More soon!
Your old Joseph Roth
1. the Mois: Le Mois, a monthly magazine for French publishers and booksellers.
219. To Carl Seelig
Rapperswil
16 October 1933
Hotel Schwanen
Dear Mr. Seelig,
thank you for your kind letter, and your Basel address. I am insufficiently musical to offer a one hundred percent guarantee. But I like what I heard of the work. I’m a layman, but I trust that my ear won’t be absolutely wrong about something.
Just come along on any day you fancy, even if I’m working you won’t bother me. At the most, good company like yours will spur me on,
Sincerely
Your J.R.
220. To Félix Bertaux
Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
22 October 1933
Dear, esteemed friend,
I haven’t heard from you in weeks, and had no reply from you to my letter from Salzburg to Lescun. I expect you’ll be back in Paris by now. Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to drop me a line here—I’m always eager to hear news of you and your wife and Pierre.
I am working hard on my novel, which I should have delivered long ago, but can’t seem to finish.
Please give my regards to Mrs. Bertaux, say hello to Pierre, and be assured of my long friendship.
Your loyal and grateful
Joseph Roth
221. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth
[postmarked: London,
3 November 1933]
Dear friend,
after some wonderful days, some very painful ones. Just imagine: from some attacks on me in Vienna and elsewhere, three weeks after the event, I learn that Insel took the letter I had written at their request to spare them unpleasantness in the matter of Klaus Mann’s magazine, and published it, without asking me, without telling me at any stage, so that to this day I haven’t had sight of it, in the Börsenblatt1 (apparently—I don’t know—without even saying it was written to them). Now the decision I was agonizing over for so long has been made for me. I sent a correction to the AZ2 which has to appear tomorrow, and I would ask you to inform anyone you happen to see, and also to send me any attacks on me, so that I can energetically and promptly put them right. And I was working so well when it happened! Another week now, and maybe see you in December.
Your St. Z.
1. Börsenblatt: The Buchhändler Börsenblatt, magazine of the German book trade. What happened was that Zweig had written at Insel’s request (rather as previously Thomas Mann, Döblin, and Schickele had at Bermann Fischer’s) a letter distancing himself from Klaus Mann’s—politically inflected—magazine of German exile writing, Die Sammlung, thereby rather leaving Klaus Mann high and dry. He, it has to be said, had proceeded to use their names either without having asked at all or having offered only a misleading prospectus for the magazine. Basically, the middle-of-the-road-to-right-wing exiles were embarrassed to appear under leftist colors, or in some cases (Thomas Mann, Döblin under special circumstances) to be outed as exiles at all.
2. AZ: Arbeiter Zeitung, an (in)appropriately left-wing newspaper in Vienna to launch such a correction.
222. To Stefan Zweig
Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
5 November 1933
Dear, esteemed friend,
let me congratulate you, me, and all your friends, on your decision! Robert Neumann1 passed through here yesterday, and talked about you. I am very glad—you should be too. You have remained Stefan Zweig, and I have remained your friend, without any reservations. Please don’t think this is “youthfulness” speaking from me, or that it’s youth that made me suspicious of Thomas Mann. Suspicion accompanied me when I was younger—suspicion of the young. Simply because most of them were and are not real writers. They are not real people either. The absolutely comme il faut Professor Thomas Mann is simply naïve. He has the gift of writing better than he can think.2 Intellectually, he is not on the level of his own talent. With Schickele you get spasms of cowardice, with Döblin the occasionally irritating infantilism that shapes two-thirds of his literary production, and three-thirds of his personal life.
Shit on the Neue Deutsche Blätter.3 It’s a bought-and-paid-for Soviet affair. Werfel, Döblin, and I, were all attacked in the same number. It’s the Communist pendant to the Gartenlaube. Boring. Jakob Wassermann, whom I saw as a German patriot not long ago in Zurich, has just published parts of his very boring novel there.
