The Silent Prophet

by Joseph Roth

  The old friend—and the same bitterness which nurtured this friendship today, as formerly the same idealism had done. Did they not both walk about with the proud grief of silent prophets, did they not both record in their invisible writing the symptoms of an inhuman and technically accomplished future, whose emblems are the aeroplane and the football and not the hammer and sickle? 'Compulsorily and yet willingly'—as Berzejev wrote—others too made their way to Siberia.

  9

  That is possibly why Friedrich obeyed the order to come to Moscow. He stood in Savelli's office. It was situated in the often described and, one may say, most feared building in Moscow. A light bare room. The customary portraits of Marx and Lenin were absent from the light-yellow walls. There were three wide comfortable leather chairs, two in front of the large desk and one behind it. Savelli occupied the latter, back to the window, face turned to the door. On the shining plate-glass over the desk there lay nothing but a single blank yellow octavo sheet. The glass reflected the dim sky admitted by the window. It was somewhat surprising, in this cold room which seemed still to be waiting for its furnishings, in which however Savelli had lived for over two years, to tread on a thick soft red carpet that was intended to absorb not only the sound of footsteps but all sound of any kind. Savelli still looked as he did on the morning when he had crossed the frontier. As R. had said of him, he had changed as little as a principle.

  'Sit down,' said Savelli to Friedrich.

  'Will it take that long?'

  'I can't very well sit while you stand.'

  'I don't wish to make it comfortable for either of us.' Savelli rose.

  'If you wish,' began Savelli, 'you can have company. R. is leaving tomorrow. He is going to Kemi, sixty-five kilometres from Solovetsk. These are, as you know, pleasant islands, 65 degrees north latitude, 36 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich. Their shores are rocky, with romantic ravines. There are eight thousand, five hundred romantics there already. And please, don't despise the monastery, which dates from the fifteenth century. It even has gilded domes. We've only removed the crosses. That should make R. sad.'

  'R. is no friend of mine,' replied Friedrich. 'You're mistaken, Savelli. At a very important period, R. was your friend and not mine. You know well enough that I want to be with Berzejev.'

  'I'm at a loss where friendships are concerned. R. had his duty to do, like you and me, no more. He does not choose to go on with it—any more than you.'

  'There are such things as rewards.'

  'Not in our cause. We are not our own historians. I have never received a reward. I am only a tool.'

  'You told me that once before.'

  'Yes, some twenty years ago. I have a good memory. There was a good friend of yours present then. Would you like to see him?'

  Savelli went to the door and said something softly to the guard. The door stayed half-open. A few minutes later Kapturak appeared in its frame. As if he had come for just this purpose, he began:

  'Parthagener is dead at last. And I'm alive, as you can see.'

  He began to move about the room, as if he had to prove it. Cap on his head, hands behind his back.

  'You see, it's not true that Comrade Savelli is ungrateful. Do you remember? I could have got fifty thousand roubles for him once.'

  'And what do you earn here?'

  'All kind of experiences, experiences. The expenses on the train don't bring in much. Sometimes I accompany people I know well in the sleeping-car. Do you remember how we used to foot it? I couldn't do it any more nowadays. Look! ' Kapturak removed his cap and showed his thick snow-white hair, as white as Parthagener's beard used to be.

  He accompanied Friedrich to P. Friedrich no longer travelled between decks, nor in a barred railway carriage. Kapturak was sent with him, not out of mistrust but as a guide, and because Savelli possessed a certain relish for underlining the events that depended on his ukase.

  10

  While these lines are being written, Friedrich is living in P., together with Berzejev. Just as in Kolymsk.

  Only P. is a larger town. It must comprise some five hundred inhabitants. And moreover, as a consolation, a man called Baranowicz lives there, a Pole, who has remained in Siberia since his youth of his own free will, without any curiosity about world events, which only reach the walls of his lonely house like a distant echo. He lives as a contented eccentric with his two large dogs, Jegor and Barin, and for several years has given shelter to the beautiful silent Alja, the wife of my friend Franz Tunda, who abandoned her when he left for the West. Foresters and bear-hunters drop in on Baranowicz. Once a year the Jew Gorin comes with new technical devices. On the basis of information received, Friedrich and Berzejev have made friends with Baranowicz. A man one can trust.

