Joseph Roth: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters

But of the (very few) letters from this time, few are personal, and really none are consciously clouded. Instead, we get an early taste of Roth with his elbows out, taking the fight to the enemy. The enemy, it has to be said, is almost invariably head office. It is a little surprising that, coming from the periphery of things as he did, nothing should have been further from Roth than awe or respect for the personalities and institutions of the center (at this stage of his life, he certainly wasn’t making a good imperial subject; the “frontiersman” in him showed itself differently). His letters are quite fearless in their bluntness, and worse in the jaunty disrespect they imply. Whether he’s putting up two fingers to the BBC , or selling himself on the sly — a contracted author — to another publisher, he seems always in a hurry, and to have little regard for the sensitivities of the persons or institutions he’s dealing with, neither the ones he’s trying to charm (“I am told you are sometimes to be found in Berlin”) nor the ones from whom he’s — perhaps not so discreetly — pursuing a disseverance: “Nor do I think the Schmiede will be overjoyed to learn of my new terms.” In a way, it’s as though he’s playing a game, or taking on a dare: to Ihering (no.10) it would be: maintain a cordial personal relationship with your boss, in case you need his support at some future time, while giving in your passionate resignation because the paper he edits is insufficiently left wing for you (make sure he feels bad about this), and also launching a noble gripe that he wasn’t paying you enough, financial and ideological reasons to receive equal weight. You have twenty minutes. Begin. And lo and behold, Roth invented the perfumed kipper.

9. Friederike Reichler1 to Paula Grübel

Berlin, 28 December 19212

half past 11 at night

Servus Paulinchen,

don’t be annoyed by the long silence. My arm got very bad, and hurt a lot. The swelling’s only just starting to go down.

Today I was unwell again — I had a terrible cough. I followed your advice, hot bath, aspirin, sweating; now I’m feeling better. Muh is at the theater, and I’m so worried about him I couldn’t stay in bed any more, and got up to write to you.

He’s terribly busy. He’s working very hard on his novel, which Frau Szajnocha will have told you about. It makes him moody, so he can’t write letters.

Please apologize for him to your father, and put in a good word for him.

How is Frau Szajnocha?

Beierle3 is still staying with us, and says hello.

Your father mentioned a jeweler by the name of Pume Torczyner. Please tell him that that’s my grandmother, my mother’s maiden name was Torczyner.

All roads lead to Brody!

Please give my best regards to your father and mother, and many kisses,

Friedl.

I can’t get hold of Galsen.

12 o’clock already, and Muh’s still not back, what do you say to that?! Shocking!!!!

1. Friederike Reichler (born 12 May 1900 in Vienna) married Roth on 5 March 1922 in Vienna. Always physically delicate, she became schizophrenic in 1929, and was put in asylums in Austria; in 1940 she was euthanized, in accordance with the prevailing practices of the Nazis. Her sweet, rather nervous tone here is ominous.

2. 1921: recte 1922, according to Bronsen.

3. Beierle: Alfred Beierle, friend of Roth’s, an actor and reciter.

10. To Herbert Ihering

Berlin, 17 September 1922

Dear Mr. Ihering,1

please don’t see this letter as a formal goodbye, nor as a polite substitute for a meeting with you, but purely as the expression of a necessity. I regret the all too short period of our collaboration, and freely admit that, while I came to the BBC 2 with certain prejudices against you, I am now pleased to entertain high opinions of both your humanity and your literary effectiveness.

I am writing a farewell letter by the same post to Dr. Faktor,3 informing him that his letter occasioned, but did not cause, my resignation. I am no longer able to share the outlook of a bourgeois readership and remain their Sunday chatterbox if I am not to deny my socialism on a daily basis. It’s possible that, out of weakness, I might have repressed my convictions in return for a higher salary or more frequent recognition of my work. Only Dr. Faktor, already sapped by hard work, constant negotiations with the editorial board, and the difficulties of his own position, treated me with a smiling condescension, often doubted the truth of my protestations, smiled at this and that, and, while I am certainly aware of my own sensitivities, I am forced to conclude that I was treated in a way that was dangerously close to that extended to Herr Schönfeld and other employees of bygone days. As far as my salary was concerned, after the latest raise, it was 9,000 marks. I was allowed to write for other papers, but not to write with all my power for the BBC . The one I was permitted to do on grounds of economy, the other was frowned upon to suppress my ambitions.

I write you this, because I wouldn’t like you to form a false picture of what happened. I would be very glad to meet you in some neutral place, but am not proposing such a thing, but am content to wait for chance to bring it about, if it will.

I remain, with best wishes, your humble servant

Joseph Roth

1. Herbert Ihering (1888–1977), theater critic with the Berliner Börsen Courier , and famously an early supporter of the plays of Bertolt Brecht; later on worked at the Burgtheater in Vienna during the Third Reich, and was a theater critic again in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) after 1945. This letter is an early instance of Roth’s rhetorical power — which sometimes becomes ferocity — and his fearlessness when confronting others in authority.

2. Not the British Broadcasting Corporation, but the Berliner Börsen Courier .

3. Faktor: Dr. Emil Faktor (born in 1876 in Prague, gassed after 1941 in Lodz), feuilleton editor of the Berliner Börsen Courier , deposed under Hitler, left for Czechoslovakia in 1933.

11. Friederike Roth to Paula Grübel

Berlin, 14 July 1924

in the next few days, we are going to go to Prague and then on to Krakow. Please, will you tell me what the prices are like in Poland now, and how well we can live on rentenmarks.1

Perhaps it would even be possible for you to make a side trip to Krakow yourself? Certainly, we would like that.

Please write straightaway, because we’re only waiting for an address from you before leaving.

Then we may all go to France together in August.

Please give Frau Szajnocha our best regards, from both of us — I’ll send off a copy of Hotel Savoy 2 this week.

Fräulein Idelsohn has been here. How are your parents doing?

Please congratulate Wittlin3 from us both.

Kisses from

Friedl and Muh.

1. The rentenmark was introduced in November 1923 in an effort to stabilize the German currency in the wake of runaway inflation. One rentenmark became equivalent to one trillion marks.

2. Hotel Savoy : Roth’s second novel — though the first to appear between covers — came out in 1924 from the respected Berlin firm Die Schmiede, publishers of Kafka and Proust. They went on to publish Rebellion and The Wandering Jews .

3. Jozef Wittlin married in 1924.

12. To Paula Grübel

[Berlin, 15 July 1924]

Dear Paula,

Friedl wrote you yesterday. But knowing how unreliable you are, I will repeat both her content, and her instruction to write back ASAP. I am going to Poland for work. What is the level of the Polish mark? I have 800 German marks. Can you work out the exchange? Can I live off it for 3 days in Krakow ? Can you meet me there? I can barely stammer a word of Polish any more. Inform Frau von Szajnocha, Wittlin, Mayer! Then I will travel to Austria with you, and perhaps even farther afield, depending on money. Am bringing books. Looking forward very much to clapping eyes and ears on you again.