Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  On account of your absentmindedness, I now own two copies of your pretty volume of stories. I took it as an omen, and read them again. I envy you your lovely epic calm, and that superior dignity which is probably a result of so much knowledge of the world and of people. How serene is even the saddest thing you have to say! It’s not for nothing that you have so many readers—and how modest you remain in your private literary demeanor. I am very glad to have come to your attention.

  Soon you will get the first galleys of Job. I hope it gives you a little of the pleasure it gives me. I hope to be done at the end of April.

  Personally, I am terribly sad. Ten years of my sad marriage can’t be gotten over just like that. I was so cut off from humanity, my wife was my only channel to the world outside, the social part of myself. My own glumness scares me.

  Till soon! With cordial gratitude

  your Joseph Roth

  1. MNN: Münchener Neueste Nachrichten. Roth was to furnish the paper with a novel for serialization, for which he was to be paid 20,000 marks. Along with the manuscript he included a page where he had scribbled a dozen times: Must finish novel in three days! Must finish novel in three days! Disconcerted either by this page, or by the rest of the manuscript, the newspaper tore up the contract with Roth; it wasn’t possible, they argued, to complete a story of the requisite quality in three days. Kesten admirably notes that nothing from Roth’s pen was ever as bad as what the MNN liked to publish.

  91. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Stein, Salzburg

  Monday, 14 [or 18] April [1930]

  Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

  I hope you’re back already. If possible I would like to see you today. I write until 2 p.m. After that I’ll be in the hotel. Perhaps you could drop me a line if you are able to see me.

  Looking forward to seeing you again,

  ever your Joseph Roth

  92. To Hedi Reichler

  Hotel Stein, Salzburg

  30 April 1930

  Dear Hedi,

  enclosed is a letter from Dr. Lichtenstern, who is the director of the sanatorium am Rosenhügel, and who knows Friedl. Find out when her consultation hours are, I think they’re 3–5 in the afternoon, you can find out over the telephone. Mme von Szajnocha has put her in the picture. She can help in various ways, choice of home, expenses, prescriptions, perhaps a particular nurse. She is a wonderful human being, and very devoted to Friedl. Perhaps you or your husband could see your way to visiting there. You have to wait for her a long time, she’s very much in demand, and it’s not possible to keep her for very long either. Don’t be put off by her manner, she’s not really brusque. She’ll certainly help.

  In your last latter I missed an answer to my question how Friedl was with Dr. Schacherl; and whether he risked making a diagnosis. I will write to him, but need to know first whether he agreed to take an interest in her case. You could also ask Dr. L. about orthopedic treatment.

  I will know in a few days whether I’ll be able to come to Vienna. I’m expecting news from Berlin. I’ll write you in time. (I’m feeling better, they’re giving me a course of injections.) I should also like to know about arsenic, insulin, and glucose.

  I have gotten in touch with a psychiatrist in Marbach. I’m expecting a detailed answer from him about the prospects of a cure.

  If Friedl happens to talk about me, whatever she says, good or bad, true or made up, the conversation should be carried forward at all costs. Not: “You’re wrong!” or “That’s nonsense!” Respond to everything. Please. Promise.

  I’m going to a lot of trouble, but don’t get impatient, and please write in as much detail as you can.

  Regards and kisses

  Your Muniu

  There’ll be more money coming on the 1st. Let me know how much Kiepenheuer sends.

  93. To his parents-in-law

  Hotel Stein, Salzburg

  3 May 1930

  Dear parents,

  Dr. Schacherl has written to Stefan Zweig about Friedl. It appears that the doctor is of one mind with me. Friedl seems, thank God, not to be suffering from any form of dementia. She probably has a hysterical psychosis. If it wasn’t that she was so intelligent and so acutely sensitive, the whole thing might have been over in a few weeks. But she is obsessing on a certain point, can find no way out, and, out of despair at this, so to speak, is losing her mind.