  And so they lead the old new life as once before. The frost sings in the winter nights. Its melody may remind the prisoners of the secret humming voices of the telegraph wires, the technical harps of civilized countries. The twilights are long, slow and oppressive, and obscure as much as half of the stunted days. What might the friends find to talk about? They no longer have the consolation of being exiled for the cause of the people, to be sure. Let us hope then that they are contemplating escape.

  For in our view it is the mark of a disappointed man to suppress his nostalgia for the old solitude and bravely to endure the present in the clamorous void. To determined onlookers like Friedrich, without any hope, the old solitude offers every pleasure: the putrescent smell of water and fish in the winding alleys of old harbour towns, the paradisiacal glitter of lights and mirrors in the cellars where made-up girls and blue sailors dance, the melancholy ecstasy of the accordion, the profane organ of popular desire, the fine and foolish bustle of the wide streets and squares, the rivers and lakes of asphalt, the illuminated green and red signals in the railway stations, those glassed-in halls of yearning. And finally the hard and proud melancholy of a solitary who wanders on the fringes of pleasures, follies and sorrows ....

  Publisher's Note

  The Silent Prophet, first published in Germany in 1966 as Der Stumme Prophet, is one of Joseph Roth's most characteristic and revealing works. It is also something of a problem novel in that the manuscript was never revised or prepared for publication in the author's lifetime and did not appear in its present form until twenty-seven years after his death.

  Together with Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without End), 1927, Zipper und sein Vater, 1928, and Rechts und Links, 1929, it belongs to a group of novels all sharing a theme that was central to the author's own experience and view of life: that of the outsider unable to settle in western European society after the 1914-1918 war. Immediately after these biographical novels with their avowed objectivity and reporting of 'observed fact', and with heroes who all represent some aspect of Roth's own personality (real or imagined), he turned to the freer inventions of works like Hiob (Job), 1930, and Radetzky-marsch (The Radetzky March), 1932, for which he is more widely known.

  It has been established that Roth was working on the present novel in 1927 and 1928; S. Fischer Verlag, to whom he was briefly under contract, rejected the unfinished manuscript in 1928. This seems to have discouraged Roth, although excerpts from the book appeared in two publications, 24 neue deutsche Erzähler and Die Neue Rundschau, in the following year. We also know that Roth went to Moscow for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the autumn of 1926 and became increasingly interested during this trip—as his Reisebilder show—in the changes brought about by the Revolution. There is evidence dating from this time of his disappointment with the embourgeoisement of the revolutionary idea and of his own ambivalent feelings towards the superficial allure of western city life, themes which were later to appear in The Silent Prophet.

  In 1926 there was still much speculation about the fate of Trotsky, but interest died down after the publication of the latter's autobiography in 1929. This may be one of the reasons why Roth decided to lay aside the novel he began after his trip to Russia. It is almost certainly the 'Trotsky novel' he
himself referred to in 1938. Although Stalin (Savelli), Lenin, Radek, and Trotsky (T.) appear only as marginal figures in the book there are enough analogies between Friedrich Kargan's fate and that of Trotsky, as it then appeared, to make the link. In his postscript to the German edition, Werner Lengning enlarges on this and also gives an account of how the manuscript came to light and was prepared for publication.

  'From the Reisebilder we know that Joseph Roth was in Moscow in the winter of 1926 for the Frankfurter Zeitung. The scene in the preface to the Kargan novel in the Moscow hotel on New Year's Eve of 1926, indicates the uncertainty about Trotsky's fate which then stirred the world. It was known that, after Lenin's death, Trotsky sharply opposed Stalin, that he lost his post as People's Commissioner for War in January 1925, that he stayed in Berlin in the spring of 1926—still a member of the Politburo—fell ill there and had to undergo an operation. But one only learned later that, on 16 January, 1927, he was exiled to Alma Ata and, on 20 January, 1929, was expelled from the Soviet Union. . . . Trotsky's autobiography appeared at the end of 1929 and he began his restless wanderings from France by way of Norway to Mexico. From the idol of anti-bourgeois circles in Germany, from the exile who could be sure of general human sympathy and who was possibly preparing his escape, expulsion created an outlaw. The Kargan material, already known through two partial printings of certain passages of Book Three, remained unpublished. Joseph Roth turned to other themes, yet he preserved the manuscript until his death [in Paris in 1939].

