The Hotel Years

by Joseph Roth

  Prager Tagblatt, 6 January 1924

  7. Baltic Tour

  The “season”—it’s a technical term—has begun very auspiciously on the Baltic coast. Here too, as in watering places the world over, there is early, late and high season. High is just beginning now, in July, late won’t start till the end of August. Both have so many subscribers already that most hotels, villas and B&Bs are booked up. This summer promises to be exceptionally profitable for the leisure industry and the local inhabitants of the Baltic beaches. They deserve it. The summer visitor, who only sees the sea and the coast by sunshine, or at worst, in wretched squalls lasting several days, has of course no notion of the difficulties faced by the locals in autumn, winter and early spring. The Baltic is not always as clement as it is during the “season”. When tourists are a distant twinkle, the coast often plays host to a primal struggle between inhabitants and elements. What these not overly well-off little communities spend a deal of money and patience building, in the way of bridges, beach huts and little wooden towers, can quite easily be destroyed by a storm in the course of one spring night. The first and most important prerequisite for living here is a basic toughness. I have talked to locals, they have told me about the harsh, white, unending winters, winters in which no one goes out of doors, in which the snow buries the buildings, the electricity and gas don’t work, water freezes in the wells, and the onshore gale blows with such merciless force that no living being can stand up to it. Summer means more to the residents than recovery, or getting well or resurrection. In the course of those cruel winters they have learned to be tight-lipped, tough, suspicious, stubborn. Even so, a generous humanity stirs in them, their hospitality is sincere, their expressions simple, their greetings curt but friendly. In our many-faceted, tribal Germany this is one of the most interesting populations. Their songs are as simple as the rhythm of the sea; their language is rich in foursquare consonants that resist the prevailing wind, to make themselves heard. One can’t hold it against these people that they charge such relatively high prices, higher for the moment than in the South of France. The beauties of the Baltic coast are worth it. Further, the baths are closer than foreign resorts, and then—they are ours. We go there and do well for ourselves. A room and board costs between seven and ten marks per visitor per day. The early season is three marks less.

  The Baltic sea baths have a greater array of natural beauties than most European spas. They are characterized by an almost improbable combination of rural variety and the eternal monotony of the sea. One can walk for days with the sea on one side, and a landscape of the most variable composition on the other. Hills, dales, woods and sea, sea, sea. One rises early and hears the surf beat on the shore, a swelling and ebbing crash. There is the kiss of the wave which combines coming and going, arrival and departure, greeting with the pain of separation—and at the same time there is the song of myriad wood-birds, an almost exotic choir, so that you would think yourself somewhere far in the south. You come here expecting only sea and screaming seagulls. But here is the melodious variety of a continental broad-leaved forest, opposing the water’s monotony with dedication and energy. It’s so unexpected to hear bird-twitter and surf-crash at once that you think you must be dreaming and it takes a while to gradually get used to the fairy-tale pairing of contrasting melodies.

  The leading resorts, Swinemünde, Heringsdorf, Bansin, Ahlbeck, are well known; the island of Rügen less well. Most landlubbers come over all awestruck at the idea of an island; places like that must be wildly inaccessible. And so, even though, or perhaps just because it’s so self-evident, you say it again: the sea-bathing on Rügen is as comfortable, as European, and as civilized as anywhere on the European coast. They have electricity, gas, running water, telephone, hairdressers, baths, hotels. And they have more, too: namely that smidgeon of intact nature that serves to guarantee the civilized townie respite from civilization. You can get a shave, send a telegram, listen to the band, and yet still go on a solitary ramble through charmed scenery, and run into a fisherman who might have lurched from the pages of Grimm. In Binz, the largest of the Rügen resorts, it’s difficult to avoid the jazz. Poetically inclined natures and canny admen have dubbed it “the Sorrento of the north”. It has twenty hotels and two hundred villas to let, a two-mile seafront promenade, is stuffed with make-up, powder, atropine, tennis racquets and sharp pleats, cocktail bars and tipsy customers; a spa hotel with dancing opportunities for black tie and evening gowns; and even some swastika flags. In Sassnitz you can be one of 26,000 visitors, and still do something for your immortal soul, and visit an Evangelical and Catholic Mass. It lies in a dip, protected to the north by beech-clad hills, and not far, a two-hour walk, is Stubbenkammer. Here the sand and clay soil is relieved by chalk. This is the terrain of the old pirate legends. The chalk cliffs are extraordinary, at night they have a ghostly glow, they seem predestined for pirate tales. The chalk bluffs have faces and eerie formations, and there’s a very strange contradiction between the deathly pallor of the material and its lively, grimacing forms.

