Hotel Savoy E-Book

Joseph Roth

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 187

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Great War is over. Gabriel Dan has been released from a POW camp in Russia and is making his way home to Austria. He comes to an industrial town in Poland and checks in at the once-grand Hotel Savoy, there to await news and funds from his family. Here he meets a kaleidoscope of characters, a microcosm of chaotic post-war Europe in which rich and poor, itinerants, dissidents, and malcontents live lives of hope, expectancy, and despair in an atmosphere pregnant with revolutionary fervor.

Leseprobe

Hotel Savoy

Joseph Roth

Translated byJonathan Katz

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street,

W1W 5PF London

www.hesperus.press

This translation first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2013

Ebook edition published by Hesperus Press, 2024

© Joseph Roth, 1924

English translation and introduction © Jonathan Katz, 2013

ISBN (ePub): 978-1-84391-344-3

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-386-3

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher

Contents

Introduction

Jonathan Katz

Hotel Savoy

Book One

Book Two

Book Three

Book Four

Notes

Biographical note

Introduction

Jonathan Katz

(New readers are advised that this Introduction discusses elements of the plot.)

One of the finest German language authors of the first half of the twentieth century, Joseph Roth was born to Jewish parents on 2 September 1894 in Brody, then little more than a shtetl in East Galicia, at that time a territory of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now in Ukraine. He began his higher education in nearby Lemberg (now Lviv) and in 1914 moved to the University in Vienna to study literature. He served in the Imperial Army on the Eastern Front in 1916, not as a combatant but as a writer and military reporter. After demobilisation and eventual return to Vienna in 1918 – an experience which must to some extent have informed his compassionate depiction of the Heimkehrer (returning soldiers, or ‘homecomers’) in Hotel Savoy – he wrote for leftist newspapers there until moving to Berlin in 1920, when he started writing for the more prominent liberal press, an early career in which he was soon employed by important papers in Frankfurt and Prague.

The rest of Roth’s story, of a life which brought him literary distinction through both journalism and a series of first-rate novels (the best known among them being the great family and historical saga The Radetzky March), but ended in Paris in 1939 in tragic exile, isolation and personal despair, has been told often enough to engender both familiarity and puzzlement. For it easy to view his political convictions as an uneasy, unsteady course of false starts, involving some considerable wishful thinking, dissemblance and self-deception; this view has also conditioned the reading of his work, in which, between those early apparently socialist leanings of the 1920s and later flirtations with Catholicism and monarchist revivalism, we may see him turning from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Furthermore – and here is a critical phenomenon by no means unique to Joseph Roth – the brilliantly accomplished later work has sometimes been seen as a creative culmination, towards which the early writing is more tentatively feeling its way, with occasional bright flashes revealing what was to come.

Taken on their own terms, however, in the context of what preceded rather than what followed, the early works seem to show a much less defined political position, and a more ironic overview, of all that presented itself to the author in the immediate post-war society he examines. Roth’s first two novels, The Spider’s Web and Hotel Savoy, portray in powerfully stark terms the condition of human nature under the immense pressure of turbulent economic and political uncertainty.

The Spider’s Web was first published in a newspaper serial form in 1923. The writing is already highly accomplished, owing no doubt much to Roth’s experience and preoccupations with both political and more ‘occasional’ (feuilletons) journalism. Hotel Savoy was also first published in the Frankfurt newspaper in 1924, but was then in the same year issued as a volume by a reputable literary publisher, and was considered by Roth himself to be his first real novel. To the psychological depth and the storyteller’s skill of the first work, Hotel Savoy adds the formal ploy of a first-person narrator, and the emotional intensity and epigrammatic economy of a lyric poet.

The main character of The Spider’s Web, Theodor Lohse, is an ex-lieutenant from the First World War who has taken up law studies and is struggling both with external circumstances and with his own personal insecurities and mediocre talents to establish himself in a new career. Manipulated by forces more powerful, and by persons more talented, than himself, his ‘progress’ and decline make him something of a sample case of recruitment to fascism, poisonous anti-Semitism and eventual moral worthlessness. Hotel Savoy takes us still a little further back in the post-war story, when the homecoming demobilised soldiers are still flooding out from the east to form an ominous undercurrent of unrest, a prelude to the upheavals to come.

