Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

The Viennese, who are of course besotted with theater and music, turned up in their droves. They thought the continual hubbub was somehow accidental, and kept going Sssh! For two whole acts. The locals laughed at them. Eventually the Germans gave up. Halfway through the act, all the French moved forward and took their empty seats.

Every act is an interval. The whole performance is interval. The French roll around at a tragedy the way we do at a comic routine. They haven’t the least idea of art. The Germans at least show respect. It would have been good to have the Berlin police to keep order in the theater yesterday.

Inevitably, the Germans and the French are going to intermarry. They are both desperately short of what the other have.

1. Willo Uhl (1880–1925), feuilleton editor on the Frankfurter Zeitung since 1913.

2. Le Matin , conservative French newspaper.

22. To Benno Reifenberg

Hotel Beauvau, Marseille

30 August [1925]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I really don’t mean to alarm you with these registered letters. They are the consequence of my morbid fear of things getting lost in the mail. I’m sure their content is in no relation to the care of their packing. The post makes a lot of money from me. I beg your pardon, and console myself with the fact that the content of this letter can’t be more displeasing to you than the fact of its being registered.

It’s not easy to write this letter. Not least because I find it immoral — tactless at the very least — to burden our personal relationship with matters of business. I don’t want to abuse the fact that I am fond of you (and you, I hope, have a liking for me) to perpetrate the unfairness of leaning on you — influencing is too certain — in your relation to me as an employee. You’ll know what I mean. True, we only know one another through work, and thanks to work. But I refuse to relegate a relationship that has outgrown the professional to the merely professional again. But what else can I do? Should I take my case to a tribunal that a tribunal won’t understand, when I know a human being? That — to my way of seeing — would mean going over your head. There is still the chance that you will preserve the distinction: on the one hand, feuilleton editor, on the other, well-disposed human being. If such a thing should seem necessary to you, I would even ask that you do so. Please don’t show me any sort of private forbearance. You can always give me advice, as if you had nothing to do with the firm.

I’m afraid you probably guess more than you know, and this introduction has been too clear. My stylistic affliction, not my personal one.

My tour will be over in the middle of September. I have enough material for a book. There too, I would like to ask your advice: I should like to write a wholly “subjective” book, in other words something completely objective. The “confession” of a young, resigned, skeptical human being, at an age where he is completely indifferent whether he sees something new to him or not, traveling somewhere. Someone with nothing of the “travel romantic” in him at all. And he sees the last vestiges of Europe, places that are innocent of the ever more apparent Americanization and Bolshevization of our continent. Think of the books of the Romantics. Take away their tools and props, both linguistic and perspectival. Replace them with the tools and props of modern irony and objectivity. Then you have the book I want to write, and feel almost compelled to write. It’s a guide to the soul of its writer, as much as of the country he’s passing through. What do you think of the idea? It’s very creative, more than a novel. I think it’s a form that would be congenial to the house. To put it in a nutshell, in a way that you don’t like, and I always do:

Books with practical occasion elevated into the poetic sphere . Were I the publisher, that would be my motto.

There would be something else as well, which you in the house are quite rightly not keen to see, but which is generally necessary, and in books quite indispensable. That is comparison. The first chapter would be called “The Other Side of the Fence.” But the book would be on far too high a level for it to contain a “critique” of Germany. Say perhaps that the critique would be on so high a level that it would no longer count as such or read like it.

What do you say?

I would like to spend two weeks in Paris, working on this book. I trust you are not party to that German prejudice that a good book cannot be written fast. Fast is the only way I can write well. The Germans write even literary books scientifically. Their feeling is scientific. That’s why they write slowly. The slow working of someone like Flaubert is based on completely different grounds: laziness, namely. You must remember from your schooldays that it’s possible to slog away all day with the greatest laziness inside you.

During those two weeks I would write nothing for you. Then I would come to Frankfurt with my book. And not to deliver the book, but to talk to you about the coming months.

Principally about money . It matters less to me than to the publisher. Three months are up, in the course of which I should have been paid 900 marks, 300 as expenses. It might have been more “sensible” not to mention it, but it would have been craven. Frankly I am too proud to behave in such a way. Had I been in Berlin now, I would probably have called for a raise because of the inflation, even though that too is craven, and disgusting moreover. I am not in Germany now. (I almost said thank God.) And, as you know, I don’t want to go back there this year.

I see three possibilities:

1. Either the firm demands my resignation and I offer it,

2. or it gives me leave to stay,

3. or I don’t offer my resignation, and the ball is back in their court, whether I starve as an even more occasional contributor, or manage to go on living, as I have lived the past 20 years. You know I don’t demand a steady income. Even so, the third possibility would be the worst, and it would be truly stupid of me not to try and go for the second.

Nothing ties me. I am not sufficiently sentimental to believe in categories like future, family, etc. etc. But sufficiently sentimental to feel devotion to this house and this newspaper, the last vestiges of the old humanistic culture. I am being straight with you — this is entre nous . I know perfectly well I couldn’t work for any other German paper. I know none would have me. And I still couldn’t go back to Germany. It’s a tragedy, not a passing fancy. Perhaps it’s the height of “patriotism” not to stand to see the tip of a pyramid not formed by a tip, but by a shaved blockhead.1 I can’t stand to see the whole of Germany turning into a Masurian swamp. If I were there now, it would drive me crazy. Everything affects me personally. If they lock up Becher,2 it’s me that’s behind bars. I don’t know what would happen. I’m capable of shooting someone, or throwing bombs, I don’t think I’d last very long. I risk my life when I return to Germany. Physically, I can’t do it.

But do you think I can say that to the newspaper? Ever since his letter to Stahl, I’ve had a great respect for Simon. I would like to talk to him, though it’s probably too personal. He might misunderstand, because he thinks of me as unscrupulous — when all I am is shrewd. I could never tell him. I always worry he doesn’t hear half of what I say. If he has ten minutes for me, eight go on all sorts of other stuff. I worry once I’m in Frankfurt again, sniff the air in the office, which has so little in common with the rest of Germany, that the newspaper can’t see Germany, and that I’ll weaken, and go back to Berlin, and it will finish me off. Berlin is bad for my liver, I have trouble with gall production. Should I not go to Frankfurt?