  If you’re looking for quiet, national characteristics, idylls—you will look up the small resorts of Sellin, Baabe, Göhren, Thiessow, Putbus, or Lauterbach. Here the waiters wear less rigidly starched shirtfronts and the hosts speak Plattdeutsch. Hens peck about on the streets, and a beautiful woman may walk through the little town in a bathrobe. The village-like quiet is disturbed only by the occasional marching band. No jazz stirs the wrath of Neptune and his fellow sea-gods. And if you’re in luck, you’ll see some of the old Mönchgut residents dancing in their traditional costume. They wear homespun clothes, black robes, colourful waistcoats, golden chains and short, baggy white pantaloons, billowing round short rubber boots, looking like bells. Their legs are like thin clappers—even with the boots. They are the last of the dancers. The young farmers have given up weaving, and don’t dance any more. A whole way of life is coming to an end.

  Visitors eager to avoid politics should seek out Baabe, which is one of the quietest and cheapest of the Baltic resorts and which is run by its clever, efficient and modern mayor, Thormann.* But in other places too the locals have not had their heads turned by swastikas, and what there is by way of nationalist propaganda is imported by the visitors.

  The sea, meanwhile, is as it always is, clean and untouched by the childish and violent games of men. You gaze at the infinity of water and sky, and forget. The wind that billows out the swastika banner does so in all innocence. The wave in which it is reflected isn’t to blame for its own desecration. So foolish are people that even in sight of these eternal things, they do not shrink in awe.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 July 1924

  * Politics: there is a late shadow cast over this enthusiastic piece by the phenomenon of “Bäder-Antisemitismus”, the anti-Semitism prevalent in some North German resorts from about 1890. Roth handles it discreetly and a little disdainfully, but it’s very evidently there

  8. Melancholy of a Tram Car in the Ruhr

  A thin, persistent rain. The tram leaves at twelve-fifteen. At one-forty-five it will be in the next town. The stop is outside a bar. I sip kirsch, and peer out at the street through the ornaments in the net curtains. Rain like this stifles sounds as much as snow does. Yes, if these curtains had no ornaments, if this bar had no curtains—why curtains?—then I could probably have seen the tram approach. I shudder at the thought of it leaving without me, and at the same time I wish it would. Then I might take the quicker, more comfortable, reliable train instead. But I am under the spell of a freely chosen torment. The more time, patience, chill, kirsch and loathing I sink into this endeavour, the more difficult it is for me to give it up. Time flows, rain flows.

  Quite punctually, no reason it should, the tram comes. Its running board is high and sodden; the floor on the inside is damp too. An old man is smoking a pipe, a woman sits with a covered basket on her lap, schoolgirls clamber aboard, with rough, ugly satchels on their backs that the rain has
darkened—like soldiers’ knapsacks with dangling sponge attached. Two workingmen lean on the back platform, keeping the conductor company. There is a country maid as well, with gold-rimmed spectacles and bare feet. She puts me in mind of a plough pulled by a locomotive. No one speaks. All are preparing themselves for the ordeal of a long ride. Such concentration demands complete silence. The hard seats of shiny polished wood are not only short; they also have a downward slope. Sitting on them means: continually and hopelessly shuffling back up.

