Ostend

by Volker Weidermann

  —

  She boards the train at the beginning of May. The main thing is to get out of the land of the brown plague, of injustice, and of those who ban books. She wants to get to the sea. It widens her thoughts, she feels. She decides to go to Ostend, where she went on holidays with her parents. And she sets off. “Behind me, a country; in front of me, the whole world.” She gets there on the fourth of May. She sees the promenade, the beach, the bistros, the casino, the whole free, informal world, and is enchanted.

  Recently she has signed a contract with the publishing house of Allert de Lange. The editor Walter Landauer has obtained it for her. Right after she reaches Ostend, she receives 300 guilders as an advance on her new book, along with three articles, individually packed and delivered to her hotel room by way of a greeting from Landauer. The world of the émigrés has been waiting for her.

  She travels to Brussels for a day. She’s been told she could get to know Hermann Kesten there. She’s read one novel of his thus far, The Charlatan. She meets him in the lobby of a large hotel. And he is the first man in this Belgian summer to be captivated by her magic. He sees her from a distance and thinks she looks like the kind of girl you would immediately want to go dancing with.

  But that changes in a flash. Now what Hermann Kesten most wants is to talk with her, listen to her, and watch her as she talks: “We hadn’t even sat down at a table with a cup of coffee and a glass of wine before she was speaking about Germany, with flashing eyes and her red, witty mouth. She talked about this exotic new Germania in a careful semiwhisper, with the boldest expressions and images. Her white silk blouse and her blond hair fluttered as if in the wildest wind, her eyes and her hands spoke volumes too, and she talked both from her heart and her head. She was naïve and brilliant, witty and despairing, folksy and fiery and no longer a girl you wanted to go dancing with, but a prophetess in accusatory mode, a chiding preacher, a political creature watching an entire civilization silt up. With every fiber she talked and laughed and mocked and mourned.”

  They talk for hours. Kesten soaks up her energy, her laugh, and her rage like a man dying of thirst. Kesten is thirty-six years old, left Germany immediately after the Nazis took power, and is the uncrowned king of émigré society. He needs the proximity of his friends, the poets, most of all. Later Stefan Zweig names him as the “protective father of all those who had been scattered across the world.”

  —

  Kesten will write one of the most affectionate books about the world of the émigrés to appear after the war. It’s called My Friends the Poets. He always writes in cafés, talks as he writes, and writes as he talks, indeed he needs conversation in order to be able to write at all.

  He simply makes his home in the circles that gather of an evening in Nice, in Sanary-sur-Mer, in Paris, in Amsterdam, and here in Ostend. Moreover he has influence; he was formerly an editor at the publishing firm of Gustav Kiepenheuer and now, in tandem with Landauer, he runs the German department at Allert de Lange. He is a large force within the small market of German texts in exile. Somehow he seems to be everywhere, and Roth is right to call him a joker. Kesten is always concerned to be in a good mood, he has the deepest laugh lines in any face among the émigrés, but he suffers just as much from the isolation of exile as any of the others.

  From Ostend he writes to his friend Franz Schoenberner: “It’s a dreadful job, particularly since the prospects are so laughable. The first and last consolation is what we writers, more or less in self-mockery, have come to call the joy in our work.”

  He struggles to hold on to this joy. Which only increases the importance of this recent meeting with the woman from Germany who knows one of his books, admires him, and is proud to meet him. She finds him incredibly clever and nice and witty. Though when he tells her what he’s working on right now—Philip II, king of Spain, sixteenth century—she’s downcast. Please! Why are they all writing works of history? On arrival, the publishing house has sent her a whole parcel of the latest émigré publications: Alfred Neumann’s The Empire, Joseph Roth’s Hundred Days, Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. When, if not now, will they get around to the present, will they have to get around to the present? Their books are banned in Germany anyhow. So there’s no need to use history to hedge around what has to be written, most urgently, about the here and now.

  But they lack immediate insight, direct contact with the Germany of today. What reaches them is only rumor or propaganda. All they know here is a travesty, or a yearning, or a nightmare. Barely amenable to being transmuted into good literature.