  'Shortly before aliens were expelled from Paris in the Second World War, his friends Friderike Zweig and Hermann Kesten had given the manuscript they had discovered to Joseph Roth's French translator for safe keeping; then the trail was lost. In the confusion of the war and the post-war period, the Kargan manuscript, together with other effects, came to America, was there salvaged for the second time by Hermann Kesten in 1963, and was handed over to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York with the agreement of the firms of Kiepenheuer & Witsch of Cologne and Allert de Lange of Amsterdam [joint publishers and copyright holders of Roth's work]. With other manuscripts which Hermann Kesten had selected for publication in 1964, the Cologne firm received the photocopies of the Kargan manuscript, the so-called Trotsky novel.

  'The initial perusal of photocopies at the firm was discouraging. One had the impression of sheets of manuscript and typescript hurriedly assembled in bundles before the flight, which had resisted all attempts at sorting until then.

  'The "Trotsky novel" finally came to the author of this postscript who had already become familiar with Roth's handwriting in the course of deciphering the unpublished letters of Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig and Blanche Gidon.

  'Inspection of what at first appeared as inextricably confused sheets gave a good insight into the working methods of Joseph Roth, who had reworded the novel repeatedly at different times, and finally there emerged two handwritten drafts of the early part of the novel (drafts A and B) and a typescript (draft C), which partly supplement each other. Draft B begins as a copy by Roth of draft A as reworked by him. Typescript C contains further condensed and tightened texts from draft B, but these make up only a third of the novel.

  'From the three drafts it became possible to reconstruct the novel continuously as far as Chapter Seven of Book Two. After that point no continuation appears to exist. However, by then the main characters belonging to the Kargan material as well as the line of action had clearly emerged, facilitating the deciphering of script, letter forms, page numbers (mostly scored through but recognizable with the aid of a magnifying glass as being in Roth's hand), and any manuscript sheets not belonging to this novel were eliminated. The result showed that Joseph Roth not only worked on each successive draft of his novels with astonishing thoroughness, but also kept everything—from draft A to draft C—that was superseded at successive creative stages. All the material needed to complete the novel was therefore there. Where Joseph Roth's initial pagination was either missing or illegible, it became necessary, with the aid of a magnifying glass, to test the internal relationship to the still unfinished chapters of Book Two and Book Three and to find the textual link between sheets by means of overlapping sentences. This cumbersome procedure brought the desired result: sheet succeeded sheet in unbroken sequence. Thus it was possible to produce an edition in which there is not a single word that is not by Roth himself.

  'It has already been said that version C includes only parts of the novel and goes only as far as the middle of chapter seven of Book Two. From there on only the B version exists, based, up to this point, on the revised portion of the old A version. The present edition therefore relies on the C version for the opening chapters and on the B version for the remaining ones.'

  About the Author

  Joseph Roth (1894-1939)

  Prolific political journalist and novelist, whose major work, the family history Radetzkymarch appeared in 1932. It depicted the Habsburg empire Austria-Hungary from 1859 to 1916. Roth saw admiringly the old empire as a cosmopolitan world and its decline a sad chapter in European history. His ambivalence toward Western civilization led him increasingly to draw on the heritage of Eastern European storytelling.

  "The Eastern Jew looks to the West with a longing that it really doesn't merit. To the Eastern Jew, the West signifies freedom, justice, civilization, and the possibility to work and develop his talents. The West exports engineers, automobiles, books, and poems to the East. It sends propaganda soaps and hygiene, useful and elevating things, all of them beguiling and come-hitherish to the East. To the Eastern Jew, Germany, for example, remains the land of Goethe and Schiller, of the German poets, with whom every keen Jewish youth is far more conversant than our own swastika'd secondary school pupils." (from The Wandering Jews)

  Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth in the German colony of Schwabendorf in Volynia (Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a Jewish family. His father-in-law was an installment seller in Vienna, his uncle a tailor, and his grandfather a rabbi. Roth's father left the family before Joseph was born and died according to Roth in a lunatic asylum in Amsterdam - actually he died in Russia. Roth lived by turns with relatives of his father and mother.

