On the very day of Zweig’s departure for Brazil, Roth is already sending a letter after him: “I really wanted to write you something cheerful, but alas it’s something sad. Huebsch quite simply fired me.” Zweig has been expecting it for some time, but it now becomes clear to him what this could mean for him too: his responsibility, let alone his financial responsibility, for his friend has just increased. And he also realizes that he will be unable to carry it on his own.
At first Roth’s panic is contained within bounds. Zweig has left him enough money to be able to live without worries for several weeks. And he hasn’t just finished his next novel, Weights and Measures, he’s already started a new one, The String of Pearls. True, both Querido and de Lange turn it down, but De Gemeenschap is ready to pay a not-inconsiderable guarantee of 3,000 guilders, half of which Roth receives as an advance. But that’s barely been paid when it is stolen from Roth, who’s in Amsterdam with Keun for the negotiations with his publisher, by a young Dutchman, Andreas van Ameringen, who has taken over certain secretarial responsibilities for Roth. The whole advance is gone, along with the money from Zweig. At the same moment Irmgard Keun is arrested for apparent passport violations and is threatened with deportation to Germany. Roth, now completely devoid of means, cannot remain in Holland any longer. Via a stroke of good luck or a friendly official, Keun gets a five-day visa for Belgium and a transit visa for France, and the two of them travel through Brussels and Paris to their eventual destination, Vienna. Austria has become the only country where Keun can stay without a visa. They live in the Hotel Bristol, where Roth’s reputation is still so good that they don’t have to pay their bill immediately. For all intents and purposes, neither of them has any money. Allert de Lange refuses for political reasons and for fear of Hitler’s Germany to publish Keun’s new novel, After Midnight, and the two of them keep sending fresh begging letters out into the world. At least old, loyal, besotted Arnold Strauss always sends large sums from America. For a while they live off these.
And just as Stefan Zweig goes through a kind of repeat of his experiences in 1914 with his journey into war and his arrival in a new Vienna, Roth is due a similar trip: “Lemberg still in our possession.” The city has long found itself outside the boundaries of Austria. But Roth’s relatives still live there, and Roth, who has been invited to make a lecture tour in Poland in the new year of 1937, travels in December 1936 to his old homeland, back to the landscape and people he longs for. In Ostend he bought himself a large haversack that he wanted to take with him when he went wandering, like his Jewish forefathers, as he said to an astonished Keun. He worshiped the pious eastern Jews of his homeland like saints, Keun recalls later; the people of western Europe simply couldn’t measure up to their human substance. He has to finally go back to visit them, has to return once more to Galicia. “It’s an eternity since I’ve been there. I have to see it one more time,” he says to his friend.
They live in the hotel. Roth doesn’t want to live with relatives. “The Jews have such little schnapps glasses,” he says.
—
During the course of this winter of 1936–37, Roth revives. Here and only here, Irmgard Keun says, where he’s at home, does he not have to keep playing someone he’s not. “Only there, where he came from, was he not splintered into a thousand fragments. He was demonstrably proud of the poorest Jews, like the ones he took me to once, who lived in a cellar where the candles burned even by day. He sat down at their table and spoke Yiddish with them; you could feel the love emanating from him, and I had to love him for it.” The only place he doesn’t want to go is Brody. “The memories,” is Keun’s conjecture, “the good as much as the bad, would have been too upsetting for him.”
He goes with his cousin Paula Gruebel to the Jewish cemetery, walks along the rows of graves, and says the names of the dead out loud to himself. “A lot of good people lie buried here,” he says to Paula.
In Strawberries, the fragment of his novel about his homeland, Joseph Roth writes: “I walked along the street that led to the cemetery. I actually intended to go in the opposite direction—to the station. But I must have muddled the directions back then. Perhaps I was thinking that the station wouldn’t be opened until morning, whereas the cemetery had to remain open all night. Light was burning in the death chamber. Old Pantalejmon slept there alongside the dead. I knew him, he knew me too. For it was the custom in our town to take walks to the cemetery. Other towns have gardens or parks. We had a cemetery. The children played between the graves. The old people sat on the gravestones and smelled the earth that was made up of our forebears, and was very rich.”
