Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

It was in France, you could say, that Roth learned to fear and hate and see Germany as it was. The specimens of German-ness that fetched up in Paris — the Prussians he thought of as boches —and penitential return visits to Frankfurt or Berlin taught him a sort of visionary anthropology. Once Paris was denied him, and he had been to Russia, and a further visit there failed to come off, the FZ had only Germany and Germany and more Germany to offer him, and Roth’s responses became swifter, more virulent, more instinctive, and less patient. His eye was trained by the health, glamour, and nature of a sort of anticipatory self-exile in France. Germany, by contrast, was a disfigurement, a freak show, a deeply sick patient:

I feel Germany right off the bat, and all of it at once. Every street corner expresses the awfulness of the whole country. It has the ugliest prostitutes, the girls indistinguishable from the women who swab the floors of the FZ at night, in fact I think they’re the same. The men are all scoutmasters on display. You see more blondes in summer than in winter. All tanned and deeply unhealthy looking. An awful lot of bodies, precious few faces. Sports shirts, no skirts. Yesterday, my first day back, was ghastly. Immediate plummet of spirits , the way mercury can fall to zero. The feeling as though your genitals were gone, nothing left! Skirts, where there are skirts, all buttoned up, crooked gait of the men, as though they were originally designed as quadrupeds. (no. 134)

This account matches the sarcastic horror paintings of Otto Dix. Roth tried — further driven on by the plight of Friedl, who required treatment, and finally hospitalization — to save himself in fiction. He put out a book a year: Flight Without End in 1927, Zipper and His Father in 1928, Right and Left in 1929. (After 1933, it was to be more like two books a year: a completely ruinous and impossible production.) The rejection by S. Fischer of The Silent Prophet and his own abandonment of Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois checked his progress. When the firm of Gustav Kiepenheuer took him on, and Job , subtitled The Story of a Simple Man came out to excellent reviews and — for the first time — appreciable sales in 1930, it looked as though — after seven novels! — Roth might be poised for a new career as a novelist, and he quite deliberately set himself (bought himself time and space, and as much peace of mind as a monthly stipend could buy) to write the “book of old Austria” that was to be his masterpiece, The Radetzky March . It was serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung (among his last gifts to the paper), and published in August 1932—nicely in time to be fed to the flames by enthusiastic National Socialist students in Berlin on 10 May 1933.

14. To Benno Reifenberg

Paris, 16 May 1925

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,1

I fear this letter may give you the impression that I am so besotted with Paris, and with France, that I have lost the balance of my mind. Be assured, therefore, that I am writing to you in full possession of my skeptical faculties, with all my wits about me, and running the risk of making a fool of myself, which is just about the worst thing that could happen to me. I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here. Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European. Paris is free, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in the most majestic pathos. Any chauffeur is wittier than our wittiest authors. We really are an unhappy bunch. Here everyone smiles at me, I fall in love with all the women, even the oldest of them, to the point of contemplating matrimony. I could weep when I cross the Seine bridges, for the first time in my life I am shattered by the aspect of buildings and streets, I feel at ease with everyone, though we continually misunderstand each other in matters of practicalities, merely because we so delightfully understand each other in matters of nuance. Were I a French author, I wouldn’t bother printing anything, I would just read and speak. The cattle drovers with whom I eat breakfast are so cultivated and noble as to put our ministers of state to shame, patriotism is justified (but only here!), nationalism is an expression of a European conscience, any poster is a poem, the announcements in a magistrate’s court are as sublime as our best prose, film placards contain more imagination and psychology than our contemporary novels, soldiers are whimsical children, policemen amusing editorialists. There is — quite literally — a party against Hindenburg2 being celebrated here at the moment, “Guignol contre Hindenburg” but then the whole city is a protest against Hindenburg anyway, against Hindenburg, Prussia, boots, and buttons. The Germans here, the North Germans, are full of rage against the city, and they are blind and insensitive to it. For instance, I quarreled with Palitzsch,3 who is of the better sort of North German and who can only understand my enthusiasm as a sort of poetic spleen, and thereby excuses it. He makes allowances for me! Me, a poet! That much vaunted North German “objectivity” is a mask for his lack of instinct, for his nose that isn’t an organ of sense but a catarrh dispenser. My so-called subjectivity is in the highest degree objective. I can smell things he won’t be able to see for another ten years.

I feel terribly sad because there are no bridges between certain races. There will never be a connection between Prussia and France. I am sitting in a restaurant, the waiter greets me, the waitress gives me a smile, while the Germans I am with are frosty to the manager and the errand boy. They give off a ghastly rigidity, they breathe out not air but walls and fences, even though their French is better than mine. Why is it? It’s the voice of blood and Catholicism. Paris is Catholic in the most urbane sense of the word, but it’s also a European expression of universal Judaism.

You must come here!

I owe it to you that I was able to come to France, and I shall never thank you enough. In a few days I’m going to take off for Provence, and I won’t write until my ecstasy has calmed down, and become the ground plan for the edifice of my descriptions.

My wife is staying here for the moment, she’s unwell, I’m afraid it may be her lungs. Please write to her:

Friedl Roth, Place de l’Odeon, Hotel de la Place de l’Odeon/Paris. It’s so cheap: 10 ff for a good meal, 15 ff for the night!

I’m also writing to the paper for the rest of my payment — perhaps you could remind them in accounts as well.

Greetings to you, and I kiss your wife’s hands,4

Your Joseph Roth

1. Reifenberg: Benno Reifenberg (1892–1970), journalist, and JR’s boss-cum-friend (though as he says frequently, this sort of mixed relationship is hard to negotiate; JR is forever talking to him privately in the office, or sending professional démarches to his home). Joined the staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1919; editor of the feuilleton from 1924, Paris correspondent from 1930 to 1932, political editor from 1932 to 1943; co-founder and co-editor of the journal Die Gegenwart (1945–58); on the board of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1958 to 1964.

2. General Paul von Hindenburg was elected president of Germany on 25 April.

3. O. A. Palitzsch, journalist.

4. Born Maryla von Mazurkiewicz, to whom JR had a cordial relationship.

15. To Bernard von Brentano

Paris, 2 June 1925

Dear Brentano,1

don’t be annoyed! In the first place, I’m incredibly mixed up. I don’t know if I’ll ever write another thing. Maybe I’ll go back to where I came from — you know — and herd sheep. I don’t see the point in being a German writer. Here is like being on top of a tall tower, you look down from the summit of European civilization, and way down at the bottom, in some sort of gulch, is Germany. I can’t write a line in German — certainly not when I am mindful of writing for a German readership.