Now Kesten is insulted. His stomach is nobody’s business but his, and as far as he’s concerned, every Frenchman and every Belgian can take their vacation here, so long as Thomas Mann doesn’t show up. This unites everyone in mocking agreement. At the beginning of the month Mann had arranged for a speech to be read out at the European Amnesty Conference in Brussels. The speech, they all agree, wasn’t bad. It was clear and urgent. An appeal to those in power in Germany to open the gates of the prisons and let all political prisoners go. Then he added that the world would then recognize that Germany was governed by spiritual values, not by despotism. “He’s absolutely mad! What spiritual values?” asks Toller. They resent Thomas Mann for taking so long to make himself one of the exiles, for trying not to wreck things with the regime in Germany, and for not wanting to lose the German market. Everyone here lost it long ago. The last to do so was Stefan Zweig, who is the only one not joining in the mockery. It is Joseph Roth who relays the rumor that Mann has been identified as a Jew in a report about the congress, and has formally denied it publicly. What a coward! And Roth says that the author of The Magic Mountain, whose concern is always balance and neutrality, simply bears the wrong name. “ ‘Man’—what an error. I’ve only ever seen him as an ‘It.’ ”
Then they get incensed about the closing of the exiles’ most important German-language daily newspaper, the Pariser Tageblatt, which happened on June 14. How few publishing venues remain where they can appear in their native language. There has been a long-running conflict between the publisher and financial backer Vladimir Poliakov and the editorial staff, most particularly the editor in chief, Georg Bernhard, who had been the editor in chief of the Vossische Zeitung in the Weimar Republic. Bernhard and the editorial staff accused the publisher of secret collaboration with the National Socialists. They left the paper in a body and founded a new one, the Pariser Tageszeitung. Everyone here in Ostend and also the émigrés in Paris know that the accusation is absurd. A committee of investigation has been set up to dig into the charges. Everyone knows they’ll find nothing. But the newspaper, with its circulation of fourteen thousand, is gone. The new one, which is currently carrying the first serialization of Mephisto and also Thomas Mann’s speech, must manage without a financial backer. And with measurably fewer readers.
And is there actually bad news? Is it, for example, bad news that the publisher Gottfried Bermann-Fischer has founded a new publishing house in Vienna, leaving the old Fischer Verlag behind in Germany under the leadership of Peter Suhrkamp? On July 15 he announced “the founding of a new publishing enterprise to [his] esteemed colleagues in the book trade.” Bringing with him all the authors of the old Fischer Verlag who had found themselves to be impossible in Germany, including Alfred Döblin, Alfred Kerr, Jakob Wassermann, Carl Zuckmayer, and, most of all, Thomas Mann. Another exiles’ publishing house! More German-language literature for the minuscule market in such books abroad. No, this news doesn’t make anyone here particularly happy either.
The mood remains depressed and irritable. Soon the circle is joined by the filmmaker Géza von Cziffra. He travels to and fro between Berlin, Paris, and Brussels. In this atmosphere poisoned by mistrust, he’s not the ideal man to bring cheer to the uneasy group. But Kisch likes him, and it’s because of Kisch that he’s here. Cziffra, like almost everyone else, is busy with a historical project: he’s planning a film on the Emperor Maximilian. And Kisch claims he himself is the nephew of the emperor’s personal physician. He talks about Emperor Franz Joseph’s fantastical plan to have his brother Archduke Maximilian crowned emperor of Mexico, to encourage him to give up all the rights of an Austrian archduke. Roth listens with interest but with mounting disbelief. Then he’s had enough: “Stop spreading this mad story, Egonek! Franz Joseph would never have done any such thing against his own brother!” “Well, perhaps not against his brother,” Kisch replies, but he knows that Maximilian in reality is a grandson of Napoleon, who had a secret relationship with Archduchess Sophie, the wife of Archduke Franz Karl. Roth freezes, looks in horror at his friend, screams, “Disgusting, disgusting three times over” into his face, jumps to his feet, and stumbles out without saying goodbye. Irmgard Keun hurries after him. The whole circle of the émigrés comes back to life, slowly shaking off the shock, and they disappear wordlessly and soft-footed into the night.
* * *
*1 Head of the German Communist Party.