  Which is why what Hermann Kesten in Brussels wants most of all to talk about is this: How is it in Germany today? How bad is it? How is the mood among sensible people? Is there any hope, any sign, that it’s going to end sometime? Her talk is lively, original, and vivid. But what it tells him is fundamentally appalling and offers no hope of an early end. She describes “a Germany in which grocers and sergeants’ widows were executing Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas. A Germany with cheerless crude chants and threatening harangues on the radio, full of the prolonged artificial ecstasies of massed marches, Party rallies, Heil Hitlers, and festivals. A Germany filled with intoxicated petits bourgeois. Intoxicated because they had been given power.” No, she has brought no hope from this country. But she brings energy and contrariness and, most of all, a delight in the world of the émigrés that its inhabitants, who have had to live in it for the last three years, have long since lost. Irmgard Keun is like a little girl who cannot believe she’s now allowed to join this quasi-secret society. “I’m the only Aryan here!” she crows in a letter home. It’s what she’d dreamed of in Germany. And now she’s really here.

  Okay, it’s sometimes a bit lonely at the beginning, many of the émigrés haven’t yet arrived, it’s cold, misty, and windy. She often sits on one of the bistro terraces overlooking the promenade in defiance of the weather, with a white headscarf and a brightly colored coat. In front of her, a little heap of cooked shrimp, a teapot, a newspaper, and blank sheets of paper. She’s totally absorbed in herself and writes. It’s her novel about Germany, the one she’s received an advance for. It’s to be called After Midnight. She writes, “I stand on the street, the night is my home. Am I drunk? Am I mad? The voices and noises that surrounded me fell away like a coat; I’m freezing. The lights are going out. I’m alone.”

  —

  Irmgard Keun has left behind a husband and also a lover. She’s long ceased to love her husband, he understands not one word of her objections to these new times. Her lover, Arnold Strauss, is Jewish, a doctor, and left for America shortly after the Nazis took power. She does love him, a little at least, but hates the problem-free nature of his existence, hates it that he’s instantly settling down in America and feeling at home, as if none of it’s an adventure, or a challenge, or ominous. She writes him lots of letters, doesn’t pretend to any longing she doesn’t feel, but asks him regularly for money, gifts, and the necessities of life for a woman. Strauss is also married, lives in the United States with his wife, and loves Irmgard Keun more than anything in the world. He would rather give up his life in America today, not tomorrow, and get divorced in order to marry Irmgard Keun. But nothing could be further from her mind, now that she’s just won this great freedom.

  “I love you, but the idea of marrying you is a dirty one,” she writes from Ostend at the beginning of June to Montgomery, West Virginia, where he’s living and working. “I would rather let myself be beaten to death in a German concentration camp than live the rest of my life gratefully and humbly by your side.”

  Clearly. But it doesn’t diminish his love in any way—on the contrary—nor his readiness to send money to the woman he adores. Irmgard Keun is delighted, keeps thinking up new demands, and writes her book.

  For more than a month she’s been living in the Hôtel de la Couronne in the center of Ostend, right next to the station, with a view onto the harbor. It’s June now, and summer is slowly arriving. The first bathing
guests are coming in, the promenade is coming to life, there are parasols, and men in swimming trunks, and the bathing huts are being pushed into position along the beach.

  Irmgard Keun goes to visit the Kisches*2 for a few days. It’s not far from Ostend to Bredene. A tram goes around the harbor basin and then as far as the big sand dune, and the whole journey takes twenty minutes. At the other end, the Kisches are ensconced in a hotel where they’ve already been living for several weeks. Irmgard Keun loves the company of the Kisches, and they love her. All this new life that has come whirling in from Germany this spring to their little congregation of émigrés!

  She shows the first thirty pages of her new book to Egon Erwin Kisch. And Kisch is wildly enthusiastic, so enthusiastic that he vanishes upstairs to his room, leaving Irmgard Keun downstairs with his wife. It’s half an hour before he comes down again. He’s written letters, one to Landauer to congratulate him on this fantastic author, one to his American publisher to recommend this sensational German writer and her new book, and one to friends in Paris, to ask them to invite Irmgard Keun to come and lecture on the current situation in Germany. Keun is enthused by his enthusiasm but also by his revolutionary élan, his fighting Communist spirit, his optimism, his undauntedness, and his certainty about the victory to come. “You don’t know anyone like this,” she immediately writes to Arnold Strauss in America, “and this desperate labor to create a new, democratic Germany!” It is glorious.

