4. Be as industrious and objective as you can. Write, write! Then none of the others will get a look in. Why don’t you have anything for me to read? You’re my hope, and I’m too proud to admit you’ve let me down.
5. Thank you for giving me news from Frankfurt. It sounds rather favorable. I have no plan and a guilty conscience. I feel as though I’ve duped the paper.
6. We’re writing to your wife now.
7. I’ll write at greater length when I’m through with the police.
8. The mail is so unreliable here, if you could, let me know you’ve received this.
9. Even if I don’t get to Germany, I’ll always be your friend.
10. My wife sends her regards
Yours Joseph Roth
Hotel de la place de l’Odéon,
VIe, place de l’Odéon 6.
You’re wrong to think people are the same the world over. The French simply are different. Yes, they whistle and clap during war films. But trust a fanatic and a “subjective” like me: I’ve never heard such feeble applause.
1. Brentano: Bernard von Brentano (1901–1964), publicist, essayist, and novelist. Descended from the Romantic poet Clemens von Brentano. From 1925 to 1930, Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. He owed his introduction to the paper to JR. There was a violent breach in the relationship in the late 1920s when Brentano swung first left, then hard right. JR was described as “foaming with rage” when BB’s name was mentioned. See no. 83.
2. O episode: Ott episode?
3. Stark: Oskar Stark (1890–1970) journalist. From 1920 to 1931 in the Berlin office of the Frankfurter Zeitung, from 1935 to 1943 in head office, after the war with the Badische Zeitung in Freiburg.
4. Illustriertes Blatt: magazine produced from the same stable as the Frankfurter Zeitung.
16. To Bernard von Brentano
Paris, 14 June 1925
Hotel de la place de l’Odéon
6. Place de l’Odéon
My dear Brentano,
many thanks for your letter. I haven’t seen your articles. It’s hard to find the Frankfurter Zeitung in Paris, it gets here a week late, and not always then, even to Dr. Stahl, its representative here. Put some clippings in an envelope, and mail them to me. Work harder! Three pieces a week. Practice that manner that’s eye-catching and load-bearing at the same time.
Thanks for your crossed fingers, my bureaucratic hoopla is looking reasonably promising just now. My wife went along to the Interior Ministry, and Frenchmen will do everything for a woman. Germans just get impatient . . .
I’m just as enthusiastic as before, and just as depressed about Germany. I can understand a German poet1 coming here, digging himself a mattress grave, and giving up the ghost. Before we get around to making a German nation, we may find there’s a European one. Perhaps to the exclusion of the Germans.
I’m taking my novel to Provence round about the 20th. I’m probably going to write a book about Marseille. My book has been translated into Russian 4 times. I have 200,000 Russian readers. And 4½ in Germany. Does that make me a German writer? I’d say of those 4½, 2½ are Russian Jews anyway.
I don’t know how things are going to go on. I think I’ll be back at least once, for practicalities. But I’m a different person, and it won’t be for long.
Will you ask your wife whether she got our postcard?
Give my regards to Dr. Guttmann,2 who behaved scandalously badly here—to me as well.
Regards to the great Sonnemann.3
Don’t go anywhere yet, and don’t talk about it either. I hear a schoolboyish eagerness has come over Otten.
I shake your hand and remain
Your old4
Joseph Roth
My wife says make sure to send her best.
1. The reference is to Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), who died in Paris. In 1848 he was suddenly paralyzed, and spent his last eight years in agonies in what he called his Matratzengruft.
2. Guttmann: Bernhard Guttmann (1869–1959). Before 1914 London correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, from 1918 to 1930 head of the Berlin office, then Frankfurt, retired in 1933.
3. Sonnemann: Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909). Founder and co-proprietor of the Frankfurter Zeitung. JR is being whimsical/facetious.
4. Roth, who will usually sign like this in his remaining years, is just thirty years old, younger than Jesus Christ and Alexander the Great.
