by Joseph Roth
I come from abroad, where they pack up mercy parcels for Germany’s army, and where the newspapers mount withering attacks on German politicians on their front pages, but their back, human pages stick up for German victims; where the window displays of banks and exchange parlours exhibit endless Reichsmark notes, not as negotiable objects of exchange, but as curiosities; where Germany’s best actors appear, not for fame, but for rustling currency; where the money still has a good oily sheen, and feels soft and smooth in the hand, as though coloured by the sacred, kingly fat of the Golden Calf.
But in this abroad the station-guard goes hungry, the trains come and go unpunctually, the heating doesn’t always work, the porters haggle, the toilets don’t flush, and the lighting in the compartments is wretched. Whereas in Germany railway carriages are full of embittered businessmen, and a hungry inspector checks your tickets—but the heating works, and a beaming lamp, worthy of a nice sitting room, sheds its light. The porters certainly have set fees. The timetable isn’t a work of fiction. The trains actually stick to it. Officials man the counters. Water flows into the WCs. The machinery of public life is well and dependably oiled. In the cities, busy brooms whisk canine excrement into purpose-built gutters. Outside food shops stands the tidy rank and file of the great army of hungry Germans.
In Leipzig I saw a man from a firm of undertakers. He wore a gleaming top hat. He had a pomaded, uptwirled black moustache. He looked like a first-class funeral. He provoked fear and respect. Round about him blew gusts of eternity. He was a representative intercessor between this world and the next; a Middle European Charon; a splendidly ceremonial death. Only—he wasn’t riding on a calèche drawn by a couple of black stallions, or in a black-lacquered automobile, not even on a tramcar; nor was he on shanks’s pony. This awe-inspiring figure was mounted—on a bicycle. He pedalled. He pedalled to the cemetery and back. He sat hunched over the handlebars, and pedalled for all he was worth. His sinister black trousers bore shiny metal clips, and were bunched at the ankles, looking like umbrellas in fair weather. This distinguished apparition couldn’t afford a tram ticket. All his metaphysical dread was wasted. It wasn’t possible to have any respect for this agent of eternity—not on a bicycle. If I had been a corpse awaiting burial, this undertaker would have taken away all my fear of the coming assizes.
Then, in Chemnitz station, I saw a conductor eating chocolates. He had found the rest of a box of pralines in a compartment. The conductor was a gentleman in what they call the “best years”, big, hairy fists, a square head, a short, squat body, and big, solid, waterproof boots. This man was wolfing down frivolous liqueur-filled confectionery, and lost all the gravity he was supposed to have as an aspect of his profession. The conductor was eating a young ladies’ cinema nibble with a rigid, humourless expression, as though it was the doorstop or hunk of sausage that would have accorded with his personality. Six months ago, this conductor certainly wouldn’t have been tucking into chocolates. But today he is hungry. What to a passenger was a frippery, to him is a necessity. If it had been a dry crust of bread he had picked up—the effect couldn’t have been more abject. Things in Germany are at such a pass that its railway conductors help themselves to expensive fripperies in their desperation. One party carelessly leaves them behind, to the other they’re a lifesaver. That’s where Germany is right now.
In Dresden I spoke to a policeman. I slipped him five Czech crowns, and they loosened his tongue. All his personal and professional grimness disappeared. A week ago, he had no money at all. He was out of work. Unemployment support wasn’t enough. He picked up a rucksack and went out into the country—to beg. A farm dog ripped his last pair of trousers. He patched them—with rope, for want of thread. The stout rope had the effect of widening the tear in the trousers. Before long, the policeman will go around clad in a rope.
