Lost worlds of Joseph Roth by Frederick RaphaelL
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1655615.ece
Joseph Roth has emerged as one of the greatest, certainly the most prescient, of the German writers of the entre-deux-guerres. If Thomas Mann achieved wider renown, it was due in good part to his performance as the aloof man of letters. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, Roth was typically irreverent: “I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water. He isn’t Goethe . . . . [He] has somehow usurped ‘objectivity’. Between you and me, he is perfectly capable of coming to an accommodation with Hitler . . . . He is one of those people who will countenance everything, under the pretext of understanding everything”.
By contrast, The Hotel Years – an anthology of Roth’s shorter journalism, collected and translated by Michael Hofmann – includes a gentle pen portrait, from 1937, of Franz Grillparzer. Composed in Parisian destitution, it demonstrates how Roth came to treasure the irretrievable civilities of the old Europe. Of the Austrian playwright’s single meeting with Goethe, he observed, “It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday”. In Roth’s case, exile and penury bestowed sorry radiance on the lost world of the shtetl in which the impoverished Ost- Juden had no occasion for alien affectations; unashamed thieves, smugglers, tricksters and whores nurtured no illusions, as Western Europe’s haute Juiverie did, of exemption from malice. Whether their obituarist in Weights and Measures (1937) would ever have been happy actually living among them is another matter.
Roth was the first novelist to mention Adolf Hitler’s name in print, as far back as 1923. The view from the street, if not yet the gutter, allowed him to see it all coming. The Radetsky March (1932) – named after “the Marseillaise of reaction” – is now recognized as a classic elegy for Emperor Franz Josef’s vanished supremacy. During its author’s lifetime, however, a lack of fame was always the spur. Without his prodigious facility for writing feuilletons for the liberal press, Roth would have been unable to make a living from his pen.
Dislocated by Versailles’s vindictive dissection of Austria-Hungary, Roth was never again at home except in the temporary sanctuary of as grand a hotel as he could afford. “Ubi bene, ibi patria” stood in for “Excelsior” as his personal device. In “Millionaire for an Hour” (1921), we are told how “the porter stands beside the revolving door, primed to greet me, like a talking fork. His owner’s monogram decorates him heart and head”. One may wonder from what orifice a fork could be imagined to talk, but a hired welcome is as good as it gets for the mendicant scribe. In “The Chief Receptionist” (1929), Roth again rejoices in the way that the price of a room procures the deference of the concierge and his sextet of minions.
In the same year, “The Patron” (in the French sense of boss or manager) is portrayed as pitiless in evicting a hungry postulant from his domain. Then, in a spasm of conscience, he unbends and orders a lackey to give the poor chap “a cup of coffee with milk”; after a moment comes the lordly correction: “make that cream”. The reader is left to guess at Roth’s wince of admiration. In “Hotel Kopriva”, on the darker side of the street, he takes us to a commercial travellers’ flop-house where guests have no choice but to double up with strangers. “Complaints do not exist”, Roth announces, “where they cannot be made.” One catches a hint of the capo’s retort when, on arriving in Auschwitz, Primo Levi asked why (warum) it was forbidden to slake his thirst on an icicle: “Here there is no Warum”.
The quality of Roth’s ephemera was often as finely and defiantly wrought as that of the fourteen terse novels whose accelerated composition interleaved his newspaper work. The journalist is the short-order cook of literature. “How many words, by when and how much?” is his emblematic question; “Coming up!” the sole promise the hack, whatever the turmoil of his personal life, can never afford to break. Deadlines kept Roth on the treadmill, alcohol his promptest, finally lethal, lubricant. Whatever his rate (until the advent of the Nazis, he was in the Frankfurter-Zeitung’s top-paid echelon), the cheques never stretched to procuring security. As his correspondence with Stefan Zweig proved, he alternated the self- belief of the literary artist with a Galician schnorrer’s importunity.