17. To Benno Reifenberg
Lyon, 25 July [1925]
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
thank you so much for your letter. With the same post I’m sending a feuilleton to the office, entitled “On the Road in France”1—it’s your title, and I’ve borrowed it—hope you don’t mind. I’m putting these business things in a personal letter, because I can’t trust the post, and I always worry a letter to a German official address wouldn’t get there.2 Please drop me a line at the Hotel de la place de l’Odeon, where they’re keeping my mail for me, just to confirm its safe arrival.
Splendid is such an overused word, but if you were here, you’d understand why I had to reach for it. Lyon is splendid in the old way, majestic and lovely, but without pomp. The Rhone is an old wide river but frisky as a stream. It doesn’t know the meaning of the word gravity, it’s a French river. I walk through the streets of the town, and the country roads about—everywhere you see the Roman flowing into the Catholic, and you see (what you must never write!) the continuation of something archaic and heathen that has found a form for itself in Catholicism, but still exists.
The people are wonderful, very open, mild, with lovely irony, the women terribly delicate, always young, always naked, a lot of Oriental blood, Negro mixed race, the middle classes quieter than in Germany, politically on the left, the men practically as well dressed as the women in Paris. The women still better, silk everywhere, wonderfully adaptable material, soft, coarse, simple, imposing—all silk.
I kiss your wife’s hand, and shake yours. I must say, Paris felt a little empty after you went, your old
Roth
Hug your little boy for me. He must learn French. It will make a European of him.
1. “On the Road in France”: this became Roth’s series of articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung “In the South of France,” which ran from 8 September to 14 November 1925, and was to have been reworked into a book called “The White Cities.” See letter no. 19. See Report from a Parisian Paradise (W. W. Norton, 2003).
2. wouldn’t get there: a habitual anxiety of JR’s. Then again, we are just seven years after the end of World War I, and the bad atmosphere between Germany and France lasted into the 1950s and beyond. Cf. de Gaulle’s dictum that he liked Germany so much, he preferred there to be two of them.
18. To Benno Reifenberg
Avignon, 1 August [1925]
My dear Mr. Reifenberg,
I’d like in this letter to tell you about my great good fortune, only I have such a fear that my pieces aren’t reaching you. It’s a sort of illness, of course, but it threatens to make me sterile, and that’s my excuse in perpetrating such a breach of decorum as to ask you in a personal letter to send me confirmation at the Hotel de l’Odeon that you have safely received the 6 or 7 feuilletons from France. My mail is being forwarded to me.
Even as I write this, I’m unsure whether you will get it. But even if you don’t, I still hope you will somehow sense that I am enjoying—seems wrong, quaking, yearning, crying—the best days of my life. I shall never be able to describe what has been vouchsafed to me here. You will probably best assess the scale of my good fortune by the way I see how small and powerless I am, and yet seem to live thousandfold. I love the rooftops, the stray dogs that run around the streets, the cats, the wonderful tramps with their red leather complexions and young eyes, the women who are so terribly thin, wit
h long legs and bony shoulders and yellow skin, the child beggars, the mix of Saracen, French, Celtic, German, Roman, Spanish, Jewish, and Greek. I am at home in the Palace of the Popes, all the beggars live in the most wonderful castles, I should like to be a beggar and sleep in its doorways. Everything we do in Germany is so stupid! So pointless! So sad! Come to me in Avignon, and I promise you you’ll never set another article of mine. I’m learning French poems by heart for the fun of it. Kiss your wife’s hand, greet your son from me in a way he’ll understand, and write a personal letter to your old
Joseph Roth
19. To Benno Reifenberg
Marseille, Hotel Beauvau
rue Beauvau, 18 August [1925]
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
I am making one last effort to find out whether I haven’t sent 6–7 feuilletons to the FZ for absolutely nothing, and haven’t written a further 3, which I’m not sending until I get a reply from you or the board. You know as a rule I couldn’t care less what they do with my stuff. But one thing I cannot be indifferent to is if all reports of a journey whose fruits are a moral victory for me, disappear without trace. I don’t know if it’s the post that is to blame, but I’m presuming I must have breached one of the unwritten Hindenburg laws that even decent people now follow in Germany, from what I hear. Perhaps an infraction of tone, a word, a suggestion, who knows. Anyway, I want to know. If so, then continuing this journey makes no sense—because I can’t deal with events in Germany, perhaps I’m not equal to the politics of the newspaper either. I can’t change my tone. Maybe the newspaper would like to be rid of me—well, fine by me. I can understand that there’s no wish to put up incendiaries in a burning house.1
I have material for a beautiful volume with the title “The White Cities”2 for the book-publishing arm. But I don’t know whether the house will still print books that make a sound like mine. I understand the air has become fairly unbreathable in Germany. That fact, combined with the circumstance that you’re not printing anything of mine, prompts me to address to you these admittedly somewhat bitter, but personally beholden lines—and address them to your private address, so as to put off for the moment a needless public kerfuffle.