These are the kind of things that happen to you in Germany. Abroad, you read the speeches. They are unimportant. They are rhetorical and political wrecks. They can do little harm and no good. But then in Germany, you see a train conductor eating pralines; a rope in lieu of a pair of trousers; death on two wheels. A clumsy foolishness attaches to these things. Their evident symbolism looks like an invention. Life doesn’t always take the trouble to come up with something convincing. It makes jokes as crass as any music hall entertainer. Who laughs about large, well-off families in Germany making their own money? And using it to buy bread with? It’s a grotesque implausibility in the column of “other news”. A dismal twopenny romance twines round death by starvation. In the West End of Berlin I saw two high-school kids. They were walking along the wide, busy road, arm in arm, like a pair of drunks, and singing:
Down, down, down with the Jewish republic,
Filthy Yids,
Filthy Yids!
And passers-by got out of their way. No one stopped to slap their faces. Not out of political indignation. But because in any other country the irritation of a kid bothering the street with his half-baked politics would have provoked someone to a pedagogic measure. In Germany the convictions of high-school boys are respected. That’s how law-abiding people are in Berlin. And that discipline is heading for a tragicomic ending. Whether it’s a schoolboy treating us to his political views on the Jewish republic or a conductor so hungry he wolfs down a box of chocolates—they are so laughable and tragic that no visitor could understand. No one understands Germany. It is the least understood nation in Europe.
A Japanese student in Berlin told me: when foreign students are matriculated in Berlin University, the rector Professor Roethe says, “We have accepted you, even though you are foreign. Thank God we are not dependent on your friendship . . .” Do you see a connection between the hysteria of the chanting schoolboys and the speechifying professor? They are both instances of the decline of Germany. That’s the way people in a fever rave. Anyone who has sat at the bedside of a sick patient will know that the hours are not all pathos and anguish. The sick man will talk all kinds of nonsense, ridiculous, trivial, unworthy of himself and his condition. He is missing the regulating consciousness.
That’s just what is missing in Germany: the regulating consciousness.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 December 1923
11. Retrospect of Magdeburg
I arrive before midnight. I knew it would be raining, and so it was: diligently and with conviction. Through the draped windows of the cafés streamed a yellowish light, along with muffled drums and cymbals. With a bold show of resolve that was worthy of an actual storm at sea, some customers left the cafés. The silver streetlamps on the empty streets seemed to be there more for the benefit of the rain than the homecomers. Old facades look moving, in amongst the distinctly neutral new buildings, and old street names had a ring of home to me, even though I was seeing them for the first time. Undeniably, the town moved me, before I started to take against it. How a man softens over time! The more you take in, the less you trust the evidence of your senses. Behind the impression given by things, you sense a secret hidden truth you are afraid of violating. No one is as cautious as an elderly mocker, especially when he knows how sensitive the local press and rotary club are. They will deny everything, even impressions! So let’s be conciliatory. In my recollection—a few weeks have passed since my visit to Magdeburg—it has acquired a sheen of melancholy.
Magdeburg’s principal street is Breite Strasse. The name has remained unchanged for a very long time. Its simple but confident assertion seems to me to speak for the good sense of the citizens of Magdeburg. Other towns would long since have given their main thoroughfare a more sonorous name. In that simple unchangingness I sense history and tradition. Germany has few streets in which the character of a historical thoroughfare has remained so clearly visible. Even so, there is a fight going on between the old constancy and the new zealotry, that “neue Sachlichkeit” that leaves no place, no movement, no association, no community untouched, disrupting the honest features of the preserved facades with
a wilful cool boldness, with smooth, neutral, disagreeably emphatic concrete. Modern apartment blocks are simplistic; in their large windows and flat roofs, the brutal intention of putting space, light and air to work, to save money, and implacably to further the health of man, beast and machine, lives the whole rampant, improving arrogance of our time that knows no self-restraint; and the small towns, afraid they might end up behind the times, instead anticipate them, adopt their tempo, and so make a mess of their best architectural virtues. Opposite the old and really beautiful cathedral set in a dignified and pensive ring of dark green, lurks the Reichsbank building, a gruesome instance of contemporary barrack- and factory-culture, a stone slap in the face, spattered down at the feet of the house of prayer. They are just now in the process of cutting down a few trees giving their own shade in the shade of the cathedral. I would bet that within ten years the vogue for skyscrapers and tower blocks will have utterly destroyed the cathedral square and possibly the cathedral itself. Then the fine café, the Café Dom, a holy temple of ancient chess players where the smoke of innumerable cigars has magically tinted ceiling, pillars and walls, will have given way to a modern “metropolitan” cafeteria of linoleum, glass and chrome, one of those hygienic execution sites with dance music that we have nowadays.