Roth was the first novelist to mention Adolf Hitler’s name in print
Karl Kraus – a one-man bandsman who, thanks to inherited money, could afford the luxury of being his own editor and prime contributor – scorned the bourgeois press for sweetening its pages with saccharine think pieces. Kraus claimed always to be able to sniff out what he termed “Mauscheln”, the indelibly alien tone of Semitic feuilletonistes who dressed their prose in presumptuous flannel. That charge could never be laid against Roth: deploring adjectives and adverbs, he larded his prose with no flowery embellishment. Like Kraus, who renounced Jewishness and then, almost, returned to it, Roth enjoyed playing both sides against the middle, not least by donning, with whatever temporary sincerity, the persona of a genuflecting son of Mother Church and liegeman of the deposed Habsburgs.
Fact and fiction fused in his personality no less than in his writing. To lend plausibility to imposture, the son of two nice Jewish parents invented a dead gentile father. Although his imagination spent more time in the trenches than he did, Roth’s voluntary enlistment – as a war correspondent and censor – warranted his assumption of the role of an officer and a gentleman. Immediately after the war he also played the ardent “Red”, until he made a disenchanting visit to the young Soviet Union. Duplicity served to keep him together; it gave him a two-eyed vision of the collapse of what he called, in “Germany in Winter” (1923), “the regulating consciousness”. His realization that common decency was no longer a reliable social adhesive was first prompted by the sight, in the west end of Berlin, of
“two high-school kids . . . 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.”
The piece, like many of those collected in The Hotel Years, appeared in the Frankfurter-Zeitung. Ten years later, its editorial board sang from the same hymn sheet as the wanton students. In the interim, Roth’s reportage, even on mundane occasions, carried the menace of the writing on the wall. Observation rendered opinion redundant. A squib from 1921, “The Umbrella”, describes how, in a Berlin street, a female pedestrian was knocked down by a car. As she was lying in the road, “a man had the presence of mind to pick up the lady’s umbrella and walk off with it . . . .The woman who had escaped with her life now wept for the loss of her umbrella and was not at all grateful that her limbs were intact. As evidenced here, people come in two sorts: unscrupulous and dim”. Hindsight supplies significance to a fait divers: the quick-witted passer-by would mutate into every ordinary German to whom Nazism afforded predatory opportunities to pillage stricken neighbours.
The Hotel Years accumulates into a portrait by indirection. Self-effacement makes Roth the man in the ironic mask. Hofmann, his perennial and resourceful translator, accuses him (flatteringly, I suspect) of “nettled arrogance”; for example, in the pronouncement that “interviews are an alibi for a journalist’s lack of ideas”. Preferring to play the secret agent, Roth drew his raw material from the casual encounter, the overheard remark, the inadvertent augury. “The Emigrants’ Ship” (1923) exemplifies its author’s role as seer:
“the Pittsburgh . . . is due to leave Bremerhaven at exactly 2 minutes past 11. The emigrants are people from the East, mainly Jews, lucky to have escaped the Europe of pogroms . . . . The ship (it has a tonnage of 16,000) carries 1,800 passengers . . . . These Eastern Jews and peasants have been emigrating westwards for hundreds of years . . . . A great sadness emanates from them, their grey beards, their wrinkled faces, their adorable, helpless bundles . . . . The emigrants are on board; they call out to the disappearing land. No one has come to see them off, so they wave to strangers, to the luminous policeman, to the dockers and porters. Up at the rim of a huge chimney appears a black figure, a chimneysweep, a toy figure compared to the enormous liner, so tiny is his silhouette against the endless blue background. Out of the perfectly round windows of their cabins, the emigrants’ faces catch their last sight of Europe.”
