Change the title of my piece; change the content too, if you like. I came up with the title as a nod to yours. As of and by itself it’s not very good. The article isn’t very good either, by my standards. I have just now written and mailed you a good one, about Paradise.1 I hope you print it soon—or not, after all, what does it matter?
How is your heart, and how is Jan?2 Write me a personal line or two. There is nothing so cruel as having a friend in an editorial office. The friendship of the poor! You hear the chains rattle.
Be well! Paris is warm and lovely! (Won’t you come here spontaneously?) My letter was meant personally, you understood . . .
Your very old
Joseph Roth, I will call myself Moses3 from now on, just so
1. Paradise: see the feuilleton “Report from a Parisian Paradise” on the pleasures of, entre autres, calvados.
2. Jan: the Reifenbergs’ son, after whom Roth almost always asks fondly.
3. Moses: a prime expression of JR’s variable identity.
34. To Benno Reifenberg
22 April 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
I’m going to give you my answer today, and beg you to forgive me for having taken longer than I said. I am ill and in bed, my handwriting won’t be distinguished, my style not very accomplished.
Let me tell you once again that leaving you and the FZ concerns me more than taking a job at Ullstein, for example. I’ll be perfectly candid, and admit to you that I’d rather not write at all, than write for another paper.
The fact that the firm wants Mr. Sieburg in Paris—that’s not for me to comment on. But sending me packing from Paris, because Mr. Sieburg doesn’t want me there, that hurt.
Mr. Sieburg is an excellent feuilleton writer. Do I therefore have to suffer because a feuilleton writer decides to try and double up as a political correspondent? You can’t write feuilletons with half a mind or one hand tied behind your back. And it’s wrong to write feuilletons on the side. It’s a bad underestimation of the whole profession. The feuilleton is just as important to the paper as its politics—and to the reader it’s even more important. The modern newspaper is made of everything else in it before it’s made of politics. The modern newspaper needs a reporter more than it needs a leader writer. I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish. Why won’t people stop kidding themselves that a fancy-pants article on the situation in Locarno will grip readers and win subscribers. If Mr. Sieburg is to write mainly feuilletons, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t equally well have remained your Paris correspondent. I won’t be gotten rid of just because it happens to suit a colleague. It’s like a curse: how can the FZ not manage to retain two such gifted journalists as Mr. Sieburg and me.
I love this paper, I serve it, I am useful to it. No one asks my opinion when it occurs to someone to have me removed from Paris. They read me with interest. Not the parliamentary reports. Not the lead articles, not the foreign bulletins. But the firm persists in thinking of Roth as a sort of trivial chatterbox that a great newspaper can just about run to. Wrong. I don’t write “witty glosses.” I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper. I’m a journalist, not a reporter; I’m an author, not a leader writer.
I asked for a contract. Stenographers and telephonists get contracts—I don’t. I asked for a raise. My pay is among the lowest in the company. I submit a book. It’s turned down. Since I’ve been with the FZ it seems to me, the only respect I’ve encountered has come from rival papers. It really is an art to take someone as willing, and useful, and loyal as me, and alienate him.
Of your various suggestions: Moscow, Italy, and Spain, only Moscow is an adequate replacement for Paris, though I don’t want to rule out the others. You will understand that my reputation as a journalist is paramount to me. It will be damaged by my departure from Paris, and my replacement by Mr. Sieburg. Only a series of Russian reportages can rescue my good name.
Spain is journalistically uninteresting. Italy is interesting, Fascism less so. I take a different position on Fascism than the newspaper. I don’t like it, but I know that one Hindenburg is worse than ten Mussolinis. We in Germany should watch our Reichswehr, our Mr. Gessler, our generals, our famous compensation program to landowners. We don’t have the right to attack a Fascist dictatorship while we ourselves are living in a far worse, secret dictatorship, complete with Fememorde,1 paramilitary marches, murderous judges, and hangmen attorneys. My conscience would never allow me, as an oppressed German, to tell the world about oppression in Italy. It would be a rather facile bravery to report behind Mussolini’s back, and keep my head down in my homeland, and go on subsidizing the thugs of the Black Reichswehr with my taxes. While I mounted an attack on Fascism in my feuilleton, in the political pages they might just about risk a mild whispering against Mr. Gessler. That’s cowardice, as I see it.
