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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
A powerful collection written on the eve of the destruction of Europe by the Second World War, by the great Joseph RothIn January 1933, on the very day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth fled to Paris. There, in what he called the 'hour before the end of the world', he wrote a series of articles. The end he foresaw would soon come to pass in the full horror of Hitler's barbarism, the Second World War and most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-European consciousness.Incisive and ironic, the writing evokes Roth's bitterness, frustration and morbid despair at the coming annihilation of the free world while displaying his great nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire into which he was born and his ingrained fear of nationalism in any form.Joseph Roth (1894–1939) was an Austrian novelist best known for his family saga The Radetzky March and for his novel of Jewish life, Job. He fought in the Austrian army in the First World War, and worked as a novelist and journalist in Frankfurt, becoming a leading Jewish intellectual of the era. With the rise of Nazism, he lived the rest of his life in exile.
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Contents
Introduction
When Joseph Roth stepped off the train in Paris on 30th January 1933, having symbolically departed Berlin at the exact moment Hitler assumed power, he could presumably not have known that he was entering the city which would shelter him for the next six years and where, even beyond a miserable death following depression, alcoholism, physical debilitation and penury, he would remain in perpetuity. Or then again perhaps he did perceive something of this. For Roth had always been drawn to la douce France ever since his travels to the Midi and Paris in the twenties, captured so eloquently and movingly in a series of articles, or ‘reportage’, gathered under the title ‘The White Cities’. To Roth, Paris was the commanding crucible responsible for this ripple effect of desirous landscapes, a veritable ‘paradise on earth’, and his rapture on arrival echoes that of a series of other Mitteleuropa exiles who wound up there during that intellectually febrile period. In May 1925, Roth stood in Paris for the first time and penned the following lines to his friend Reifenberg, editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung. ‘I feel compelled to inform you “in person” that Paris is the capital of the world and that you must come here. No one who hasn’t been here can claim to be more than half human or any sort of European. It is free, open, intellectual in the best sense and ironic in its magnificent pathos.’1
Roth would never return to Germany, now the lair of the beast, and would make only fleeting appearances in Austria before the hatch of the Anschluss came down in 1938 and darkness prevailed. The remainder of his time in these years would be spent either in Paris or on various extended sojourns to the Low Countries, primarily Holland where his only publishing life lines, the houses Allert de Lange, Querido and, latterly, De Gemeenschap, were located. In fact Roth spent extended periods in Amsterdam and later in Brussels, where, like many a literary exile before him, he found life cheaper and less mentally devouring than Paris. It’s odd then that articles on Roth in the English language often fail to mention these countries, as if there were a Belgian black hole, if not a Dutch one. It is commonly assumed that the years between his leaving Germany in 1933 and his death in Paris on 27th May 1939 were purely Parisian, where his extended residence at the venerable Hôtel Foyot off the Luxembourg Gardens and his table at the Café Tournon opposite have become the stuff of legend.
Yet observing the chronology of Roth in these years, we see that, like his close friend and virtual patron Stefan Zweig, himself exiled from Salzburg to London, he was ever on the move, whether for brokering publishing contracts abroad, seeking a new environment in which to complete a work, or merely taking up invitations from exiled friends. Famously, in the summer of 1936, Roth travels to Ostend, the prestigious ‘Queen’ of the northern resorts, on the invitation of a holidaying Zweig and his circle. A telling picture exists of this reunion. At a café table showing empty glasses, the tall, dapper Zweig appears relaxed, leaning in protectively towards Roth, who in contrast seems small, pressed hard up against the table and exuding a grouchy air, like a defeated gambler waiting for his next futile hand. Unlike Zweig, who was financially secure, Roth was perennially on his beam-ends and usually had to borrow the money for his travel costs and even his meals and clothing. But whatever the current postulations from the respective Zweig and Roth camps, it cannot be doubted that, for Roth, Zweig proved a crucial mainstay in terms of financial underpinning, mutually valued fraternal kinship, tactful counsel and as chief mediator in his undying quest for publishing opportunities outside Germany. These two close friends, whose powerful relationship has recently been dissected as never before, trod a deeply felt but sometimes uncomfortable path due to Roth’s compulsively, prickly ‘well intentioned’ criticism of Zweig’s writings and the mutual exasperation of two friends of the same vocation and Jewish faith, pinioned by fate at the same point in history, yet with striking contrasts in their situations. For example after meeting his publisher in Amsterdam in autumn 1938, Roth only manages to make it back to Paris by borrowing money for the train ticket from his hotel. Again and again he is obliged to resort to Zweig for handouts. This living on the edge progressively worsened during the 1930s since the regular income Roth received from prestigious German newspapers, in which his articles once appeared, had long vanished. Not only this but his German readership and publishing framework had disintegrated with the arrival of the Nazis, his hitherto published works were among the first to be seized and reduced to ashes in the book burning purges of 1933.
