Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

He looked up the former party leader in the diplomatic post he now held. He was living ‘according to his station’. The hall looked almost like that of the illustrious Herr von Maerker. Only the party leader’s study had remained the same. Modesty is a virtue. The paperknife, shaped like a cavalry sabre, still lay on the desk. A small dome bulged over the ink-well, which resembled a mosque. The forget-me-not frames still surrounded the two sons in uniform, although happily they had returned home. And the only new object was the large oil-painting of the party leader, painted by one of the leading portraitists of the Reich. What did it matter to the painter? He painted, painted without stopping. Once the Kaiser, twice the beloved general, once a radical. Art had nothing to do with politics. The painters wanted to be left alone in their studios. Art was Christmas, a holiday when all hearts beat in the same rhythm. How handsome the party leader was in the portrait, with his gaze directed to the future of the Fatherland, his right hand supported on the corner of the desk and his left toying with an iron watch-chain, which he had substituted for the gold one! No doubt about it, it was painted grey, it was made of iron. And he did not look like a party leader, but like a leader of parties. The Kaiser had known none, but he knew them all. ‘We have a passionate interest in Russia,’ he began. And, with the satisfaction of a man who speaks in the name of his country, he cited Bismarck, whose reminiscences he had read in all objectivity. Ah, he had always been a non-party man! The Fatherland, like painting, had nothing to do with politics. ‘In Germany,’ replied Friedrich, ‘the so-called Left will probably only succeed in a hundred years in being unrelenting towards their opponents. They are unable to hate. They are unable to become excited. It is their most zealous endeavour, not to defeat the enemy but to understand him. Eventually they come to know him so well that they own him to be right and can no longer attack him.’

The party leader wandered off into the wide domains of world history. It was evident that he saw himself as speaking from a tribune, and that he treated a solitary listener as an entire assembly. He loved it because he did not for a moment forget that he himself was a representative while unfailingly regarding the other, too, as a representative, and he magnified the importance he was wont to ascribe to himself by also attributing great importance to his partner. In the constant hope that each of his utterances was fitted to become a winged word, he now stressed the simple phrases and commonplaces that he had recited to Friedrich years before without pretension and as if by rote, as if they were original ideas. He had evidently, and at the first glance, remained his old self. He still appeared to be wearing the same rust-brown double-breasted jacket, and his trousers still fell in wide folds over wide smooth solid boots, the like of which were no longer to be found in shoe-maker’s shop-windows and consequently looked as if they had been sought for long and zealously. But the very care the man took to be humble echoed the diligence he employed to play a central part in the history of the times. And when he repeated again and again: ‘If only they’d listened to me then,’ or ‘Of course things turned out as I prophesied,’ or ‘The rashness which I have always condemned,’ he appeared to be convinced that his prescience justified the sturdy neglect of his dress. And when, from time to time, he spoke of his country as ‘we’, he believed himself to be equally discreet and blameless in his speech. And yet his ‘we’, his ‘our’, his ‘us’ recalled the way in which the employees of a large department store identify themselves with their firm even though they do not share their master’s income.

Some time later Friedrich was to encounter the party leader at a large assembly of politicians, journalists, diplomats and industrialists, one of those ambassadorial entertainments which are termed ‘a congenial gathering’ in professional circles and newspaper reports. All the men had donned tails, the uniform of congeniality. They ate sandwiches over whose butter was stretched a regular lattice of anchovy strips. Each held a plate or a cup or an empty glass in his hand without knowing why, and all sought discreetly and in vain for a place where they might dispose of these implements. Crafty guests betook themselves to the vicinity of the window-ledges and removed themselves after having deposited their plate in a perilous place, with meek expressions and in the slight anxiety that it might soon fall down and shatter. They only breathed freely when they had gained the opposite corner. The majority, however, stayed riveted to their plates and were consequently unable to be vivacious. The congeniality went from strength to strength.

Friedrich ran into a number of people here whom he had known well in Zürich. He even saw Bernardin and Dr Schleicher again. They had both become diplomats and maintained their understanding. They had sealed an alliance for life, were inseparable, and promenaded silently together because they had no more to say to each other. They had talked themselves out. They knew everything about one another. Now they were united by the memory of their bartered confessions. They were peace comrades just as two men who once met in the trenches were war comrades. Each also represented his country. And as both were concerned with so-called peaceful relations between Germany and France, and as they might have been reproached with remissness for any clouding of these relations, they both cherished peace like their own careers and their ambition accorded it the value that generals accord to war. And just as professional marriage-brokers are concerned about the bliss of the parties they have brought together, because their living depends on it, so Dr Schleicher and Bernardin were similarly concerned about peace between the two countries. They trafficked in peace as they had trafficked in state secrets during the war. Their friendship was troubled only if the name of one of them was mentioned in the newspapers more often than that of the other, or if, in the group photographs of conference participants published in the illustrated magazines, the face of one was more distinctly recognizable than that of his friend. This ‘congenial gathering’ too was taken by a photographer for publicity purposes, to appear under the title ‘A diplomatic tea-party’ in the Sunday supplements. Bernardin and Dr Schleicher separated, since they took it for diplomatic subtlety not to let their association become apparent to the other nations. While they stationed themselves in the background with heroic modesty, they pressed their faces between the shoulders of the front row so as to appear on the plate nonetheless. And furtively but persistently, in their anxiety at the crucial moment when the flash blazed out, they would discard the facial expressions they had donned as advantageous, cast sidelong glances at each other, and consider which of them was standing in a better and more prominent position. The journalists, whose vocation is ever to scent out secrets, believed that the glances of the two were the equivalent of abbreviated diplomatic Notes. And every reporter who spotted this exchange of glances thought at once of the possibility of drawing attention to it in the morning paper under the magic formula of ‘as rumoured in exclusive circles’.

There was only one journalist at this gathering who considered it unworthy to pay attention to glances. This was the Dr Süsskind whom Friedrich had encountered on the train years before. To be sure, Dr Süsskind did not recognize his old travelling companion. But, even if he had recognized Friedrich, it would probably not have prevented him from remarking very audibly to one of the press attachés who had become so common after the war, and who were initiating the era of democracy: ‘When I was in Austria during the war, I realized at once that we should lose the war. Perhaps you remember what I wrote after the breakthrough at Gorlice?’ And as the press attaché, who was not yet sufficiently versed in diplomacy to succeed in being tactful, said ‘No!’, Dr Süsskind went into a detailed account of his article which had revealed a prophetic pessimism. Friedrich recalled the journalist’s optimism in the train. ‘I once had the pleasure,’ he said to Dr Süsskind, ‘of meeting you.’ ‘I certainly don’t remember it,’ said the candid journalist, for whom truth came first. ‘You were sitting in the train with a Prussian colonel and an Austrian major,’ persisted Friedrich. ‘Quite right,’ said Dr Süsskind, ‘but I never noticed you.’ There was no point in talking to him. As if his primary concern, before embarking on a conversation, was to fathom whether Friedrich was telling the truth, he repeated once more: ‘I certainly didn’t notice you!’ ‘Yes,’ said Friedrich, to jolt the other’s memory, ‘your wife was waiting for you at K.’ ‘Ah,’ replied Süsskind bleakly, ‘that was not my wife, that was my sister-in-law.’ And that disposed of the matter.