The Hotel Years

by Joseph Roth

  Now the ice had been broken, and the Negro started to speak. He spoke German. A fluent German, with a deep, pleasant, sonorous voice. He had already been in Europe for four months. He knew some of the major German cities, such as Cologne, Frankfurt, Hanover, Koblenz and Düsseldorf. He felt very much at home in Germany. People were perplexed that he was blond. When he went out for a moment, the heavy gentleman said to his neighbour: “I say, will you ask him how he got to be blond?” But when the Negro came back, no one asked him.

  We both got out at Koblenz. He left the carriage with a hearty South German greeting: “Grüss Gott”. A Grüss-Gott Negro. What a wonderful mixture—almost pure Aryan.

  At the station in Koblenz he excited great interest. He was tall, broad-shouldered, high-hipped, a wonderful specimen. We waited together outside the left luggage office. He was leaving a heavy suitcase. I let him go first. He declined. We spent five minutes arguing about which of us should give in his case first. Things slowly escalated into a black shame. Finally we began talking personally, and this is what the blond Negro told me:

  His name is Guillaume. But not just Guillaume, also Thiele. So his real name is Wilhelm Thiele, and he’s a sergeant, and a member of the occupying army, and hence an enemy of Germany. A Negro and blond and blue-eyed, a bundle of contradictions. A political, an ethnological paradox.

  His father was in the Foreign Legion, his mother was black. So he got the blond hair from his father, and his mother tongue is German. His mother lived in Munich for a while, as a typist in a bank. He grew up with his grandparents. He’s not just German, he’s Bavarian. (Sometimes he says “nit” for “nicht”.)

  What does it feel like being in Germany, as an “enemy”, I ask him.

  It had made him very happy to be in Germany. He gave occasional lectures to his comrades. He read aloud to them from Goethe. His favourite poet is Lenau. And after a quarter of an hour I could see that not only did this Negro know far more than Hitler and the Negroes of Upper Austria, he also had a deeper and more intuitive grasp of the German character than any Professor Freytag-Loringhoven or Roethe; that in the purity of his soul this Negro Guillaume stood far above the ostensible racial purity of Dinter; and that he didn’t even need his blue eyes and blond hair to be German.

  He lived in a little farmhouse not far from Koblenz, and I spent the afternoon with him. He played the violin. I saw that he was slimly built, with large hands and fingers. I saw the photo of his father, a man with blond upturned moustaches. He had died in the service of France. And then I saw the picture of a young girl from Munich, who is to be his bride. Later, of course, once everything is over.

  I’m afraid it will be a long time before it is all over, at least in Munich, where the white Negroes dwell and where I’m sure it’s not possible to be the bride of a Franco-German blond Negro, not without being raked by swastikas.

  Neue Berliner Zeitung—12 Uhr-Blatt, 28 December 1923

  * Black Shame: Roth ironically deploys the term that was used for the perceived shame of parts of the Rhineland being occupied by Black African French soldiers when Germany fell behind with reparations.

  Dinter: Artur Dinter (1876–1948), German racist writer and politician, obsessed with racial purity. The fact that his Nazi Party number was as low as 5 speaks for itself.

  14. Adventurers

  1. THE CAPTAIN OF KÖPENICK

  The cobbler Voigt, who passed away a few days ago, was an adventurer of small scale and surprising consequence. His contribution was to extend the lexicon of crime by a single word: “Köpenick-iad”.*

  It is to this coinage that he owes his survival; not the boldness of his criminal imagination. He was a stunted cobbler; his exterior alone marked him out as a butt of fortune’s joke. His enterprise allowed him a further coup. He himself hadn’t wanted it. It turned out that at a time of doughty militarism it had an extraordinary effect. His absurd appearance was overlooked. His orders were heard and obeyed. He proved that even the most rigid discipline is helpless in the face of stupidity.

  Today his image has paled. When he died, his name flickered up again here and there. People remembered a time when fate still had a sense of humour. The present offers no such ridiculous adventurers; only dismal, humourless ones. The exploits of the cobbler Voigt come to us from a more innocent, pre-Revolutionary era: relatively harmless pranks, with a happy ending.

