Joseph Roth - The Hotel Years

His father was in the Foreign Legion, his mother was black. So he got the blond hair from his father, and his mother tongue is German. His mother lived in Munich for a while, as a typist in a bank. He grew up with his grandparents. He’s not just German, he’s Bavarian. (Sometimes he says “nit” for “nicht”.)

What does it feel like being in Germany, as an “enemy”, I ask him.

It had made him very happy to be in Germany. He gave occasional lectures to his comrades. He read aloud to them from Goethe. His favourite poet is Lenau. And after a quarter of an hour I could see that not only did this Negro know far more than Hitler and the Negroes of Upper Austria, he also had a deeper and more intuitive grasp of the German character than any Professor Freytag-Loringhoven or Roethe; that in the purity of his soul this Negro Guillaume stood far above the ostensible racial purity of Dinter; and that he didn’t even need his blue eyes and blond hair to be German.

He lived in a little farmhouse not far from Koblenz, and I spent the afternoon with him. He played the violin. I saw that he was slimly built, with large hands and fingers. I saw the photo of his father, a man with blond upturned moustaches. He had died in the service of France. And then I saw the picture of a young girl from Munich, who is to be his bride. Later, of course, once everything is over.

I’m afraid it will be a long time before it is all over, at least in Munich, where the white Negroes dwell and where I’m sure it’s not possible to be the bride of a Franco-German blond Negro, not without being raked by swastikas.

Neue Berliner Zeitung—12 Uhr-Blatt, 28 December 1923

* Black Shame: Roth ironically deploys the term that was used for the perceived shame of parts of the Rhineland being occupied by Black African French soldiers when Germany fell behind with reparations.

Dinter: Artur Dinter (1876–1948), German racist writer and politician, obsessed with racial purity. The fact that his Nazi Party number was as low as 5 speaks for itself.

1. THE CAPTAIN OF KÖPENICK

The cobbler Voigt, who passed away a few days ago, was an adventurer of small scale and surprising consequence. His contribution was to extend the lexicon of crime by a single word: “Köpenick-iad”.*

It is to this coinage that he owes his survival; not the boldness of his criminal imagination. He was a stunted cobbler; his exterior alone marked him out as a butt of fortune’s joke. His enterprise allowed him a further coup. He himself hadn’t wanted it. It turned out that at a time of doughty militarism it had an extraordinary effect. His absurd appearance was overlooked. His orders were heard and obeyed. He proved that even the most rigid discipline is helpless in the face of stupidity.

Today his image has paled. When he died, his name flickered up again here and there. People remembered a time when fate still had a sense of humour. The present offers no such ridiculous adventurers; only dismal, humourless ones. The exploits of the cobbler Voigt come to us from a more innocent, pre-Revolutionary era: relatively harmless pranks, with a happy ending.

To each time its own adventurers.

2. COUNT SCHLIEFFEN

Our time boasts Count Schlieffen, who a few days ago was re-arrested in Hamburg.

Count Schlieffen is a bourgeois officer cadet; real name unknown. Nor can he do without his military lustre. He moves in distinguished circles in Hamburg and America, gets engaged to a singer, marries her on the strength of some false documents, is unmasked at the wedding, flees to Berlin with the help of a few left-wing politicians, and there becomes an aristocrat again. Till he returns to Hamburg, where he is finally nabbed.

He is a typical adventurer of the twentieth century; a touch of demonism, drawn to politics, origins shrouded in mystery, shading into the tragic. He is the complete hero of a revolutionary age; erotic and sentimental, played upon by war and fame, socially adept and ambitious. A profiteer of our turbulent times, dashing, but with a head for figures. Not to be defeated by border guards or lack of papers, a cool liar, cool as a film hero, and innately superior to those things that ultimately ensnare him.

He loses himself, likeably enough, in complications, because — walking talking testimony to the effect of the Eternal Feminine — he gives up his career for a woman. He is arrested on his way to the singer in Hamburg, in one final attempt to talk her round.

There was no need for him to do it. He could have lived a pampered life in Berlin, untroubled by his pursuers. But probably he loves his singer. Either that or his vanity is wounded. The fact that hundreds of people take him for a swindler bothers him little. But the fact that this woman, who once loved him, no longer trusts him, that hurts.

Count Schlieffen is no hard-boiled sinner. He is sympathetic at that point where he becomes vulnerable. His heart is his Achilles heel. One can understand “Count Schlieffen”. A woman was his undoing. That’s masculine.

3. COUNT AVALOV-BERMONT

This Count is a Russian commoner who has made a career in the army, has lived in Berlin since the Revolution, and has awarded, so to speak, posthumous medals to Baltic soldiers and officers. The police have therefore extradited him.

Count Avalov is an enthusiast, not a snake. He probably believes in his title and his significance. He lives in a middling B&B in the West End of Berlin with an adjutant, who is a former officer. A visit to the “Count” is one of those grotesque experiences Berlin has to offer.

The adjutant announces you, you wait in an ante-room, the door flies open, and the adjutant announces: “His Excellency”. And in clatters, rattles, jangles the lofty form of the Count, who is tall and presentable: a stately pine from the gardens of Tsarskoye-Selo.

His voice is rough and hoarse. The syllables march past, curt and clipped, and form up into companies of sentences. His speech is a military function, his gestures fictive rifle exercises.

Count Avalov believes in himself and his mission. He too can be understood as a victim of his times. The Czar has been murdered and Avalov feels compelled to represent the real Russia in the eyes of the world. He pulls on his costume as a personal demonstration against Lenin and Trotsky.

He is a brave man, no doubt, and no more dishonest to the world than he is to himself. He wishes to be a prop of the monarchy, and so offers himself as a theatrical prop.

He is an adventurer out of self-deception. He thinks of himself as a general and Machiavelli rolled into one. All he does is pin tin medals on people.

Berlin Börsen-Courier, 8 January 1922

* Köpenick-iad: a confidence trick, as when the cobbler Voigt got into a borrowed military uniform and occupied the town hall of Köpenick outside Berlin. The subject of Carl Zuckmayer’s enduringly popular tragicomedy of 1931, The Captain of Köpenick .

Yesterday the nineteen-year-old labourer Franz Zagacki was sentenced to five years in prison. He had tried to kill his mother while she was peeling potatoes, first with an axe, then by asphyxiation, and finally by stabbing her. Then, supposing she was dead, he robbed her of a wallet in her petticoats containing two thousand two hundred marks, went to a tobacconist’s, paid his debts, bought cigarettes, invited his friends and his sweetheart who had helped him plan the deed to a cosy get-together in the flat of the apparently deceased woman, and went out to have himself a fun day. The mother though did not die, and the son was arrested and taken to prison for questioning.

Yesterday the mother stood in court and explained that she had forgiven her son. No sooner were the wounds healed that he had dealt her, than she was setting off to her son’s prison bringing preserves and other delicacies she had forgone. Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son, and if she had had the strength and if her lust for life had not prevailed when she was near death, then she would have remained quietly under the bedding in which he had tried to asphyxiate her, in order to spare him. What was her view of her child? she was asked. Nothing but the best. Oh, it wasn’t his fault, bad company had led him astray, it’s always bad company that’s to blame. She didn’t know anything about his girlfriend, he was impressionable, but when he was younger he had been a good boy.