Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

That’s why there was no Christmas bonus. The company no longer turns a profit. It doesn’t sell. No reason to call it names. The BT 8 can afford more than a fortnight’s salary, because it’s already been sold. Whereas we sell our own freedom in return for our bonuses — indirectly, of course.

With things as they are, it’s bad if I stay, bad if I go. Then there’s the fact that Reifenberg needs someone to hold his hand here. He’s not quite a match for Diebold.9 Geck10 and Diebold annoy him, and in the end he’s a rather haughty passive character, whose passivity may well win out, but only at the end of ten years. I wish we could just both leave. Think about it. This place lacks control and direction. I have no idea how that could be arranged. I really don’t want to spend half my time in Berlin. All I know is that someone needs to be sitting with Reifenberg in his office, otherwise things will get worse. I’ve suggested guest writers as star turns. But with the stodginess of this outfit, there’s no sense in even waiting for an answer. We could think of a plan and put it into effect by ourselves. If you were to turn up here one day instead of me, no one would say a thing. While everything’s in the balance, it’s still possible to get things done.

But I’m afraid it won’t be like that forever, and once Guttmann’s regiment has taken over, nothing will be possible any more. He’s just hired another sergeant major. Gradually he’s taking over the building. Nassauer’s powers of attorney have been limited, and Lasswitz11 is turning into a chief under one’s very eyes. Today he’s still glad of a smile and a friendly word from me, but who knows if that’ll still be true the day after tomorrow? He complained to me about your standoffishness. I told him distinguished people were like that, and to prove it to him, I went in the next day to see Nassauer, who was out — as I knew he would be — and I was even more standoffish to him than you are, and told him grand people were painfully inhibited in matters of money, and that it took years of friendship to gain their trust. So he gets the picture, and I’m afraid next time you see him, he’ll probably be all over you.

I keep a thousand ears pinned to the ground, I have confidants in every camp, and I’m noiseless as an Indian. Dr. Simon is in Berlin now, if you should run into him, treat him nicely.

Come soon, and kiss the hand of your dear wife.

I remain your old

Roth

1. Dr. Max Geisenheyner worked on the travel section of the FZ .

2. your presence, in person: a recurring idea with JR in these letters, where he connects it with the Austrian character. (See, for instance, no. 276.) I fancy it is just as true of JR, personally.

3. Wolf von Dewall (1882–1959) joined the staff of the FZ in 1916, correspondent in London and Ankara; after the war freelance journalist in Stuttgart.

4. Friedrich Sieburg (1893–1964), author, poet, essayist, translator. Correspondent for the FZ from 1923 to 1942. After 1942 press attaché in Paris for the Nazi envoy Abetz. From 1948 to 1955 co-editor of the magazine Die Gegenwart ; after 1956, literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . It was probably the greatest disappointment of JR’s life that he was passed over for the Paris job in favor of Sieburg in 1925–26.

5. Kurt Lachmann, journalist. Went into exile in 1933. After the war, was a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report in Bonn.

6. Fritz Naphtali (1888–1961), business editor of the FZ from 1921 to 1927.

7. Artur Feiler (1879–1943), business editor from 1903 to 1909, domestic political editor from 1910 to 1930.

8. BT : the Berliner Tageblatt .

9. Dr. Bernhard Diebold (1886–1945), theater critic for the FZ , who in 1934 returned to his native Switzerland.

10. Dr. Rudolf Geck (d. 1936), feuilleton editor on the FZ ; at the paper since 1898. Credited with first having brought JR to the FZ .

11. Erich Lasswitz (1880–1959), technical director and writer for the FZ from 1918 to 1943. Roth sometimes strikes one as the only Indian, among this collective of chiefs, and less able to make his way than he proudly/overweeningly thinks.

27. To Bernard von Brentano

[undated]

Dear friend,

you fell for the fool’s mate, because you were working on the false assumption that the Schmiede was going to be even more stupid than it actually was. I read the carbon of your letter, there’s nothing in it but my address. You shouldn’t have even started talking to those idiots. Now it’s finished. We’ll have to just let them write. I don’t care. I’m past the stage where I would give them anything of mine — even if it was the last thing I wrote in German. Please tell me, more precisely, what your conversation with them was. That’s not a reproach to you, but a lesson. You haven’t yet got that Jewish cunning, with which it’s possible to keep an entire country at bay. But you might need to have it one day. Above all, learn to speak less .

If you’re doing badly, so am I. I want to send my wife to Paris, while I go on my German tour. I’m going to be spending some 3 or 4 weeks in the Ruhrgebiet,1 and probably go to Paris once that’s done. I’m skint. I can’t get by, never mind how much I earn. Germany is making me ill. Every day I feel more hatred, and I could choke on my own contempt. Even the language is loathsome to me. A country’s provinces give it away like nothing else. The fake elegance, the loud voices, the yahoos, the silence, the respect, the impertinence. There is a sort of unfreedom in these people that is worse than the subordination in front of a sergeant major. I understand that the rest of Germany kowtows to Prussia. It has one method: to distract people from their lack of inner freedom by external impositions. The way you make your toothache better by slapping your face.

I saw Dr. Simon. We concluded a sort of truce. He admitted he was slightly afraid or wary of me. I suspect that hasn’t entirely vanished. We were somewhat reconciled. We talked about your brother.2 He made a very good impression, albeit still a “Catholic-Jesuitical” one. Simon feels a degree of suspicion of him too. Suspicion will always accompany admiration in him. I understand it very well, and let it pass, having encountered it a thousand times myself.

My dear friend, I’m becoming more and more solitary.3 More manifest in the details of life, in matters of taste, food, clothing, restaurants, and pleasures than in questions of principle or philosophy. Sometimes I catch an echo of it from Reifenberg. Even my wife is withdrawing from me, for all her love. She is normal, and I am what you’d have to call insane. She doesn’t react as I do, with vehemence, with trembling, she’s less sensitive to atmosphere, she is sensible and straightforward. Anything and everything is capable of provoking me. The conversation at another table, a look, a dress, a walk. It’s really not “normal.” I’m afraid I’m going to have to forswear society, and break off all ties. I no longer believe anything I’m told. I see through a magnifying glass. I peel the skins off people and things to see their hidden secrets — after that, you really can’t believe anything. I know, before the object of my scrutiny knows, how it will adapt, how it will evolve, what it will do next. It might change utterly. But my knowledge of it is such that it will do exactly what I think it will do. If it occurs to me that someone will do something vicious or low, he goes and does it. I am becoming dangerous to ordinary decent people because of my knowledge of them.

It makes for an atrocious life. It precludes all of love and most of friendship. My mistrust kills all warmth, as bleach kills most germs. I no longer understand the forms of human intercourse. A harmless conversation chokes me. I am incapable of speaking an innocent word. I don’t understand how people utter banalities. How they manage to sing. How they manage to play charades. If only the traditional forms still applied! But the new informality in Germany kills everything. I can’t participate. All I can do is talk very cleverly with other very clever people. I am starting to hate decency, where — as is so often the case — it’s paired with limited intelligence. The merely decent are beginning to hate me back. It can’t go on. It can’t go on.