  To each time its own adventurers.

  2. COUNT SCHLIEFFEN

  Our time boasts Count Schlieffen, who a few days ago was re-arrested in Hamburg.

  Count Schlieffen is a bourgeois officer cadet; real name unknown. Nor can he do without his military lustre. He moves in distinguished circles in Hamburg and America, gets engaged to a singer, marries her on the strength of some false documents, is unmasked at the wedding, flees to Berlin with the help of a few left-wing politicians, and there becomes an aristocrat again. Till he returns to Hamburg, where he is finally nabbed.

  He is a typical adventurer of the twentieth century; a touch of demonism, drawn to politics, origins shrouded in mystery, shading into the tragic. He is the complete hero of a revolutionary age; erotic and sentimental, played upon by war and fame, socially adept and ambitious. A profiteer of our turbulent times, dashing, but with a head for figures. Not to be defeated by border guards or lack of papers, a cool liar, cool as a film hero, and innately superior to those things that ultimately ensnare him.

  He loses himself, likeably enough, in complications, because—walking talking testimony to the effect of the Eternal Feminine—he gives up his career for a woman. He is arrested on his way to the singer in Hamburg, in one final attempt to talk her round.

  There was no need for him to do it. He could have lived a pampered life in Berlin, untroubled by his pursuers. But probably he loves his singer. Either that or his vanity is wounded. The fact that hundreds of people take him for a swindler bothers him little. But the fact that this woman, who once loved him, no longer trusts him, that hurts.

  Count Schlieffen is no hard-boiled sinner. He is sympathetic at that point where he becomes vulnerable. His heart is his Achilles heel. One can understand “Count Schlieffen”. A woman was his undoing. That’s masculine.

  3. COUNT AVALOV-BERMONT

  This Count is a Russian commoner who has made a career in the army, has lived in Berlin since the Revolution, and has awarded, so to speak, posthumous medals to Baltic soldiers and officers. The police have therefore extradited him.

  Count Avalov is an enthusiast, not a snake. He probably believes in his title and his significance. He lives in a middling B&B in the West End of Berlin with an adjutant, who is a former officer. A visit to the “Count” is one of those grotesque experiences Berlin has to offer.

  The adjutant announces you, you wait in an ante-room, the door flies open, and the adjutant announces: “His Excellency”. And in clatters, rattles, jangles the lofty form of the Count, who is tall and presentable: a stately pine from the gardens of Tsarskoye-Selo.

  His voice is rough and hoarse. The syllables march past, curt and clipped, and form up into companies of sentences. His speech is a military function, his gestures fictive rifle exercises.

  Count Avalov believes in himself and his mission. He too can be understood as a victim of his times. The Czar has been murdered and Avalov feels compelled to represent the real Russia in the eyes of the world. He pulls on his costume as a personal demonstration against Lenin and Trotsky.

  He is a brave man, no doubt, and no more dishonest to the world than he is to himself. He wishes to be a prop of the monarchy, and so offers himself as a theatrical prop.

  He is an adventurer out of self-deception. He thinks of himself as a general and Machiavelli rolled into one. All he does is pin tin medals on people.

  Berlin Börsen-Courier, 8 January 1922

  * Köpenick-iad: a confidence trick, as when the cobbler Voigt got into a borrowed military
uniform and occupied the town hall of Köpenick outside Berlin. The subject of Carl Zuckmayer’s enduringly popular tragicomedy of 1931, The Captain of Köpenick.

  15. The Mother

  Yesterday the nineteen-year-old labourer Franz Zagacki was sentenced to five years in prison. He had tried to kill his mother while she was peeling potatoes, first with an axe, then by asphyxiation, and finally by stabbing her. Then, supposing she was dead, he robbed her of a wallet in her petticoats containing two thousand two hundred marks, went to a tobacconist’s, paid his debts, bought cigarettes, invited his friends and his sweetheart who had helped him plan the deed to a cosy get-together in the flat of the apparently deceased woman, and went out to have himself a fun day. The mother though did not die, and the son was arrested and taken to prison for questioning.