Joseph Roth senses that he’s seeing it all for the last time. He’s “as thin as a skeleton,” writes Keun, weighs the same as a ten-year-old boy, only the stomach is like a cannonball. He has only three teeth in his mouth, has heart trouble and pains in his liver, and throws up for hours every day, so that Keun thinks each time he’s going to die. He’s bad-tempered with her, jealous, never letting her out of his sight for a moment now, and he gets delirious. At night he wakes with a start, calls “Where is Frau Keun?” wildly, and she screams back that they’re downstairs in the restaurant, and he should go back to sleep at once. He goes to sleep and remembers none of it the next morning. Arnold Strauss, to whom she describes Roth’s symptoms, writes back that his liver won’t last more than a year, maximum two.
In the spring of 1937 they’re in Salzburg for a few weeks at the invitation of Friderike Zweig, staying in the Hotel Stein at the foot of the Kapuzinerberg. They see Stefan Zweig only briefly. He’s as pale as a ghost, chilly. It’s the day the sale of his house is being finalized, his final parting from Austria and his previous life. Next day the lawyers in Vienna settle the support payments for his wife and the terms of the separation. Joseph Roth is dreadfully hurt by Zweig’s coldness. Where has his old friend gone? He doesn’t understand Zweig’s unwillingness to see him during these days, or that the problem of Roth is more than he can deal with at this moment. Roth is offended. “You spend more time with assholes than you do with me,” he writes from his bit of Salzburg to his friend’s. His old savior doesn’t reply. In a letter to Lotte, Zweig complains about the “disgustingly drunken Roth.” Back in December he had written to Friderike, “What a magnificent man is going to pieces.”
Stefan Zweig can no longer help, and no longer wants to. Roth has sensed this for a long time, rages against him, and yet keeps hoping for a happy ending, a return of their wonderful summer. July 1936 all over again, and the sea again, and Ostend.
—
Roth goes. “I want to go to Ostend. It will remind me of you,” he writes on July 10, and sets off. Back to the Hôtel de la Couronne, back to the view of the sailboats and the harbor. “Ostend without you. The same bars, and everything’s different. Very familiar and very strange. Dreadfully, both at once.” He writes letters of longing, love letters. He still hopes that Zweig will come. He asks for money. Zweig sends money. Roth writes about all the friends who’ve died this summer, for whom he wrote obituaries in the exile papers. But he won’t write an obituary for Zweig, so he shouldn’t get his hopes up. “You’re not just close to me spiritually, but bodily. It’s the umbilical cord of friendship: there is such a thing. I don’t have the necessary distance from you, the prerequisite for an obituary.”
His own death is slow in coming. “The end is dragging on, unfortunately,” he writes at the close. “Croaking takes longer than living.” And at the foot of the page, after Roth has added “I embrace you,” their pasta chef adds his own greeting: “Salutations, Almondo, Ostend.” And then Roth adds another line, that Floréal, the owner of the apartment house with the loggia where Zweig stayed, asks after him every day. And absolutely euphoric: “I just met Almondo in the Café Flynt on the square, where I’m writing this. He bought me a bottle of Verveine!!!”
Then the letters become darker and more despairing. Stefan Zweig is not going to come again. One time Roth sees two policemen leading away a sus
pect. At first he depicts the scene sympathetically, with curiosity, then gets the idea that he could speak to the two officials and alert them to the fact that there’s been a mistaken arrest. He himself is the man they’re looking for. Roth writes that he hopes this will “avert the definitive catastrophe,” but even as he’s writing this, he knows that “it’s a literary idea” and lets the opportunity pass.
On September 21, sobered, he finally writes, “Dear friend, today I leave. I’ve waited in vain to see you.”
The magical summer resort has brought no change in his life. Roth travels to Paris; here too he hopes to meet up with Zweig again. He pleads, he asks, he makes threats again about his imminent death, he cannot understand why Zweig doesn’t make every effort to see him. And at the same time, he knows why; that not even Stefan Zweig can save him anymore. Not with money, not with shared plans, and not with shared books.