The little booklet in which the town hall of Magdeburg is described is prefaced by an introduction from the mayor of Magdeburg. “To know our town hall is to love it!” he says.
One probably shouldn’t ever take a mayor at his word. But the limited lexicon of human feeling that gives us “love” is surely unable to cope with the enormous dimensions of this town hall. The only feeling I can muster towards this newest of German constructions is awe. This town hall strikes me as a successful effort to construct a palace for the people; the attempt to orchestrate such a thing as the dignity of the masses. The least of the details of this enormous construction is calculated not to let the masses lose human dignity. Wardrobes you don’t have to cluster around. Entrances and exits you don’t have to fight to use, an economical excess of space, space, space, in which all possibility of panic is quenched: this is the masses being educated to self-control. Noble blond wood, no carpeting, plain red and blue velvet curtains; ceilings of silvery brown wood, horizontal bank of lights on the stage, shimmering nickel ornamentation; the biggest organ in Germany (if not the whole world), with ten thousand pipes! It’s a triumph of size, number and utility. The practical is promoted to the ranks of the dignified, and dignity is confusingly close to utility.
On the quiet morning when I wander through the town hall, I am taken with the linguistic play between echo and corridor, and I hear the exaggerated crashing echo of my footfall on the naked boards.* When there are thousands going up and down the stairs on evenings of celebration and joy, then the echo surely won’t sound so hollow, sorry and unfestive. Probably the wood then is just as quiet as carpets would be, it just needs one condition: that a sufficient mass of people be there to walk about on it. When there is just me, I feel like a solitary gymnast. As I leave the town hall and look at the cathedral opposite, I wonder whether I am allowed to say that actually I love carpets, and that bare boards always seem a trifle unadorned to me. I am standing in the so-called exhibition space. Almost every town in Germany now has such a space, in which the excessive numbers of fairs, the tournaments of trade and industry, are held: grassy asphalted spaces, airy filmy walls that in actual fact may have a trusty steel frame within them. So why is it that I feel closer to the fourteenth-century cathedral than to the town hall which was completed in 1927? Why? I can’t tell you. Our grandchildren, of whom the mayor remarks that the town hall will show them what German determination was able to accomplish, may understand me better . . .
And now from this excess more calculated to win my respect than my heart, let me come to a subject I am able to approach with affection: the people of Magdeburg struck me as more estimable than their new buildings. I knew no one when I got here, I knew several when I left. That speaks for the town. It’s not possible to remain a stranger here for long. They were quiet, critical, warm-hearted people. A few with that blessed trait of having returned home after wanting to see the world and feeling homesick that is sometimes called “humdrum” or “prosaic”. No doubt it has its narrow-minded citizens, every town does. But it also accommodates a few un-bourgeois free spirits. They patronize a modern bookshop, and put on literary evenings. Yes, it even seems to me that this practical-minded, industrious, and architecturally inclined town is blessed with that sort of atmosphere in which native and stranger alike may lapse into forgetfulness and settle. The past nestles in the old buildings and blows from the Elbe port through the old part of town. The people are small-townish enough to have whims and eccentricities. The best of them have no desire to be metropolitan. They have time. The trams are reassuringly slow. The women are attractive. And the curfew hour is late.
From time to time I think of describing the “German”, or defining his “typical” existence. Probably that isn’t possible. Even when I sense the presence of such a thing, I am unable to define it. What can I do, apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit? The describing of singularities within this profusion may be the least deceptive; the chance thing, plucked from a tangle of others, may most easily make for order. I have seen this and that; I have tried to write about what stuck in my senses and my memory.
