[2] He then switched to the "Literary directorship" of the then newly established Sunday edition of the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

[4] March 2006 saw the appearance of Weidermann's literary history, "Lichtjahre" (literally "light years"), subtitled, rather more helpfully.

[5] This gave rise to a discussion about the division of literary criticism in Germany into two mutually unhearing camps, characterized by Hubert Winkels of the national radio station as the "Emphatic and the Gnostic".

[6] The distinction drawn by Winkels, writing in Die Zeit, is between literary critics such as Weidermann, who paid close attention to the vitality, realism and passion of an author's output and those who actually concentrated on the textual form and style along with the language and the dramaturgy.

[11] Other exiled German writers and artists were at Ostend at the same time, including Roth's latest love, Irmgard Keun, along with Hermann Kesten, Egon Erwin Kisch, Arthur Koestler, Willi Münzenberg, Ernst Toller and Toller's young wife, Christiane Grautoff.