Finally, in February 1938, Stefan Zweig does come to Paris again, with Lotte. They meet. Roth is in catastrophic shape. Irmgard Keun has left him. By the end, he was totally dependent on her, in a panic of jealousy—she couldn’t even go out without his mistrust following her. Later, as she remembered it, “in Paris I left him with a deep sigh of relief and went to Nice with a naval officer. I felt as if I’d escaped an unbearable burden.”
For almost two years they had been the most remarkable couple among the émigrés, the young old man and the wise woman of the world, the hopeless drinker and the merry imbiber, two fighters pitted against ruin, the ruin of the world and all too soon their own. Irmgard Keun had been dragged deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of disaster. Kisch had been right. Roth had won, she drank and drank and soon could match him, the champion drinker, while preserving a sense of the possibilities, of the two of them maybe finding a way to be good for each other and of mutual assistance. But that was long gone. He clung to her with the last of his strength, pleading like a child. Never has she loved a man as much as him, and she never will again. “My skin said ‘yes’ at once.” As did her soul, everything she had been and still was. But he had slipped through her fingers, grown smaller, paler, more dependent, a wan shadow. In Paris she had to be strong; she had been fearing this moment for a long time. The farewell was brief, unambiguous, spoken at great speed. It was flight—she feared that sympathy would cause her to die along with him. Later she writes about the last meeting in Paris and the parting: “It was like always. It was the end.”
—
But there is still one hope in Joseph Roth’s life. In recent months he has paid several visits to the old Austrian emperor-in-waiting, Otto von Hapsburg, in exile in Steenokkerzeel. And the prince, along with Roth and other Austrian monarchists, has dreamed up a desperate plan to propose to the Austrian chancellor, Schuschnigg, that he should resign in favor of the old emperor, thus preventing the threatened annexation of the country to Nazi Germany at the very last moment and saving the fatherland. Otto von Hapsburg writes Schuschnigg a letter laying out the plan, but it’s not enough for Roth. Roth is so convinced of the plan that he wants to do everything to put it into action. For him, everything hangs on it. Zweig, whom he tells about it, tries not to cloud his friend’s beautiful enthusiasm, but of course he thinks the plan is utter nonsense. Why would Schuschnigg let himself get involved? Why would Hitler let it derail his plans? Zweig too is a dreaming lover of the old Austria, but he sees clearly enough to know that politics is not a fairy tale. Naturally he is troubled when he learns from Roth what Roth’s part in the plan is to be, but he doesn’t hold him back. He can’t save him, nor can he get him to see reason. Roth has finally parted company with the rational world. What is Zweig to do?
Joseph Roth in any case has decided to go to Austria himself, to win over Schuschnigg to the emperor’s plan in person. It is madness. German troops are already at the border, the invasion will start at any moment. And a drunken writer in narrow officer’s trousers, which he’s started wearing again, is going to stop it?
Yes, that is Roth’s plan. Heroically courageous, he says goodbye to Stefan Zweig for the last time. He, who was the first Jewish writer to leave Germany after Hitler seized power, is the last to enter Austria before Hitler seizes power there. He goes by train and has himself announced to the chancellor. But Schuschnigg does not receive Roth. He is merely admitted to see the state secretary for security, Michael Skubl, who has only one message for Roth: Leave the country as soon as possible. Your life is in the greatest danger.
On March 11, Joseph Roth journeys back to Paris. On March 12 the Austrian people celebrate the new rulers on the Heldenplatz. Roth’s fatherland, and Stefan Zweig’s, no longer exists.