I intend to wait here until I get word from you.
Till that time, I remain your—and your wife’s—old
Joseph Roth
1. The office wired JR back, “No pink elephants, all articles arrived safely, write just exactly what you want, pay no regard to anything.”
2. “The White Cities”: which sadly never came out in that form, though the revised sequence of pieces, some of Roth’s finest, happiest, and most boisterous writing, is included in Report from a Parisian Paradise.
20. To Bernard von Brentano
Marseille, 22 August 1925
My dear friend,
I’ve received one typed letter here, and another rather hasty one. A third therefore seems to have gotten lost.
If I can begin by setting your mind at ease regarding our relationship: your income doesn’t stand between us, rather it connects us. A relationship between two people isn’t based on bread, but it remains important that both should have enough to eat. Hunger trumps sentiment. It’s important that neither of us should starve. That’s why I raised the matter, and that’s why I mentioned you to Reifenberg and Simon.1 I think you’re over the worst. I think I’m headed straight for it.
I have sent the FZ 7 articles. So far as I know, not one of them has appeared. I think I can no longer hit the democratic tone. In every line of mine the republic gets slapped around—whatever I’m writing about. The paper is cowardly. It won’t print my articles, and it won’t tell me why. I think its behavior is immoral. I wrote to Reifenberg to say so. If the publisher has the courage of his convictions, he will give me the boot. Then I will be free, as I was for twenty years of my life. I’ll go to Mexico. If he wants to be a coward, then I’ll demand that he pay me properly for his cowardice. If he doesn’t publish me, I want to see money. And even so I’m going to go to Mexico one day, in the not too distant future. I’ve been established for too long. You see: I really don’t care about an income. I don’t care about a bourgeois base. It gets in the way. It makes me ill. I am ill already.
Name and reputation in Germany—what’s the good of that? I can see past the nationality. But not the language. German is a dead language, as dead as late Latin. It’s only spoken by scholars and poets. By Jews. In the Middle Ages a man had power if he wrote in that language. In our democracy today he’s nothing. I can cope with the fact that the Germans are barbarians. But not with my inability to convert them. We’re like missionaries addressing heathens in Latin, to convert them. Futile endeavor.
To move from proletarian to human is easily said. But what if I’m only having my first experience of human beings now, at the ripe old age of 31? What if I met my first humans here in France? Germany is populated by geniuses and murderers (half animals). Humans begin at Aix. I would have to live and study for another twenty years before I could write about humans. And even then I wouldn’t be sure it was possible to do it in German.