If you have ex-friends who are now out to hurt you, then you should be pleased. You always had too many friends for my liking. The worst of it was they came from all over the spectrum. I never cared for that. If you shed a few friends, that can only do you good.
I don’t know any lawyer for you. It seems better to me that you take someone in England, not a Swiss or a Dutchman.
Stay strong, calm, and happy.
Thank your dear wife for the greeting on the envelope, and kiss her hand for me.
Greet Schalom Asch for me, the Homeric Jew. I think of him often, for no reason I can think of. He could have taken part in the Trojan Wars.
Your old
Joseph Roth
1. Robert Neumann (1897–1975), novelist, satirist, and parodist. Went into exile in London in 1934.
2. Mann, Döblin, Schickele—see my note on no. 221.
3. Neue Deutsche Blätter, a monthly magazine for German life and letters, produced in Prague between 1933 and 1935.
223. To Stefan Zweig
Rapperswil
Tuesday, 7 November 1933
Dear, esteemed friend,
I was happy to get your postcard. I’ll be honest with you, and say I wouldn’t have known what to say. I saw the Börsenblatt and the Arbeiter Zeitung; or rather, I was shown them with a great display of mockery. Of course I made the pathetic attempt to deny everything. You can imagine with what feelings. You don’t know that I was about to lay into Thomas Mann, Döblin, and Schickele for their similar statements. When I heard about you, I felt I’d been slapped. At least with those three you could argue that they were too dependent on [. . .] Bermann Fischer. You are not dependent on Insel. At the time you wrote your letter, I’m thinking you must have known the resounding comment which the ministry slapped on the loyalty declaration of the three valiant little tailors: that they still didn’t approve of the intellectual position of the loyal writers.
Well, I’m glad of what separates you from that trio: they write to their publisher, knowing it will be published—they even wired him. Whereas your letter to Insel was private. What I’m not glad of is the fact that you saw fit to write at all. Sure, many things separate me from Feuchtwanger. But only things that divide human beings. But what divides me from everyone, without a single exception, who is today active in Germany, with Germany, for Germany, is precisely what divides a human from an animal. Compared to stinking hyenas, compared to the spawn of hell, even my old foe Tucholsky is a comrade in arms. And even if the Sammlung were wrong a thousand times over: they would be right about Goebbels, about the violators of Germany and the German language, about those stinking Luther farts. I think Klaus Mann, with whom, God knows I don’t have much in common, still gave the most dignified reply to your letters to German publishers: the appeal of Romain Rolland in the latest issue of the Sammlung.
Rolland is right. An upright man should have no cause to fear “politics.” We have outstanding examples in literature. It is hubris to want to be more Olympian than Hugo and Zola. But I admit it’s a question of temperament, whether one seeks to intervene or not. However, to swear fealty to that band of killers and cackers, of liars and morons, of madmen and illiterates and rapists and robbers and mountebanks: that I don’t understand. Drop your misguided respect for “power,” for numbers, for 60 millions,1 leave i
t to the stupid Hendersons2 and Macdonalds,3 the Socialists, the politicians of bankruptcy. If we don’t see the truth, and quake at those jumped-up farts: who’s going to see the truth?
Ah, I can hear you say, but we’re Jews. Well, even though my head is too precious for me to waste it by running against a brick wall, I don’t see why my blood should absolve me from fighting in the front line, and condemn me to clerkdom. Only beasts like those yonder mention my blood to me. I’m staying in my trench. I daren’t ask what others think of me. I am human, and I’m fighting for man, and against animals. Numbskulls can say what they like. The just cause is stronger than the appeal to my Judaism.
Then comes your second objection: I’m underestimating the enemy. Oh dear, I’m afraid you’re overestimating him. However stupid the world is: in the long run they won’t fall in with the shower that’s running Germany just now. There is a fight to the death between European civilization and Prussia. Or hadn’t you noticed?
