The Silent Prophet

by Joseph Roth

  'In Germany,' said one, 'it'll only take a week before the Revolution breaks out. Then it will happen in France, then in England, and last of all in America.'

  'Blockhead,' said the other. 'Who told you that?'

  'I was at a lecture that R. gave to the students.'

  'What nonsense,' said the other. 'First, you didn't understand the lecture, second, it probably had a special meaning, and third, R. is a Jew and I no longer believe a word he says. A few days ago, when I was on duty at T., he spoke to us.'

  'Jew or not, we're finished with all that, there's no religion anymore.'

  'But there are still blockheads, since you're still alive,' cried a third and they all roared.

  'Who are the clever ones, then?' asked Friedrich. They mentioned three names which echoed through Russia and the world. Finally, one mentioned the name that Savelli had now adopted. Several agreed with him.

  'A splendid man,' he said. 'He knows what has to be done. I came across him once in a corridor in the X-department. The corridor was narrow and dark, I stepped back to let him pass, I greeted him, he raised his head, did not reply, only looked at me with his eyes made of night and ice. I felt cold all over. He knows what he wants. Most of the clever Jews only speak prophecies, and that is on account of the radio, just because the ignorant peasants in the villages all listen. And so one never hears anything clever any more, it's all kept for the radio.'

  'Yes,' exclaimed another, 'I often think that the comrades take us for stupider than we are. They say something quite simple a hundred times. I know it by heart already. In the paper they always write the same thing, too.'

  'Why should I care what they say?' thought Friedrich. 'I'm beginning a new life.'

  4

  But he began his new life as if he had already lived it once before. He knew it. He set foot in it like an actor on the stage in a part he has already played on many evenings, in the vague hope of some untoward incident of a minor nature which, through an emergency, assumes the nature of a sensation. He even hoped for minor misfortunes, an arrest, expulsion, perhaps a jail sentence.

  Anyone else in his position would have thought of a revolution. He was surprised that the war did not recommence. When he arrived at M., the mid-German town where he had spent a few rainy days during the war, he noted that it was still raining. In the large windows of the café there still hung notices asserting that Frenchmen, Englishmen, Poles and other nationalities were unwelcome on the premises. The school was of red brick and when one passed by in the morning a chorus of clear children's voices could be heard singing Ich halt' einen Kameraden. In the centre stood the red-brick church. The tax office was made of red brick. The town hall was constructed of red bricks. And although all these buildings veered towards prettiness, and seemed to have been assembled as in a game by some sort of oversized children, they nevertheless betrayed a tendency to eternity, like the Pyramids. After five or six years it was still raining. The tram still shuttled to and fro. Only the conductress had returned to hearth and home. The women still wore the same hats. Where was the comrade who, in those days, had arranged his first genuine false passport? He was alive. He had become naturalized in the meantime and been made a member of parliament. And where was the party leader? He was a member of the administration in Berlin. And, although the Communist tailor was now the furious political opponent of that Social Democratic party leader, it seemed to Friedrich, because he had not witnessed events at close quarters, that both, the Communist and the party leader, were engaged in a consistent and parallel ascent like officers or government officials who attained a higher grade after a certain period of service. And although they had both attained their rank in fighting against each other, the ironic fate that is a special feature of radical politicians conferred on them a frightening resemblance. Like the Jews, who always turn to the east when they pray, the revolutionaries always turned to the right when they began to act publicly. However radical the tailor might be, it did not affect this rule. Every month he seriously expected the revolution. He should have served a prison sentence on account of an insult he had hurled at the party leader, and he had to thank his parliamentary immunity for his present freedom. Twenty years earlier the insulted one had found himself in the same situation. But both seemed to have forgotten it. 'Who knows,' thought Friedrich, 'twenty years from now my comrade will be insulted and complain. The Revolution always remained on the left; only its champions always turned to the right.' 'Last week,' related the tailor, 'two policemen had to remove me forcibly from parliament. You should have seen the goings-on! Oh, things aren't always as peaceful for us as people in Moscow sometimes make out! We are just on the verge of a railway strike. The Party is working at full stretch. We've gained five thousand members in Hamburg. Here, in M., we're strongly represented. We can count on fifty-five per cent of the factory workers. The party funds come in absolutely on time. And twice or three times a week we have our evenings.' 'What a local kind of patriotism this comrade has!' thought Friedrich. 'It's on this basis that love of the fatherland is built. He is proud of the district that has elected him. It won't take much to make him take even the reactionary parties of his constituency under his wing and consider them better than the reactionaries of other constituencies. Here I have an opportunity, no longer rare these days, to be present at the birth of a kind of local patriotism, love of constituency, ab ovo. He considers his communists the most revolutionary. And how he's changed! He now wears a Russian blouse. The last time I was here, he was still wearing an unassuming shirt without a collar. And just as the men who make a bourgeois career acquire a double chin and a paunch, so the men who are my comrades procure a revolutionary costume and a briefcase. A few years ago he still had a hat. Now he wears a sports cap. Then he still wore his hair parted, now he combs it backwards. And he himself is unaware of this. His revolutionary posture develops as insidiously as a double chin. This comrade is reliable.'