  Kisch tells her about his epic journey to Australia two years ago as a delegate to the Anti-War Congress in October 1934. The Australian government did not let him land—he supposedly was a danger to the country’s safety. Whereupon a group of forty sympathizers who’d already made it to shore hired a motorboat and circled Kisch’s enormous steamer. He jumped down into the little boat from a height of eighteen feet, to be greeted by an antiwar banner they had hoisted. Kisch broke a leg but was finally allowed ashore and hailed by jubilant crowds; the entire world press reported the story. And in Australia, the story went, the movement against war and Fascism, which previously hadn’t amounted to more than a small group, became a mass phenomenon. Egon Erwin Kisch was its hero for several weeks.

  Slightly less heroic is the fact that he’s been working on his book about the trip for eighteen months now and still can’t finish it. He already spent the summer here last year to do just that, but he’s still sitting on it. It’s supposed to be called Landing in Australia, and he laughs uneasily when he mentions it. But he laughs. Egon Erwin Kisch likes to laugh at himself. He chain-smokes, always has some Communists visiting, and is always hatching plans with them. Irmgard Keun is smitten. She calls him Egonek, as do all his friends.

  She spends a few wonderful days with him and his wife passing the time lying in the dune with Gisela, swimming, doing exercises, and writing to Montgomery. “I’ve gone completely native and look like a Negress wearing a yellow wig.”

  Then one day Egonek says to her: We’re going to Ostend together today. To the Café Flore. There’s someone I have to introduce you to.

  They go over by train. The promenade is pullulating with vacationers—children in bright hats, sun, the easy life. They sit down in the Flore in the shade under the awning, with a view of the beach, and are ordering aperitifs when two men arrive. The one is in a pale suit, with waistcoat and tie, well-trimmed mustache and thick hair, and dark darting eyes; self-confident, worldly, with a firm stride, like an elegant shrew in his Sunday best. And right behind him, a smaller man, a trifle hunched, in a dark suit, narrow officer’s trousers, a little potbelly protruding above them, a striped bowtie, a tuft of hair coming down over his forehead, a pale unkempt mustache over his upper lip, and a slightly wavering gait. He looks like a mournful seal that has wandered accidentally onto dry land. Egon Erwin Kisch and Gisela greet the man in the pale suit with friendly laughter and introduce Irmgard Keun. It’s Stefan Zweig, and shyly she gives him her hand. Meantime Kisch has run to the swaying seal and is slapping him on the back with full force. “What? No crown? No ermine? What’s wrong, you old Hapsburg Jew?” is his joyous form of greeting. “Very funny, you old Bolshevik Jew,” accompanied by a rumbling laugh, is the response. And Kisch, cigarette in corner of mouth, kicks off a euphoric round of conversation, interrupting Zweig and Keun in their first slightly stiff exchanges to speed along the process of these other two getting to know each other as well. They shake hands in friendly fashion. Irmgard Keun sees his delicate white hands protruding from the black sleeves, she sees the wispy blond mustache and the ash on his jacket. “My skin said ‘yes’ immediately,” she writes later. She looks at him, looks at his blue eyes, sees the bad teeth that he tries hard to keep hidden under the long mustache, sees his sadness. “When I first saw Joseph Roth back then in Ostend, I had the feeling I was seeing someone who would die of sheer sadness in a matter of hours. His round, blue eyes stared almost blindly in despair and his voice seemed to founder under a burden of grief. This impression was later blurred by the fact that Roth was not only sad back then, he was also the most accomplished and vigorous hater.”

  The two of them are lost to the rest of the little group that evening. Roth wordlessly pulls her down onto a chair by his side. He’s mistrustful. She’s not Jewish, he doesn’t know her, he doesn’t know any of her books. Why is she here? Because of her repugnance at the country, the people, and those in power, she says. Aha. And why has she come just now? She talks about her husband, her mother, and her Jewish lover in America. Roth is still mistrustful. Not because he thinks she’s an informer. He simply doesn’t accept that she’s only now taken the decision to come. Emigration brooks no hesitation and no ambivalence and no delay. But naturally she also impresses him too. Because, as a non-Jew, she willingly gave up everything, and because she’s fighting the German authorities in complete outrage. The longer she talks, the more quietly and greedily he listens. About Germany, about life there, about Berlin. He hasn’t been there for three and a half years. He wants to know everything.