  Yesterday the mother stood in court and explained that she had forgiven her son. No sooner were the wounds healed that he had dealt her, than she was setting off to her son’s prison bringing preserves and other delicacies she had forgone. Even while she lay in hospital she was trembling for the well-being of her son, and if she had had the strength and if her lust for life had not prevailed when she was near death, then she would have remained quietly under the bedding in which he had tried to asphyxiate her, in order to spare him. What was her view of her child? she was asked. Nothing but the best. Oh, it wasn’t his fault, bad company had led him astray, it’s always bad company that’s to blame. She didn’t know anything about his girlfriend, he was impressionable, but when he was younger he had been a good boy.

  The mother will now be able to visit her son regularly in prison. With trembling fingers she will pack up preserves for him for Christmas and the other holidays, she will scrimp and save for her son, and her old soul will weep for him and hope. And it will be exactly as though her son was not in prison at all, but at university or abroad somewhere, or in some other kind of place that is not easy to return from for professional or some other reasons.

  The mother’s day is full of work and painstaking, sometimes dirty labour. But between each thing and the next, the scrubbing of the floorboards and the chopping of the kindling, there will be a brief, secretive folding of her hands. And each time she sits down to peel potatoes, as when the axe struck her, she will cry from pain; but stronger than her woe is her hope, stronger than her pain her faith, and slowly from her love of the child, like young leaves from fertile soil a kind of shy pride will sprout, without cause, she couldn’t say why, not based on qualities, but simply on the fact of this boy’s existence.

  And each time she looks at the hatchet or thinks of it, a terrible day will loom up at her out of the past. And for all its terror it’s still weaker in outline and force than the other day, approaching, when her son will come home, upright, healed, and full of regret.

  Full of regret? He has nothing to regret. The others are to blame, of course! Any moment the door will open, and he’ll walk in. And even though it’s five years, five lots of three hundred and sixty-five days, it could be any day.

  Because the mother doesn’t stick to facts, she denies the solar calendar and the year.

  Berliner Börsen-Courier, 25 April 1922

  16. Rose Gentschow

  Rose Gentschow is the daughter of a landowner near Danzig. Her father died of paralysis of the brain. Her mother is addicted to morphine, and is in an institution. Three sisters have taken the prescribed way into middle-class life that ends with marriage to a well-situated man. Rose Gentschow too could have followed that path. She was even prepared for it by the girls’ academy she attended until the age of sixteen. Then she became a secretary. A harmless event undergone by many girls on the path to material self-sufficiency left Rose Gentschow with a bad and painful illness. She was twenty-one at the time. Her mother gave her morphine to relieve her pain. She lost her job. Relatives supported her. Then she met a “friend”. He sent her out on the street. She stole from the flats of gentlemen she accosted in bars, abetted by her friend. Her habit was to slip opium into the glasses they drank from. One, Hemel, a businessman, died. She had slipped a little too much in his drink. He fell off his barstool and was dead. Rose was arrested.

  Today she is thirty-three. She looks younger. Hers is the deceptive youth of women who are professionally young because they live off their looks; who have experienced nothing but passion which doesn’t always age, but sometimes keeps them young; whose life consists of alternating waves of ecstasy and unconsciousness; who drown anxieties, age and illness in intoxication, and forget them in the moment. Rose Gentschow has the beguiling expression of the incurable vice girl. It comes from the faraway sins of dreams. It goes into dreamy sins. Rose Gentschow has remained slender and light. She has never known the everyday worries of the middle class that make one fat and heavy. She lives in consuming passion. But also in consuming poverty. Sometimes she had to earn money to buy her beloved morphine. She sold herself so that she could afford to intoxicate herself.

  On no fewer than fifteen occasions she has tried to escape her fate. Fifteen times she went on a detoxification cure. Fifteen times she lapsed back into morphine dependency. She would have extended her life and her method to an early grave, had Hemel had a stronger constitution. That he didn’t was blind chance. A stroke of fortune interrupted the activity of the lady poisoner. That’s how she’s referred to in the court reports. The one who is poisoned though is she. Her hands are thin, and her gestures awkward and embarrassed. She cries a lot. She tries to hide her face. Then she dries eyes and tears with a fist. The childish movement is charming. Little girls dry their tears with their fists.