*2 The American title of the film was Sins of Man.
IRMGARD KEUN LOVES JOSEPH ROTH and sees into him more deeply than anyone ever has. She knows that the two of them have come together this summer primarily out of loneliness, and she loves this loneliness and sadness in him, and his desire to have her always and totally and completely at his side. At night, when they’re next to each other in bed, he sometimes plunges his hands deep, deep into her hair, as if afraid that she might suddenly disappear in the darkness. And in the morning, after she’s slowly disentangled her hair from his small, white hands, she holds his head when he needs to vomit, for hours. Meanwhile she’s read all his books. He hasn’t read any of hers. But he drives her to write, unceasingly. In a letter to Arnold Strauss she says that she and Roth engage every day in “the purest literary Olympics.” She works at warp speed, and yet when they count their pages in the evenings, he usually has more than she does. If she’s tired, doesn’t want to get up, doesn’t want to go to the bistro and write, he won’t let her get away with it. She’s not a woman, she’s a soldier, a writer with a mission in the world. No time out to relax, no breaks. Writing is a sacred duty. Breaks are a sin, in his eyes. It’s the law by which he leads his life. Irmgard Keun is prepared to live under this law, for a while.
She loves his gift of being able to laugh at himself, at his clumsy awkwardness as a soldier and his unheroic life. But she soon learns that this in no way means that she is allowed to repeat these stories later and laugh. He is enormously vulnerable, even oversensitive, and not even Irmgard Keun can guess what will upset him. “He was so easily wounded that he had to wear a mask even with me,” she tells Roth’s biographer David Bronsen in later years.
The way she sees him is that he is the same in personal matters and in small things as he is in political matters and in the big things. His understanding is clear and acute, and he sees everything exactly, both his own downfall and the downfall of his world, and of course he also sees that his monarchism is a chimera, a childish belief, a sweet lie that he tells himself day after day to make life and his own clarity and knowledge endurable. It is why one becomes a writer, to see the world another way and wish it into otherness, to describe it as other than it is and will become.
Irmgard Keun knew everything about Roth: “In his books Roth loved to submerge himself in the world of the old Austrian monarchy—a world that he made the most despairing and fervent efforts to believe was—at least once in the past—the home of all thought and all feeling. But he knew that he had no home, and never would have one. Everything that came near him—people, things, ideas—he recognized in all their most hidden inadequacies, and he detected the cold that can freeze even the warmest living breath. So he searched out worlds that were completely foreign to him, and that he hoped would remain warmer and less recognizable. But no matter how successful his eternally creative fantasies, they were always undone by his furious intelligence. He would have blessed the devil and hailed him as god if he had helped him to believe. From time to time he saw himself in some ghostly empty space between the rational and the mystical, untethered from reality and unable to reach the unreachable, knowing too that it was indeed unreachable. He was tortured and wanted to be free of himself and able in any circumstances to be something that he was not.”
It comes most easily when he’s writing. “Bunny, I’ve got a beautiful invention,” he calls over to his girlfriend at her table. He flashes a smile and has already vanished into his invention again. Much that he writes is drawn directly from things he sees here and that they discuss. And afte
r he’s written it down, Irmgard Keun can barely recognize them again: “His lightning-quick fantasy had transformed them into something else.” And he always has good ideas, not just literary ones but practical ideas for living. When Irmgard Keun complains that she doesn’t know how to extract a divorce agreement from her Nazi supporter of a husband in Germany, who’s fighting it, Roth suggests she simply send him a postcard saying she’s in Belgium sleeping with Negroes and Jews, and the whole thing will settle itself. Roth likes thinking up ideas and always believes that he owes the best ones to schnapps. “If you want, I’ll show you the good places in each of my books that I owe to a fine Calvados,” he once said to Soma Morgenstern. Unfortunately he didn’t have his books at hand when he said it.
What he likes to do best with his girlfriend is making things up. He has such beautiful long eyelashes, she once says to him. To which he says yes, he knows—it comes from the fact that he once had an eye infection long ago that blinded him briefly, and all his eyelashes had to be plucked out. During this incident he had to keep walking around in a whole troupe of blind men and sometimes banged into walls. This doesn’t precisely explain why his eyelashes grew back so thick and long as a result, but it’s a good story.
