4. The page was left blank aside from this injunction.
7. To Paula Grübel
Field Post 632 on 24 August 1917
Dear Paula,
among the accumulated mail of four weeks I found your letter, which I was all the more pleased to see because of the quite astonishing maturity of its language, and its thought. Have you really become so old?
I am currently in some Augean shtetl in East Galicia. Gray filth, harboring one or two Jewish businesses. Everything’s awash when it rains, and when the sun comes out it starts to stink. But the location has one great advantage: it’s about 6 miles behind the lines. Reserve encampment.
Materially, I’m not so well off as I used to be. Our newspaper is failing, and once the aura of reporter has faded away, there’ll be nothing left of me but a one-year volunteer. And I’ll be treated accordingly.
But for the likes of me that doesn’t really matter. The main thing is experience, intensity of feeling, tunneling into events. I have experienced frightful moments of grim beauty. Little opportunity for active creation, aside from a couple of lyric poems, which were more out of passive sensation anyway.
What you have to say about reading with Frau Szajnocha1 makes me very happy—by the way, said reading is clearly manifested in the stylistic quality of your letter. Please salute the lady for me, and give her my best.
I enclose a poem at your request, kindly read it carefully. Its beauty lies in the originality of its imagery. I consider it one of the few of mine that have completely succeeded.
On August 5 I had a poem in the Prager Tagblatt.2 Please, order up a copy. I should like to have it for reference for some possible future collection.
I hope to be in Lemberg sometime in the next few days. I view your decision to go there as a little premature. I’ll have more to say on the matter in a letter to Uncle.
I think I’ll be gone from here in 2 to 3 weeks. I may be transferred to Lemberg, to the Record Office, or possibly Sternberg. It’s also possible that our office will be moved to Albania, to start a paper there, in which case it’s Albania here I come.
Best wishes
Your M.
1. Szajnocha: Helena von Szajnocha, née Baroness von Schenk (ca. 1863–1945), lived in the same house as the Grübel family in Lemberg/Lvov, Hofmana 7. The divorced wife of a university professor in Cracow, she was a French tutor. A personal and literary influence on Roth and Wittlin. Chronically infirm, she made her rooms a sort of literary and musical salon.
2. The Prager Tagblatt was a leading German-language newspaper in Prague.
8. To Paula Grübel
Vienna, 24 February 1918
Dear Paula,
when I came here, it was freezing cold and clouded over, you could stare at the sun with your naked eye, it was small and round and red like a Christmas blood orange. On Friday, it suddenly warmed up, a hot wind, the foehn. It was very pleasant on our street, among other things I saw on the streetcar a man in a stiff hat, and a wreath around it, presumably of paper, attaching it to his chin, like two bonnet strings. A young lady ran into my arms on the Ring. She presumably took me for a lamppost. Another lady’s skirts flew up in the wind, you could see her stocking was ripped, and she had a provisional red garter. Nice.
At home, I found I had an invitation from the “Scholle,”1 and I duly went along on Saturday. A couple of dilettantes read their contemptible poems. A young lady condescended to participate. Her mother, a Jewess from Leopoldstadt, stood up and said: That’s my little girl. Those four words made her—the mother—immortal. More than the daughter will ever be by her writing. The mother will take up residence in the “Scholle,” and, please God, in a book of mine.
On Monday I went to the Burgtheater to buy tickets. I looked for my friend, Roth the actor, but didn’t find him. He wasn’t at home, maybe he’s left town. Nothing to be had at the box office. I went to the Deutsches Volkstheater. A lady cashier with a mustache. The mustache of an actor, who had had it taken off. She was frowning and hard as if she had food to sell. She looked as though she wanted me not to go near her theater. Purely to annoy her, I bought a ticket for the matinee show of Molnar’s Herrenmode, a piece of filth. On Tuesday I went to listen to Hubermann.2 He played a Bach etude with skill, froideur, and physical exertion. Then some Italian music with warmth and fervor. Finally, as I’d wished, “Ave Maria.” He played it in such a way that I can’t possibly torture you with it any more. Divine.
