Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  What I regretted soon after sending the telegram (and regret to this day) is the form of words, in which I followed too closely the wishes of the publishers and that (this is not insignificant here) was criticized mildly but distinctly by Thomas Mann. Whereas Heinrich Mann, long before I had decided to send the telegram, said to me, and these are his very words: “Deny it in the crudest possible terms.” It was clear to me that his vehemence was out of friendship for me, because he thought it was principally his own essay that had caused the ruckus.

  Dear Roth, in your letter you talk about comradeship—but how does the friend differ from the enemy, if he condemns his comrade without even giving him a hearing? Neither Annette Kolb nor anyone else led me to suppose you were baying with the wolves against me, which, quite apart from our friendship, is not your style at all. Your letter hit me unprepared. It is a painful experience, the most painful of all of those I have undergone in this matter. If you, Joseph Roth, committed a murder, and the whole world arose against you, then I would be blindly on your side and seek illumination from you, and not join a band of pathetic but for all that no less malign dervishes.

  On 28 August 1932 we were all sitting together on our terrace in Badenweiler . . . You remember the occasion, don’t you? We were very harmonious. At a time when the leaders of today’s emigration were successively hailing Brüning,5 Papen,6 and Schleicher7 as “the lesser of two evils,” and were ready to take all sorts of kicking, so long as the government left them the possibility of receiving them at home . . . I, though not personally affected, was physically ill at the sight of this charade, but at no time did it cross my mind to break with old friends over this . . . I rebuked them when they were with me, and able to defend themselves, and basically my pity only heightened my fellow feeling for them. How could I ever have guessed you in the chorus of those who would defame a man who voluntarily, facing no threat, left Germany together with them, who resigned from the Academy8 (and not, like the others, whose names feature in all the émigré publications, not over the matter of the declaration of loyalty), and condemned him, of whom even his enemies said, they “would never have expected it of him,” without even taking the trouble to inquire how this uncharacteristic and unexpected action had come about?

  The first to approach me over the telegram was someone who had come to me during the war when I was in Berlin editing the Weisse Blätter and brought me a “heroic” war novella asking me to publish it. I returned it to him, and talked to him long and patiently, and since he was a Jew, told him about the role of Judaism in the world that did not consist of putting on the beard of Father Jahn9 when the hour seemed to call for it. Unfortunately, I was unable to convince him. When the war was over, and pacifism was the “order of the day” the man rewrote his novella in the new spirit, and dedicated it to me. It’s in one of his books, dedication and all. So this man was the first who approached me in Sanary. And in what manner? Bursting with malignity, like a whore catching a previously respectable woman in flagrante. I swear, his voice cracked with malice! At home I had the manuscript of his latest book, with a foreword where he explained how certain regards compelled him to publish anonymously. (In the meantime, the need for these regards has fallen away, and his book will shortly come out, with his own name bravely on the spine.) This was the emigrant who, powerless in the face of real violence and oppression, plays his one sorry trump against a “comrade”—a goy who “won’t live in Germany, but doesn’t want to lose out on the German market”! (What a foolish reproach, by the way! As if the deepest desire of all emigrants throughout history were not precisely to be heard in the land from which they had been expelled: from Marx and Heine and Victor Hugo to Lenin and Trotsky.) I say “goy,” because it struck me that in the course of what I suppose I may call his tirade, that he only ever spoke of Thomas Mann and me, and never of Döblin . . .

  I always had the deepest suspicion of émigrés—for their noted sentimentality (it was Victor Hugo’s friends who accused him of continuing to see France the way he saw it in 1851, the year he left), and this wave of emigration in particular, whose leading members I know all too well. With few exceptions, they have all swallowed shit, until the Nazis put an end to it, and they had to leave. If Hitler hadn’t been such a rabid anti-Semite, they would be hailing him today as the “lesser evil” and reserving their fire for Bolshevism and the Nuremberger Streicher.10 And now they feel like big heroes, which is always how the people behind the lines felt. Which of them seriously thinks about the poor devils standing in the front line of indignity and abuse, unable to flee, and having to gulp down their own shit every day? I would excuse all those in Germany who betray themselves with each action decreed by those in power, and who with each new day sink further into self-contempt. Those are the ones whom God will forgive first, their sufferings are possibly even greater than those others, gifted with physical courage, who are simply beaten to death or strangled.