Stefan Zweig likes to tell a tale about a memory, in spring some years back, of meeting the beautiful wife of a publisher. “How well this beautiful May morning suits Frau Kiepenheuer” was his charming salute. To which Roth added, “You haven’t yet seen her on a September evening.” To which Zweig, outdone, says, “Now we know what a great writer you are.”
Joseph Roth is always at his most charming when Irmgard Keun least expects it. She says, without thinking, that she misses German black bread here. Then Roth sees a dray horse being fed black bread by its owner. Roth follows man and horse for long enough to reappear in front of his girlfriend half an hour later, beaming with joy and clutching a slab of black bread.
—
When they write—and they’re almost always writing—Keun and Roth sit at separate tables, she at the window, he right at the back of the bistro. He can’t stand the sun. His eyes, his swollen feet, his skin, his suit—nothing about the man is made for the summer sun. They sit within calling distance of each other. Each of them watching the other mistrustfully to see who’s getting on faster. And who’s drinking more.
Their shared writing day begins by reading the horoscope in Paris Soir and ends at five p.m. with the arrival of Stefan Zweig. He goes past her little table with a short pause to say hello, and into the dark corner in the back, where his friend is.
At the beginning when they first meet, Irmgard Keun keeps her distance, writing to America: “Stefan Zweig is a fine man, as smooth as velvet, dripping with goodwill and love of his fellow men. I can’t begin to cope with either him or his books.” The two of them are utterly foreign to each other. But there’s something else: jealousy of this man who has taken on something of the role of a faithful, concerned wife in the chaotic life of Joseph Roth. And shame as well. She doesn’t want to see her beloved writer dependent on this man. She doesn’t want Zweig to be allowed to feel superior to Roth. She doesn’t want her brilliant Roth to allow himself to be kept by Zweig. Gradually all this develops into something close to enmity, and she soon sees Roth’s best friend with hostile eyes. “He seems very decorative. Just the way a cinemagoer would imagine a famous writer. Worldly, elegant, well groomed, and a touch of gentle melancholy in the eyes. He talked with loving sincerity about Vienna and painted charming pastel pictures of his life, which has already begun its quiet, unstoppable descent into decay.”
If Roth makes fun of Zweig, it’s in self-defense, out of an effort to retain his self-respect, not to lose it here, in his new suit, paid for by his great friend. Every day he wears it on his own body. This gift, this symbol of his inferiority in the world of money. Joseph Roth writes about it in his books. The glitter, the necessity of money, and how simple life is in a world where the money never runs out and the idiots out there give the narrator the respect he has earned.
It’s also in the book he’s just finished, the second half of which he’s revising again in the dark corner of the Belgian bistro: Confession of a Murderer. It’s the story of Golubchik, who grows up fatherless and dirt poor somewhere in the forests of Joseph Roth’s homeland. His apparent father is the rich, distant, passionate Prince Krapotkin, who knows nothing of this son, the fruit of a long-forgotten affair, nor wants to find out. Golubchik fights his entire life for recognition, becomes a pitiless informant for the Russian secret police, falls for the glorious Lutetia, follows her to Paris, loves money, is addicted to display and to new clothes: “I needed all those available external validations: clothes for myself and Lutetia, the subservience of the tailors who took my measurements in the hotel with careful fingers, as if I were a fragile idol; who barely mustered the courage to touch my shoulders and my legs with the tape. Because I was merely a Golubchik, I needed everything that would have been a burden to a Krapotkin: the hangdog look in the eye of the porter, the servile backs of the waiters and servants, of whom I got to see no more than their perfectly shaved necks. And money, I needed money too.”
It is Stefan Zweig with whom he revises the second half of the Confession one more time. He reads it out loud to him and gives his friend the pages of the first draft. The collaboration with Zweig leads to so many revisions that Roth has to write from Ostend to his publisher Walter Landauer that after page sixty-five a great deal has been altered, that the most important changes are contained in the last two galleys and the end has been totally rewritten. He doesn’t write to whom he owes these alterations but adds that Stefan is there too and would love to see Landauer. Roth knows how important the best-selling and well-connected Zweig is for Landauer and the notoriously hard-up publishing house of Allert de Lange, and he drops the possibility of such a meeting into his letter casually, calculatedly offhand. Landauer hurries to respond: “It would be good if I could speak to Herr Stefan Zweig this coming Wednesday.”