I propose: Russia until winter, not just Moscow, but Kiev and Odessa as well; and in the winter Spain and Italy under some other aspect.
Manfred Georg2 is going to America for the 8 Uhr Blatt. Kisch3 is going to Russia for the BZ. I can’t be seen to do any less than them. There is so much going on in Russia, one doesn’t have to write about the Communist terror. The presence of so much new life springing up from the ruins will give me a lot of unpolitical material.
Will you please ask Mr. Schotthöfer—and my greetings to him—what I need to obtain a Russian visa. My skin disease will take another 3 weeks or so to heal. Till that time, I would like some time in which to convalesce.
That’s what I propose. I hope the company won’t need to think twice, this time. I’d like a speedy answer.
With best wishes I remain
Your old
Joseph Roth
1. Fememorde: “Vehmic murderers”—an anthropological label from the Dark Ages for these political killings that appear in a list of shameful manifestations in the Weimar Republic.
2. Manfred Georg (1893–1965), journalist and writer. Left Germany in 1933 for Prague, then 1938 to New York, where he founded and edited the German-language progressive Jewish weekly Der Aufbau.
3. Kisch: Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), the so-called rasender Reporter (roving or racing or raving reporter), one of the most prominent journalists of the time, and possessor of a suitably adventurous life.
35. To Benno Reifenberg
Café de la Régence
Paris, 29 April 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
thank you for your letter, and your kind words on my “Paradise.”1 Entirely undeserved. There was so much more that might have been said, and my feuilleton covers only a small part of Paradise. Tomorrow, I’ll send you a couple of book reviews, and in the coming days a feuilleton on the preacher Samson.
I will answer your official letter tomorrow, officially, and for the firm. I have a few counterproposals, details that might mitigate my defeat, our defeat, if the company agrees to them. Thank Picard.2 I’m going to see him tomorrow. It’s too bad I can’t go to Ullstein for 1,500 a month, and write for Monty Jacobs3 instead of Benno Reifenberg. I would have to close my eyes and think of journalism, or else write for the Frankfurter Generalanzeiger. Even that is better than Ullstein. Plus I’ve suddenly come down with something “very nasty,” a serious skin condition. For a while it looked “like syphilis,” the blood test hasn’t been done yet. I am completely covered with red boils, I can only go out after dark, can’t shake hands, I’m completely slathered with sulfur, and stink to match. You wouldn’t so much as spit at me, in spite of being my friend, because in addition to being good and distinguished, you are sensitive. This illness lasts for 4–5 weeks apparently, or it may do, dermatology is learning from me, and claims it is an illness associated with hair loss, and—in me, imagine—the END OF PUBERTY! It’s God’s revenge, praise be to Jehovah. I already have a mattress grave, and must leav
e Paris. Please will you see that I get paid, it’s the end of the month already. My money for May. I’m writing a separate letter to the firm and to Mr. Nassauer. Regards to him! Is he better? Why does the firm ignore my appeals if it cares what happens to me? . . .
I am miserable, industrious, poor, and abandoned. It’s a cold spring this year. I’m itching all over. I have to stay up and work at night to keep from scratching myself, and in the day I’m wretched. The doctor tells me it may start to improve tomorrow. I’ll be relieved once my extremities are in the clear again. At least it’s not infectious. I’m proud of that.
Who is Professor Salomon4 from Frankfurt? He’s been in Paris, telling everyone (telling Valeska Gert)5 that I have the most modern style of any journalist around.
