But what else could he do? His situation was wretched. His much-loved wife was schizophrenic and confined to an institution and, poor though he was, he had other dependants, whose position was even worse than his own. "You can tell me," he wrote to Zweig in 1936, "advances are ruinous or immoral till you're blue in the face. It seems to me it would be more immoral to give up writing or living altogether. It's just a fact that I don't have any money. I can't live without advances. Fate is oppressing me in a terrible and tawdrily symbolic way, as if it were aping a stupid romantic novelist. I'm even ashamed of the blows it deals me. Such low blows." (Did Zweig perhaps wince when he read that line about the "stupid romantic novelist"?)

What do you do when the world is collapsing? In 1937 Roth reproached Zweig for being "still on the side of ‘common sense'. You've experienced repulsive things with me: but the terror is still ahead. (Believe me!)." It is easy for us, at this distance, to admire Roth's intransigence, his refusal to compromise, his insistence that if he survived his "penury" he would "outlive Germany; easy even to admire, or at least sympathise with, his self-destructive alcoholism, and to denigrate Zweig as the comfortable and prosperous writer, reluctant to look the bleak reality in the face — one reviewer of Roth's letters dismissed Zweig as "a shit in a schloss". 

But it is fairer to accept that Zweig displayed the timidity and unjustified optimism of a man who had much to lose while Roth had the courage of one who had burned his boats long ago. Roth knew the temptation of despair and refused to surrender to it. He went on working, writing his books and articles, helping refugees even more helpless than he was himself. At the same time anyone reading these letters should recognise that in his dealings with Roth, Zweig showed consistent sympathy, understanding and readiness to meet the repeated demands for money. If he does not emerge from Matuschek's biography as a very likeable character, there was nevertheless much that was admirable in him. Zweig too was forced to beg for asylum in the end.

Roth's letters are harrowing, and not only in the picture they present of his own life. Footnote after footnote identifying people mentioned in the text report death in exile from Germany or Austria or death in the Nazi camps. A roll-call of those mentioned is like a funeral bell tolling for the culture of central Europe. The work of both Roth and Zweig was for decades unknown or forgotten in the English-speaking world. Pushkin Press has brought much of Zweig's back into print. Michael Hoffman's translations of Roth and tireless advocacy of his work have established him as one of the great German writers of the first half of the 20th century. 

But the culture which nurtured them and of which Roth was one of the finest flowers, has been destroyed for ever. Roth's life may be called tragic. The same adjective may be applied to Zweig's end. There remains that other tragedy, the "dark secret" described by Tamas: that the two "industrious mass-murderers" destroyed "a universe of culture" which will never be revived, and can be recovered only in memory and the reading of books.