Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Berlin
5 July 1932
Dear esteemed Ms. Annette Kolb,
your kind letters come chasing after one another so charmingly quickly, I barely have a chance to reply. Today your sweet photograph came—thank you so much. If I had a bed, I would hang it up over the bed, if you didn’t mind. It’s a very nice picture, suffused with a sort of Whitsun earnestness.
Practical things, now:
1. Of course Kiepenheuer would publish a book that promised to sell. But no one here speaks English—I don’t myself—and when I try, I sound like a bad imitation of an American Yid. Is it too much trouble to ask you to write out a typed summary of the book and send it to me? Some other interested parties might turn up.
2. My Radetzky March still isn’t quite set. You’ll get it right after I’ve revised the proofs, at the end of July.
3. Would you be so good as to say that to Mr. Poupet? He’ll get the book right away, as soon as he offers any sort of advance; because:
4. I can’t tell you how bad I feel. If you’d known me 12 or 13 years ago, I would just have had to tell you: as bad as 13 years ago, and you’d have understood. Today I have misfortune behind me and alongside me, gray hair, a bad liver, and I’m an incurable alcoholic (which is worse than 13 years ago).
5. Since I quite deliberately no longer look at articles of mine in print, I can’t tell you when they appeared. But the Frankfurter Zeitung office will send you whatever you ask for pretty quickly.
6. Those are all the “practical” things that come to mind.
Please drop me a line! I get the sense that [. . .] is messing you about by turning you off Ireland. But you can’t blame Jews for anything nowadays. They are pushed in the direction of “money”—and that’s the only thing they can try and cling on to. [. . .]
I kiss your dear hands
your old Joseph Roth
153. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth
11 July 1932
To Mr. J. Roth, c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, 10 Kantstrasse,
Berlin-Charlottenburg 2
Dear Roth,
The Radetzky March is the first novel I read in serial form in the paper from beginning to end. Sometimes I even waited for the Reich edition to come out, so that I could read the following installment the evening before.
I am a bit tired of the political work, and am going to Tutzing to spend 4 days with Hausenstein. Will I find you in Frankfurt? Please write and let me know
[. . .]
Your old
[Benno Reifenberg]1
1. It’s hard to imagine a more gallant letter than this, and yet—dictated; addressed to Roth at his publisher’s—it marks another stage in the decay of a friendship.
154. To Stefan Zweig
7 August 1932
Baden-Baden
c/o Fabisch, Yburgstrasse 21
Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,
I’m not sure that after such a long time, you don’t have the right to set this letter aside, unopened. In 4 months this is the first week—a friend has invited me, and I’m going to be here another week—that I can draw breath. The last 4 weeks, when I might perhaps have been able to do so, I was tormented by a horrible stomach catarrh, slowly getting better now. Better, but I fear probably never well. Like my eye inflammation back then, it’s just another physical expression of the catastrophic situation of my life. Imagine, my novel had started to run in the paper before it was even finished. And, so to speak with the hot breath of pursuing time on my neck—of course to paralyzing effect—I had to go on writing, revise, correct, and finally put in a flimsy ending. A Hamburg book club bought the book for August. I have to correct and revise, all at the same time, for 8 bloody hours a day and I’m completely enfeebled by it. My hands are still shaking. The whole time since I left Paris, I’ve had to spend 4-week stints with various friends and acquaintances, and you know how ghastly that is for a habitual hotel dweller like me. The publisher was paying me 5 marks a day. I’ve had to stop paying back all my most pressing debts. Which made them press me all the more. There were places I couldn’t even show my face. I owe the Frankfurter Zeitung 400 marks, I don’t have the patience to write articles any more. The only thing I’ve managed to keep up are the monthly installments for my wife’s hospitals. Kiepenheuer can only keep going as long as its Jewish bankers stay in Germany. But everything suggests they’re pulling out of Berlin. National Socialism will strike at the core of my existence—apart from the fact that the booksellers are terrorized, inasmuch as they’re not Nationalists themselves, and want nothing to do with writing that strikes them as “cosmopolitan” or western