Kölnische Zeitung, 3 May 1931
* Echo and corridor: German allows a rather superior play on words here—Hall und Widerhall.
II
Sketches
12. The Fraternity Member
The fraternity student is the only zoological creature whose natural distribution has nothing to do with natural factors—with geography and climate—but is dependent on nations and governments. While in countries whose biological conditions are similar to those in Germany he may already have become extinct, or never even have arisen, we get him here, and in innumerable variants. (The technical name for these is couleurs.)
One encounters him in bars, on duelling-grounds and at nationalist meetings (such as lectures by Professors Roethe, Freytag-Loringhoven and others), also in lecture rooms. The fraternity student can be identified at a glance: the hypothesis that God created man in his own image receives a practical rebuttal by the facial markings which are called “scars”. Askew on his closely cropped skull he sports a cap that would be the envy of any American messenger boy. Across his chest he wears a gaudy sash of two or three colours in which may be picked out a ringing phrase, as for example: “With God for King and country!” So he projects his innermost feelings and convictions, a slogan on two legs, nourished on beer and tradition, and kept in his paper life by the extraordinary long-suffering patience of German citizens. Since he has no contents, he lives on as a shell; a little like a paper lantern the day after a party.
In order to demonstrate the purpose of his existence all the same, he creates tumults and affrays—in the mistaken view that acoustic effects entitle one to exist. Even though this is where he betrays his outstanding past and present anachronism. His noise resembles the underworld stirrings of incompletely deceased ghosts.
Because he has slipped the bonds of time, he believes time is out of whack. Because he sleeps away the day, he only ever sees the world by night—and then often double. Therefore he fails to apprehend the dimensions of reality. Seeing ghosts, he is his very own ghost, seeming in the chime of a beer glass to hear the bells of Old Heidelberg. Drunkenness that saps others gives him strength. He lives from the mould of the past and decay. His sheen is as that of a dead body that phosphoresces at night. Even so—and because he is a corpse that history has failed to bury—he makes his way, called a career, protected from unsympathetic reality by laws and customs—to the top of the legal, political and medical professions. He pronounces sentences and prescribes castor oil. He becomes a p
rofessor and imagines he is spreading knowledge when he shares what he thinks he knows. Ideals from the nursery deck out his walls and hang in his brain. One day a young beer drinker becomes an old fart. Just as if he had never been alive, he wanders through the years, on the periphery of the world and yet thought to be a part of it, becomes grey and finally dies the death of the living, at the end of a life of the dead.
To his grieving fraternity, he bequeaths beer stein, sabre, swastika, cap, sash and whatever else he may possess in the way of student knick-knacks. Making haste to follow him, the next generation comes along, and plants their hopes, which to us are disappointments, on his grave . . .
Vorwärts, 24 February 1924
13. Guillaume the Blond Negro
The blond Negro, the self-contradiction, the living denial of his “black shame”, the manifest Negro with the blue eyes, a figure for Dinter, I addressed on the train from Wiesbaden to Koblenz.* A lot of stout citizens were on the train, and in a corner by the window sat the Negro. Did I say Negro? The man had thick lips, splendid white teeth, strong cheekbones—but also fair curly hair and eyes of forget-me-not blue. The whole carriage was staring at him. He was wearing a French army uniform and reading a book, a German book. Finally a fat gentleman, a traveller, a Tom, Dick or Harry, a helpful man who would offer unsolicited advice to anyone, and who knew the train timetable by heart, could help himself no longer. He leaned across to the blond Negro, and asked: “I say, what’s that book you’re reading?” The Negro replied: “It’s a Sven Elvestad, just a run-of-the-mill thriller.” Thus showing his superiority to the questioner, who had never heard of Sven Elvestad, and to whom a thriller was hardly run-of-the-mill.