  And she loves his curiosity, his acute attention, his wide stare, his follow-up questions, his quick judgments, as wicked as they are surprising and spot on. She knows his books Job and Radetsky March, she thinks very highly of them and is astonished that he is as good a storyteller, if not better, in conversation than in his books. No one knows what in his stories is made up and what is actual experience. He just loves to tell stories, and in particular he’s loving telling them to sunburned Irmgard Keun, brought here by old Kisch. Later she will say she has never met, either before or since, a man with the sexual magnetism of Joseph Roth that evening in the Café Flore. What she really wants is to go off with him immediately, no matter where. Just to keep listening and talking. To be with him. And drink.

  That too is a bond between them from the very beginning. They realize immediately that they are both seasoned drinkers, artists of drink, skilled in its basics, understanding why drink is essential both to life and to writing. “You only have to open a newspaper, and you know how idiotic it is to be persisting in writing at all,” Irmgard Keun explains in a letter to Arnold Strauss concerning her drinking. “If you want to write, you have to suppress your thoughts and your awareness of the flood to come, and of war etc. Otherwise you can’t write at all. And that’s why you need alcohol. The only thing that matters is to drink well and wisely. The artist’s calling is irretrievably, inescapably bound to your moods.”

  Finally someone who understands me, thinks Roth and thinks Keun. Someone you can drink with uninhibitedly, who knows it’s the only way to endure, that abstinence may perhaps in the long run prolong life, but in the short run the here and now makes it quite impossible. In addition, here in Ostend, Roth is constantly accompanied by his conscience, Stefan Zweig, who is doing everything in his power to stop Roth from drinking. When he joins him in the bistro, Roth drinks milk, to spare himself the reproaches and to use this exaggerated obedience to make fun of Zweig. Zweig is like a mother to him. He sees that it’s going to kill Roth, t
hat it’s destroying his writing, no matter how much Roth tells himself that it’s drink that makes his art possible at all. “I cannot discipline my writing without dissipating myself physically,” he once wrote to Zweig. Roth is an advanced alcoholic. His legs and feet are badly swollen, to the point where it’s almost impossible for him to put on a pair of shoes. For years now, he’s had to throw up every morning, sometimes for hours. He eats almost nothing. Going out to eat in a restaurant strikes him as an eccentric waste of money, that only a rich man like Stefan Zweig could dream up. Nevertheless, Zweig tries to convince him to eat a meal day after day. This summer in Ostend it even frequently works.

  * * *

  *1  The official writers’ organization in Nazi Germany, in which membership was compulsory.

  *2  Egon Erwin Kisch was the most famous German reporter of the day.

  EGON ERWIN KISCH IS CONSTANTLY surrounded by his Communist fellow fighters. They discuss the political situation like commanders, discuss new strategies in the battle against European Fascism, plan congresses, committees, and calls to arms. Willi Muenzenberg is the charismatic leader of their circle. During the Weimar Republic he was the Communist press czar of Germany; he had set up an entire empire of daily newspapers, weekly newspapers, and illustrated magazines, with circulation in the millions. He owned newspapers all around the world, nineteen dailies in Japan alone, and a film production company in Russia. Willi Muenzenberg was the embodiment of the public face of Communism. Now, after the banning of all his German publications and many of those in other countries around the globe, he is the powerful chief of the agitprop department of the Comintern. He’s no intellectual, anything but. He’s a bear, he’s built like a cupboard, indeed in his youth he worked as a carpenter. He’s a worker, he comes from a working-class family, and he speaks with a broad Thuringian accent. He doesn’t take part in struggles over the Party line or in intrigues. He’s a pragmatist, a propagandist. When he enters, silence falls over archdukes, bankers, and Socialist ministers. When he slips into a room, it’s as if he were breaking through a wall. And his co-workers anxiously search his face for signs of his mood that day. He’s a charismatic leader of men, always surrounded by his closest co-workers, the three musketeers. These are his secretary, Hans Schultz; Emil the chauffeur; and Yupp, his bodyguard. You never meet him without the other three.