All right, avoid joining sides publicly. Maintain that—to me, incredible—respect for everything you term the “elemental-national” or whatever you want to call it. But I tell you, stop trying to build bridges to Germany. Stuff the Insel. Anyone who has a public function in Germany today, no matter who he is or what he once did, is a BEAST.
It used to be that you were happy to deny that you were Arnold Zweig. What you’re doing today, with the least association with Germany, is denying that you’re Stefan Zweig. (A reader of yours came up with that.)
You have so much to lose: not just your personal dignity, but your literary—and world-renowned—bearing. To thousands who think of Germany the way I do, not you, you were a prop, a pillar of faith. In the war you stood at the side of Romain Rolland. And now, now that things are at a worse pass than they ever were then, you’re writing anxious little letters to the Insel. It’s as if, during the war, you’d written letters to a captain in headquarters—merely because his reputation might have suffered on account of his old friendship with you: to say that you weren’t opposed to the war at all, “not really.”
Everything is the fault of your shilly-shallying. All the badness. All the ambiguity. All the stupid newspaper comments on you. You are in danger of losing your moral credit vis-à-vis the world, and not winning anything in the Third Reich either. Put practically. And in moral terms: you’re repudiating your personal principles of 30 years. And why? For whom? For a business partner. A decent, narrow-minded person, that’s about the most that could be said about him, who’s made a fortune from publishing you. Whose son-in-law is [. . .]. Who, merely by remaining in Germany himself, has undone all the good he may have done to you and others. (Though that too was business.)
Dear friend, you know I belong more to those who want to be fair than the implacable ones. I am revolted by narrow-mindedness and sectarianism. But now the hour of decision is at hand. More than in the war. Now, confronted by this hellish hour in which a beast gets itself crowned and anointed, not even a Goethe would have remained quiet. (At least he wouldn’t have denied involvement with the enemies of the Third Reich.) This is no longer the time to speak of Jews and non-Jews either. Why didn’t you think of it then, when you were in Switzerland, in the war, that you mustn’t do anything to strengthen the disgraceful calumny that Jews were sabotaging the fatherland? You were a Jew then, as much as now.
I can’t approve of your position. I’m a better friend to you than the Insel. If only for my sake you should never have written that letter. Not without asking me. Even if you didn’t know it, you will still have sensed that I would not have approved of such a letter.
It’s the hour of decision, not just in the sense that it’s time to take the side of mankind against Germany, but also in that it’s time to tell every friend the truth. So I say to you—and believe me, haste forces me to a ceremonial tone that is rather embarrassing to me—there will be an abyss between the two of us, unless and until you have finally and innerly broken with Germany. I would prefer it if you were fighting against it with all the power of your name. If you are unable to do that, then at least keep quiet. Don’t go writing letters to Insel, or to some other Tom, Dick, and Harries. To spare the addressee from any “unpleasantnesses.” You’ll only incur worse ones yourself. You’re smart enough to realize that in Germany nowadays the proprietor of the Insel is just as much a state-appointed functionary as a minister of state. You should have known all by yourself that your letter would never remain private. Any ordinary German citizen is an ass-kissing employee of the state; never mind the publishers of Insel, or Fischer. (They should all be packed off to a concentration camp.)
(Please send the Tagebuch4 a copy of your reply to the Arbeiter Zeitung. Mr. Schwarzschild mentioned your letter to Insel to me as well. I think it’s important that he knows where you stand.)
One more time: you will have to finish with the Third Reich, or with me. You cannot simultaneously have relationships with representatives of the Third Reich—which includes every single publisher—and with me. I won’t stand for it. I can’t justify it, not to you, not to myself.
Reply, please, as soon as possible. Kiss Mrs. Zweig’s hand for me.
Your old friend
Joseph Roth
Wednesday [8 November 1933]
Dear friend,
I’ve just read over the letter I wrote you yesterday. Lest you be in any doubt: I did not write it while intoxicated. I drink almost nothing but white wine these days. I am stone sober. Please be in no doubt about that.
