Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

My novel is coming along.

I got an invitation to join Döblin’s group.4 I will accept it in a noncommittal way, out of politeness. I don’t want any ties to German writers. Not one of them feels as radically as I do. Read my essay on Döblin. I think it will offend him. I can’t help it. Ask him about it sometime.

Say hello to Dr. Simon. I wrote to Guttmann yesterday.

Write me at the office. I am leaving this week. If I get enough money, I’ll look you up in Berlin. Otherwise I’ll be there in about three weeks.

Your old friend

I’m off.

1. Ruhrgebiet: the industrial sector in western Germany. From 1923 to 1925, it was under the occupation of the French, exasperated by the German nonpayment of reparations (this was during the time of the inflation). Roth wrote a series of reportages from there. See also no. 29.

2. brother: Heinrich von Brentano (1904–1964). German foreign minister from 1955 to 1961.

3. more and more solitary: cf. the dangerously detached Franz Tunda, the hero of Roth’s 1927 novel, Flight Without End , which is also the novel that is described as “coming along.”

4. group: the “Gruppe 1925,” a Marxist discussion club, whose secretary was Rudolf Walter Leonhard, and whose members included Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Ehrenstein, Egon Erwin Kisch, Kurt Tucholsky, and Alfred Döblin. Not a natural or congenial habitat for Roth.

28. To Bernard von Brentano

[undated]

Dear friend,

thank you so much for your letter. I wish you would always write with such detail and clarity. Today I got your piece on the blown-up building. It’s not outstanding, but it is journalism. In such pieces I miss information. The number of workers, the buildings on either side, the neighborhood and its social setting.

Your visit to Frankfurt will probably encounter difficulties. I haven’t discussed it with Reifenberg yet.

Nor can I tell you whether I’m coming to Berlin or not.

I want to turn down your suggestion regarding the Modeblatt . I have no desire to take on the goodness of your mother and your family for an organ I’ve never even seen. I don’t think it’s quite right. Not even with your permission. The sort of journalism that makes profit (“tacheles”) from a chance personal relationship seems dubious to me. There is only one person who can take this thing on, whether for the FZ or the Modeblatt , which is you. I don’t understand why you didn’t do it long ago anyway.

From your wife’s letter I see that Landau did come in useful. In matters of health and money, prominent Jews are always a good idea. Jewish doctors are a sort of atonement for the crucifixion.

Will you tell me what Florath is up to.

Call Reifenberg about Diebold.

Neither with Reifenberg nor anywhere else in the Lothar1 establishment did I come upon any favor for the idea of your visit. It wouldn’t greatly matter anyway. I’ve been there, and heard a lot. The party was arranged for and partly by Simon. It was my first experience of the Frankfurt haute volée . Seven counts were of the company, Unruh2 drank champagne in an exclusive circle. Jewish and Christian bankers behaved abominably. Their wives were whores manquées , dreadful informality for all their efforts to stay among themselves and in costume. Panic at the approach of any outsiders. A fancy dress ball where everyone pretended not to know one another, and where all those who wanted to, rapidly got acquainted. A few didn’t — and remained tiddly ridiculous outsiders. I was the only one with more pride than the counts and bankers. I sat there silently. Simon crept around me, my look drove him away, he saw bombs ticking in my eyes. A stench of living bourgeois corpses.3 For at least a day Simon hated me. If our relationship takes account of this development, I will leave the paper.

No, my dear Brentano, this isn’t a society where I want to be known and read. The aristocracy is visibly subservient to industry, industry to the banks, and turn about. It’s a world dying of ugliness. If the Andrä society in Berlin is anything like that, I want no part of it. I’m afraid I’m right. These people will cling to power for another 5 years. Their manners gave them power over the proletariat. Now they themselves are unmannerly plebeians. Proles have better taste.

As of yesterday my hatred of the country and its rulers has grown considerably. I am bound to leave it.

Your old

Roth

Kiss your wife’s hand. Get well!

1. Lothar: Hans Lothar, relative of Heinrich Simon’s, working on the FZ .

2. Unruh: Fritz von Unruh (1885–1970), playwright, novelist, essayist. Pacifist after World War I. Went to live in France and Italy in 1932, in New York from 1940. Wrote an autobiography, The General’s Son , in 1957.

3. living bourgeois corpses: see the ferocious party scene in Flight Without End , based on such experiences. JR in those days was like an open knife, a mixture of prophet, revolutionary, and sociopath.

29. To Bernard von Brentano

Kaiserhof, Essen, 11 February 1926

Dear friend,

your letter of the 6th was forwarded to me here today. By now you will have spoken with Reifenberg, and you will know my views on editing. But just in case, let me say again: it goes against the grain of journalism to forbid an editor to make cuts. Since I fought for this principle the whole time I was in Frankfurt, I can’t very well turn around and say you shouldn’t be cut. (It wouldn’t do much for you either.) Not only is it right to cut and to make changes, I see it almost as an imperative. Of the 40-odd pieces I’ve written, maybe ten appeared “unshorn.” You are no soloist, you’re a choir member. You toe the line. In questions of detail, you can argue the toss if you like. But in principle you are duty bound to submit. Perhaps, with your jealous love of every single line you write, you will become a brilliant poet, but you’ll never make a half-decent journalist. The subject of your article is sacred to you. Your article is means to an end. Your subject and you, the writer, are more important than your article. As much more as you are more than the air you breathe out. As far as your latest piece is concerned, it wasn’t any good. Kracauer cut it. He was right to. It was loose, inorganic, the description of a path, but not the path itself. You have good ideas, good images, good turns of phrase. But they don’t grow together. Your pieces are chain links without any coherence. Read French feuilletons, read Heine’s prose. Learn about natural transitions. Your spade was the best piece of yours I’ve read. In poems, atmosphere and rhythm fuse loose things together. In so-called prose, the context must make the atmosphere.

My wife is in Paris, Hotel de la place de l’Odéon. I’m about to go on the road for a few weeks. With no money. It’s terrible to set off in such a state, I’m desperate, I can’t forsake my expensive habits, and the newspaper is economizing, and economizing horribly. It’s no fun any more, I haven’t even had an advance for March, I have no contract, I am inconsolable.

It’s not pretty in the Ruhr, Nationalist like everywhere, or still worse, in Cologne. Everything is red-white-and-black, all the cinemas are showing Nationalist trash, the “black shame”1 is proclaimed on every street corner, “the enemy is gone,” our culture is under arms.

Tell Dr. Guttmann, to whom I send regards, I’ve written to him already.

Write to me at my old Parisian address, or at the newspaper, it’ll be forwarded to me either way.

Don’t take my strictures amiss. You are the only young person I have any regard for, don’t go fishing for compliments from the clientele at Schwannecke’s,2 you shouldn’t trust compliments anyway. If you don’t live up to your own standards, no amount of compliments will help. Don’t write letters in your initial excitement. Leave it for 24 hours, if you’re still excited.