To make matters worse, Roth’s wife Friederike Reichler had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and was incarcerated in the Steinhof mental institution in Vienna. This constituted an added burden emotionally, financially and morally. His natural sense of responsibility to his wife’s welfare and the eventual outcome of her situation could now only be met at a distance. In the end the Nazis resolved this situation, in their customary fashion, just a year after Roth’s own demise. So, for Roth, a deep repugnance for Hitler and his regime and mounting despair at its dread evolution was exacerbated and, in a sense, distilled into the need for writerly response by this ongoing slew of personal demands and burdens which had sunk their claws deep and hung from him like so many predators weakening and eventually bringing down their prey through sheer exhaustion. Roth was only too aware that the Nazis and their sprawling nihilistic apparatus, the preposterous theatricality yet terrifying reality of their ‘death’s head’ cult, had fatally compromised the infrastructure of his life.
However, Roth was still alive and out of the madhouse that Germany now was and he could still write, he could still articulate his feelings for his tormentors who like slaughtermen had merely tossed the soul of his cherished Austria onto the pyre, like the unwanted parts of a butchered animal, but write for whom and through which channels? However, Roth knew the prospects were bleak. He wrote to a dithering Zweig as early as February 1933, with the following brutal conclusion. ‘Quite apart from our personal situations – our literary and material existence has been wrecked – we are headed for a new war. I wouldn’t give a heller for our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.’2
Roth continued to produce novels and seek their publication, even though his publishing prospects were precarious and ever in danger of being snuffed out altogether. He yearned to be translated into other languages and secure untapped readerships as Zweig had done, but Roth lacked the feting of a country such as Brazil or any other ‘land of the future’ and was resigned to parleying with a clutch of Dutch publishers who had become increasingly exasperated with his idiosyncratic behaviour. ‘I am known only in the Dutch language!’ he complained bitterly to Zweig. Alongside the novels, Roth wrote articles about the situation in Germany and Austria, both in an attempt to warn and inform those peoples and countries he viewed as next in line for Hitler’s special treatment, to expose the hypocrisy and narrowly focused, blinkered positions of those who thought they had the measure of the man from Braunau, and most of all to let rip and assuage his own pent-up fury and outrage at the loss of his European domain. These articles were regularly published in a handful of German language papers that served the exiled community, principally the Pariser Tageszeitung and Das Neue-Tagebuch.
Roth realised the danger of Hitler’s dark theatre early, and his name appears in a work dating from 1923. For this reason I chose to include the first article in this collection ‘The Dream of a Carnival Night’, published in 1924, a decade before Roth’s exile, in the wake of Hitler’s show ‘trial’ for the 1923 Putsch. This serious though quirky and enjoyable assault sets the standard for the even more bristling articles to come, a decade later. From the outset Roth is witness to the hazardous folly and farce that characterizes both the Nazi mentality and their duped victims, the general public. Roth simply states ‘I deny the reality of Hitler’s trial’ and then proceeds to dismantle the whole absurd theatrical indulgence. For Roth the Hitler trial is unreality, a grotesque dream, a ship of fools crewed by corpse-like mannequins. The speeches are uttered by ‘ghosts’ and the court sketchers are kept busy drawing the deceased.