  I am passing this on to you right away to get your hopes up. Dr. Schacherl is an outstanding diagnostician, and a reliable fellow. Chin up, Friedl will one day speak clearly again. For the time being, her sickness is fed by her physical frailty. I’m in favor of mixing Hepathrat into all her food where it can go unnoticed. If her heart is sound, she can drink good strong coffee. Instead of Luminal, ask for Luminalettes, where the dosage is far lower. A little of that could go into her food as well, so that she keeps ingesting it at a low level throughout the day. Episodes of disquiet cost her strength, whereas the Luminal doesn’t hurt and will only keep her from weakening further. Her weight has to go up to 55 kilos again. If she can tolerate liver and will eat it, give her liver, as much as possible, and slightly underdone. It’s not just a matter of nutritious things, as of such that will replenish her stock of blood. Hence the Hepathrat and the liver. Perhaps she will take blood soup. I am just now in correspondence with a psychiatrist in Marbach about the possibility of blood transfusions. Friedl is seriously anemic, i.e., she has too many white blood cells. Perhaps you might ask Dr. Schacherl on the telephone whether she could be given a hormonal preparation. In any case, her physical condition is of paramount importance. Concern yourselves as little as you can with her mental symptoms. Tell Friedl whenever you can that her confusion is caused by a glandular imbalance. She will understand. She understands everything, it’s just that she doesn’t respond in the right ways. It will come as a huge relief to her to learn that her confusion has a physical basis. Her thoughts should be deflected away from obsessing with some emotional conflict to a solicitude for her physical well-being. (Please write and tell me you understand this!) As long as her weight is under 50 kilos, she is at risk. Please ask also whether short spells of ultraviolet irradiation may be indicated. According to what Professor Kretschmer tells me, such attacks often heal quite suddenly, even after a long time. So please, please, don’t lose patience! So long as I can manage to bring in enough money, I’m sure Friedl will get well without an asylum.

  I hope to be in Vienna for a day or two, on around the 6th or 7th or 8th. Please don’t tell Friedl. If it’s not too much trouble, why not give her a canary to keep in her room. It might distract her. You can always give it away, and they don’t cost much. Can you run to a canary?

  It does no harm to speak of Friedl’s physical infirmity in her presence. That will stir her will to live. Please follow the instructions of this letter as well as you are able.

  I embrace you both

  your M.

  94. To Stefan Zweig

  13 May 1930

  Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

  I should have written to you long ago, I’ve been living in such turmoil since leaving you that I only do what I physically must to survive, and thus dash madly from one bit of drudgery to the next. But I want you to know that I think of you often and gratefully and with an affection that I haven’t mustered for anyone in a long time, and that has the effect of rejuvenating me.

  Today, just an hour ago, I learned that a woman friend of mine yesterday shot herself. She was staying here in the hotel, had failed to find me yesterday, and I’m convinced I could have averted her death. All around me are suffering and death, and I could weep at my inability to find a little bit of goodness in myself, to save the life of a single human being.

  It’s not my intention to drive you to sorrow, but it’s how I feel all the time. You had the ability, as long as we were together, to tickle a little cheerfu
lness out of me. You are clever and good.

  Drop me a line, but only if it doesn’t get in the way of your work. Keep your fondness for me, as I do for you.

  Cordially your

  Joseph Roth

  Hotel am Zoo

  Kurfürstendamm 25

  Berlin W.

  95. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth

  14 May 1930

  To Mr. Joseph Roth, c/o Gustav Kiepenheuer, Altonaerstrasse 4, Berlin NW 87

  Dear Mr. Roth,

  I wired you yesterday. I wouldn’t have waited so long, if I hadn’t thought the correspondence between me and Kracauer about your renewed engagement for us would have been over sooner. Let me tell you then, while the correspondence is still inconclusive, how things stand.

  1. If the Frankfurter Zeitung is to work with you again, then it can only be on condition that we once again enjoy an exclusive right to your journalistic work. We will not and must not share a Joseph Roth with other papers.

  2. The tedious business with the Weltbühne1 must be put to bed. What you may not appreciate is that the entire editorial board here saw your article as a defamation of the FZ, and you are therefore facing an extraordinary degree of suspicion and resentment. I had thought it might be possible to level off the affair by an open letter to you, and your subsequent reply. However, voices were raised to the effect that you should resolve the matter—where it began—in the Weltbühne. I can’t do anything without my colleagues, not least as I am no longer in charge of the feuilleton section, but rather, as you know, have become the Paris correspondent of the FZ. I wrote therefore to Heinz Simon, and asked him to take a hand in the matter. I hope he will be able to give you a final decision quite soon.

