In the summer of 1936, a number of Central European writers, almost all of them Jewish, gathered in the coastal Belgian town of Ostend. They had left Germany fearing Nazi persecution, and in Belgium found a measure of tranquility—at least until the breakout of war in 1939. Volker Weidermann describes this moment in European literary history in Summer Before the Dark, a book that, according to Adam Kirsch, provides rich detail but misses something important:
A book about [Joseph] Roth and [Stefan] Zweig—and [Irmgard] Keun and [Ernst] Toller and Arthur Koestler and Willi Münzenberg—is necessarily a book about despair. Yet if there is an objection to be made to Summer Before the Dark, it is that Weidermann turns what ought to be a wretched, wrenching experience into one that is merely melancholy, and not without a kind of glamor. He does not omit the grim details of the émigrés’ lives: we see Roth’s “badly swollen” feet, the stigmata of advanced alcoholism, which make it hard for him to wear shoes. Yet the whole approach and tone (and title) of the book are intent on turning Ostend 1936 into a kind of late-afternoon idyll of European civilization. From our point of view, it is all so “interesting”—the brilliant minds, the political drama, the friendships and love affairs. Only by turning to Roth’s letters, or the essays of Walter Benjamin, can we begin to grasp what it really meant to be exiled and waiting for death in an indifferent world—as millions of people are in our own time.
Read more on New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/01/stefan-zweig-and-joseph-roth-how-europe-s-exiled-intellectuals-ended-belgian