It is this perennial blindness to the cold reality of Nazism’s murderous intent, or an unwillingness to face it, that obsesses Roth throughout these pieces, whether they concern the hypocrisy of Danzig East Prussia, the tragedy of School Exchange programmes between Germany and France, the grotesquerie of political intrigues, the heedless romanticism of journalists, or the cowardice of religious authorities. No one, it seems, is safe from Roth’s venom, not even the Jews, for Roth, Renaissance man and ‘good European’, sees the feet dragging of the ‘remainder of the civilized world’ (i.e. the western powers of Britain and France) almost as criminal acts which will have to be answered for once the dark age gives way. Roth always leads from the front, and his first line is more often a swift uppercut. ‘For seventeen months now we have got used to the fact that, in Germany more blood has been spilled than the printer’s ink required to write about it…’ Roth’s incendiary titles launch them selves with revengeful intent. Unsurprisingly perhaps, many include the words ‘German’ or ‘Germany’. The attack here is not just on Hitler and his demonic regime but Germany and the Germans, for the recurring symptom of their nationally catastrophic behaviour, which Roth sees as nothing new but merely emboldened and reshaped into an even more destructive power under Nazism, a pernicious trait that has been in some sense ‘embalmed’ in the German soul and is simply reanimated and released at certain points in history to calamitous effect.
This is no better displayed than in the impossibly darkly humoured piece ‘National Pyromania’ from 1934. Here Roth brilliantly lampoons the German obsession with fire, the arsonist compulsion, along with the sinister suggestion that the German murders even those who have offered him refuge. This is proven, it seems, by an article in the paper about such an event, and Roth goes on to link the traditional summer solstice fires with the ‘apparently irresistible tendency of modern Germans to start a fire’. Roth’s article is obviously influenced by the book burnings, but the piece is also unconsciously prophetic of even worse burnings to come, those that thankfully Roth was not privy too. But also this piece highlights the indefinable ‘irrationality’ Roth perceives in the German race, which permeates all these pieces, some aberration in their psyche which has caused the ‘modern German’ to align willingly with Hitler. ‘The modern German knows nothing more than those commands which a primitive humanity obeys, and what he knows least, are the laws of hospitality.’
In ‘The Myth of the German Soul’, Roth extends this theme and makes a plausible case for the canny hyping of the Wagnerian myth by Goebbels propaganda ministry and the disastrous consequences for the Western powers as their intellectuals and journalists perform like so many sleepwalkers, ushered in whatever direction the Nazis want them to go. Faced with radicalism and the unparalleled dangers of a Nazified Europe, they have according to Roth, ‘fled into the myth of the German soul’. They are evading their own radical response by entangling themselves in ‘unfathomable mysticism’, observing events ‘through opera glasses normally reserved for Wagner’s operas’. These westerners are so infatuated with Wagnerism, Roth suggests, that they super impose mythological figures and their actions onto the real actions and positions of ordinary Germans colluding with the Nazis, confusing atrocity with romanticism. ‘It’s human nature, to see the basest cruelty as a harmless game,’ says Roth. His seemingly grimly pessimistic stance is however confirmed when one thinks of later evidence from the genocide in the east, countless images of German soldiers, SS and local militias laughing and grinning as the beards of helpless orthodox Jews are shorn. A harmless game…
‘Europe Is Only Possible Without the Third Reich’ is one of the most telling pieces of the collection. Here Roth laments the vanishing of a European conscience, the brutalizing of a noble concept through the rank stupidity of nationalism. The sentinel shadow of Stefan Zweig looms approvingly in the background. Roth is concerned at the loss of a ‘European cultural awareness’. Roth’s premise is that love of the ‘soil’, the ‘fatherland’, is a misconception, a delusion, and leads nowhere but war and ruin. He asserts that instead we are born of a time, of a particular epoch, rather than in a certain physical place, and that the latter is merely a pretext for barbarism and murderous patriotism. Today, when the same errors are made by the same type of people, for the same fictitious causes, with the same pointless outcomes, we can but sympathise with Roth’s synopsis, a remarkable feat of resistance, given his situation, abandoned on a reducing ice floe with all manner of sharks circling. Roth’s prescription for change to this miserable state of affairs is presented, though with a half smile. ‘No European solidarity is possible with Germany, with the “Third Reich”. Europe with Germany on board is a nonsense. Without Germany Europe is a force.’