European, and so on and so forth. I’m convinced nothing will befall the cheeky chutzpah-Jews, but the conservatives will suffer—never has it been as true as now: dog will not eat dog. I bet the Hungarian Jews will end up practicing censorship in the 3rd Reich just as they do in Russia and in this fucking democracy. Too bad we lived to see it. Every janitor is a reactionary today, and mixes me up with Tucholsky,1 who is his cousin! A few weeks ago, I was talking to some Nazis about you—and it took 10 minutes before it dawned on me they had Arnold Z.2 in mind! Not that they like you any better, because you’re such an “internationalist”! They just get annoyed that someone is known all over Europe, and they detach Germany from Europe to the degree that writers with a European reputation are enemies to them, as if they’d been French. It’s so disgusting, I tell you, you can’t breathe it, never mind write it! It’s hideous to be assorted with the Left, against one’s will, against one’s being, lumped together with something like the Weltbühne. That hideous arrest of Ossietzky’s,3 when all the Jewesses drove down the Kurfürstendamm in their magnificent cars—and the poor goy paced back and forth in his cell, and Toller gave a speech outside. I was the only one (aside from H. Mann) not to participate, in my case it was out of disgust, H.M. was pressed for time. It’s meaningless, everything’s become meaningless! I have the strong sense that for me personally there is no future.
Farewell! If you’re not angry, drop a line to your old
Joseph Roth
1. Tucholsky: Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935), editor of the Schaubühne and the Weltbühne, satirist, novelist, essayist, went into voluntary exile in Sweden in 1929, where, depressed by European politics, he died by his own hand in 1935. For some reason, Roth always loathed him, even when he was farther to the left than currently, when he seems at least in part to be blaming the Jews for having brought their imminent misfortune upon themselves by dabbling in radical politics.
2. Arnold Z: Arnold Zweig, the Communist author of Sergeant Grisha, not to be confused with Stefan Zweig, with whom he was not related.
3. Ossietzky’s: Carl von Ossietzky (1889–1938), Tucholsky’s associate on the Weltbühne. Among the first prominent victims of the Nazis, he was put in a concentration camp in 1933, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia in 1935, and died in police custody in 1938. It is uncomfortable to feel JR’s rabid loathing for such a man.
155. To Benno Reifenberg
28 August [1932]
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
you helped me out of one of the biggest calamities of my life, and I want you to know, and to remember that you not only materially alleviated my condition, but—on a human level—picked me up and in a Picardian sense improved me. Please will you tell the firm, and Dr. Heinrich Simon, that his responsiveness was a real act of nobility, which continues to honor and ennoble me, after first of all helping me. Please, promise to tell Dr. Simon. The old god will help the old paper. He’s not to despair.
So far as I know, Gubler is not in Frankfurt, so I must ask you to forgive me if I leave the ethereal heights of politics where you are now situated, to revert to the depths of the feuilleton, where you once used to publish my glittering pieces in a sort of second Morgenpost. Everything avenges itself. Now you
need to pay attention, and work out with me:
I have had 350 marks in advances.
I need another 300 marks, with articles already written.
Therefore I have to write 650 lines.
Now, pay attention.
Yesterday I sent off one article for the books pages; today a piece for the Bäderblatt.
Makes perhaps 250 lines. Which means I must still write 400 lines.
I will send these within the next 3 days, all glittering pieces for the feuilleton.
But then I must have the money, so that I can pay this fucking hotel. Coming to Frankfurt for 2 days, then Switzerland.
I have to live like a dog till 20 September.
Would you kindly write back right away, so that I may be sure you’ve grasped my muddled calculations. I need to be perfectly sure of that.
Thank you very much. (Which is a stupid thing to say, but never mind.) I can see I am abusing your friendship, but console myself by thinking that behind that is our comradeship which can’t be abused.
Your old muddleheaded
Joseph Roth
156. To Ernst Krenek
Hotel Schwanen, Rapperswil am Zürichsee
as of: Englischer Hof, Frankfurt/Main
10 September 1932
Dear esteemed Mr. Ernst Krenek,
thank you for your letter and your oeuvre, both! Where may I send you the book?