In the same year, Roth finds himself, with other “stout citizens”, in a train, from Wiesbaden to Koblenz, with Guillaume, “the blond Negro” with “eyes of forget-me-not blue”, “a figure for Dinter”. Who he? The excellent Hofmann reminds us that Dinter was a “writer and politician, obsessed with racial purity . . . his Nazi party number was as low as 5”. Guillaume, with his splendid white teeth and fair curly hair
“was wearing a French army uniform and reading a book, a German book. Finally, a fat gentleman . . . leaned across to the blond Negro, and asked: ‘I say, what’s that book you’re reading?’ The Negro replied: ‘It’s 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.”
Following him off the train, Roth is quick to quiz Guillaume and discovers that his blond German father was in the Foreign Legion, his mother black, and he grew up with his grandparents in Munich.
“He’s not just German, he’s Bavarian. (Sometimes he says ‘nit’ for ‘nicht’.) . . . . After a quarter of an hour, I could see that not only did this Negro know far more than Hitler and the Negroes of Upper Austria, but he also had a deeper and more intuitive grasp of the German character than any Professor . . . that in the purity of his soul this Negro Guillaume stood far above the ostensible racial purity of Dinter . . . .And then I saw the picture of a young girl from Munich, who is to be his bride. Later, of course, once everything is over. I’m afraid it will be a long time . . . at least in Munich, where the white Negroes dwell and where I’m sure it’s not possible to be the bride of a Franco-German blond Negro, not without being raked by swastikas.”
This appeared in the Neue Berlin Zeitung, at a time when disparagement of Bavarian provincialism gave no offence. Roth, however, was always aware for whom the bell was tolling. In “The Third Reich, a Dependence of Hell on Earth” (1934), he declares that Goebbels “has caused truth to walk with the limp he has himself. The officially sanctioned German truth has been given its own club foot . . . . Germany has started using its loudspeakers to drown out the cries of blood”. By that time, Cassandra’s truths could find no publisher.
He is similarly prescient on the economy. Here he is, in 1924, writing – this time for the Prager Tagblatt – about the “Hamburg Gold Mark”, a locally issued paper currency
“that proclaims that the Hamburg banks will vouch for its full convertibility . . . . A month ago there was a risk that this great mass of unemployed, cultivated assiduously by communist and nationalist propaganda, might spark a revolution . . . . And lo! The Hamburg Gold Mark came along, and everything went quiet. It’s one of the mysteries of economics why a great mass of people, none of whom have so much as a Hamburg gold pfennig . . . are pacified by the existence of the Hamburg Gold Mark . . . . no one knows how long it will last . . . because . . . in shady bars haunted by desperate people . . . in these sinister breeding-grounds of international crime, what has been on the agenda for the last few months is politics . . . . People who were left cold by the European economy . . . now spend all their evenings in smoke-filled rooms – not because they are interested in the speeches, but because they are given food there, and schnapps and – money . . . . For the time being, the Hamburg Gold Mark has calmed people down. In the long run, though, no unemployed man can take comfort from the fact that his fellow in work can now afford to buy butter. Without the free food he gets in assembly halls, he would starve . . . . where people used to go to smooch and drink, they are now daubing swastikas and Soviet stars.”
While not a few Western statesmen, Winston Churchill among them, blessed Benito Mussolini with the brisk qualities of a new broom, Roth let the Duce speak, damningly, for himself: “Fascist Italy has: 60,000 gendarmes, 15,000 policemen, and a 10,000-strong rail, post and communications militia . . . and a 300,000-strong volunteer Fascist militia for ‘national security’”. Roth adds “The mere existence of these units would suffice to trim the freedoms of Italian citizens. But then there are Fascist laws, which are such as to entirely destroy them”. This prediction of 1928 appeared in the Frankfurter-Zeitung which would of course, in due season, defer to an infinitely more savage tyrant than Mussolini.