  He looked up the former party leader in the diplomatic post he now held. He was living 'according to his station'. The hall looked almost like that of the illustrious Herr von Maerker. Only the party leader's study had remained the same. Modesty is a virtue. The paperknife, shaped like a cavalry sabre, still lay on the desk. A small dome bulged over the ink-well, which resembled a mosque. The forget-me-not frames still surrounded the two sons in uniform, although happily they had returned home. And the only new object was the large oil-painting of the party leader, painted by one of the leading portraitists of the Reich. What did it matter to the painter? He painted, painted without stopping. Once the Kaiser, twice the beloved general, once a radical. Art had nothing to do with politics. The painters wanted to be left alone in their studios. Art was Christmas, a holiday when all hearts beat in the same rhythm. How handsome the party leader was in the portrait, with his gaze directed to the future of the Fatherland, his right hand supported on the corner of the desk and his left toying with an iron watch-chain, which he had substituted for the gold one! No doubt about it, it was painted grey, it was made of iron. And he did not look like a party leader, but like a leader of parties. The Kaiser had known none, but he knew them all. 'We have a passionate interest in Russia,' he began. And, with the satisfaction of a man who speaks in the name of his country, he cited Bismarck, whose reminiscences he had read in all objectivity. Ah, he had always been a non-party man! The Fatherland, like painting, had nothing to do with politics. 'In Germany,' replied Friedrich, 'the so-called Left will probably only succeed in a hundred years in being unrelenting towards their opponents. They are unable to hate. They are unable to become excited. It is their most zealous endeavour, not to defeat the enemy but to understand him. Eventually they come to know him so well that they own him to be right and can no longer attack him.'

  The party leader wandered off into the wide domains of world history. It was evident that he saw himself as speaking from a tribune, and that he treated a solitary listener as an entire assembly. He loved it because he did not for a moment forget that h
e himself was a representative while unfailingly regarding the other, too, as a representative, and he magnified the importance he was wont to ascribe to himself by also attributing great importance to his partner. In the constant hope that each of his utterances was fitted to become a winged word, he now stressed the simple phrases and commonplaces that he had recited to Friedrich years before without pretension and as if by rote, as if they were original ideas. He had evidently, and at the first glance, remained his old self. He still appeared to be wearing the same rust-brown double-breasted jacket, and his trousers still fell in wide folds over wide smooth solid boots, the like of which were no longer to be found in shoe-maker's shop-windows and consequently looked as if they had been sought for long and zealously. But the very care the man took to be humble echoed the diligence he employed to play a central part in the history of the times. And when he repeated again and again: 'If only they'd listened to me then,' or 'Of course things turned out as I prophesied,' or 'The rashness which I have always condemned,' he appeared to be convinced that his prescience justified the sturdy neglect of his dress. And when, from time to time, he spoke of his country as 'we', he believed himself to be equally discreet and blameless in his speech. And yet his 'we', his 'our', his 'us' recalled the way in which the employees of a large department store identify themselves with their firm even though they do not share their master's income.