Already as a journalist Roth had made it his business not only to report but to extrapolate, speculate, predict. Such combined insights are creatively deployed both in the narrative plot and setting of the novel, and in its curiously ambivalent first-person observer. This narrator, Gabriel Dan, is himself a returner. After long internment as a prisoner of war in Siberia he has endured a grueling journey out of captivity towards a new life in the ‘West’, a future in which he seems by his own admission to have little firm belief. In reality he feels himself to be more permanently on the move, happy just to be ‘stripping away an old life once again’. Arriving at a border town placed physically and symbolically bet ween East and West – Roth never names the place but it is almost certainly intended to be the town of Łódz´ – where he knows he has relatives he hopes might be able to help him, he puts up at the monumental Hotel Savoy, at once a vividly drawn microcosm, containing the full spectrum of life’s luxuries and degradations, and an evocative symbol of the political and moral state of a society now in the control of dark and threatening forces. The hotel’s residents fall ‘victim’ to it, and those with the weaker defences eventually perish violently along with it.

Ambivalent certainly, but also self-knowing and self-critical, Dan is in a way saved by his own detachment and noninvolvement. Or rather, he is narrowly saved from death, but he is also condemned to witness the departure of those whose lives he seems to admire as more authentic and vital than his own. His splendidly independent-minded friend Zwonimir Pansin, the wild proto-revolutionary, engages Dan’s affection and understanding with his outraged observations of inequality, unfairness and the exploitation of one class by another; but there is also an obtuseness and a perverseness in Zwonimir, a self-absorbed recklessness that prevents him from genuinely appreciating, let alone serving, his own interests or the common good.

Gabriel Dan, ruefully recollecting that even in the war he was able to think only of his own life and his own death (‘I walked over corpses, and sometimes it troubled me that I felt no pain’) is ultimately forced to confront himself too, as the impassive individualist he is, a ‘cold creature’ who has ‘nothing in common with any crowd’; and as such he is powerless to rescue or redeem even the more attractive of the hotel’s other resident victims – the loveable clown Santschin, or the girl Dan wishes to love but cannot bring himself even to address honestly and committedly, and whom in the end he chooses, despite some self-recrimination, to abandon, while deceiving himself that the failure is partly hers.

For some readers the most poignant relationship of all will be the affection Dan unexpectedly discovers with that very different ‘homecomer’, their former fellow townsman now turned American millionaire. Bloomfield’s arrival from America, awaited with such fervent longing by the townspeople who delude themselves that he is coming as a saviour to banish all their miseries, has in reality a very different reason for returning, and becomes the unwitting cause of their further lapse into inertia and hopelessness. But there are those few who do know, and have known all along, what brings Bloomfield home, and to them, and through them to Gabriel Dan, he is able to impart something more lasting.

Amidst the pathos, and amidst the hotel’s grotesque world of rascals and inadequates and lame ducks and shysters, there are moments of comedy and burlesque, and moments of tenderness, through which Gabriel passes as the ever neutral, ironic observer. The eventual violent destruction of that world, and the hints of a more general and spreading conflagration beyond it, leave him, and us, finally travelling on, on a slow train, towards some indeterminate future.

Hotel Savoy

Book One

I

I arrive at ten o’clock in the morning at the Hotel Savoy. I have decided to rest for a few days or a week. This is the town where my relatives live – my parents were Russian Jews. I want to get some money together and continue my journey to the West.

I am returning after three years as a prisoner of war; I was in a Siberian prison camp, and I’ve wandered through Russian villages and towns as a worker, day-labourer, night watchman, porter, baker’s assistant.

I am wearing a Russian smock someone gave me, short breeches I got from a comrade who died, and boots, still serviceable – now I can’t even remember myself where they came from.

For the first time in five years I am standing once again at the gates of Europe. It looks to me – this Hotel Savoy – more European than any other Eastern Hotel, with its seven floors and its gilded coat of arms and liveried porter. It promises water, soap, English-style toilet, a lift, maids in white caps, chamber pots with a friendly gleam to them like priceless surprise gifts in little brown-inlaid cabinets; there’ll be electric lamps, with the light blossoming from pink and green shades like flowers from the calyx, and bells ringing out brightly at the press of a button, and real beds with eiderdown quilts billowing, cheerfully ready to welcome the body.

I am happy to be stripping away an old life once again, as so often over these years. I see in my mind the soldier, the murderer, the man almost murdered, the man resurrected, the captive in chains, the wanderer.

