Roth was a tactician, Joseph Roth was in despair and wanted at all costs to have his friend by his side. He wanted to talk to him, write with him, drink together, he wanted to be next to him, freed of all worries by this man who paid for everything and solved all problems with his sunny common sense. So his letter was a little exaggerated. But he meant what he said about a homecoming. It was both wish and reality.

  —

  Roth felt on the verge of death. His room, he said, looked like a coffin. “Think about how you never know when you’re going to see someone for the last time. Letters can’t replace that moment when you see each other, greet each other, nor the other, when you say goodbye.”

  Finally, Stefan Zweig gave in. Roth was part of the reason he decided that Ostend was to be the refuge that summer. His friend could get there quickly by train from Amsterdam; it wasn’t far. That there was, moreover, a ban on schnapps in Belgium, as Zweig wrote to tell him delightedly, would not necessarily have been a great attraction to Roth, but he knew his friend’s pedagogical ambitions and would find ways to get around them. That it might be a plus that Zweig had chosen a seaside resort was not on Roth’s mind either. He liked to say that he didn’t set foot in the sea, and fish didn’t set foot in cafés. Roth didn’t care about a hot sun, he didn’t care about beaches, and he didn’t care about a happy holiday atmosphere. Zweig appeased him by saying Ostend was a real city, with more of a café culture than Brussels, and more bistros than you could count.

  BUT IT’S HARD TO TRAVEL in these times if you’re a Jew with an Austrian passport and no means of bribing people, even for the shortest distances, even between the Netherlands and Belgium. Roth has spent two weeks already waiting in Amsterdam for his Belgian visa.

  Then things get even more stirred up. Roth too has just separated from his life’s companion, Andrea Manga Bell—born in Cameroon, raised in Hamburg, married to a Cameroonian prince—with whom he’s been living for the past seven years. She has grown children from her first marriage, a son and a daughter; her husband left them after the birth of the daughter to return to Africa. He apparently possesses a fabulous fortune but pays absolutely nothing to his abandoned wife or the children. Andrea Manga Bell is a former actress who lived out her dream of a royal life in Africa on the stage, then worked as a graphic artist till she met Joseph Roth and took over as his secretary, typing his manuscripts. Since then she has earned no money of her own. So Roth has had to support her. But Roth no longer has the will or the means. He went to Amsterdam in March so as to live more cheaply and get free of the family burden.

  In June he writes to his companion and suggests that she come to Amsterdam or later to Brussels, to live with him there. But without the children. It’s time they supported themselves, or their father supported them, or whoever. But he, Joseph Roth, is no longer going to do it. If not, they must split up. He receives no reply for a long time. Then on June 28, a telegram arrives from Tueke Manga Bell, Andrea’s daughter: “Please come at once!” Nothing else. Roth is in a dreadful state, fearing the worst; he has no money for a trip to Paris, he’s been waiting for days in the Hotel Eden for his Belgian visa; he makes a panicked phone call to his French translator Blanche Gidon in Paris. She knows nothing either. Is this comforting in and of itself? Would she have heard if Manga Bell had died? Roth is in despair. For two days he waits for news from Tueke or from Blanche Gidon. Then another telegram from Tueke Manga Bell
arrives. Her mother, on learning that Roth intends to part from her, has had a nervous breakdown.

  At first Roth is relieved. He had really feared she had taken her own life. A nervous breakdown sounds more like a trick, a fake illness to make him come back to his senses and back to the family. But he’s had enough. “Frau Manga Bell has consistently refused to live according to my rules,” he writes a few days later to Blanche Gidon to justify himself. He’s plagued by guilt, doubly so because the fate of his first great love, Friedl, his wife, lies over him like a shadow. Back then in Berlin, she couldn’t live “according to his rules” either, a life of hotels and constant traveling to keep up with her husband. They had lived together only at the very beginning of their marriage in 1922–23, when they shared an apartment in Berlin-Schoeneberg. Then Roth found it burdensome, restricting, somehow false, and they moved from hotel to hotel. Friedl was young, slim, modern, pale, and very pretty. In photos she looked both shy and self-possessed. The marriage made her ill. Roth believes his whole life long that this is his fault. But she was already fragile, nervous, and uneasy in the world when they first met. Roth had written to his cousin Paula Gruebel back then, saying that Friedl “was afraid of people.” From Vienna, in the summer of 1922, he wrote, “She spends the day crossing over a ford in the Danube and back again, pretending it’s the sea, and lives the life of a creeping plant.” And he added, “I would never have believed I could love a little girl this long. I love her shyness in the face of any confession, and the feeling she has which is a mixture of fear and love, and her heart that is always frightened of the very thing she adores.”