Some of Roth’s drollest prose describes a visit in 1927 to President Ahmed Zogu of Albania. Having obtained power by the murder of any number of rivals, the self-enthroned bandit would be graced with gallant royalty by the Western press when, in 1939, the country he had appropriated was invaded by the Italians. Roth was amused to notice that, in charmless foreign locations, civilized people who “wouldn’t talk to each other in their comfortable homelands . . . unpack from their travelling bags never-used, gleaming friendliness . . . . Real ladies have been seen dancing with commercial representatives in the European club . . . . Tirana has a tennis club where anyone who swings a racket and uses toothpaste is admitted”. A foretaste of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy comes with the observation “Sooner or later, you’re going to get shot. By the Italians? By the South Slavs? – Who cares? War is war”.
Roth was never more an educated northern European cosmopolite than in his account of the Albanians “utterly intent on preserving old habits . . . stressing their Albanianism at the expense of their humanity . . . cultivating their tribalism at the expense of their nation”. Their language, he tells us, has no word for “love”, no fixed terms for the colours of the rainbow, no particular word for “God”. An Albanian major tells him, “It’s as well that the Turks oppressed us and kept us away from their civilisation. But for that, the Albanian language might have disappeared . . .”. Roth says that he was sorely tempted to reply: “it’s a crime to oppress a nation . . . . But to praise the negative outcome of this oppression, the chance survival of a technically interesting language, is false and childish national pride”. It is unsurprising that the sadly percipient Roth had an inkling of the danger of Zionism as an answer to “the Jewish question”. He feared that re- upholstering their millennial contradictions – the genius and the pariahdom – into a patriotic bundle would dock the Jews of their errant uniqueness without securing their salvation. Optimism was never his style.
Self-effacement makes Roth the man in the ironic mask
Roth shared Cyril Connolly’s notion that hotel bedrooms were the writer’s spiritual home (Vladimir Nabokov chose to write his last books in the consoling sumptuousness of the Palace Hotel, Montreux). Hotel Savoy (1924), Roth’s second novel, remains a masterpiece of concise, apocalyptic impressionism, matched in English only by Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939). In the hotel, which stands for the whole of Eastern Europe in the process of accelerating post-1918 decomposition, Roth’s alter ego, Gabriel Dan, bumps into his wartime companion-in-arms Zwonimir:
“He loved America. When a billet was good, he’d say ‘America!’ If an emplacement was strongly constructed he’d say ‘America!’ Of a fine lieutenant, again ‘America!’ And because I shot well he’d dub my best shots: ‘America!’”
Roth was to die, in 1939, at the age of forty-four, before he could acquire the visa to emigrate to the US which might indeed have been his best shot. His death was said to be accelerated by the news that Ernst Toller, who had served as a volunteer for more than a year in the trenches on the Western Front, had hanged himself in a New York hotel bedroom. Would Roth have found happy sanctuary among America’s Jews? Gabriel Dan is surely doubling for his author when he announces:
“‘I am a loner and have no sense of community. I am an egoist . . . a real egoist.’
‘An educated word,” Zwonimir reproaches me. ‘All educated words are deplorable. In ordinary language you could never say anything so repulsive.’
‘I am on my own. My heart beats for me alone. The strikers are of no interest to me. I have nothing in common with any crowd, and nothing with individuals either. I am a cold creature. In the war I never felt really part of my company . . . . I walked over corpses, and sometimes it troubled me that I felt no pain.’
‘My community is the residents of the Hotel Savoy.’”
The nicest twist in Hotel Savoy comes with the discovery that the voyeuristic liftman Ignatz is, in fact, the supposedly absentee proprietor Kalegyropoulos, who just may be the instigator of the fire which brings the novel to its holocaustic climax. Evidence of Roth’s educated youth is incised in the text when he shows knowledge, as the examiners say, by flashing the Greek genitive, Kalegyropoulou. This modest Atticism serves to link Roth with another mendicant writer of durable ephemera: Lucian, the second-century AD Syrian arriviste, who wrote classier classical Greek than his Hellenistic contemporaries and whose wit – not least at the expense of high-flying historians who had never known battle – set a sardonic precedent for both Roth and Kraus.
Frederic Raphael’s autobiography, Going Up: To Cambridge and beyond, and novel, Private Views, were both published last year
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