I sense early-morning haze, hear the drum-roll of troops on the march rattling the window-panes at the tops of the buildings, I see a man in white shirt-sleeves, and the jerking arms of the soldiers, and a glow in the woods, the gleam of the morning dew; I plunge into the grass before my ‘imaginary foe’ and feel that burning desire to stay there, for always, right there in the velvet grass that strokes my face.

I hear the silence of the sick-bay, the white silence. I rise from my bed on a summer’s morning, hear the trilling of lively larks, enjoy the taste of morning cocoa with buttered rolls and the odour of iodine in the day’s ‘first diet’.

I am living in a white world made of sky and snow, the ground covered in a sallow mange of barrack buildings. I take in one last sweet drag on a foraged cigarette butt; I read the advertisements page of an ancient newspaper from my home town, from which I can recall the familiar street-names, and recognise the man running the local grocery store, and a porter, and one blond Agnes whom I once slept with.

I hear the blissful sound of rain in a sleepless night, and the icicles rapidly melting under the smiling morning sun, and I clasp the ample breasts of a woman I met along my way and lay with on the moss, the white splendour of her thighs. I sleep the profoundest sleep amid the hay, in the barn. I stride over furrowed fields, and drink in the frail singing of a balalaika.

You can absorb so much, and yet remain unchanged in body, and in gait and manner, you can quaff from any number of vessels and never have your fill, just as a rainbow may glitter in all its colours but still in the end remain a rainbow with just the same palette.

I could turn up here at the Hotel Savoy with one shirt, and leave as the proud owner of twenty trunks – and I’d still be the same Gabriel Dan. Perhaps it is realising this that has made me so self-assured, so proud and grandiose that the porter salutes me, me the mere vagrant in a Russian smock, and a servant boy dances attendance even though I have no luggage.

I am taken up by a lift, mirrors adorning every side of it; the lift-boy, a man already advanced in years, lets the rope slip through his hands, the compartment rises, and I sway with it – I think to myself, I could so easily fly aloft like this for a good long time. I love this swaying, and reckon how many wearying steps I’d have to clamber up if I weren’t able to sit in this splendid lift; and I hurl back down all my bitterness, and my hardship and wandering and homelessness, my beggar’s life now in the past – I hurl it all deep down, from where it can never reach me again as I soar up and up on high.

My room – I have been given one of the cheapest – is up on the sixth floor and bears the number 703. That appeals to me – I am superstitious about numbers; the nought in the middle is like a lady with an older and a younger gentleman on either side. On the bed there is a yellow coverlet, thank God not a grey one to remind me of army service. I switch the light on and off a few times, I open up the bedside cabinet, the mattress gives under my hand and springs up again, water glistens from a carafe, the window looks out onto back yards, where gaily coloured laundry flutters and children shout and hens strut around freely.

I wash, and slide slowly into bed, savouring every moment. I open the window, the hens are clucking loudly and cheerfully; it is like a sweet lullaby. I sleep a dreamless sleep, the whole day long.

II

Late sunshine was reddening the topmost windows of the house opposite; the laundry and hens and children and had disappeared from the yard.

In the morning, when I arrived, there had been light rain. In the meantime it had become bright again, and I felt as if I’d slept not one but three days. My tiredness was gone; I was in fine spirits. I was curious about the town, and this new life of mine. My room felt friendly, as if I’d already lived there for a long time, and the bell was now familiar, and the push-button, and the electric switch, the green lampshade, wardrobe and washbasin. Everything homely, as in a room where you’ve spent your childhood, everything making for calm and comfort and warmth, as it is when you have been reunited with someone you love. Only one thing was new: a notice pinned to the door, with the words:

‘After 10.00 pm quiet is kindly requested. No liability accepted for missing valuables. Safe deposit in hotel. Respectfully, Kalegyropoulos, Proprietor.’

It was a foreign name, Greek. I had a little fun declining it: Kalegyropoulos, Kalegyropoulou, Kalegyropoulō – a hazy memory of cheerless school lessons; a Greek teacher surfacing again from a forgotten era, in his patina-green jacket. I decided to walk around the town, perhaps go and find a relative if there was enough time, and enjoy myself, if enjoyment was on offer this evening in this place. I went along the corridor to the main staircase, relishing the fine stone slabs of the hotel passageway, the red stonework, and the echo of my firm footsteps.

