2. brother: Heinrich von Brentano (1904–1964). German foreign minister from 1955 to 1961.
3. more and more solitary: cf. the dangerously detached Franz Tunda, the hero of Roth’s 1927 novel, Flight Without End, which is also the novel that is described as “coming along.”
4. group: the “Gruppe 1925,” a Marxist discussion club, whose secretary was Rudolf Walter Leonhard, and whose members included Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Ehrenstein, Egon Erwin Kisch, Kurt Tucholsky, and Alfred Döblin. Not a natural or congenial habitat for Roth.
28. To Bernard von Brentano
[undated]
Dear friend,
thank you so much for your letter. I wish you would always write with such detail and clarity. Today I got your piece on the blown-up building. It’s not outstanding, but it is journalism. In such pieces I miss information. The number of workers, the buildings on either side, the neighborhood and its social setting.
Your visit to Frankfurt will probably encounter difficulties. I haven’t discussed it with Reifenberg yet.
Nor can I tell you whether I’m coming to Berlin or not.
I want to turn down your suggestion regarding the Modeblatt. I have no desire to take on the goodness of your mother and your family for an organ I’ve never even seen. I don’t think it’s quite right. Not even with your permission. The sort of journalism that makes profit (“tacheles”) from a chance personal relationship seems dubious to me. There is only one person who can take this thing on, whether for the FZ or the Modeblatt, which is you. I don’t understand why you didn’t do it long ago anyway.
From your wife’s letter I see that Landau did come in useful. In matters of health and money, prominent Jews are always a good idea. Jewish doctors are a sort of atonement for the crucifixion.
Will you tell me what Florath is up to.
Call Reifenberg about Diebold.
Neither with Reifenberg nor anywhere else in the Lothar1 establishment did I come upon any favor for the idea of your visit. It wouldn’t greatly matter anyway. I’ve been there, and heard a lot. The party was arranged for and partly by Simon. It was my first experience of the Frankfurt haute volée. Seven counts were of the company, Unruh2 drank champagne in an exclusive circle. Jewish and Christian bankers behaved abominably. Their wives were whores manquées, dreadful informality for all their efforts to stay among themselves and in costume. Panic at the approach of any outsiders. A fancy dress ball where everyone pretended not to know one another, and where all those who wanted to, rapidly got acquainted. A few didn’t—and remained tiddly ridiculous outsiders. I was the only one with more pride than the counts and bankers. I sat there silently. Simon crept around me, my look drove him away, he saw bombs ticking in my eyes. A stench of living bourgeois corpses.3 For at least a day Simon hated me. If our relationship takes account of this development, I will leave the paper.
No, my dear Brentano, this isn’t a society where I want to be known and read. The aristocracy is visibly subservient to industry, industry to the banks, and turn about. It’s a world dying of ugliness. If the Andrä society in Berlin is anything like that, I want no part of it. I’m afraid I’m right. These people will cling to power for another 5 years. Their manners gave them power over the proletariat. Now they themselves are unmannerly plebeians. Proles have better taste.
As of yesterday my hatred of the country and its rulers has grown considerably. I am bound to leave it.
Your old
Roth
Kiss your wife’s hand. Get well!
1. Lothar: Hans Lothar, relative of Heinrich Simon’s, working on the FZ.
2. Unruh: Fritz von Unruh (1885–1970), playwright, novelist, essayist. Pacifist after World War I. Went to live in France and Italy in 1932, in New York from 1940. Wrote an autobiography, The General’s Son, in 1957.
3. living bourgeois corpses: see the ferocious party scene in Flight Without End, based on such experiences. JR in those days was like an open knife, a mixture of prophet, revolutionary, and sociopath.