I felt a little rush of sympathy when he bowed stiffly afterwards. While playing, his expression was austere; the instant he puts down his bow, he loses all his majesty, he’s a poor wretch, almost shy. I thought of my story about the violinist.
I smoke Turkish cigarettes, a delicious aroma, and play with Helene’s little son. He’s blond and blue-eyed, wears a velvet jacket with two big pockets where he stores pencils, pens, pocket knives, chains, crumbs, gingerbread, and chocolate. He gets very dirty at times, and takes particular delight in making me dirty.
I took out a subscription at Last’s, and borrowed Otto Flake’s Logbuch. Flake3 is from Luxembourg, an Alemanne by birth, a cheery, healthy, and sensual type. Occasionally, in his descriptive passages he combines naïveté and inspiration, childish and serious touches so brusquely that you have the sense you’re reading Heine. But then he doesn’t have Heine’s Jewish sentiment, or French elegance. Sometimes he’s clear and objective, like Gottfried Keller, and as bitter and bracing as that. Keller was Alemannic too. You should borrow something of Flake’s, you won’t regret it. Resia4 should read him.
I was ill for three days, with the flu. I had myself looked after, drank chamomile tea, took quinine and aspirin. Today I’m feeling better.
Please tell your father—I’m writing to him under a separate cover—not to go off the deep end if I didn’t send him a card. Does he need a postcard from me with a couple of lines of writing on it to prove my gratitude and devotion? Where would that take us! It’s absurd to be so fixated on externals. I got sick, otherwise I would have written long ago.
If you have any mail for me, would you kindly forward it to me. I’m leaving next Sunday or Monday. Keep me posted.
Greetings to Aunt Resia, and Heini
Your Mun.
Best wishes to Frau v. Szajnocha!
1. Scholle: “soil” or “sod” in German. Almost always—as here—with an unpleasantly patriotic taint.
2. Hubermann: Bronislav Hubermann (1882–1947), a renowned violinist. There is a childhood photograph of Roth in 1905 with a violin.
3. Flake: Otto Flake (1880–1962), writer and essayist. Das Logbuch had just come out with S. Fischer in 1917.
4. Roth’s aunt Resia, wife of Siegmund Grübel.
PART II
1920–1925
Berlin, Newspapers, Early Novels, and Marriage
JOSEPH ROTH WITH FRIEDL IN BERLIN, IN 1922
“No Eastern Jew goes to Berlin voluntarily,” Roth says in The Wandering Jews. “Who in all the world goes to Berlin voluntarily?” Not himself, for sure. But there was in the twenties in the German-speaking world no way around that often invoked “Moloch.” It had the appeal, within a relatively new federation, of an even newer center, with its score of daily newspapers putting out editions around the clock, its myriad openings in film and theater and book publishing, its evidently insatiable appetite for fresh provincial talent. Even if its streets weren’t paved with gold but with particularly unyielding paving stones, it still played the role of London in the story of Dick Whittington. (It was one of the jokes about Berlin that no one actually came from there; it understood all about outsourcing long before the word existed.)
Joseph Roth fetched up there in the summer of 1920, ready if need be, as he stylized it with his typical brio, to sleep on park benches and live on cherries. He had nothing organized, and went there on spec, an
d perhaps in a hurry. He had met Friedl Reichler in Vienna in the autumn of 1919, and successfully wooed her away from her fiancé (a fellow journalist, as it happens). But being—already—under no illusion about the unsteadiness of his life and prospects, and his besetting need for freedom (Brecht’s line in “Vom armen BB” might have been written for Roth: “In me you have someone on whom you can’t rely”), some honest and old-fashioned part of him (substantial, by the way: he wasn’t a principled cad like Brecht) would have conceded that he couldn’t offer stability, home, and a living to the young woman. Perhaps it was Friedl—only moderately disguised, by Roth’s standards—who was the “married woman” who threatened him (in no. 98) with losing his freedom, and for whose sake, so to speak, he upped sticks and went to Berlin (thereby breaking the engagement). Berlin, originally, was perhaps as much about personal liberty (Roth uses the phrase in no. 244, about his move to France, “La liberté PERSONNELLE”) as about professional advancement.