  He saw early on what was happening to her, even if he still swore the opposite in his letters: “She is normal, and I am what you would have to call mad. She doesn’t read the same way I do, not so strongly, not trembling as much, she is less atmospherically predictable, she’s straightforward and sensible.” In reality, Roth already feared for her sanity in 1925. Four years later he wrote the novel that made him famous, the novel about the pious Jew Mendel Singer, who is tested beyond all measure by God, and whose daughter Miriam loses her mind. In Job, Joseph Roth was also describing the fate of his wife. “It is true that you cannot share your pain without doubling it,” he wrote in a letter in March 1929. “But this doubling also contains an immeasurable comfort. My suffering moves from the private sphere to the public and thus is easier to endure.” Later in the year Friedl suffered such a severe breakdown that she did not recover. Roth described it in a letter to his friend René Schickele in December 1929: “I’m writing to you in desperate need. Yesterday I traveled, indeed I fled to Munich. My wife has been ill since August, psychosis, hysteria, absolute fixation on suicide, she’s barely alive—and I’m harried and surrounded by dark red demons, headless, lacking the capacity even to lift a finger, faint and crippled, helpless, with no prospect of getting better.” At first Friedl’s parents took care of their sick daughter, then the next year, on the same day the last chapter of the Job novel was serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung, she was committed to the Rekawinkel sanatorium near Vienna. Later she was moved to the Steinhof psychiatric hospital, also near Vienna.

  For the rest of his life, Roth blames himself for Friedl. And so naturally he is horrified when he hears of Manga Bell’s nervous breakdown. At the same time he is clearer than ever that he will not go back to her. He has already frequently been afraid of her, always after a fight. Ludwig Marcuse reports later that Roth once begged him urgently to accompany him to a reconciliation with his companion after a long quarrel. She was totally unpredictable, he said, and besides, she always carried a small pistol in her purse. He didn’t think it was impossible that she’d use it.

  But his fear that Manga Bell may have a psychiatric disorder is almost greater. “I cannot carry the slightest psychic burden anymore without the risk of dying,” he writes now to Blanche Gidon. “And I don’t want to die.”

  One day, after learning of Manga Bell’s breakdown, Joseph Roth calls on the Belgian PEN club for help. This finally works, and he gets his visa. But Roth hesitates about making the journey to Ostend. He’s discovered that not only Stefan Zweig and Lotte Altmann are there but also Egon Erwin Kisch and Hermann Kesten, fair-weather friends from better days. Roth doesn’t feel they’re the right company in this dark summer. “I find it truly awkward to meet Kesten and Kisch in Ostend—which is unavoidable,” he writes to Zweig. “I can no longer have any patience for jokes.”

  But Zweig really persuades him, he extols the virtues of Ostend, the hotel prices, and the bistros, and concerning the end of Roth’s love affair, which the latter has described to him, he writes cheerfully, “And don’t make yourself ill over Ma.Be. It’s a stroke of good luck when things suddenly resolve themselves rather than pulling tighter and tighter.”

  Stefan Zweig knows exactly what he’s talking about. Two months previously, at the height of the marital battles in the Zweig household, Joseph Roth had inserted himself cautiously into the argument on the side of Friderike, of whom he was very fond and whose affectionate name for him was Rothi. She had left London more or less in flight. Roth wrote to Zweig, “It’s good that your wife has left. I think it’s not indiscreet of me to say to you that I advised her to do so. But don’t ever forget, dear friend, that she is an exceptionally fine human being and has earned consideration, and that she’s at an age when all women fear they’re going to be abandoned. It’s the age of panic.” And he added, “Dear friend, one must love and keep loving, these days. We’re all in such a muddle.”