  Curious how readily the victims take on the habits of the jailers! Whoever takes revenge is not just evil, but also stupid. If the victims don’t yet rule the world, it can only be because of that. Cometh the hour, cometh the hour of vengeance, and the intellectual victim happily turns hangman. There is no end to cycles of grief and revenge. The empire of Christ has barely even begun. No sooner was he dead than a general took over the enterprise. His name was Paul. He was a stupid and ambitious fellow, another general who dabbled in politics.

  The true horseman of the Apocalypse is Stupidity, the others just trot along after.

  You speak of the Antichrist, dear Joseph Roth. But you’re underestimating him if you think he wears just the one uniform. He is in every camp. And that’s what makes him so powerful. He forces his enemies into a fighting style that turns them inevitably into his creatures. To go back to my starting point: something of that is what I wanted to show in my Widow Bosca—she forces her daughter to kill her lover, she even forces her husband to strangle her. Burguburu11 doesn’t want revenge—which is why I allow the mechanical clock of the seasons to play a soft little “Gerettet”12 at the end. It’s just a windup clock. But I hope it sounds pure. I don’t have the strength for amplification. But how I’d love to stun and change the whole world with that same tune!

  Excuse the long letter. And now: not another word! I don’t demand an answer, and I don’t need one. Whatever you might say by way of reply, I couldn’t say anything back to you that I haven’t said here. Even more than your judgment, I want your friendship, even if you won’t agree with me over this matter here, ephemeral though I think you will agree it is,

  Yours sincerely

  René Schickele

  1. my book: the novel Die Witwe Bosca.

  2. Professor Saenger: Samuel Saenger (1864–1944), editor of the S. Fischer house magazine, Die Neue Rundschau. Went into exile in France in 1939, to the USA in 1941.

  3. Sami: as S. Fischer was known to intimates and unqualified persons alike.

  4. we were of the view: the counterargument to Roth’s intransigence and inflexibility-leading-sooner-or-later-to-war—the importance of going on talking, going on trading, going on dealing with an opponent.

  5. Brüning: Heinrich Brüning (1885–1970), chancellor between 1930 and 1932. From 1934 to 1951 in exile in the United States.

  6. Papen: Franz von Papen (1879–1969), 1932 chancellor, 1933 deputy chancellor under Hitler, then personal envoy and ambassador in Vienna and Ankara till 1945.

  7. Schleicher: Kurt von Schleicher (1882–1934), chancellor from December 1932 through January 1933. Murdered by the SS in June 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives, on direct orders of Hitler.

  8. the Academy: recte, the Preussische Akademie der Künste: Sektion für Dichtkunst, founded in 1926, and taken over in 1933 by the Nazis. (The poet Gottfried Benn, for a brief, unhappy, and regrettable period, allowed himself to be used as their cat’s-paw.) Schickele is pleading for more sympathy for the likes
of himself, Heinrich (who was elected its new chairman in 1931) and Thomas Mann, Ricarda Huch, Käthe Kollwitz, and others, who lost prestige and living, and in some cases went into exile, though (!) not themselves Jews.

  9. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852), who gave German nationalism a gymnastic and Prussian inflection.

  10. Streicher: executed for war crimes in 1946, Julius Streicher (born 1885) was a racial theorist and founder and editor of Der Stürmer.

  11. Burguburu: a character in Schickele’s Die Witwe Bosca.

  12. “Gerettet”: “rescued” or “saved.” Cf. the quartet in Beethoven’s Fidelio, act 2.

  242. To René Schickele

  Hotel Foyot, Paris 6e

  33 rue de Tournon

  31 January 1934

  Dear esteemed René Schickele,

  your desire for no reply won’t prevent me from telling you two things. Firstly, my thanks and a friendly greeting to you.