  Some time later Friedrich was to encounter the party leader at a large assembly of politicians, journalists, diplomats and industrialists, one of those ambassadorial entertainments which are termed 'a congenial gathering' in professional circles and newspaper reports. All the men had donned tails, the uniform of congeniality. They ate sandwiches over whose butter was stretched a regular lattice of anchovy strips. Each held a plate or a cup or an empty glass in his hand without knowing why, and all sought discreetly and in vain for a place where they might dispose of these implements. Crafty guests betook themselves to the vicinity of the window-ledges and removed themselves after having deposited their plate in a perilous place, with meek expressions and in the slight anxiety that it might soon fall down and shatter. They only breathed freely when they had gained the opposite corner. The majority, however, stayed riveted to their plates and were consequently unable to be vivacious. The congeniality went from strength to strength.

  Friedrich ran into a number of people here whom he had known well in Zürich. He even saw Bernardin and Dr Schleicher again. They had both become diplomats and maintained their understanding. They had sealed an alliance for life, were inseparable, and promenaded silently together because they had no more to say to each other. They had talked themselves out. They knew everything about one another. Now they were united by the memory of their bartered confessions. They were peace comrades just as two men who once met in the trenches were war comrades. Each also represented his country. And as both were concerned with so-called peaceful relations between Germany and France, and as they might have been reproached with remissness for any clouding of these relations, they both cherished peace like their own careers and their ambition accorded it the value that generals accord to war. And just as professional marriage-brokers are concerned about the bliss of the parties they have brought together, because their living depends on it, so Dr Schleicher and Bernardin were similarly concerned about peace between the two countries. They trafficked in peace as they had trafficked in state secrets during the war. Their friendship was troubled only if the name of one of them was mentioned in the newspapers more often than that of the other, or if, in the group photographs of conference participants published in the illustrated magazines, the face of one was more distinctly recognizable than that of his friend. This 'congenial gathering' too was taken by a photographer for publicity purposes, to appear under the title 'A diplomatic tea-party' in the Sunday supplements. Bernardin and Dr Schleicher separated, since they took it for diplomatic subtlety not to let their association become apparent to the other nations. While they stationed themselves in the background with heroic modesty, they pressed their faces between the shoulders of the front row so as to appear on the plate nonetheless. And furtively but persistently, in their anxiety at the crucial moment when the flash blazed out, they would discard the facial expressions they had donned as advantageous, cast sidelong glances at each other, and consider which of them was standing in a better and more prominent position. The journalists, whose vocation is ever to scent out secrets, believed that the glances of the two were the equivalent of abbreviated diplomatic Notes. And every reporter who spotted this exchange of glances thought at once of the possibility of drawing attention to it in the morning paper under the magic formula of 'as rumoured in exclusive circles'.

  There was only one journalist at this gathering who considered it unworthy to pay attention to glances. This was the Dr Süsskind whom Friedrich had encountered on the train years before. To be sure, Dr Süsskind did not recognize his old travelling companion. But, even if he had recognized Friedrich, it would probably not have prevented him from remarking very audibly to one of the press attachés who had become so common after the war, and who were initiating the era of democracy: 'When I was in Austria during the war, I realized at once that we should lose the war. Perhaps you remember what I wrote after the breakthrough at Gorlice?' And as the press attaché, who was not yet sufficiently versed in diplomacy to succeed in being tactful, said 'No!', Dr Süsskind went into a detailed account of his article which had revealed a prophetic pessimism. Friedrich recalled the journalist's optimism in the train. 'I once had the pleasure,' he said to Dr Süsskind, 'of meeting you.' 'I certainly don't remember it,' said the candid journalist, for whom truth came first. 'You were sitting in the train with a Prussian colonel and an Austrian major,' persisted Friedrich. 'Quite right,' said Dr Süsskind, 'but I never noticed you.' There was no point in talking to him. As if his primary concern, before embarking on a conversation, was to fathom whether Friedrich was telling the truth, he repeated once more: 'I certainly didn't notice you!' 'Yes,' said Friedrich, to jolt the other's memory, 'your wife was waiting for you at K.' 'Ah,' replied Süsskind bleakly, 'that was not my wife, that was my sister-in-law.' And that disposed of the matter.