  I don’t need to tell you how much I look forward to seeing you here again. We’re well. Babuscha is with us of course. Jan has grown, and is as charming and delightful as ever.

  In old cordiality

  Your [Benno Reifenberg]

  1. Weltbühne: Die Weltbühne, a highbrow weekly magazine founded in 1905 in Berlin by Siegfried Jacobsohn. Following his death, in 1926, it was edited, briefly, by Kurt Tucholsky, JR’s bête noire, and then by Carl von Ossietzky. JR remained rigidly unsympathetic to its politics and style.

  96. To Benno Reifenberg

  17 May 1930

  Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

  I just came back from Vienna, to find your letter waiting for me. The enclosed letter will probably say more to enlighten you about my state than I could. I have taken my wife back to the sanatorium outside Vienna. You may imagine what a week’s stay there meant for me. When I am in Paris you will have a chance to see for yourself how little of me is left for any newspaper to have. I am completely indifferent to all matters of public interest. As Kiepenheuer’s 50th birthday is on 10 June, I can’t be in Paris before then. How long will you remain in the city in summer?

  Max Picard should be there. Give him my best. We’ve been exchanging letters for a while, on the subject of you and me.

  I wouldn’t be able to take anything back in the Weltbühne. I am not on terms with the Weltbühne. I want nothing more to do with those scum.

  What I wrote at the time was that my views were not identical with those of the FZ. Which is true. I do not have any sort of philosophical solidarity with the likes of Dr. Drill and Junge1 and Schotthöfer, nor do I aspire to it. Do you consider that offensive?

  Kiepenheuer won’t be happy to have me on an exclusive contract to the FZ. It would mean he couldn’t pay me anything. But we’ll see about that. For the moment, I’ve asked him to call off other negotiations that were in train. Since he is paying me a stipend, I take it he won’t want to stand idly by for long. He gives me everything, my wife too, he has been very good to me.

  I look forward to seeing you in Paris.

  Warmest regards to Babuscha, Maryla, and Jan.

  Where are your political sympathies just now?

  Tomorrow I’ll look for Kracauer.

  Most cordially your

  Joseph Roth

  1. Junge: Karl August Junge, journalist, with the FZ since 1903.

  97. To Jenny Reichler

  Berlin, 18 May [1930]

  Dear mother,

  just back today from Frankfurt. Thank you! In two weeks I’ll be finished with the novel. I hope to get an extra 200 marks then, and send them to you, an article has come out in America. I’ll write from Baden-Baden next. I’ve got an invitation there. My health is fine. Apart from that, I’m living off rachmones.1

  Give Friedl my best, write me again, and don’t be cross with me if I don’t write. I have thought of a way of earning 2,000 marks at one fell swoop. I have an invitation to write a novella for a Dutch periodical.

  Warm embraces from

  your Muniu

  1. rachmones: (Yiddish) charity.

  98. To Gustav Kiepenheuer on his fiftieth birthday1

  I have covered many miles. Between the place where I was born, and the towns and villages I have lived in in the last ten years—and lived in only, apparently, to leave them again—lies my life, amenable more readily to spatial than to chronological measurement. The years I have put behind me are the roads I have traveled. Nowhere, in no parish register or cadaster is there a record of my name or date of birth. I have no home, aside from being at home in myself. Wherever I am unhappy is my home. I am only ever happy abroad. If I leave myself even once, I will lose myself. Therefore, I take great care to remain within myself.