  Secondly, the book I am working on now is called The Antichrist.1 It will contain all his manifestations. Precisely that is my subject: the Antichrist as enemy and friend. By the end, a fragment of him will be in me.

  You could say we are the last Christians. That’s the result of these times: it’s not Christ we see and recognize—he’s too distant—but his enemy.

  Regards to your dear wife!

  Good luck to your Bosca! I remain enraptured.

  Your old

  Joseph Roth

  I reread these lines and see that they do not say how very fond of you I am. Let me tell you so, then, expressis verbis: I am very fond of you.

  And forgive me: one other thing I am unable to bite back:

  When I ran into Döblin, I told him I would not sit down with him unless and until he had explained the telegram: well, at that time his two eldest sons were in Germany. Saenger talked about concentration camp. That’s fairly easily understood. Even I understand it. Forgive me my strictness! It’s the old tribe of Jehovah, from which I am descended.

  Forgive me!

  1. The Antichrist: Der Antichrist. A polemic, published by Allert de Lange, Amsterdam,1934. It was translated into English in 2010, and published by Peter Owen.

  243. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Foyot, Paris 6e

  33 rue de Tournon

  9 February 1934

  Dear friend,

  on 4 February I wrote to you at the Hotel Louvois, because I’d heard you were in Paris to give a lecture on Austrian literature at the Sorbonne. I didn’t understand why you didn’t meet me, or alternatively, didn’t tell me why you wouldn’t meet me. Well, were you here or not? Today I got a card dated 7th inst. about the novella.1 But I don’t have the novellas yet. Did you send them registered mail? Then they’ll be sure to come a day late.

  I’ve spent the last 6 days in bed with flu. But I will read the novella right away, and tell you what I think about it.

  Most sincerely your

  Joseph Roth

  1. the novella: (Zweig’s) Angst (Fear), 1925.

  244. To Blanche Gidon (written in French)

  Hotel Foyot

  Paris 6e

  16 February 1934

  Dear Madam Gidon,

  here are some facts:

  Born on 2 September 1894

  in Szvaby,1 a German settlement

  close to the Austrian frontier,

  to a Russian Jewish mother

  and an Austrian father (state employee, painter, alcoholic, went mad shortly before my birth)2

  school: lycée (humanist gymnasium)

  very poor, gave lessons to very rich people

  university: Vienna, “German language and literature”

  1916 war

  volunteered

  eastern front

  1917 promoted to second lieutenant, 2 months in Russian detention

  1918 revolution

  1919 journalist in Vienna

  1920 journalist in Berlin

  many foreign trips (Russia. Africa, Albania, Balkans)

  1922 France – la lumière, la liberté PERSONELLE

  (not a figure of speech!)

  Cordially, all yours

  Joseph Roth

  1. Szvaby: actually one of the villages outlying Brody, Roth’s actual birthplace, and hence part of his systematic mystification regarding his birth. Swaby (to German ears evoking “Schwaben,” Swabia, from where German emigrants settled parts of southeastern Europe, in some cases many hundreds of years ago) has the effect of making Roth appear thoroughly and ancestrally German. Brody, a known center for Jews since the eighteenth century, if not a particularly miserable center for particularly miserable Jews (as witness the saying “verfallen wie in Brody,” desperate or wretched as in Brody), has and had a very different resonance, which Roth for much of his life sought to avoid.

  2. His father (Nahum) was the most mythologized person in Roth’s life, possibly including himself. Roth’s biographer David Bronsen reckoned up seventeen versions of his identity. The “painter” and “alcoholic” here suggests an identification with the character of Moser in The Radetzky March.

  245. To Stefan Zweig

  Paris, 18 February 1934

  Dear friend,

  I am pleased to have your letter. I was getting a little nervous.