  It was in no way remarkable to encounter Dr Süsskind's stubborn matter-of-factness in the realm of this newly hatched diplomacy. The legacy of the career diplomats who had brought about the war through folly, ambition, an unthinking pleasure in the secret game, but who at least displayed the social forms as natural qualities, fell after the war to the bourgeois intellectuals—editors, men of letters, teachers and judges—men who, with an incurable love of sincerity, endeavoured to copy the traditional tricks of international politics, and who could be seen from a mile away as striving to safeguard a so-called state secret. With diplomatic passports, for which they themselves had more respect than the customs officials, they crossed the frontiers hiding in their sealed bags lace for their wives and liqueurs for their guests, in conformity with the familiar behaviour of the lower middle class from which they sprang. Diplomatic intercourse between the representatives of the old and the new states acquired the cosy aspect of bourgeois family occasions; and it was no accident that beer, the festive drink of sturdy uprightness, became a political intoxicant. Beer evenings were the vogue. The reconciliation of the nations was achieved under the aegis of beer, just as formerly the preparation of the war had been achieved to the accompaniment of champagne. Men had become congenial. The international dominance of the bourgeoisie had only just begun.

  Within this petty bourgeois diplomacy only the representatives of the sole proletarian state mastered the old diplomatic forms. A natural cunning, acquired in long struggles with the authorities, a sharp instinct for artifice and dissimulation, a spontaneous desire to deceive friend and foe, all these conferred on the representatives of the Revolution those qualities that an ancient tradition, the inherited experience of aristocratic blood and a training in courteous insincerity had conferred on the diplomats of the vanishi
ng old world. Of all the people Friedrich now had anything to do with—and his occupation consisted in the main of having to talk to them—not a single one seemed to him capable of that kind of impassioned deliberation without which it is impossible to have an overall view of the world. All lay like soldiers in the trenches, knowing only their own section. It was war. And as each had a rank in the services, or at least a well-defined task, each took note of the uniform and insignia of the other; and if one of them were to be asked if the man he had been negotiating with every day for years were good or bad, clever or stupid, enthusiastic or half-hearted, convinced or indifferent, the questioned one would have replied: 'Mr X, about whom you enquire, only smokes cigars, is married, negotiates with me over the concession at Tomsk and is esteemed by his superiors.' And it really was as if the so-called 'human' qualities had been the characteristic features of a period of human history long past and were now only to be found on tombstones, as inscriptions for the dead. It was as if these human qualities were gradually disappearing, like goods for which there was no longer any demand, and as if they had to be replaced by others that were now much sought after. Friedrich never succeeded in obtaining any other answer to his question as to who this or that person might be than: 'X. has left the Party, B. is editor of the Democratic newspaper, Y. is Director General of the Z. works.' And one obtained such answers, not so much because no one cared about anyone else, but because, in fact, an editor seemed to be nothing but an editor and a Director General only a Director General. One of the most intimate peculiarities that could be imparted about a man was that he practised this or that vocation, displayed this or that political opinion. And Friedrich, who had never known a vocation, thought: 'I am the only one with human qualities. I am malicious, nasty, egoistic, hard-hearted and intelligent. But no longer ambitious. My ambition is extinct. For its aim was to exercise power over human beings, not over Director Generals, editors and party members or those without party. It would have been my passion to see through cunning, chastise evil, buttress justice, annihilate the vicious. I would have identified with a cause. Nothing remains for me now but to look on. For twenty years I looked on, in order to learn. For a single year I fought. I shall remain an onlooker for the rest of my life. "Was it really necessary?" said old Parthagener.'