  We go along a long road with dark buildings and dark spaces between them; plots with boards and fences that make no sense, no hope of ever becoming a garden, a field, or a house. The dead bodies of plots. The town refuses to end. If it ever does, though, you can be sure the next one will begin immediately. The towns hand the streets on. Each time, we stop in front of brown shelters of creosoted wood that look like the primal forms of stations in the wilder parts of America. Next come allotments, little hutments of roofing cardboard, the summer castles of the little man and the little rabbit. Jugs, pots and bowls have been spiked on fence-posts like so many severed heads. A red-brick factory, an iron fence, a little white stone gate-house with a visible clock-punch, behind it big puffing chimneys, four, five, six of them, ready to reproduce at a moment’s notice.

  The country keeps being on the point of taking over, and making country again—and then it can’t. There are no buildings. The road could turn into a country road at this point. There are even trees at either side, preparing to speak up for it. But our tram needs its overhead wires, and the wires need long, bare, wooden poles, with a couple of china pots flowering at the top end, for purposes of electricity. A caricature of a snowdrop.

  In the far distance, on the very horizon, nature is at pains to produce a wood. But there is no wood. There is a kind of beginning vegetative bald patch with comb-over fronds of pine. Next come the inns, one after the other, and each one announcing “picturesque garden location”. What can they mean, what is picturesque here? I imagine a restaurant with painted orange trees and laurel in flower pots; or a bit of a cabbage patch with a veranda; four fences festooned with wild Virginia creeper. There are no limits to the imagination.

  Next comes a completely unscheduled stop. The driver gets out, the conductor follows suit, they meet somewhere in the middle. We listen to the rain. There are no signs anywhere. Chimneys, some stout, some slender, puff away in unrelieved torment. The rain shreds the thick smoke, pulverizes it, evenly, without rancour. The rain pulls curtains in front of the scene, curtains without ornaments. There is no landscape, just a kind of extended townscape, industrial-scape—punctuated with picturesque garden locations.

  Then, barely visible through the rain, we catch a glimmering of an undertaker on one side, and on the opposite side Persil, the epitome of life. No one speaks. Each time the door opens, someone slams it shut. It’s cold. When we stop, it’s colder. We feel like pulling our feet up on to the seats, but that’s almost certainly forbidden. We have leisure to read the notices: twenty seats; no spitting. I have half a mind to.

  Now we’re on the move again. And here is the beginning of the next conurbation. We reach our destination. It looks like where we began from. It’s as though there are no spatial destinations here, only temporal ones, like the certain, final and irrevocable death of the last patch of native earth.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 March 1926

  9. Smoke Joins up the Towns

  Here the whole sky is smoke. It connects all the towns. It hangs in a grey pall over the land that has made it and that continues to make more of it. The wind that might scatter it is choked and buried under it. The sun that might tunnel through it is deflected and buried in thick clouds. Like something not earthborn and ephemeral, it ascends, conquers celestial regions, acquires mass, spins substance out of nothing, bundles its shadow into a body and incessantly increases its specific weight. It draws new sustenance from massive chimneys. It rises voluminously into the air. It is sacrifice, god and priest all at once. Billions of specks of dust are exhaled by it. By the mere fact of producing it, we worship it. We create it with an industry that is more than reverence. We are filled with it.

  Also filled with it is the metropolis that is made up of all the towns of the Ruhrgebiet. An unholy expanse of greater and lesser conurbations, linked by rails, wires, interests and surrounded by smoke, cut off from the rest of the country. If it was just one single, great, gruesome city, it would still be a fantastic place, but not so menacingly ghostly. A big city has centres, rows of streets joined up by the sense of a structure, it has history, and its checkable expansion is somehow calming. It has a periphery, a limit, a line where it stops and goes over into country. Here, though, are a dozen beginnings; and it ends a dozen times. Land wants to resume, poor, smoke-pregnant land, but along comes a wire and says: not here you don’t. Great cubes of brick ­factory advance unceremoniously, stand there, more firmly set than mountains or hills, more naturally decreed than woods. Every small town has its focus, its edges, its development. But since they are all to be united by smoke to a single city, the separate forms and histories lose credibility, certainly function. Why? Why? Why is Essen here? Why are Duisburg, Hamborn, Oberhausen, Mülheim, Bottrop, Elberfeld, Barmen there? Why so many names, why so many mayors, so many officials for a single town? And as if all that weren’t enough, a provincial border runs through the middle of things. The inhabitants have the delusion of being Westphalians on the right, Rhinelanders on the left. But what are they really? Inhabitants of the smokeland, smoke worshippers, smoke makers, children of smoke.

