History that reads like a novel: the story of the writers and intellectuals behind the failed Bavarian Revolution of 1918, by the author of the acclaimed Summer Before the DarkAt the end of the First World War in Germany, the journalist and theatre critic Kurt Eisner organised a revolution which overthrew the monarchy, and declared a Free State of Bavaria. In February 1919, he was assassinated, and the revolution failed.But while the dream lived, it was the writers, the poets, the playwrights and the intellectuals who led the way. As well as Eisner, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many other prominent figures in German cultural history were involved.In his characteristically lucid, sharp prose, Volker Weidermann presents us with a slice of history - November 1918 to April 1919 - and shows how a small group of people could have altered the course of the twentieth century.

The true story of two of the twentieth century's great writers, exiled from Nazi Germany to a Belgian seaside resort, and the world they built there: written with a novelist's eye for pacing, chronology, and language--a dazzling work of historical nonfiction.It's the summer of 1936, and the writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his home in Austria has been seized. He's been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town--a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his new lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with his semi-estranged fellow writer and close friend Joseph Roth, himself newly in love. For a moment, they create a fragile paradise. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn. In Ostend, Volker Weidermann lyrically recounts "the summer before the dark," when a coterie of...