29. To Bernard von Brentano
Kaiserhof, Essen, 11 February 1926
Dear friend,
your letter of the 6th was forwarded to me here today. By now you will have spoken with Reifenberg, and you will know my views on editing. But just in case, let me say again: it goes against the grain of journalism to forbid an editor to make cuts. Since I fought for this principle the whole time I was in Frankfurt, I can’t very well turn around and say you shouldn’t be cut. (It wouldn’t do much for you either.) Not only is it right to cut and to make changes, I see it almost as an imperative. Of the 40-odd pieces I’ve written, maybe ten appeared “unshorn.” You are no soloist, you’re a choir member. You toe the line. In questions of detail, you can argue the toss if you like. But in principle you are duty bound to submit. Perhaps, with your jealous love of every single line you write, you will become a brilliant poet, but you’ll never make a half-decent journalist. The subject of your article is sacred to you. Your article is means to an end. Your subject and you, the writer, are more important than your article. As much more as you are more than the air you breathe out. As far as your latest piece is concerned, it wasn’t any good. Kracauer cut it. He was right to. It was loose, inorganic, the description of a path, but not the path itself. You have good ideas, good images, good turns of phrase. But they don’t grow together. Your pieces are chain links without any coherence. Read French feuilletons, read Heine’s prose. Learn about natural transitions. Your spade was the best piece of yours I’ve read. In poems, atmosphere and rhythm fuse loose things together. In so-called prose, the context must make the atmosphere.
My wife is in Paris, Hotel de la place de l’Odéon. I’m about to go on the road for a few weeks. With no money. It’s terrible to set off in such a state, I’m desperate, I can’t forsake my expensive habits, and the newspaper is economizing, and economizing horribly. It’s no fun any more, I haven’t even had an advance for March, I have no contract, I am inconsolable.
It’s not pretty in the Ruhr, Nationalist like everywhere, or still worse, in Cologne. Everything is red-white-and-black, all the cinemas are showing Nationalist trash, the “black shame”1 is proclaimed on every street corner, “the enemy is gone,” our culture is under arms.
Tell Dr. Guttmann, to whom I send regards, I’ve written to him already.
Write to me at my old Parisian address, or at the newspaper, it’ll be forwarded to me either way.
Don’t take my strictures amiss. You are the only young person I have any regard for, don’t go fishing for compliments from the clientele at Schwannecke’s,2 you shouldn’t trust compliments anyway. If you don’t live up to your own standards, no amount of compliments will help. Don’t write letters in your initial excitement. Leave it for 24 hours, if you’re still excited.
I didn’t write to Döblin, who’s not the president of the association, but to Rudolf Leonhard, who was responsible for inviting me. Between ourselves, it’s no advantage to belong to such a club. There are people in it I despise. I told Leonhard that I wondered if I could praise an association whose task it was to get all decent people to emigrate. The state is not just Gessler’s3 and Stresemann’s4 and Gerhart Hauptmann’s,5 but also Heinrich Eduard Jacob’s,6 Alfred Kerr’s,7 and Rowohlt’s,8 and there’s nothing in it for us.
Let’s meet up when I have money again. Keep me posted.
Your old
Joseph Roth
1. “black shame”: an allusion to the Nationalist campaign against the African soldiers who were a prominent part of the French occupying force in Germany left of the Rhine.
2. Schwannecke’s: rather preening literary café in Berlin in the 1920s, just off the Kurfürstendamm. See JR’s feuilleton “At Schwannecke’s,” in What I Saw.
3. Otto Gessler (1875–1955), German defense minister from 1920 to
1928.
4. Dr. Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929). German chancellor in 1923, foreign minister from 1923 to 1929. Responsible for the Locarno treaties in 1925, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in the following year.
5. Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), playwright, novelist, essayist. It seems the first three names here meet with Roth’s approval—or at any rate are figures of substance—and the second three not.
6. Heinrich Eduard Jacob (1889–1967), writer, biographer, essayist.
7. Alfred Kerr (1867–1948), the other well-known theater critic of the day (with Ihering).
8. Rowohlt: Ernst Rowohlt (1887–1960), founder of the publishing house bearing his name; it was situated first in Berlin, and after the war in Hamburg.