  She is facing three judges and six jurors. This is the composition of the new courts, following the ministerial decree of 24 January 1924. The jurors sit up alongside the judges. The jurors’ bench is empty. When Rose Gentschow speaks, she speaks to nine men. She looks at them all. Sometimes her look catches on one or other of them. Perhaps he seems kinder, better, more benevolent than the others. Then the controlling consciousness corrects the stalled look, and she goes back to watching all nine.

  Her voice is thin and low. With all her self-control, tears are never far away. In spite of herself, a sob catches in her throat. Sometimes she is hoarse, creaky, as though speaking without vocal cords. She sounds choked, as though she kept her hand in front of each of her words.

  Her former neighbours are in attendance. They are curious and ­lacking compassion. It is possible they are vindictive. Naïve people often are. Some share the destiny of the accused. Morphine lurks in their eyes. Their hands shake. Do they feel they have something in common? Are they suffering with her? Are they looking into their own future? I watch them eating their sandwiches. Perhaps one can see one’s destiny accomplished before one’s very eyes and still feel hungry. Men are there, both as witnesses and onlookers. Their constitution survived her opium. An army officer speaks. He is as calm and objective as a lawyer. He is not at all excited. But he too was one of her victims. His constitution withstood the opium. He met the girl on Potsdamer Platz. She wasn’t the first, nor the last. These are the women he crosses paths with. He doesn’t become her destiny, nor she his. They are his episodes, and luckily he too is just an episode. He wanders along on the fringes of danger, and nibbles at them.

  Rose Gentschow is still hoping for reprieve. But her small, fogged brain is not equal to the sharpness of the judge. He asks: “How did you come to steal?” She answers: “I didn’t know what I was doing. I had already taken a lot of morphine.” The judge: “Were you stealing on the orders of your friend?” She, swiftly espying possible salvation: “Yes, yes!” The judge: “Then how can you claim not to have known what you were doing?” She is baffled by the logic. From a world of inebriation and thoughtless exhaustion, she suddenly finds herself in a sphere of implacable reason. Dazzled by the luminosity of logic, she leans back, closing her eyes. She loses herself, she is lost.

  She can go on no longer. The world is sinki
ng. She opens her eyes once more. Then she lapses into a kindly oblivion.

  Prager Tagblatt, 10 April 1924

  17. Two Gypsy Girls

  The sun had an unusual, animating shine, it was as brisk as early morning, and as warm as noon, and lots of people were hurrying along the busy street. They were coming out of department stores carrying parcels, they were bustling about, dressed in bright and cheery clothes, as though they were on their way to a great party. The screaking trams, the tooting cars, the clattering buses were creating a joyful tumult. The whole city felt as cheerful as an adult become childish with joy.

  Just then two young gypsy girls came along.

  They were very brown and were wearing bright colourful clothes, red blouses and blue and white floral skirts, red ribbons in their hair and big yellow amber necklaces at their throats. On their feet they had red sandals. They had suddenly sprung up from somewhere, maybe they had come out of a shop. Even in their haste, the people stepped aside, so that they walked into an unoccupied space, and the looks that were sent their way were in equal part astonished and suspicious. They had little childish faces, pointy chins on which smiling dimples barely managed to find room, and brimming violet eyes. (Even their whites had a bluish shimmer.) Their blouses seemed to be casually un­buttoned, and yet were chastely closed, and the stout amber necklaces made their slender throats look even nobler, narrower, ­aristocratic. Under the flowing garments one sensed they were well-grown.

  The two young gypsy girls were walking slowly, casually, a little taken aback, a little confused by the sunny throng, like a pair of alarmed young queens. Even so, their sandals barely brushed the paving stones; the teetering steps of young ladies in heels were heavier and stayed longer on the ground, even though they were in a hurry. The young gypsies wanted to cross the main road, but they were afraid of the vehicles that clattered by so merrily and dangerously to life and limb. Three times they walked out into the middle of the road, only to flee back to the pavement like alarmed colourful birds. A great panic came over their pretty faces. People laughed a little.