Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  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 Savoy2 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.

  Warmest best regards ALL ROUND.

  Your Mu

  13. To Erich Lichtenstein

  Berlin, 22 January 1925

  Dear Dr. Lichtenstein,1

  I am writing to you on the instructions of Dr. Max Krell.2 I seem to recall writing to you once before. By mid-February I shall have completed a novel. However, I am contractually tied to the “Schmiede.”3 I will admit to you quite openly, though with a plea for discretion, that I am not satisfied with either the promotion, the payment, or the appearance of the books. Nor do I think the Schmiede will be overjoyed to learn of my new terms. So it might very well come about that you and I will have business with one another.

  At the same time, I would like to write books other than novels, books that are not covered by my contract with the Schmiede. For instance, I have long toyed with a plan to write a book of cheeky and irreverent dialogs on (in the broadest sense) “questions of the day.” I can imagine the book appearing under the title “Alfred and Edward,” or something of the sort.

  I am told you are sometimes to be found in Berlin. I will be here until March, and thereafter in Paris. If you are ever in the city, I should like to be informed. In any case, I should be grateful for the kindness of an acknowledgment.

  Yours sincerely,

  Joseph Roth

  N 35, Potsdamerstrasse 115 a. c/o Tome

  1. Lichtenstein: Dr. Erich Lichtenstein (1888–1967), reviewer, publicist, and publisher. This letter is an early instance of Roth’s simoniac tendencies as an author, his self-given right to agitate, to inveigh, to two-time, and ultimately to desert publishers. (NB, such behavior on his part comfortably antedated exile and Third Reich.)

  2. Max Krell worked as an editor for another publisher, the Propyläen Verlag.

  3. The unfortunate “Schmiede” was where Roth’s books for a time appeared. Roth’s swagger is hard to take, and hard to like.

  PART III

  1925–1933

  Paris, Points South and East, Disappointment, Tragedy, and Triumph

  JOSEPH ROTH WITH THE TRADEMARK NEWSPAPER

  France—the Midi, Paris, Marseille—marks nothing less than the appearance of grace in Roth’s life. (And for once, not—his phrase—the “grace of unhappiness.”) Something unlooked for, undreamed of, or perhaps only dreamed of, something exceeding any human measure of reason or cognition. It is one of those classic collisions between the highly intelligent and almost post-mature but somehow starved observer and the Abundant Place: other instances that come to mind involve poets: Osip Mandelstam in Georgia, and Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil. Roth for once flaps at the limits of sense—which, as witness the reproving letters to his friend and protégé Bernard von Brentano (or later to Stefan Zweig), is something he hates to do, he disdains anything incoherent, stuttering, pompous, blathering. “I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here,” he writes in no. 14 to his boss-cum-friend Benno Reifenberg, “Paris is Catholic in the most urbane sense of the word, but it’s also a European expression of universal Judaism.” (Reifenberg got it, and later got to be the paper’s Paris correspondent himself.) Roth’s delirium, cooled and formed, is still palpable in the beautiful series of pieces he gave the Frankfurter Zeitung (they ran between 8 September and 4 November 1925), called Im mittäglichen Frankreich, “In the French Midi,” and a projected—and sadly, rejected—book version to be called “The White Cities.” I found the white cities just as they were in my dreams,” he writes in the title piece, ending with a landscape of Matisse-like strength, serenity, and loveliness:

  The sun is young and strong, the sky is lofty and deep blue, the trees dark green, ancient, and pensive. And broad white roads that have been drinking in and reflecting the sun for hundreds of years, lead to the white cities with flat roofs, which are as they are to prove that even elevation can be harmless and benign, and that you never, ever fall into the black depths.