  The causes and consequences of the catastrophe in Austria1 don’t seem quite so plain to me. Both sides, all three sides, if you like, seem to have made one mistake after another. A good party line is hard to evolve at a time when the party has no power. A child could have worked out that the Social Democrats were doomed. They could not look to their enemies for fear or respect. A year ago they might still have won. This time, whether provoked or not, it was a glorious suicide. I don’t myself believe in the wholesale switch of Socialist workers to the Nazis. If it can even be expressed in figures at all, then I see about one-third Nazis, mainly those Socialists who were closer to Communists. For all the tragedy and catastrophe, I don’t yet see the Anschluss or the end of Austria. Hitler’s situation was never so bad as now. The foreign powers are watching him like a hawk, and he’s almost lost his only friend, which was Italy. If Dollfuss cuts a sorry figure in the world, then Hitler cuts a worse one, because he’s frightening into the bargain. Besides, you know how quickly the world forgets and forgives violence. Objectively it’s not right to speak of a war debt. Certainly, the elemental moment was important here. But I am cast down, and at my wits’ end. It’s made me even sicker than I was before. I’m still spending half my days in bed, unable to write a line. Please forgive me for dictating now. In particular, forgive me for dictating what I have to say on the novella.2 I’m returning it by the same post.

  Of course you know that your novella is another masterpiece. Whoever manages such clever construction, and heightens the tension almost to the very last line, knows a thing or two about literary artistry. I have nothing to teach you about craft, my own artisanal soul delights in those tiny solder seams invisible to the layman, those tiny, concealed, and silent hinges and joints, and those lights, each one brighter than the one before, or rather all continuing to cast their light however far one goes. It’s like a walk along a beautiful, gently climbing path where you have the feeling right from the start that you’re going uphill, and that affords a score of surprises at every bend. Then, when you reach the end, you have the unaccountable feeling that the path has been perfectly straight. I have to ask myself whether I’ve been had. I don’t think so. I’m certain my craft conscience wouldn’t allow itself to be bribed.

  Keeping pace with this mastery of craft is your psychology, and what I would term the ethical component of your writing. It’s splendid how the narrator’s psychology identifies ever more strongly with the psychology of the subject, and how therefore simultaneously, even those who disa
pprove of the subject have their ethics refined. The most original way of defending a murderer is when the being with the most developed conscience, namely the writer, identifies with the criminal. You get a poet pleading. And a clever poet like you deploys his nobility so deftly, not only knowing his own psychology and that of the criminal, but also that of the ordinary reader. How easily someone else might have become irritating, in the name of conventional morality!

  Now I have a bone to pick with you. The last page and a half or two pages, it seems to me, should be either shortened or lengthened. I might be tempted to leave out the conclusion. There is no need to indemnify the criminal for his fear. Here a personal—and hence, in a literary sense, implausible nobility—mingles with the previous, legitimate, plausible form. Right at the end, something personal is shared with us. It becomes a confession, which diminishes the necessary distance between your persona and the reader. Moreover, it’s inconceivable that the man out there is still afraid. He must have that much human understanding, and indeed he does, as you’ve told us yourself. I don’t know how to improve it. But I think the ending has to change. I have complaints about the beginning as well. I see no justified connections between the special character of that day, and the subsequent events. I would make cuts. And also shorten the address to Paris. It’s all too “somptueux” for me. Both the introduction, and that address. Style and use of metaphor are a little careless. I would cite the word “capricious” for April showers, I don’t like the notion of a spring that leaves a calling card, because that’s more than an urbane spring, that’s a positively genteel one; you wreck the planned irruption of the elemental into the urbane by stressing the capricious qualities of the elemental. Nor do I want to associate the damp and streaming season with the crisp dry edge of the visiting card. Nor yet the regiments of water, when to keep faith with a military metaphor, they should be projectiles, which indeed you go on to say in the same sentence, and thereby confuse your metaphors. The capitulating locomotive I find a little precious. Then how do you come to associate sunbeams with tridents? I wouldn’t use the word “biped.” It’s a little facile. Day of curiosity seems like a private usage. Other pages too have some slapdash expressions, too many to list. You will see them yourself. There are some rather worn adjectives.3