One sees accounts of your plans in the papers, here and there. May God give you health, money, and luck! I think of you often. Not only, by any means, when I read something of yours in the FZ. Oh, it remains the “decentest rag.” I’m bad, I’m very bad. I can’t manage any more in the muddle of my personal life. Yes, it’s in lockstep with “public affairs.” We Austrians, eh? We have no more business here. We live and think and write in Middle High German.1 Your music is like that. I don’t know a lot about music. But, among 20 “modern” tunes that a girlfriend sang to me, I still managed to pick out yours. I wasn’t nice to you. I’m often drunk, or half-seas. Forgive me! My solidarity with you is always greater.
As far as Austria is concerned: your life there may be harder than mine in Germany. Because in Germany, I can always still pin my hopes on Austria. But when I open an Austrian newspaper, I get the impression that things there are looking pretty German. The Prussian boot, the hysterical boot, the bossy boot: mean, perverse, and decadent. It will trample all over Austria too. Down with the Anschluss! Too bad that France is our salvation. German salvation. Write me if you get a chance, tell me Austria’s not yet as bad as its newspapers. (Germany is a sight worse than its newspapers.)
Your old
Joseph Roth
1. Middle High German: Professor Brecht, with whom Roth studied in Vienna before World War I, believed in and advanced an idea of Austria not as a corrupt and negligible appendage ripe for a tacit or explicit Anschluss, “a sort of nether Bavaria,” as JR says in no. 22 (when arguing not against Nazism, but Socialism), but as an older, better form of Germany, “the land of the older form of German culture, a culture that has preserved many ancient German traits . . . a land of the soul and the spirit, full of tolerance, protean, rich and colorful, eluding definition, yes, opposed to definition, like the Middle Ages, like the life of the Catholic Church.” Bronsen, who notes that Roth was not easily influenced by others, took Brecht’s lectures to heart. Without this Austrocentric, in excelsis Austria creed in mind, it is difficult to make sense not just of JR’s tone to Krenek here, but of his overall faith in Austria, his opposition to Germany, perhaps even his late upsurge of Royalism. See, for instance, no. 210 or no. 217. Even the mystic believes in something for a reason.
157. To Stefan Zweig
Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
18 September 1932
Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,
I’m sending this letter by messenger, ideally I’d have wired it, to thank you for your friendly, spirited, and moving letter, and to beg you to pardon a quite unpardonable oversight on the part of my publishers. Because of course I’d set your name at the head of the list of persons due to receive “reading copies” two or three weeks ago. I also sent a slip with a personal dedication to put in the book, which has been out now these past 5 days. How your good luck message shames me. Believe me, I know all too well that my book hasn’t turned out the way it should have. Of course I can tell you exactly why and wherefore. But what would be the point? I felt it while I was writing. I didn’t write you that whole time. I know you have no fondness for wailing walls. They don’t bring luck. Any friendship with me is ruinous. I myself am a wailing wall, if not a heap of rubble. You have no idea how dark it is inside me. My dear, admired friend, you have the grace of luck and of true golden joy in the world. Your senses are open to what is right, there is something in you of Goethe’s understanding of life. Don’t forget that since my bleak childhood I’ve been groaning up at the brightness, I’m not sure if, for all your knowledge of me, you can have felt all that. Because you are lucky enough—I’ve wanted to say this to you for a long time—not to be able to see certain depths of darkness, yes, you avert your eye. You have the grace to be able to avert your eye from darknesses that would do you harm.1 (Interestingly enough, your wife was able to feel it in me, sometimes when you had lost your temper.) I know my shortcomings in this novel, how I cried to the story itself to help me, embarrassing help for my “composition,” which was rotten and deceitful of me. That’s why I tinkered away at it for so long, two years, that’s no proof of health, strength, and productivity. Yes, I must ask you for forgiveness: your critical judgment let you down when you read my Radetzky March. It’s flattering for me: it let you down because of your feeling for me. I promise you: I don’t deserve it, and it’s harmful to you. And that’s why I didn’t write to you. You’re a good person. But I didn’t want to disturb the harmony that’s a part of your goodness. You must remain happy, serene, so childishly serene in a perfectly naïve way, to be good, to be truly good. Basically, you don’t like people like me; and quite rightly: because they harm you. I first met you under other circumstances. (Believe me, it hurts me that I owe you money, for instance!