  Roth's early years are little known and his own account is not always reliable. He attended Baron-Hirsch-Schule, Brody (1901-05), Impererial-Royal Crown Prince Rudolph Gymnasium (1905-13), studied literature and philosophy at the University of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) and Vienna (1914-16). From 1916 to 1918 he served in the Austrian army in the rifle regiment (Feldjäger) - he probably had a desk job. Roth claimed later to have spent months in Russian captivity as a prisoner of war. The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, with its 15 official languages, collapsed in the war, but Roth did not lose his adoration of the vanished empire. "... we all lost a world, our world," he once said.

  After the war Roth worked as a journalist in Vienna, where he wrote his first feuilletons, and moved in 1920 to Berlin, which he described as "an aimlessly sprawling stone emblem for the sorry aimless of our national existence." In the 1920s his articles showed traces of socialist conviction, although he never became a political thinker. During his exile years he professed Catholicism. Roth's marriage failed, his wife became mentally ill and was confined to a hospital.

  From 1923 to 1932 Roth was a correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung, travelling around Europe. Some of his widely read articles from this period were collected in The Wandering Jews (1927). In 1926 Roth went to the Soviet Union and recorded his resigned Socialist views in Der stumme Propher, which was published posthumously in 1966. When Hitler came into power, Roth was obliged to flee Germany and return to Vienna. "The European mind is capitulating," he wrote in 1933. Roth wrote for emigre publications, and drank even harder than before. In 1933 and 1937 Roth travelled in Poland on PEN lecture tour. After the assassination of Dolfuss, he moved to Paris, where he died in a poorhouse (in some sources in an army hospital) on May 27, 1939.

  "Joseph Roth was an enigmatic figure in his life more than in his wo
rk. Though Jewish, he rarely spoke about his Jewishness. Plagued by poverty, he admired aristocracy. Though extremely gifted, his truly deserved recognition came to him only posthumously." (Elie Wiesel on Joseph Roth, in a review of Radetzky March, New York Times, Nov. 3, 1974)

  Roth started his career as a writer in the 1920s under the influence of French and Russian psychological realism (Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), but later his works became nearer Viennese Impressionism (Hofmannstahl, Schnitzler). In Hotel Savoy (1924) Roth described a variety of hotel clientele, arranging the stories according to the wealth and status of the figures. Die Rebellion (1924) was a story of Andreas Pum who has lost a leg in battle. "He believed in a just god. One who handed out shrapnel, amputations, and medals to the deserving. Viewed in the correct light, the loss of a leg wasn't so very bad, and the joy of receiving a medal was considerable. An invalid might enjoy the respect of the world. An invalid with a medal could depend on that of the government." He plays the barrel organ on street corners. After a rebellion his marriage is ruined and Pum finds himself in jail. Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927) traced the experiences of an Austrian soldier who makes his way back from captivity in Siberia to West, and who finds himself alienated from the bourgeois world. The protagonists of these novels belonged to the wartime generation that found the society changed and the traditional values threatened.

  Roth's best-know novel, Radetzkymarsch, portraits the latter days of Habsburg monarch, its multiethnic equilibrium, bureaucratic correctness, and hedonistic sensuality. In the opening of the work an Austrian army officer saves the life of the young emperor at the battle of Solferino. Through his account of the descendants of this hero Roth creates a Spenglerian vision of European culture in decline and loss. The same nostalgic theme is repeating in Roth's later novels. Its sequel, Die Kapuzinergruft, (1938), traced the collapse of the Empire through an account of a whole family, the Van Trottas. It shows Roth responding to the National Socialist takeover in Austria with an expression of passionate commitment for the Hapsburg dynasty. The author once said: "I am a conservative and a Catholic, consider Austria my fatherland, and desire the return of the Empire."