The professional advancement side of things went well. A writer as diligent, as versatile, as spirited, and as inspired as Roth did not want for work. By 1921, he had a regular engagement at one of the twenty dailies, the Berliner Börsen Courier, and made occasional appearances in a number of the others. (He made his debut in the Frankfurter Zeitung in January 1923.) This having “made good” elsewhere permitted him to return to Vienna in triumph (as one can imagine a man with his pride would have insisted on doing, not as a suppliant or a lucky winner) and swoop up Friedl after all. They were married in Vienna in March 1922. Roth, I think, loved Friedl and was proud of her—her sweetness, her appearance, stylish enough to pass for French—but never knew what to do with her. He kept her with him in hotels, or, on the frequent occasions when he was on the road somewhere, whether tours of provincial Germany or abroad to Russia, Albania, and Italy, he parked her somewhere alone, with just his money and his jealousy for company. No. 9 seems, touchingly and ominously, to cover many of the bases of the new existence, from the enigmatic ailment (what’s the matter with her arm?) and her curious misdating of the letter (they weren’t married in December 1921; is it that she hankers for that still to be the case?), to her anxiously trying to fit into his life, which could be no other way than the way it was, and half the time meant being alone and waiting up for him. With the benefit of hindsight, Roth almost always sounds regretful, as for instance in no. 79, a sadly ruminative but still relatively discreet letter to Stefan Zweig, whom at that stage he had yet to meet: “In a fit of mindlessness, I took on the responsibility for a young woman. I need to keep her somewhere, she is frail, and physically not up to a life at my side.” But even before Friedl began behaving erratically in 1928, Roth could sound resentful of his marriage: if you are synesthetically minded, you can surely hear the sailor’s tattoos in no. 21, from Marseilles, in the tough bit of worldly wisdom: “It’s only in a port that you know you’re married.” It’s there in his approval of a man going to Shanghai, of meeting the (ex-Austrian) Mexican chief of police, it’s there everywhere in his fiction where being stuck somewhere with someone is doom, and the final movement of so many stories and novels is an impetuous sudden departure: in Right and Left; in the magnificent, useless last scene of Flight Without End (whose title is often used to emblematize Roth’s life) where Tunda seems briefly to have outrun all his pursuers (one pictures his life, panting in the distance with its hands on its hips); of Hotel Savoy; of “April” and “Stationmaster Fallmerayer” and “Rare and ever rarer in this world of empirical facts . . .” in which the narrator congratulates himself on not having to describe a man “duped into love by a shallow affect,” but instead one “prompted by a profound instinct to flee bourgeois existence.”
But of the (very few) letters from this time, few are personal, and really none are consciously clouded. Instead, we get an early taste of Roth with his elbows out, taking the fight to the enemy. The enemy, it has to be said, is almost invariably head office. It is a little surprising that, coming from the periphery of things as he did, nothing should have been further from Roth than awe or respect for the personalities and institutions of the center (at this stage of his life, he certainly wasn’t making a good imperial subject; the “frontiersman” in him showed itself differently). His letters are quite fearless in their bluntness, and worse in the jaunty disrespect they imply. Whether he’s putting up two fingers to the BBC, or selling himself on the sly—a contracted author—to another publisher, he seems always in a hurry, and to have little regard for the sensitivities of the persons or institutions he’s dealing with, neither the ones he’s trying to charm (“I am told you are sometimes to be found in Berlin”) nor the ones from whom he’s—perhaps not so discreetly—pursuing a disseverance: “Nor do I think the Schmiede will be overjoyed to learn of my new terms.” In a way, it’s as though he’s playing a game, or taking on a dare: to Ihering (no.10) it would be: maintain a cordial personal relationship with your boss, in case you need his support at some future time, while giving in your passionate resignation because the paper he edits is insufficiently left wing for you (make sure he feels bad about this), and also launching a noble gripe that he wasn’t paying you enough, financial and ideological reasons to receive equal weight. You have twenty minutes. Begin. And lo and behold, Roth invented the perfumed kipper.