Roth’s key adversary in his journalistic pieces concerned with the Third Reich is chief of propaganda, the club-footed ‘little’ Goebbels. Again and again, Goebbels comes in for ridicule but also a grudging respect at least in terms of his evil brilliance. In ‘Orator of the Apocalypse’, Roth pounds away at Goebbels and his gang’s nefarious activities. We can easily forget that what are now the habitually squalid activities of the press were a relatively new phenomenon at the time, and today we admire the literary dissections performed by the likes of Kraus and Roth on practices now long accepted as foreordained. Roth looks to the future with a keen gaze and a raw sense of the unpreventable. ‘In the long run, this mediocre man of letters with his giant loudhailer will have utterly transformed the system of camouflage, not only in the newspapers of his homeland but those of many other countries.’
Several pieces from the period 1938–39 discuss the decline and final collapse of Austria, as Hitler gradually wheedles his way in like a determined trickster, long primed to loot the treasure house. Austria’s goodies fell into the Führer’s lap with out a fight; the Anschluss was for Roth almost the violent hammer blow, the first of several. Roth does not place the guilt solely at Germany’s door, but lashes into the foolhardiness of his own country’s leaders and the litany of political mistakes. It serves as a fascinating contribution to the intrigues of the Austrian situation during the 1930s and Roth’s knowledge of the finer detail is that of a man who follows the course of events from the papers in his chosen café, and despairs inwardly, incubating the despair until it becomes something literary and purposeful. But Roth also took action. On the eve of the Anschluss he even travelled to Vienna for an audience with Schuschnigg, a doomed attempt to persuade him to restore the monarchy through Otto von Habsburg. But for those inadequate men who took Austria to the brink, Roth has a fraction more scorn than pity. Of the hapless Schuschnigg he concludes with the unforgettable. ‘He never even had this country in his hands, but somehow he still dropped it.’
Two pieces stand out from the rest here and form a wistful brace of remembrance and nostalgia. ‘Rest while Viewing the Demolition’ and ‘In the Bistro after Midnight’ take place at the Tournon, just across the road from the Foyot, whose destruction in early November 1937 was indecently symbolic for Roth. One of the last to leave the hotel which was his home for a number of years, Roth installed himself on the terrace of the Tournon and thereby observed the orchestra of destruction conduct itself with a certain melancholy inevitability. The bittersweet vignette shows Roth engaging amicably, almost conspiratorially, with the lime-dust-caked apparitions of the cheery workmen, ‘powdered white like mighty millers who grind stones’, as they tear down the walls of his room. Roth has lost another ‘homeland’ and there is nowhere left to go. His gaze shifts to the café table and the papers lying there. ‘The evening papers, the ones that are awash with heated skirmishes and cold blood, and yet which – and it’s hard to believe – rustle gamely on the terrace tables like huge doves of peace wearied by evening.’
The significance for contemporary readers of these morbidly cloaked, deliciously bruising, cruelly percipient pieces is self evident for, when we read the following, for example, in ‘The Third Reich – Agency of Hell on Earth’, we learn with a sense of disillusion that little has changed: ‘Only a decade ago, in whichever place, a murder would leave the world horror struck, whosoever the victim… But since Germany drowned out the cry of spilt blood with its loudspeakers, it is only perceived high in the heavens, while on earth they just disseminate it through the usual newsprint.’ ‘Furor teutonicus’ may have been tamed, but the hazardous spill of nationalism and the media system born from Goebbels’ propaganda techniques advance unchecked. But reading Roth as he revels in identifying the rare flora of insanity that marks the lead up to humanity’s most self-destructive convulsion, we are always enriched and through his emboldened, lucid and perennially impassioned writings even our despair may take on a gilded tone.
– Will Stone, 2013
1. Joseph Roth – A Life in Letters (Translation: Michael Hofmann)
2. Ibid
On the End of the World
The Dream of a Carnival Night
I deny the reality of the significant event which marked Germany so solemnly this week: I deny the reality of Hitler’s trial.1