—
It is unlikely that Stefan Zweig has time for Walter Landauer that very Wednesday. At the seaside this summer he seems to have time for nothing. Or rather, for everything. He gets hardly any mail, which is to say almost no bad news, no begging letters, no attacks either because of Castellio or his abandoned wife and the abandoned house on the Kapuzinerberg, no attacks because of his excessive political caution, and none because of any excessive aggression. He wants peace, here in the north in his ideal summer place, just peace, not for himself but for his work.
What was it he’d written to Lotte? “We’d live simply there.” But in the same letter he’d added who—or what—he was also expecting to accompany this simple living by the seashore: “You and the machine.” Perhaps a little heartless in a letter to his still-secret lover, when he wrote at the end of June that he would be in touch with her by telegram “so that you and the machine can arrive one or two days later.”
And when he sent on his written travel instructions to Lotte in London from Ostend on July 3, he repeated under point four what was to be brought with her: “The machine of course.” Zweig’s chief desire was to work. So he would be followed not just by his secretary and lover Lotte Altmann but also by his friend and editor Emil Fuchs, who had promised to come, and arrived from Salzburg a few days ago to help Zweig put together the second volume of novellas, which is due to be published by his new publishing house, Reichner, in the fall.
Fuchs is Zweig’s longtime editor; a close working friendship has developed over the years, and the two men share a silent passion: chess. But in the evenings, if Zweig isn’t sitting with Roth, he’s usually with Fuchs for hours, smoking cigars, silent in front of a chessboard.
So Zweig has an entire writing office here, and he’s working better and more effectively than he’s done for years. Fuchs works on the volume of novellas more or less independently while Zweig writes two of the miniatures for a new edition of Shooting Stars, one about the conquest of Byzanti
um, the other about Lenin’s journey through Germany to Russia in the sealed train in 1917.
Both of them come easily to him. He’s collected all the basic materials already, and the history of Byzantium is a kind of by-product of the big story he’s writing at the moment, and for which, more than ever, he’s relying on help from Joseph Roth. “I’m working on this novella,” he’d written to Roth two months before leaving for Ostend. “It’s really a legend, a Jewish legend, which I’ve built up both high and wide over a very narrow historical foundation. I think it’s going to be good, despite my reluctance to say such things. But I’m not so sure about the style. Which is why I need you to look at it.” But the style is not the only thing Zweig is unsure about in this instance. It’s the religious or, more accurately, the ritual aspect. At the end of June he writes to Roth: “It would be my good fortune to have you in place as my literary conscience for this legend. We could test ourselves together of an evening and teach each other the way we did in the good old days.” The novella that Zweig is writing will later appear under the title of The Buried Candelabrum. It’s the legend of a seven-branched candelabrum that wanders from Jerusalem to Babylon, returns, is brought to Rome by Titus, is stolen by the Vandals, then is taken to Carthage and finally is returned to Byzantium. Until Justinian brings it back to Jerusalem, although to a Christian church, at which point the candelabrum disappears forever. It is the story of the eternal Jewish wanderings that Stefan Zweig wants to continue and complete in Ostend. The story of the menorah, as the story of the Jews’ banishment and homelessness and their undying hope that one day there will be an end to the eternal wandering. As he wrote to Roth, he could write only about the things “that are relevant to the times and that provide some kind of reinforcement.” Yet it is fundamentally a story of hopelessness and sadness. The candelabrum is lost again and again. Zweig tells the story from the perspective of the Jew Benjamin Marnefesh, who as a boy is a silent and despairing witness to the first act of theft, when the Vandals’ slaves take the treasures of Rome on board their ships. In his attempt to snatch the menorah away from one of the slaves, his arm is shattered, he falls, and the menorah seems lost forever. “White foam ran over the keel, it slid forward with a hissing murmur, its brown frame was already rising and falling on the waves as if it were a living, breathing thing, and the galleon, under full sail, steered a straight course out from the roads into the endless expanse of the open sea.”
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