9. Friederike Reichler1 to Paula Grübel
Berlin, 28 December 19212
half past 11 at night
Servus Paulinchen,
don’t be annoyed by the long silence. My arm got very bad, and hurt a lot. The swelling’s only just starting to go down.
Today I was unwell again—I had a terrible cough. I followed your advice, hot bath, aspirin, sweating; now I’m feeling better. Muh is at the theater, and I’m so worried about him I couldn’t stay in bed any more, and got up to write to you.
He’s terribly busy. He’s working very hard on his novel, which Frau Szajnocha will have told you about. It makes him moody, so he can’t write letters.
Please apologize for him to your father, and put in a good word for him.
How is Frau Szajnocha?
Beierle3 is still staying with us, and says hello.
Your father mentioned a jeweler by the name of Pume Torczyner. Please tell him that that’s my grandmother, my mother’s maiden name was Torczyner.
All roads lead to Brody!
Please give my best regards to your father and mother, and many kisses,
Friedl.
I can’t get hold of Galsen.
12 o’clock already, and Muh’s still not back, what do you say to that?! Shocking!!!!
1. Friederike Reichler (born 12 May 1900 in Vienna) married Roth on 5 March 1922 in Vienna. Always physically delicate, she became schizophrenic in 1929, and was put in asylums in Austria; in 1940 she was euthanized, in accordance with the prevailing practices of the Nazis. Her sweet, rather nervous tone here is ominous.
2. 1921: recte 1922, according to Bronsen.
3. Beierle: Alfred Beierle, friend of Roth’s, an actor and reciter.
10. To Herbert Ihering
Berlin, 17 September 1922
Dear Mr. Ihering,1
please don’t see this letter as a formal goodbye, nor as a polite substitute for a meeting with you, but purely as the expression of a necessity. I regret the all too short period of our collaboration, and freely admit that, while I came to the BBC2 with certain prejudices against you, I am now pleased to entertain high opinions of both your humanity and your literary effectiveness.
I am writing a farewell letter by the same post to Dr. Faktor,3 informing him that his letter occasioned, but did not cause, my resignation. I am no longer able to share the outlook of a bourgeois readership and remain their Sunday chatterbox if I am not to deny my socialism on a daily basis. It’s possible that, out of weakness, I might have repressed my convictions in return for a higher salary or more frequent recognition
of my work. Only Dr. Faktor, already sapped by hard work, constant negotiations with the editorial board, and the difficulties of his own position, treated me with a smiling condescension, often doubted the truth of my protestations, smiled at this and that, and, while I am certainly aware of my own sensitivities, I am forced to conclude that I was treated in a way that was dangerously close to that extended to Herr Schönfeld and other employees of bygone days. As far as my salary was concerned, after the latest raise, it was 9,000 marks. I was allowed to write for other papers, but not to write with all my power for the BBC. The one I was permitted to do on grounds of economy, the other was frowned upon to suppress my ambitions.
I write you this, because I wouldn’t like you to form a false picture of what happened. I would be very glad to meet you in some neutral place, but am not proposing such a thing, but am content to wait for chance to bring it about, if it will.
I remain, with best wishes, your humble servant
Joseph Roth
1. Herbert Ihering (1888–1977), theater critic with the Berliner Börsen Courier, and famously an early supporter of the plays of Bertolt Brecht; later on worked at the Burgtheater in Vienna during the Third Reich, and was a theater critic again in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) after 1945. This letter is an early instance of Roth’s rhetorical power—which sometimes becomes ferocity—and his fearlessness when confronting others in authority.
2. Not the British Broadcasting Corporation, but the Berliner Börsen Courier.
3. Faktor: Dr. Emil Faktor (born in 1876 in Prague, gassed after 1941 in Lodz), feuilleton editor of the Berliner Börsen Courier, deposed under Hitler, left for Czechoslovakia in 1933.
11. Friederike Roth to Paula Grübel
Berlin, 14 July 1924
in the next few days, we are going to go to Prague and then on to Krakow. Please, will you tell me what the prices are like in Poland now, and how well we can live on rentenmarks.1
Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters Page 3