This letter will—I know—make you disgusted with me, but you should fight the feeling, that’s what friendship is. Of the two of us, things are easier for me, because you are certainly a finer, handsomer—what a comparative—human being than your wretched old Moses Joseph Roth
I thought Kracauer’s umbrella piece was delightful up until the last 2 paragraphs. The style of the evening edition is still not right: too small.
1. This is the feuilleton “Report from a Parisian Paradise.” It is interesting that JR wrote it as he did, under threat of imminent dismissal.
2. Picard: Max Picard (1888–1965), doctor and cultural philosopher.
3. Monty Jacobs (1875–1945), editor of the feuilleton section of the Vossische Zeitung from 1910 to 1934, when he went into exile in London.
4. Professor Gottfried Salomon (1892–1964) was a sociologist at the University of Frankfurt.
5. Valeska Gert (1892–1978) was a “grotesque dancer.”
36. To the Frankfurter Zeitung
Paris, 2 June 1926
Dear Sirs,
I hear that you of your kindness are deliberating as to where I should send my next dispatches from, and are tending to favor America against Russia. I don’t think you are seriously afraid that I might convert to Bolshevism, but your line of thinking may be that the so-called New World would be inappropriate to my habitually satirical mode, and that I would be condemned either to supply optimistic reports in an access of youthful enthusiasm, or to clam up entirely.
I am grateful to be the subject of so much consideration. However, I would be sorry if you concluded that my specific gifts would incline me to ironize Western institutions, customs, and habits, following the doubtful successes of the Russian revolution.
On the contrary: I am (perhaps unfortunately) wholly incapable of allowing any enthusiasm in me more space than my skepticism. I ask that you not infer from this “negative attitude” that I would substitute the deficiencies of one world view for those of another. I don’t believe in the perfection of bourgeois democracy, but I don’t doubt for a second the narrowness of a proletarian dictatorship. On the contrary, I believe in the terrible existence of a sort of “petty working class” if you’ll allow the phrase, a species that would be still less inclined to allow me the freedom I require than its bourgeois cousins.
I am carrying none of the ideological baggage of the sort that most literary visitors to Russia have carried with them in the last few years. Unlike them, as a consequence of my birth and my knowledge of the country, I am immunized to what goes by “Russian mysticism” or “the great Russian soul,” and the like. I am too well aware—as western Europeans are apt to forget—that the Russians were not invented by Dostoyevsky. I am quite unsentimental about the country, and about the Soviet project.
On this occasion let me admit—not to burden you with a full-blown confession—that my relationship to Catholicism and the Church is not at all as one might imagine, on the basis of a fleeting knowledge of my person, my essays, and even my books. That fact alone guarantees a certain distance, when it comes to things in Russia. Things that, incidentally, concern us more nearly than things in America. I get the impression that a certain useful calm has set in there, useful in the sense that people may finally be coming to terms with the recent past. I get a sense of things being about to change therefore in Russia, while America in a year’s time will still be America, if not more so.
Since I report on actual conditions, depicting daily life rather than expressing opinions, the danger that I might be unable to send objective reports from Russia is not very great. Even in countries without censorship, my criticism was more to be found between the lines than on the surface of my pieces.
I will be greatly obliged to you if you were to see these depositions as a basis on which to make your decision.
Yours respectfully
Joseph Roth
37. To Benno Reifenberg
30 August 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
I am writing to you from the deck of a mail steamer on the Volga. I plan to stop in Astrakhan for a couple of days. I hope this finds you back in Frankfurt, having enjoyed your vacation. I shall be sending my first pieces to the paper from here, and would like you to read them as they come in. I know you won’t read them after others have. I have been unable to write anything till now. I was overwhelmed, famished, continually shaking. It’s taken me two months. If one were to set foot on a different star, things couldn’t be more different or more strange.
