Joseph Roth - The Hotel Years

It is a distinguished book. The author walks in the shadow of her great hero — and yet her discretion betrays her sympathetic presence. The book, written in German, appears in French, one of the few worthy gifts that German writers across the borders of German barbarism have been able to offer the French admirers of Heine and his spirit.

II

An evidently significant coincidence brings us, almost simultaneously, a new book by the noted Heine biographer and politician Hermann Wendel. Readers who are acquainted with pre- and post-1914 politics will need no introduction to Hermann Wendel. Born in Metz of German parents, tending in his heart a love of France and a wish for a free and dignified Germany, Hermann Wendel was a socialist MP out of poetic élan, an active politician from idealism, not a realist but an idealist politician, if you like. The very embodiment of the frontier man, German and Gaul, European in a way that no longer exists.

Hermann Wendel has now published his memoirs ( Recollections of a Citizen of Metz ) with the Strasbourg house of Mésange: written in German, felt in European, like everything from the pen of this politician, historian and publicist. These memoirs radiate a kindly melancholy, a forgiving melancholy. (Wendel certainly has much to forgive socialism and Germany.) His book is important, and of broad interest, even though seeming to contain only personal experience. But Wendel has the grace of the writer and the man of the world. Everything he says is cultured, delicate, powerful, valid and rich in suggestion.

III

The third book that seems to me worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the two foregoing are the thoughts of the well-known Berlin lawyer Dr. Alfred Apfel on the background of German justice ( Les dessous de la justice Allemande , again from Gallimard.) These are revelations. Germans reading this book will recall with pain that Germany was all set to become a Third Reich long before Hitler was ever thought of. French readers will see what they were slow to learn, and perhaps have learned too late. (By their justice ye shall know them!) Apfel, himself imprisoned by the Hitler regime, has managed to escape to France, and it seems to me both indicative and correct that these revelations first appear in French. If one has escaped to France, then how else thank this country except by illuminating the French. It’s not just a thank you, it’s also meritorious, whatever our barbarians may say about “high treason”. Remember, our fatherland is not the one where we fare well! A country where bad things happen and more bad things are prepared than in any Hell’s kitchen, no longer deserves to be called a fatherland. We can’t love soil that puts forth such weeds.

Each chapter of Alfred Apfel’s book has an epigraph from Heinrich Heine, that prophetic and forever momentous Heinrich Heine whom Antonina Vallentin has illuminated.

Pariser Tageblatt, 14 July 1934

I

Peevish, cantankerous, grumpy, he concealed his shyness behind an aggressive humility, a modesty that was in point of fact haughtiness. He was no “sweet-natured Austrian”, more the opposite: a highly awkward, even gloomy one. It was as though, in consequence of his promise to be a classical representative of the monarchy, he felt primarily the need to go against the picture-postcard notions the other German peoples had of Austria (and this before the advent of the picture postcard). At the same time he went against the popular type of the prickly loyal subject that was so popular in the upper echelons of his own country. He never revolted, because he was in permanent rebellion. He rebelled out of conservatism, as a supporter of hierarchical order and a defender of traditional values, which he saw as under attack, neglected, offended against not from below, but from above. Devoted to the House of Habsburg and the pan-German and transnational ideas that it symbolized, he still viewed the Emperor with a degree of cool and irritation; embittered too by his experience, which had proved to him that those in power had no vocation for it, he set himself, a poor, weak, capriciously treated official, a playwright exposed to the favour, disfavour and indifference of others, to defend the inheritance, the great, misunderstood inheritance of the Roman Emperor. Yes, he enjoyed “the very highest approbation”, he sought and required it as a formal affirmation of his idealizing picture — not sloppily idealizing, more reconstructive — but this recognition was a cold sun. And he felt such a chill already! He was full of suspicion. His great, pale eyes seemed to have been made to listen as much as look, they were hearkening lights. They made enemies for him, and awakened further mistrust. In Austria, people with listening eyes were not popular. (Only Beethoven was an exception: he was deaf.)

Rarely was he seized by yearning to be away, the longing to leave the limits of his extensive, varied fatherland that could be home and abroad at one and the same time. Once, he set off to pay a visit to Goethe. Cultured readers will know the lamentable outcome of this encounter between the humble man who hid behind his modesty, and the great one who used his greatness to keep the world at arm’s length. It was the Kahlenberg’s encounter with Olympus: tragic, because it led to the underestimation of the Kahlenberg.† Grillparzer had hoped for a while to escape the peevishness of his constricting homeland, and to be allowed to breathe the atmosphere of global horizons for two days, no more than two wretched days. And he returned home more shaken than broken, more sad than disappointed, enriched by the experience that his Catholic faith affirmed: that no man can become a demigod and that even a genius is limited to the standard five senses, a few crumbs of intuition, and sometimes a degree of good fortune that is nothing compared to the grace of suffering.

He filed this experience away with the others. He actively provoked the disfavour of fate. Perhaps the reason he went to Goethe was to see with his own eyes the happiness of a fortunate man, his better and his opposite. It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like, and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday.

II

Love entails risk. One has a justifiable dread of risks. They are distantly related to revolts, uprisings and civil disturbances. The object of love is not responsible for the unpredictable character of the feeling that is called a “passion”—and passion of course in the original sense of “suffering”. For all this the object of love, the individual woman, is of course not responsible, but as a type, as “woman”, she represents unpredictability, danger, the potential for revolution and sin. In a world of few certainties, she makes commotion and drama more probable. She can splinter the steps of hierarchic order, in the way that a child might take it into its head to loosen and break the rungs of a ladder. Grillparzer is happily in love. He fears only the other sex. Bizarre descendant from Austrian troubadours, he turns the saying of the Minnesingers on its head and loves before he adores: a moralist, not a courtier — no more than he is a courtier in his attitude to the Emperor. He wasn’t a flatterer, he was silent: his silence was reproachful.

The way he was, and the way he portrayed himself, he should have demanded to be loved: not just as a man of sorrows, but as a grump, uncomfortable and pedantic, knowing that such qualities are antipathetic to a woman’s heart. There was arrogance in him, uncertainty and the pleasure of self-denial. He fulfilled, nourished, fed his desire by denying it.

So he didn’t “know” woman in the Biblical sense. Nor did he find friends among men either. Love nuzzled him, trustfully, with interest. He could have reached out to stroke it, but instead he pushed it away; like a traveller in the desert who persists in taking an oasis for a mirage, and in his mind pushed it back to the unattainable blue horizon. He didn’t trample on happiness where it offered itself to him, but he did push it away with both hands, declined it, avoided it, looked the other way.