30. To Benno Reifenberg
Paris, 29 March 1926
Dear friend,
at last, spring has come to France, and our meteorological soothsayer, the abbé Gabriel, is said to have predicted fine weather for Easter. Come and visit, there are plenty of things we can do! We can take the boat to Sèvres, past the irrigated fields of Asnières, and Sèvres-Ville d’Avray, where Gambetta died and Balzac lived. We can visit the grand, famous, and now verdant park at St. Cloud, more of an aristocratic wood, really, stand on the plateau from where one can look over the whole of Paris, the cheerful squirming of its chimneys, and the stately, dignified, and happy dance of its towers. Would you like to go to Versailles, Malmaison, St. Germain? Would you like to see the old cathedral of St. Denis? Wherever you go, you will find the earth drenched with history, a cultivated nature that, with proud grace, has yielded to human wishes; humane landscapes, endowed with common sense; paths that seem to know themselves where they are going; hills that seem to know their own height; valleys that can dally with you.
There will be many people too. Charabancs take inquisitive Englishmen all around the outskirts of Paris, travelers of the kind we are familiar with, who need to feel they have understood something to enjoy it, and can’t in any case enjoy it without taking a photograph of it. It might be an idea, therefore, to head out to Normandy, by way of Rouen. It’s really not far! If we’re at the St. Lazare Station at ten o’clock on Good Friday morning, we can lunch in Rouen at noon, with a view of the cathedral, the lean singing central tower of Rouen Cathedral, the old medieval city, whose bells are very powerful and very distant, and whose streets and lanes are of a bright and cheerful narrowness, of the sort one finds only in French towns.
And two hours after that, we’d find ourselves in Le Havre, the second-biggest port in France. We’d tour the old harbor together, where the little bars are: where the carousels turn, and the dance halls are packed, and where you can win—or lose—a lot of money. Then we can go on a walking tour of Normandy. People will stop and stare. Because in this country, no one goes anywhere on foot, even though the roads are as fine and smooth as parquet floors. The livestock will be grazing in the fields. Every hour, we will hear the chimes of Lisieux, Honfleur, and Pont-l’Evèque. By night, the searchlights of Le Havre stroke the dark countryside like silver hands. And always, the song of the sea.
I think we’ll go to Deauville, the very ritzy, still empty, and in any case boring spa town. From there, there’s a direct express to Paris. Four hours.
There, doesn’t that sound good to you? Come, and come soon!1
Your Joseph Roth
1. Reifenberg had this letter printed—see no. 33—in the Easter supplement of the FZ, on April 4, 1926; it is included in Report from a Parisian Paradise.
31. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth
Frankfurter Zeitung, editorial
Frankfurt am Main, 7 April 1926
Dear Mr. Roth,
I have much to thank you for, Le Sourire1 and the American magazine; for your punctual Easter letter which I took personally, even though I went ahead and printed it in the newspaper; for your continuing work on the Ruhrgebiet, and the “private lives of workers”; and now for your reportage from the battlefields. I would put it to you that you change the title from “Don’t Forget the Battlefields” to: St. Quentin, Perronne, La Maisonnette.2 That gives the piece a geographical title that is a continuation of my Champagne. Hermann Wendel is writing on Verdun. In any case, I don’t think the title “Don’t Forget the Battlefields” is a great loss.
