Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

Can I spend the winter in Paris then? I wouldn’t care to stay any longer than that. Can I go to some third country — Albania, maybe — and write another book? Should I forget about the 100 marks, and so free myself from Germany? Can I go to Moscow? Schotthöfer3 is back. Russia and the East are familiar to me.

I am desperate . I can’t even go to Vienna since the Jewish Socialists have started clamoring for their Anschluss. What are they after? They want Hindenburg? At the time that Emperor Franz Joseph died, I was already a “revolutionary,” but I shed tears for him. I was a one-year volunteer in a Vienna regiment, a so-called elite unit, that stood by the Kapuzinergruft as a guard of honor, and I tell you, I was crying. An epoch was buried. With the Anschluss, a culture will be put in the ground. Every European must be against the Anschluss. And only those mediocre Socialist brains don’t get it. So little difference between German Nationalist and Socialist policies! Between Jew and Christian! The various camps are united by their mediocrity more firmly than by any principle or ideal. Can’t anyone feel that an independent Austria is still a gesture toward a united Europe? Do they want to become a sort of nether Bavaria? More than German reactionaries, I hate that obtuse German efficiency, decency, honesty, the Löbe4 type, the accountant who has found his way into politics. Those people should have remained civil servants. But just because there are no politicians in Germany, the civil servants go into politics, and the idiots occupy the chancelleries, and because the prisons are overcrowded the criminals have moved into the police stations. I can’t go to Germany, I can’t!

I hope you liked my last three articles. If not, please tell me straight out. Someone who writes day and night as I do has no vanity. Nor is it vanity that is unhappy with an “appendix” to my essays. It’s the formal conscience of a journalist. There is such a thing as a typographical conscience. It insists on a preamble and won’t stand for an afterword . That would have to be in a different typeface. The newspaper is insufficiently expressive in that way. There is no smallest type size. I’ve just forgotten the name of it. Petit and leaded petit are too small. Formal technical resources allow for more expression. It’s terribly important for the paper to have a thousand faces; it has a thousand news stories. Congratulations, anyway, on the new masthead and design. Who is it who sets the paper now? The best-looking edition was the one with the French diplomatic démarche. Who set that? I like the layout of the world news as well. If only I could have that column to myself three times a week. With specifications as to layout. Would that be possible?

How are your invalids? Give them my best, I mean it. I remain, come what may, your old Joseph Roth

1. shaved blockhead: an unmistakable limning of Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), World War I general and then elected president of Germany in 1925 and again in 1932; the man who in January 1933 gave the German chancellorship to Adolf Hitler.

2. Becher: Johannes Becher (1891–1958), poet, playwright, novelist, and member of the Independent Social Democratic Party.

3. Schotthöfer: Fritz Schotthöfer, worked on the Frankfurter Zeitung from 1900. Retired in 1943, died in 1951.

4. Löbe: Paul Löbe (1875–1967), member of the Social Democratic Party.

23. To Bernard von Brentano

Paris, 11 September [1925]

Dear friend,

I got your two letters before I left. I’ve been in Paris again since yesterday. I’m working very hard, starting my travel book tomorrow, and hoping to finish it by the end of the month. Hence just a few lines now. My address is the same. Please tell me right away that you’re better. I worry about you, not just for your sake, but because it’s important that decent people remain alive and in good health. My liver’s already packing up. The fools aren’t to remain unsupervised, and in the happy knowledge that the good people are getting sick and falling away. My relationship with the firm is being decided now. I’ll probably take the finished book with me to Frankfurt.

Write if you must. I imagine you’ll have been paid, in accordance with the snail’s pace of everything in Frankfurt.

Send me a detailed note.

My best to your wife.

Get well.

When is Guttmann back?

Your old

Joseph Roth

24. To Bernard von Brentano

29 November 1925

Dear friend,

let’s start with your affairs:

1. I’ve checked with R., I won’t be able to hear you speak in Offenbach. The paper doesn’t run to that kind of thing.

2. Reifenberg will bring up your 5 mss. with Nassauer.1 There shouldn’t be a problem.

3. Come here, I would be delighted. So would Reifenberg.

4. Your articles will be out soon. The film [piece?] wouldn’t fit in the politics [section?].

As for me, or rather my book,2 I’ve withdrawn it, and offered it to Dietz.3 Thus far — it’s too early still — no word. I wouldn’t have left it with this lot for all the tea in China. R. once remarked it was a pity I’d already sold it. R. apparently upset about the rejection. Upset is about as good as it gets with him. The degree of his upset might have made a difference, but probably not much. I’m still not sure who turned it down, even though I know Dr. Claassen,4 the editor. He’s a little Galician Jewish egghead — with German education, formerly a tutor in Simon’s employ. It’s possible the decision was his. Everything is possible.

I’ve only had one conversation with Simon, which was chilly, almost hostile. He’s depressed that he isn’t allowed to spend any money. It’s very hard for me to get a wage rise put through here. A freeze has been slapped on everything, the atmosphere in the firm is gloomy. I’m unable to suggest any more jaunts, they all cost money. There is as yet no Paris correspondent in place.5 They are so desperate to make economies, they hope to find one who will double as a feuilleton writer, and all for 800 marks. I have half a mind to quit. Through my personal friendship with Nassauer, I might be able to get a few advances that I could earn out later. But I’m not looking for favors. I am looking for practical, material acknowledgment from the firm. But it’s in no position now to treat itself to what it sees as a luxury.

I don’t know what course is more sensible: to sit tight and get out of Germany, or to resign and stay out of Germany in less comfort. The whole FZ looks to me like a microcosm of Germany. My loathing for it is growing all the time. I don’t have a publisher there, I don’t have readers, I don’t have recognition. But nor do I feel pain, because nothing makes me sad there; or disappointment because I have no hopes; or melancholy, because I am just cold and indifferent. It’s snowing here constantly, the world looks like a German bakery, sugar-sweet and sickening. I have nothing to do with the landscape, nothing to do with this sky. Nor anything with the technology, with the paving stones and the construction of the buildings, with the society, with the art. It’s very hard to change anything in the feuilleton. They keep running German nature scenes, they pile up here, and they’re all taken. It’s only really when I’m here that I see how poorly we fit in. I’ve given up the struggle. There’s no point. I just want to finish my Jewish book.6

The German brutality of your chauffeur is no worse than the German mildness of the culture. There’s nothing to choose between them. Cultural Germany lies between Ullstein7 on the one side and the FZ on the other. God punish it!8

We’ll see each other over a glass of wine.