THE FRIENDS NEVER SEE EACH other again. Each takes his own road to death. The distance is not long. Joseph Roth had assured Zweig that he would not write his obituary. He also slowly comes to realize that this temptation will never come within his reach, though he is ten years younger—that his journey will end before Zweig’s. But shortly before his death, Roth does write something new about the two of them, a kind of obituary of their friendship, in a book for which Zweig can no longer help him, in neither a literary nor a practical way, nor financially, nor in terms of getting it published. Roth’s last book is The Legend of the Holy Drinker. A remarkably carefree man staggers around Paris. Homeless, an enthusiastic drinker, and always in big difficulties. He’s called Andreas, camps under bridges, and knows that newspapers are good at providing warmth on cold nights. He’s on his last legs when a well-dressed man steps into his path one night and presses a large sum of money on him. He calls the unfortunate drinker “brother.” The latter replies that he didn’t know he had a brother, but he could certainly use the money. An odd couple, the rich man and the poor man. They are bound to each other, for not only is poor Andreas happy about his unexpected rescue from need, his rich brother insists that he counts himself fortunate to be able to give some of his money to the poor man. And something else binds these brothers together: it is not only Andreas who camps out under bridges without house or home; the seemingly rich gentleman is another traveling man who lives under bridges. So for a time miracle succeeds miracle in this last book of Joseph Roth’s. Until the miracles run out.
When Joseph Roth gets the news in Paris in May 1939 that Ernst Toller has committed suicide in his hotel room in New York, he breaks down. Friderike Zweig, who’s with him, has him taken to a hospital, where he dies a few days later. Stefan Zweig hears of this in London as he is writing to Romain Rolland. “We will not grow old, we exiles,” he writes, shattered. “I loved him like a brother.”
OSTEND NO LONGER EXISTS. There’s another city today, a new one with the same name. The German troops marched into Ostend on May 29, 1940. They met with no resistance. In 1944 the Allied forces flew numerous missions that almost reduced the city to nothing. Today a pathetic fragment of the station façade can still be seen, but the promenade along the beach is strewn with white, faceless buildings. The boulevard is as broad as it once was, paved in red bricks. Concrete benches stand around everywhere, and no one sits on them. It’s November 2012, the sky is gray, the place is empty of people. The Hôtel de la Couronne has disappeared, in its place a dark apartment house called the Riviera. Next to it is an empty building site—you can see the wallpaper in the neighboring house, with gray flowers on the wall. Sailboats in the harbor. Nobody’s sailing them. Then, by the sea, where the Maison Floréal once stood, there’s a functional building from the 1960s; on the fourth floor, at the level of the former loggia, there’s a garishly colored sign, “Te Huur,” to rent.
In the Langestraat, where Almondo served pasta to his two famous guests, there’s now a dark pub, called Manuscript; the friendly waiter is already drunk in the afternoon and skims the foam off the beer glasses in the Belgian fashion with a wooden stick. The sound system is playing “Crazy Mama” by J. J. Cale, Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right,” Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” and “Mystery Train” by Paul Butterfield. Four men are sitting silently at the ba
r. They make you think they live here. The sea is gray and flat, great green breakwaters reach down into the waves, the beach is wide and empty. No bathing huts, but a few early Christmas trees in the wind. In one of the cul-de-sacs leading down off the promenade, an old, narrow house. In the window, masks, starfish on invisible threads, and shells. Inside a counter made of dark wood, more masks, old photos on the walls. A red-carpeted staircase leads up past a small kitchen with red enameled pots on the stove to the room, and the piano is there, and the painting with the deathly procession that covers one entire wall. A vase with dusty grasses, another with a skull and a lady’s hat on top; a picture in a photo album shows the distraught old painter in the ruins of his hometown. James Ensor’s house. It is one of the few houses from the old times still standing today.
And the people?