Dear Mr. Roth, I won’t have to tell you that your departure from our newspaper is the gravest blow I have experienced in the course of these early years. I was simply counting on you. I need the work of men of my generation with whom I can communicate effortlessly, with whom I share ideas that I have grown up with. I would see it as a defeat if your name were now to appear in Berlin newspapers. I have said as much to the firm, and ask that you believe me when I tell you that the firm shares my view, and is very concerned to reach a solid understanding with you. If you think the suggestion that you go to Italy was a refuge, a pis aller, then you are right inasmuch as the firm is really in a tricky position with you. When they took on Mautner, they did give you a fairly firm guarantee of Paris. Then, through the physical incapacity of Mautner, which emerged only later, it was forced to take on Dr. Sieburg. It’s not altogether that they don’t want to send Dr. Sieburg, a noted feuilletonist, as you yourself concede, together with you to Paris. But the firm wants to keep you on at the newspaper, and your name to appear in it, come what may. Given the pithy way that you write, the dateline or subject matter of your pieces is always a secondary concern. If therefore Italy does not agree with you, I have been asked to put the following proposal to you: the firm is ready to send you as a feuilleton correspondent to Moscow, and is also prepared to send you to Spain for a time. True, we have an elderly correspondent in Spain, but he writes little or nothing any more, and we have little sense of contemporary Spain. This last proposal comes from Mr. Schotthöfer. The proposal relating to Moscow may be more attractive to you. There is, admittedly, the question whether your knowledge of Russian is good enough. You personally, Schotthöfer insists, would not only experience no difficulties, you would be received with great warmth. I still cling to the idea of Italy as the best suggestion. The problem of Mussolini and Fascism is internationally acute, and it will be a question of identifying the national component of Fascism. To date, we have heard far too little from Italy.
I would like to add (and Brentano will bear me out) that Sieburg is very unhappy about the way that he and you have by force of circumstance been turned into rivals. To my mind, Sieburg is very frail, and uncertainty has made him adept. I don’t quite trust him on the surface, but I do truly believe that among the few genuine sentiments he is capable of is the desire to get along with people of your stamp.
I now must ask you to let me know your decision soon. Sieburg starts in Paris on 1 May. It would be ideal if you could keep us supplied with occasional short pieces and news stories throughout April. We are rather too insular, and have nothing about France in the newspaper. Yesterday we ran a report that 350,000 French war veterans demonstrated for Locarno, we should have been able to offer a little background on such a story.
I wish you well, and remain with warm greetings and in expectation of a speedy reply your Reifenberg
1. Le Sourire: a Paris-based humorous paper.
2. St. Quentin, Peronne, Maisonnette: see Report from a Parisian Paradise.
32. To Bernard von Brentano
8 April 1926
Dear friend,
you write me bafflingly unclear and ill-conceived letters. I worry about you. You are in a bad way, I know, Frankfurt and the firm are to blame. But you must be stronger than your surroundings at all times; remember that.
Don’t worry about a hotel or spa. There are plenty of rooms, it’s enough if you write me 4–5 days before you come, no earlier, no later. Most likely you have different standards than I do where hotels are concerned, but you can always move. There are plenty of quiet places on the map, so
me in Brittany come to mind, which Professor Hensard told me about. Just see that you get here!
As far as my position is concerned, you are entirely mistaken. You think I fear having Sieburg in Paris as a rival, whereas the situation is that the firm is compelling me to leave Paris. They won’t let me stay there. I informed Reifenberg of my decision to stay in Paris, and leave the paper. Now the publisher proposes Italy, Spain, or Moscow, doesn’t seem to be that shaken about my departure. I’m not keen to go to Ullstein, though I could. Stahl would like to have me. I don’t want to surrender to the firm that has treated me badly. I don’t want to turn down Moscow just like that either. I am thinking my position through very carefully.
That, for your information, is how things stand. Mr. Reifenberg doesn’t seem to have told you. I don’t know if he has a reason for keeping his correspondence with me secret, but I don’t think so. I am writing this to put you in the picture. In any case, my trust in this Jewish firm is shaken, and nothing remains but my friendship with Reifenberg. I know he will get old and gray before he achieves anything here, and that he himself has no idea how little he has achieved. I only hope he doesn’t have a bad awakening one of these days. He is anything but careful.
Give him my regards, tell him—which is true—that friendship has compelled me to share this with you, and try to be calmer and not so nervous and fidgety when you next write,
to your old
Roth
33. To Benno Reifenberg
9 April 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
thank you very much for your long letter, which must have been as hard for you to write as mine was for me. I am terribly cast down, I can’t answer you yet, I beg you for around 8–10 days’ grace. To leave you behind in the firm is like leaving a brother on the field. Believe me! You have no idea how much I stand to lose in both personal and career terms if I have to leave Paris.
Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters Page 8