I have no money. I need 42 marks per diem, excluding travel and the vast tips a visitor is obliged to leave. I am experiencing incredible things. Almost more than I can put down, in terms of fullness and intensity. My illness is almost gone. I eat black bread and onions and for 3 or 4 days of the week, live like a peasant. The remaining days, admittedly, I spend in the best hotels I can find. I spent a week tramping on foot through Chuvash villages. I have been to Minsk and Byelorussia. I am now on my way to Baku, Tbilisi, Odessa, the whole Ukraine. A few newspapers greeted my arrival: “Revolutionary writer comes to Russia.” Reviews of my books continue to appear. I have avoided doing anything officially sanctioned, even though most doors were open to me.
I live in the continual fear that it’s all too much for the company. It’s been paying me money since JULY and has received no copy. Perhaps you could set their minds at ease—and mine too!
Poland was in such an abject political and human state, that I’ve put off writing about it until I’m on my way back. I’m sorry to say that blasé German correspondents are not always wrong. For now, silence is the best policy for me.
There’s no doubt that a new world is being born in Russia. For all my skepticism, I am happy to be able to witness it. It’s not possible to live without having been here, it’s as if you had stayed at home during the war.
Write and tell me what your dear wife is doing, and my friend Jan. I carry his picture in my wallet—any other photograph would be sentimental. Is he well?
In old friendship I shake your hand, and remain as ever
Your Joseph Roth
Picard didn’t reply. I feel offended.
I haven’t seen a copy of the newspaper for months. My permanent address is:
Moscow, Hotel Bolshaya Moskovskaya till October,
Thereafter c/o German Embassy for Joseph Roth, Frankfurter Zeitung
Moscow Leontyevsky pereulok 10
38. To Bernard von Brentano
Odessa, 26 September 1926
Dear friend,
you must be puzzled and irked and probably less puzzled than irked. Calm! Forgiveness! Today is the first day I have given myself off. Not that I have deserved it. I really ought to walk around and gather material and order it in my head, just exactly as I have on all my other days. I have never worked as hard as I have in Russia; and you know I have never been one for idleness. I shall be staying in Odessa for another two weeks; then through the rest of the Ukraine. At the end of October I’ll be in Moscow again. You could write me Hotel Bolshaya Moskovskaya ca. 14 October, or here, Odessa, Hotel
London, but only by airmail. An airmail letter takes 5 days—unless the censor happens to take an interest in it.
I feel as though I’ve been gone from Europe for six months. I’ve experienced so much here, and all of it strange to me. Never has it been brought home to me so strongly that I’m a European, a man of the Mediterranean if you will, a Roman and a Catholic, a Humanist and a Renaissance man. Everything I told you about myself in Paris was wrong, and a lot of what you told me was right. It’s a boon that I’ve come to Russia. I should never have gotten to know myself otherwise. Finally I have the subject for the book that only I can write, and will maybe write while in Russia. It will be the novel I’ve waited for for so long,1 and with me a couple of other people in the West as well. You would be amazed if I were to tell you the story. But you will get to read it in a year’s time.
I hope my articles have got through and been printed. Write and tell me, if you will. The most important of them are still to come.
You know I’m a celebrity here. I enclose a clipping of an interview with me—it’s as if I were an American shoe-polish king, or something. I am mobbed by journalists wherever I go. They don’t always get things right, but I’d be the last person to object to a false echo, so long as it’s just an echo. (Jesuit.)
Everything Toller2 and Kisch have said about Russia is wrong. And all the attacks are not just unfair, but misplaced. It’s like viewing a human residence through the eyes of a fly. I’m not talking about a positive or negative view of the Soviet states—I want to show you that both the positives and the negatives are completely wrong, because they are political. The issue here is not politics, the issue is culture, religion, metaphysics, spirituality. You will understand what I mean if you recall our conversations about Russia, and my exposition, and if you see the situation diagrammatically.
In other words, I am looking in a completely different direction. Russia is somewhere else. I was like a mariner from antiquity or the Middle Ages, setting off for the Spice Islands, in the persuasion that the earth was flat. If you know it’s round, you know how mistaken the voyage was.
Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters Page 9