  I was born in a tiny hamlet in Volhynia, on 2 September 1894, under the sign of the Virgin, to whom my given name of Joseph stands in some vague relation.2 My mother was a Jewess of strong, earthy, Slavic constitution. She would often sing Ukrainian songs because she was very unhappy (and where I come from it is the unfortunates who sing, not the lucky ones, as in Western countries. That’s why Eastern songs are more beautiful, and anyone with a heart who listens to them will be moved to tears). She had no money and no husband, because my father, who turned up one day, and whisked her off to the west with him—probably with the sole purpose of siring me—left her in Katowice, and disappeared, never to be seen again. He must have been a strange man, an Austrian scallywag, a drinker and a spendthrift. He died insane when I was sixteen. His specialty was the melancholy which I inherited from him. I never saw him. But I remember when I was four or five, I had a dream of a man in whom I saw my father. Ten or twelve years after that, I first saw a photograph of my father. I had seen the face before. He was the man in my dream.

  At the sort of tender age when other children are just learning to walk, I was already traveling on trains. I came to Vienna early in my life, left it, came back, went west again, had no money, lived on handouts from well-off relatives and from giving lessons, started to study, was keen and ambitious, an odiously good boy, full of quiet malice and poison, modest out of conceit, jealous of the rich, but incapable of solidarity with the poor. They seemed stupid and clumsy to me. I dreaded any sort of coarseness. It made me very happy when I found an authoritative confirmation of my instincts in Horace’s odi profanum vulgus. I loved freedom. The times I spent with my mother were my happiest. I got up in the middle of the night, dressed, and left the house. I walked for three or four days, slept in houses whose state I didn’t know, and with women whose faces I was curious to see, and never did. I roasted potatoes on summer meadows, and on hard autumnal fields. I picked strawberries in forests, and hung around with a half-grown rabble, and was thrashed from time to time, so to speak, by mistake. Everyone who gave me a thrashing would quickly beg my forgiveness. Because he feared my revenge. My revenge could be terrible. I had no particular affection for anyone. But if I hated anyone, I would wish his death, and was prepared to kill him. I had the best slings, I always aimed for the head, and I didn’t just use stones, but also broken glass and razor blades. I laid traps and
snares, and I lay in wait and lurked in bushes. When one of my enemies once turned up armed with a revolver, admittedly without ammunition, I felt humiliated. I started off by flattering him; gradually, in the teeth of my true feelings, made myself his friend; and finally bought the revolver from him, with bullets I had been given by a forester. I persuaded my friend that the ammunition on its own was much more dangerous than a weapon without ammunition.

  Tender feelings came to me later, and not for long. My first noble stirrings were roused in me by a girl when I was in my second semester as a student of German. The girl in question came from Witkowitz. At sixteen, she had fallen prey to an engineer, and got pregnant by him. Luckily, the child she had was stillborn. The engineer didn’t care about her. So she went to Vienna, as a governess with horrible, stupid people. What else could I do, but be noble? I rented a room for the girl, induced her to abandon her ghastly blond charges in their sailor suits, and decided I would make a live baby with the poor girl, and challenge the engineer. To that end, I sold my coat, and took an advance from a lawyer whose son I was teaching. I traveled to Witkowitz, found the engineer, he arranged to meet me in a café, after he received my blunt little note. He had a pointed black beard, crooked upward-slanting eyebrows, glittering eyes, a fine, brown complexion, slender hands, he reminded me of the devil. On his calling card it said: Lieutenant of the Reserve. He bought me a cup of coffee, was friendly, smiled, admitted that he slept with the daughters of all his foremen one after the other on principle, but didn’t have time to busy himself with them beyond that. He took me to a brothel, bought me three girls at once, and said he was prepared to turn one of his Witkowitz damsels over to me. He bought me drinks, took me to the station, we embraced as we parted. Unfortunately, he was carried off by the typhoid epidemic of 1916. He was one of my earliest friends.

  I got back, the girl had found a new job by now. She wrote me a nice farewell letter, from which it appeared I wasn’t the type for her. Quite rightly, she was still in love with the engineer. Thenceforth, I started looking for women in the Stadtpark, the Volksgarten, the Vienna Woods. With modesty and false timidity, I tried to win the pity, and then the love, of the mothers of my pupils. I was especially popular with the wives of lawyers, as their husbands had so little time for them. They gave me shirts, underpants, ties, took me with them to their boxes at the opera, in their carriages, and went away with me to Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, and Graz. They were my mothers. I loved them all dearly.3