  Zweig did not reply. Until now, indirectly, as he congratulates him on the sudden end of his love. No comfort for Roth.

  —

  In a lecture Roth gave on the twelfth of June to a full house in the bookshop owned by his publisher-in-exile, Allert de Lange, which was titled “Faith and Progress,” a much-applauded fulmination against the superstition that modern technology had the power to heal mankind and its very humanity, he ended with the appeal: “Let us set reason in the service of that for which it has been given to us: namely, in the service of love.”

  —

  And so now: over the border and away from nervous collapse and a love that is over. His visa has come. Up toward the seashore, and a bistro, to meet a friend. A summer of love. July in Ostend.

  He clambers awkwardly out of the train at this, its final stop. Zweig, waiting on the platform, has already made all the arrangements, porter, hotel, the journey from here to there. The reencounter between the two friends up here by the sea is initially a little diffident, stiff, unsure on both sides. For a long time they’ve communicated only by letter; Roth has given his old friend many angry reproaches and many declarations of love, some exaggerated, some the honest truth. Zweig has dissembled, has avoided meetings, nervous, cautious, concerned to protect his own mental equilibrium. In their letters they have established a competitive, affectionate balance between friendship, envy, admiration, dependency, love, smart-aleck superiority, and mutual jealousy. Roth’s despair, alone in Amsterdam, begging for a visa to get to Belgium, has plumbed new depths.

  Now they shake hands. “Herr Zweig.” “Herr Roth! Finally. Welcome to the sea!” And then everything is back to normal. Roth’s relief comes flooding back by the minute. A man, a friend who organizes things for him, his connection to the sun, to common sense, to the guarantee of a safe existence. How gladly he will entrust himself to him this summer. How confident his step becomes immediately. And how happy Zweig is here and now, knowing that he can be the means of good fortune for his friend. How he savors his own superiority. He feels for a moment once again that he’s equal to life as he watches his friend walking falteringly along the narrow streets. It’s as if they’re made for each other. Two men, both falling, but holding each other up for a time.

  SHE IS EUPHORIC, BEYOND HAPPY, to have got out. Happy that she’s escaped from Nazi-land. Irmgard Keun is not Jewish, but her books have been banned in Germany nonetheless. The women she portrayed in The Arti
ficial Silk Girl and Gilgi—One of Us were far too modern and far too self-aware. Her style is far too modern too, far too redolent of the big city.

  She’s a self-confident, beautiful young woman, a fur around her neck, a wide mouth, big eyes. And she thought, if anyone was going to start banning books around there, she was going to see about it. So she complained, lodged the complaint with the Nazi authorities, and requested financial assistance for the trial. It’s a fact: Keun v. Propaganda Ministry. First of all she demanded a valid reason for why her books were no longer to be available, and second, she demanded damages for the confiscated copies. There was more: “The damages I have suffered are in no way limited to my author’s share of the confiscated stock; they result from the demonstrable fact that before the books were impounded, my monthly income was several thousand marks, and since they were impounded, it has fallen below one hundred marks.” She sent the letter by registered mail to the state court in Berlin. The president of the court passed it on to the Gestapo. From there an inquiry went to the Reichsschrifttumskammer*1 as to whether Irmgard Keun’s writings were actually on the list of noxious and undesirable works. The answer came eight days later and was unambiguous: yes. So Keun got a letter from the Gestapo: “The books were submitted by the president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer pursuant to Article I of the Reichsschrifttumskammer pertaining to noxious and undesirable works, and were confiscated and withdrawn by me. There is no entitlement to compensatory damages.” Whereupon Irmgard Keun made claims for compensatory damages to several other state courts, but no legal proceedings were ever opened.

  She herself had naturally never expected things to come to trial. But she simply couldn’t put up with it. What the hell? How could a new government come in and proceed to confiscate her books just like that? Irmgard Keun has a childlike propensity to question absolutely everything. Why is it that way? Where are my books? Is that just? Is it lawful? And if it isn’t lawful, how can we change it right now? She has a sunny view of the world, even this new one. But no one can keep looking at it that way. Not when reality keeps getting darker, and more dangerous—and more brown.