  It’s as though the inhabitants of the cities were outdistanced by the wisdom and the aspirations of the cities themselves. Things have a better feeling for the future than people do. People feel historically, i.e. retrospectively. Walls, streets, wires, chimneys feel prospectively. People get in the way of progress. They hang sentimental weights on the winged feet of time. Each one wants his own church tower. In the meantime chimneys grow over the heads of church towers. The smoke eats up the sound of bells. It swaddles them in its black wool, so that they cannot be heard, much less told apart. Each city has its theatres, its monuments, its museum, its history. But none of these things has any lasting resonance. For historical or so-called cultural things live off the echo that sustains them. Here though is no room for echo and resonance. The sounds of bells live from echo, and they all fight each other, until the smoke comes along and chokes them.

  Some of the smaller towns here have their old gabled romantic parts. These are referred to as idyllic. Time drones all round them. Busy wires enmesh them. All the trembling airwaves are full of the radio-borne words of the present. What is the point of these slumbering nooks, these dreamy beauties? While there was a blue sky over them they were in their element, but now grey smoke hangs over them. They are buried under billions of dust and carbon particles. They will never experience a resurrection. Never will a pure naked sunbeam gild them. Never will a pure rain rinse them clean. Never will an actual cloud lend them shade. In all their fixity they are doomed. They were built for the ages in lasting stone, and their durable construction is the only reason they still exist now. Not because they have any force or presence. They are like old silver coins that have no value as currency. The flimsiest banknote is more actual.

  It is of just such ridiculous thin material that the new parts of cities are built. There are walls you can pinch between finger and thumb. There are tenements of wood and hollow brick. There are shingle roofs that children might have draped. Things stand and fall and are rebuilt. Moments ago they were white and gleaming with fresh paint. Now they are black as rotten teeth. Each street a gaping mouth.

  People live here. People with ambitions and desires. Even the unemployed. They step out. Why hang about? What is there to see here? Children play in the middle of the streets. All the windows are identical. All the doors are identical. Only the numbers on them are different. All the people
are grimly determined to reach their destination. Perhaps it is the dole office. Perhaps the co-op. Perhaps it is a meeting hall. Perhaps a break-in. Perhaps the revolution. Perhaps it is the cinema.

  Oh, but it matters so little! One destination is like the other. One city like the next. Each street like the next. Climb on the tram. In half an hour you’ll be in the next place. Is there any difference? Smoke over the world! You go to Oberhausen, and then Mülheim, and then to Recklinghausen, to Bochum, to Gladbeck, to Buer, to Hamborn, to Bottrop. Smoke over the world! No sky, no clouds. Rain precipitated from smoke: black rain. A hundred chimneys, so many fingers, pillars of the smoke sky, altars of the Almighty Smoke. Rails along the ground, corresponding wires through the air. All one grim city made of stacks of city, of bundles of towns. In amongst it all runs the abstract provincial boundary. But overhead is the uniform sky, and that is smoke, smoke, smoke.

  Frankfurter Zeitung, 18 March 1926

  10. Germany in Winter

  There is something half-hearted about this winter. The calendrical harshness of nature is nothing to the boundless cruelty of history. Snow melts away a couple of hours after falling. A mild zephyr blows over the land. There is a relation between the desires and the fears of the hungry, the cold, the unshod and the unclothed, and the permanent laws of the changing seasons. God’s fist has never oppressed us so much; the hand that doles out frost and bitterness every year was never so mild. There is some compensatory mechanism.