Tomorrow the Socialist Congress begins here. I have spoken to acquaintances from Berlin and Vienna. It’s a terrible thing to see those people in this setting. The sun shows how much dust there is on them. They have landed here, like the Lombards a thousand years ago. With Schiller collars! With briefcases! With umbrellas! With fat flat-footed wives! And hatless! They sweat. They smell. They drink beer. They are noisier than the many Orientals who make a deafening noise here in the port city. Social Democrats always look German. Even when they’re technically Lithuanians. Because the type is native to Germany: honest, hardworking, beer-bibbing, world-improving. A socialist and a democrat. “Justice!” Hope for evolution. German through and through. The aspiration of the German woman to march through a busy life on flat heels is already halfway to socialism. They all carry on as though they had to determine world history in the next decade. They have come together to fight for Ibsenite ideals. Not knowing how antiquated those are. I saw Friedrich Adler,2 my great compatriot. A tyrannicide on his uppers. No pistol in his briefcase any more. Features shaped from the mealy dough of humanity. The monarchies are dead—here are people with nothing left to slay. They haven’t a chance against industry.
I have visited so many towns in Provence, I could write a book about them: “The White Cities.” But do I know if I still need to write it? It’ll be settled one way or another in the first half of September. Write to me in Paris.
Regards to your wife. Mine is in bed with a fever. Brought on by the climate, obviously. I’m just off to spend the night in the old port. That’s the world I feel really at home in. My maternal forefathers live there. We’re all kin there. Every onion seller is my uncle.
Your friend
Joseph Roth
1. Simon: Heinrich Simon (born in Berlin in 1880, robbed and murdered in 1941 in Washington, D.C.), son-in-law of Leopold Sonnemann, the founder of the FZ, on the board from 1906, co-owner from 1919. Went into exile in 1934, first to Palestine, where he co-founded an orchestra with Toscanini, then the United States.
2. Friedrich Adler (1879–1960), son of the Austrian Socialist leader Viktor Adler. In 1916 he made an attempt on the life of the Austrian prime minister Count Friedrich Stürgkh, was condemned to death, and pardoned in 1918; secretary of the Second International.
21. To Benno Reifenberg
Hotel Beauvau, Marseille
26 August [1925]
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
you are much too zealous in your self-accusations. It’s wrong to think you should have known how nervous I am. No one can know about the level of my agitation—constant and powerful—about everything under the sun. I am never at ease. Of course I exaggerate. When I write in that vein, you shouldn’t take it seriously.
For all that, I’m grateful for your lett
er. I sent off three feuilletons today. Not everything in them is the way it ought to be. But they are entirely honest, I think that will come across. I have seen a bullfight for the first time in my life. If you’ve never seen anything like that, then you can have no conception of the gruesomeness of it. I know of no French writer who has written about—much less against—these Provençal bullfights. Not Daudet, not Mistral either, to the best of my knowledge. I think they’d be ashamed, and they’re scared. They’re happy to write about the wind, the sky, the people, the riders, the women. Tell me why a great writer isn’t duty bound to accuse his country instead of praising it. They all write as though they wanted their personal monument. And I’m not just talking about their relation to the patrie, but to humanity, to society, to every manifestation of life. These writers are all so appallingly affirmative. They reinforce their readers in their bourgeois—i.e., antiquated—attitudes, instead of destroying as many of them as possible. They themselves are nothing but superbourgeois. It’s perfectly OK for a little burgomaster to put up a statue to a great writer from time to time. Next to the statue of the little burgomaster. Perfectly OK for the older daughter to play Schubert on the piano. Schubert composed for her.
I was depressed to hear of Willo Uhl’s1 death. He was the first person I met in Frankfurt 3 years ago, and I’m fond of his children. I got a couple of recent editions of the paper. There were only two decent feuilletons: Rudolf Schneider on “heroes” and Willo’s obituary. He was such a good and cheerful goy, he stood between the sentimental Jews and the awkward ones on the board, and he was the very opposite of German democracy. It’s too bad he’s dead. He could never have made 60, but 45 is maybe ten years too early. What did he die of?
Slap in the middle of my lovely time in Marseille is the Social Democratic Congress. 200 Germans, 100 Austrians. The latter a nasty perversion of Germans. The Austrians look like Germans who have understood nothing. As vile as a Prussian is when he’s taking his pleasure, that’s how ghastly the Austrian is all his life. Degenerate boches.
Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters Page 5