  In a life full of calamities—his father’s madness before he was even born, Friedl’s schizophrenia, the end of the Dual Monarchy, Hitler’s coming to power—the loss of the Paris correspondent’s job for the Frankfurter Zeitung seems perhaps the most gratuitously wounding of all. It is too tantalizing to imagine Roth’s life with—in the full, officially possessing sense of the word—Paris. Perhaps his critical, oppositional spirit would have asserted itself sooner or later anyway; the novelist would have shouldered his way out past the journalist. But as it was, the Frankfurter gave, and the Frankfurter took away: for Roth, the flat roofs of the white cities were to have hurtful and malign black depths below them after all. In its unwisdom (and in the financial and organizational and political nervousness and turmoil of the twenties), this Jewish-liberal institution made the Nationalist—and later Nazi—Friedrich Sieburg its Paris correspondent, reasoning that Sieburg could do reporting as well as feuilleton. Roth in 1934 made a sour little joke about Sieburg’s busily seeking God in France (it’s an expression meaning something like “high on the hog”), while the Germans had happily found Wotan at home in Germany—but his feelings toward the man were not amusing or benign. Roth—hardly nature’s idea of a docile employee anyway—never subsequently trusted the paper, but then you could argue that he had probably never previously trusted it either. In any case, who could blame him? He remained based in Paris, half out of protest, but demoted, casualized, cantankerous, and impatient to be done with newspapers.

  The antagonistic relationship between the FZ and its star writer is one of the burdens of this correspondence. Lines of command at the paper were, to say the least, fuzzy. There was an editorial committee—hence the extraordinary proliferation of newspapermen’s names in some of these letters (a history of The New Yorker would be no different, of course). Design, personnel, allegiances, politics, finance, all underwent continual change. Hence one’s sense of Roth’s at times loitering unhappily and unproductively around the head office in Frankfurt—he was watching his own back. Hence, too, his adoption of the slightly younger Brentano—it was so that he too might have someone to command, to patronize, to induct into mysteries, and to lead into battle. From these letters, one feels that there was any numb
er of chiefs at the Frankfurter, and Roth their only Indian. It was a remarkable paper, distinguished, even unrivaled, in its roster of writers, among them Walter Benjamin—but it also had a powerful (and to Roth, never that much of a team player, rather nauseating) sense of its own distinguished remarkability. Newly arrived in Paris, or in Russia, out of sight of it, he still had some interest in its affairs, and wrote painstaking critiques and—practically!—memos to senior colleagues. A few years later, he had none. In 1931, he wrote to Friedrich Traugott Gubler, Reifenberg’s successor as feuilleton editor, “It’s just a paper, only slightly better than the others in Germany. It’s no longer absolutely good or essential. And neither you nor Reifenberg nor Picard will be able to fix it. You will sacrifice your personal lives, the only important thing.” And this is what he then, rather movingly, goes on to prescribe: “Always do what your wife says, spend time with her and the children, discuss everything with her, and don’t do anything just because your obstinate man’s head tells you to.” The Frankfurter’s sense of exceptionalism—one might almost call it “manifest destiny”—mixed, of course, with relativism, kept it going, trimming as it went, through ten years of the Third Reich, until it was finally closed down in August 1943. Like some of his colleagues, Reifenberg, who stayed at the paper throughout, and was involved in its next incarnation as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of today, was persuaded that they had managed to keep up some coded, clandestine resistance to the Nazis in their columns. Looking at some contributions with a view to putting together an anthology of them in the 1950s, he was forced to realize there was no resistance in any meaningful sense, not that any reader would have understood. The newspaper was trapped in a vainglorious bubble of its own making; and Roth, who after 1933 would have nothing to do with it, and broke off all relations with colleagues still there, was tacitly and belatedly vindicated in his intransigence.

  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.

  Secondly, I’ve failed to do all the bureaucratic police stuff on time, and am forced to hang around waiting for a visa extension. Don’t snigger—it’s not the French who are to blame, it’s purely my fault.

  Third, don’t give the O.2 episode any more importance than it has. Don’t bother your head about him, or Mr. Stark,3 or any of the rest of them. The Illustriertes Blatt4 is none of your beeswax. If someone tries to accuse you, shrug your shoulders. I can’t understand your worrying about it. Ott is a fanatic of bad behavior. Be distant to him. Don’t get “cross.” Be “nice” to him. Be like a father, or a nobleman: remember, distance. Basically he’s just a soft and decent human being, just a little “nervous.”