Egon Erwin Kisch went to New York, then Mexico, then back to New York after the war, then returned to his home city of Prague, where he died in 1948 in the aftermath of two heart attacks. Six horses pulled the bier with his coffin through the streets of the city while traffic came to a halt. At the end of the funeral service, the “Internationale” was sung. Arthur Koestler succeeded in penetrating Franco’s headquarters, was arrested, spent three months on death row, escaped, went to London, repudiated Communism, wrote the epochal Darkness at Noon, and on March 3, 1983, committed joint suicide with his wife, Cynthia. On November 27, 1916, Émile Verhaeren slipped while boarding a train in Rouen, where he had delivered an anti-German lecture about the war, and was run over by the departing carriage. The family declined an offer to have him interred in the Pantheon and buried him in the military cemetery at Adinkerke instead. He was soon dug up again out of fear of the advancing German troops and transferred to the security of Wulveringen; from there his body was moved again in 1927 to his final resting place in his original home of Sint-Amands. Friedl Roth, after her parents emigrated to Palestine, was moved from the Steinhof psychiatric hospital to the regional care facility of Mauer-Oehling. In 1940 she was moved to a clinic in Linz, where she was murdered in June of that year pursuant to the National Socialist euthanasia program. Irmgard Keun went into hiding in Holland when the German troops invaded in May 1940. She had lost forty pounds, drank constantly, and was sometimes to be seen in the street and sometimes in a pub. She wanted to go back to Cologne. Her brother wrote to a friend: “What’s going to happen to her, as a purely practical matter, is something more or less unimaginable to me. What she’s written is all too clearly hostile, and will hardly be forgiven. I’m appalled that fate takes a life made up of such a mixture of foolishness and honorable endeavors and makes it a capital matter.” She succeeded in going back. A Nazi literary publication triumphantly announced her suicide, but she lived, secretly, in Germany, for years even after the war, forgotten by her readers. At the end of the 1970s, her work was rediscovered thanks to the journalist Jürgen Serke. The last three years of her life, to her astonishment, were a kind of small literary triumphant procession. She died on May 5, 1982. Christiane Grautoff lived a life that was like a novel. She had many husbands, many lovers, and many friends. She died on August 27, 1974, in her apartment in Mexico City, so peacefully that her granddaughter Christiane, who was bouncing around on the bed, didn’t even notice. She had written an account of her life shortly before. A piece of paper was found on her deathbed, with the words, in English: “The one and only reason I wrote my autobiography with all my blood and sweat is—” Willi Muenzenberg left the Communist Party in March 1939. In May 1940 he let himself be interned in the Stade de Colombe, a vacation camp that had hosted soccer games for the World Cup not two years previously. He hoped this would lead to his transfer to the southern part of France. His plan went into motion; he set off for Chambaran, near Lyon, in a column that also included the journalist Leopold Schwarzschild, the publisher Kurt Wolff, and many others. On June 12 he separated from the column. On October 17 his body was found with a noose around the neck in a forest near Charmes. He had been dead since June 21 or 22. Otto Katz spent his life in service of the Party, was active in building up the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, and in 1952, along with numerous comrades of mostly Jewish origin, was put on trial and sentenced to death. His ashes were reputedly mixed with winter road grit and scattered on the streets of Prague. Despite international protests, Etkar André was beheaded on November 4, 1936. The five thousand inmates of Fuhlsbuettel Prison thereupon went on strike; the burial had to take place in strictest secrecy by orders of the Gestapo. Stefan and Lotte Zweig moved into the little house in Petrópolis. This was where Stefan Zweig wrote Chess Story and finished The World of Yesterday. On February 22, 1942, he writes a farewell letter to the world, heading it Declaraçāo. “I greet all my friends! May they all see the glow of dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, am going on ahead.” He doesn’t mention Lotte. No farewell letter from her was found. The longest survivor was Hermann Kesten. He became an American citizen, lived in New York, later in Rome, and finally in Basel. The young German writers had no interest in him. The head of Group 47,* Hans Werner Richter, who didn’t want to have any émigrés in the group, did actually invite Kesten and the critic Hans Sahl one time. A mistake, as the former Wehrmacht soldier Richter wrote in his diary: “Neither of them tolerated any criticism, both were full of sensitive, idiotic vanity, both were expecting [we’d have] guilt complexes.” Kesten himself, in an assessment he made of German literature in 1965, complained of “a certain intolerance (among the new German writers) for the former exiled authors, whom they no longer consider to be part of German literature or consign to a kind of ghetto. Certainly a little group of the formerly exiled authors is somewhat sensitive, that is, those who are still alive.” Kesten died in 1996. He was ninety-six years old. James Ensor died in November 19, 1949, in his hometown, at the age of eighty-nine. He is buried in the graveyard on the dunes in Ostend. From up there you have a beautiful view of the sea.
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