And be in no doubt either that I am your friend. Even if you don’t answer my plea, and don’t end your commerce with Germany, I remain your friend, and will defend you wherever possible.
I am, further, quite clear about the fact that it constitutes an act of crass presumption to approach you with rules for conduct. I apologize. I have probably made a mess of my own life. But I still think I can see the life of one dear to me perfectly. I think I am right where you are concerned.
Stay true to the picture I have of you. I have painted you as you are.
You yourself will know that best (and your wife knows it too).
If it’s even necessary to say this, and even though it sounds offensive: I can see straight through your worldly wisdom, and into your poetic heart.
Don’t repudiate it! Remain true to it. It’s worth it.
Don’t betray the “emigration” any more! Leave that to the bastards and the idiots.
I appeal to you once more: keep your DIGNITY!
Your old
Joseph Roth
1. 60 millions: the number of Germans at the time, and hence the number of Stefan Zweig’s potential readership.
2. Henderson: Arthur Henderson (1863–1935), leader of the British Labour Party. Foreign secretary from 1929 to 1931, Nobel Peace Prize in 1934.
3. Macdonald: James Ramsay Macdonald (1866–1937), co-founder of the Labour Party in 1900, prime minister in 1924 and again from 1929 to 1935.
4. Tagebuch: Das neue Tagebuch, weekly magazine in German, edited by Leopold Schwarzschild. It existed from July 1933 to May 1940, and was based in Paris and Amsterdam. Roth wrote many magnificent and wrenching pieces for it.
224. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth
[November 1933]
Dear friend,
forgive me for giving such a rushed reply to a letter whose human content I sense so profoundly. But I am exhausted, this affair has put me into a quite unparalleled situation—all brought about by the remissness of friends, the complete silence on the part of my publishers, by my own change of address (which probably no one will believe). I have communicated the enclosed explanation to the world press via the Jewish Telegrafic Agency (you can show it to anyone not yet familiar with it), and set other necessary steps in train. I have still no idea of the legal position, even a year ago my work was a vast object of speculation for the Insel, i
ts standing today is impossible for me to ascertain, I must consult an expert (Swiss or Dutch) as to how to conduct the affair, in the event that—and this is why I exercised self-restraint—it is not amicably resolved. You, you young people, who have been involved with the German publishing scene for no more than 3–5 years, and are able to move with your houses, you can have no idea of the fact that Thomas Mann and I are involved in ties that cannot be undone overnight (for instance, Fischer demands 200,000 marks for the release of Wassermann’s rights), this just so that you get some idea of how things look after thirty years of ties to the damned material world. Not that I am out for money, I shit on it, but I must clarify the situation (do you happen to know, by the way, some expert from whom I could get advice, and who might ultimately represent me, not a Jew, nor a German?); I don’t think it will prove necessary, because things are moving my way through the planned Zwangsschriftstellergesetz,1 and then I would have the advantage that I wouldn’t have to negotiate my freedom, but would be offered it on a plate. Please don’t think I’m such a fool or weakling as to seek to be “tolerated” in Germany, or be boycotted silently instead of openly: what I am concerned about is getting control of my own work again and not (my nerves wouldn’t be up to it) having to go to court over it. But it couldn’t be done violently, the way you imagine it. Why won’t you give someone you’ve known for many years a few weeks’ grace, and not shout “Treason!” right away where you don’t understand something (as with Thomas Mann too, a highly principled man, who as an Aryan has no need to share the fate of Jews). You can’t rub out the seventy million Germans with your outcry, and I’m afraid the Jews abroad are in for more disappointment, it’s quite possible that a pact may be concluded over their heads, diplomacy is capable of any sort of dastardliness, and politics of the wildest leaps, we will have to bear a lot of disappointment in the time to come: how crazy to rage against each other now! If only the meeting I suggested had come about, then our joint position would have had enormous strength, whereas today, to the glee of the Nazis, we are tearing strips off one another.
More soon
Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters Page 29