I went slowly down the stairs. Voices were coming from the floors below; up here it was all quiet, all the doors were closed, and it was as if you were in an old monastery and walking past the cells of monks at prayer. The fifth floor looked exactly like the sixth; you could easily mistake one for the other. Both there and down here there were hotel clocks on the wall overlooking the staircase, only the two were not showing the same time. It was ten past seven on the sixth floor, and here just seven o’clock. Then on the fourth floor it was another ten minutes earlier.

Over the flagstones on the third floor there are dark red carpets with green borders, and you can’t hear your footsteps any more. The room numbers aren’t painted on the doors here, but set on little oval porcelain plaques. A girl comes along with a feather duster and a wastepaper basket; there is apparently more attention paid to cleanliness down here. This is where the rich live; Kalegyropoulos, cunning fellow, deliberately keeps the clocks slow, because rich people have plenty of time. On the raised ground floor the two leaves of a door stood wide open.

It was a large room with two windows, two beds, two chests of drawers, a green plush sofa, a brown tile stove and a stand for luggage. There was no copy of Kalegyropoulos’s notice to be seen on the door – perhaps the residents on the upper ground floor were permitted to make a noise after ten o’clock, and perhaps liability was accepted for these people’s ‘missing valuables’ – or were they already aware of the hotel safe deposit, or did Kalegyropoulos perhaps tell them in person?

A woman came rustling out of a neighbouring room, perfumed and in a grey feather boa. There’s a real lady! I said to myself, and followed closely after her down the few steps, looking in admiration at her little patent-leather boots. She paused for a short while at the porter’s lodge. I got to the door at the same time as she did; the porter saluted, and I was flattered to think that maybe he took me for the rich lady’s companion.

Not knowing any of the directions here, I decided to follow along behind the lady.

She turned right out of the narrow lane where the hotel stood, from where the marketplace broadened out. It must have been market day, hay and straw lying scattered on the paving, people just now shutting up the shops, locks clinking, chains rattling, pedlars making their way home with their little hand-carts, women in gaily coloured head-scarves hurrying along and carefully holding brimming pots in front of them, overflowing bags on their arms, with wooden kitchen spoons poking out. The occasional street lantern threw a silvery glow into the twilight; the pavements were turning into a Corso, with men in uniform and in civilian clothes sporting slim canes, and there were intermittent wafts of sweet Russian scent. Carriages came jolting along from the station, with luggage piled high and passengers all muffled up. The road was rough, full of potholes and sudden dips; over some of the damaged places there were rotten wooden boards that rattled disconcertingly.

And yet the town looked more friendly in the evening than during the day. In the morning it had been grey, coal dust from nearby factories billowing out over it from giant chimneys, grimy beggars grovelled on the street corners, rubbish and slop buckets lay piled up in narrow side streets. But now all of this, all the filth and ordure, poverty and pestilence, all was hidden in the darkness – kindly, motherly darkness, forgiving, concealing.

Houses, frail and dilapidated, appear ghostly, mysterious in the dark, arbitrary in their architecture. Crooked gables are softened in the shadows, meagre light confidentially lures and beckons through half-darkened windows, and then just two steps later there is light streaming out from a confectionery shop, through windows tall as a man, mirrors reflecting the glare of crystal and chandeliers, angels charmingly hovering and swooping from the ceiling. This is the confectionery shop of the rich man’s world, with money to earn and money to spend in this industrial town.

This was where the lady went, but I didn’t follow her in; I reflected that my money would have to last some time yet before I could travel further.

I strolled on, saw little black clusters of quick-witted kaftan-clad Jews, overheard loud mutterings, greetings and counter-greetings, angry retorts, lengthy discourse; talk of feathers, percentages, hops, steel, coal, lemons, went flying round, discharged into the air by mouths, aimed at ears. Suspicious-looking men with rubber collars – apparently policemen. I reached automatically for my breast pocket, where I had my passport, just as I always used to reach for my cap when I was in the army and someone in authority was around. I was a soldier coming home, my papers were in order, I had nothing to fear.

I went up to a policeman and asked how to get to Gibka, which was where my relatives were living, my rich uncle Phoebus Böhlaug. The policeman spoke German. Lots of people spoke German here; in this town German manufacturers, engineers and tradesmen predominated in society, business and industry.