—and it hurts me too that I am telling you this, I know exactly how much, I have it written down. I also know that you would otherwise give it to much more deserving individuals. I want to pay it back to you in slow installments.) I tell you all this, shamelessly. I hope you will understand. Yes, you will understand.—I want to make an end. If there weren’t such a danger that I’d be mistaken by decent people for a “Romantic” in double or triple quotation marks): I’d like to become a monk. Assuming a modicum of grace.—Physically I’m fucked. I’ve got no money. I owe enormous amounts. I can’t take on any more debt. Even the stupidest article takes me three days to write. And (entre nous) the FZ has asked me to write less. They just can’t pay me.—(Strictly, entre nous.)—Well, there’s the wailing wall again. Throw away this letter! It’ll only bring you bad luck!—From now on I’ll just write about public affairs. You must have seen the article in the Völkischer Beobachter,2 where you are named with little shits way beneath you, I’m sure you must have seen that.—Well, greetings! I’d like to see you again—and I’m a little afraid of it.—To tell you something of a “practical” nature: I’m here till 1 October.—I’d like you to confirm receipt of this letter.—I have many more things I could tell you, and can’t think of anything.—Otto Zarek’s novel is in Sport und Bild or God knows the hell where. I saw one of the installments. In person, Zarek is much more sensible than you’d suppose from that installment. It seems to me he’s allowed Berlin to get to him. Even so, I’ve asked to review the book for the FZ, because he understands a lot about human predicaments. Is it coming out in autumn? Do you happen to know? (I don’t have his address.) Plus: I’d like to ask you to confirm the safe arrival of my book. I need to know whether Kiepenheuer carries out instructions.
your very old Joseph Roth
1. darknesses that would do you harm: as often in these letters of JR’s to Zweig, he packs a catastrophic punch. Bronsen describes “the congenitally cautious and reticent Zweig, who liked to take himself for an Erasmus, but was no more than just a law-abiding citizen, in whom a plausible witness attested to ‘a weakness for anything demonic, at a safe distance.’ ” The witness is Robert Neumann, friend to Zweig and author of the wonderfully entitled Meine Freunde die Kollegen.
2. Völkischer Beobachter: (People’s Observer), the organ of the Nazi party, founded in 1920.
158. To Stefan Zweig
Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
18 September 1932
Dear, esteemed Stefan Zweig,
in my letter I forgot to tell you that I owe you a couple of scenes in my novel,1 you will know which ones they are, and that I am deeply, deeply grateful to you, for all my dissatisfaction with the book as a whole.
Cordially
your Joseph Roth
1. Scenes in my novel: the ominous gathering of crows in the trees presaging the beginning of World War I seems to have been Zweig’s idea, for one. (Roth already had geese.)
159. To Stefan Zweig
Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
23 September 1932
Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,
I am most reluctant, of course, to write this: Mr. Landauer (he of the Kiepenheuer Verlag) insists that I ask you both that you write about the Radetzky March yourself, and that you induce Otto Zarek, who is writing about me in the Vossische, not to “trash” me. I am so utterly dependent on the wishes of Mr. Landauer, and so utterly revolted by the whole business, the publisher, his wishes, reviews, that I tell you without beating about the bush, simply so as to be able to report back to the publisher that I have done as required. It’s disgusting, nauseating! I know you know I’m being utterly straight with you. If I were to think “sensibly,” I’d have to say Landauer is right. He means well by me. I don’t want to lie to him, or to you.—I hope it doesn’t upset our relationship. I live off Landauer, I have to write to you, and I write this pukeworthy request, and I hope you understand me . . .
Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters Page 22
